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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="240" caption="Pullman: not impressed"]<a href="http://commons.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Philip_Pullman_2005-04-16.png"><img class=" " title="Philip Pullman signing a copy of Lyra's Oxford..." src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/66/Philip_Pullman_2005-04-16.png/300px-Philip_Pullman_2005-04-16.png" alt="Philip Pullman signing a copy of Lyra's Oxford..." width="240" height="337" /></a>[/caption]

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Oh dear. The Booker shortlist has sparked a controversy. How often does that happen? This time it’s because half of the books – three novels in all – are written in the present tense (throughout one assumes).

Philip Pullman and Philip Hensher have both weighed in against the use of the present tense. Pullman says, ‘This wretched fad has been spreading more and more widely. I can’t see the appeal at all. To my mind it drastically narrows the options available to the writer. When a language has a range of tenses such as the perfect, the imperfect, the pluperfect, each of which makes other kinds of statement possible, why on earth not use them?’

Makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t aim for the Booker, of course. I am merely a journeyman writer of fiction for general consumption. I will use the present tense occasionally, but only for brief passages when I want to bump the reader out of some comfortable position and bring them closer to the characters at a dramatic moment in the story. An entire book in the present tense seems to me a touch flat and indigestible, and rather restricting for both writer and author too. It gets a bit wearing frankly, not that I’ve read any of the three on the list so perhaps the Booker judges are right, and present tense is fine throughout in sufficiently skilled hands.

Temperamentally though I’m with Pullman. Books are about richness, of language and imagination. For me the present strips away some of the magic.

<em><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/7994914/Philip-Pullman-and-Philip-Hensher-criticise-Booker-Prize-for-including-present-tense-novels.html" target="_blank">Daily Telegraph on the controversy</a></em>