The Charioteer by Mary Renault
Published 1953 · 96,800 words · about 7 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Charioteer to read?
The Charioteer scores 52 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 58 out of 100
- Formal mid-century English.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Long, careful sentences.
- Abstraction: 55 out of 100
- Concrete hospital life carrying a Platonic argument.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Moderate wartime detail.
- Narrative indirection: 48 out of 100
- A close third person tied to a man in self-denial.
- Symbolic density: 58 out of 100
- The Phaedrus runs under the whole book.
- Ironic distance: 48 out of 100
- Distance between what Laurie believes and what he wants.
- Resolution withholding: 52 out of 100
- The ending settles the plot, not the question.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Linear.
How The Charioteer is regarded
The Charioteer holds a literary regard score of 58 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.