The Spell by Alan Hollinghurst
Published 1998 · 70,675 words · about 5 hours at an average pace
How hard is The Spell to read?
The Spell scores 53 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: 62 out of 100
- Rich, precise vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 65 out of 100
- Long, elegant sentences.
- Abstraction: 52 out of 100
- Concrete social comedy.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Moderate.
- Narrative indirection: 48 out of 100
- A rotating third person across four men.
- Symbolic density: 48 out of 100
- The cottage and the drugs do modest work.
- Ironic distance: 65 out of 100
- Sustained comic irony about all four.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- The couplings resolve; nothing else does.
- Structural complexity: 42 out of 100
- Linear across a summer.
How The Spell is regarded
The Spell holds a literary regard score of 52 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.