That was the most painfully smug and contrived dialogue I've read since Atlas Shrugged. Would have been more effective if the whole thing was replaced by the two-sentence summary at the end.
This hackneyed dialectical style seems to be pretty common in "business writing". Management consultants don't always write especially well, even if they're excellent persuasive speakers.
It's very heavy handed. The characters don't converse like real people, it feels like they're just vehicles for hitting you over the head with the author's message. Always with the befuddled idiot and the enlightened but exasperated one coyly dropping wisdom. Just didn't find it compelling.
Long speeches tho were really once more common. I don't have a lot of 'feel' for this tho because I don't even listen to contemporary speeches (because I much prefer being able to read a transcript much more quickly).
The speech at the end is really just a disguised essay that summarizes everything you already have figured out, but does it really slowly, in a book that's already taken its sweet time. From the point of view of structuring a story, it's a waste of the reader's time. Furthermore, it's a violation of the long standing convention that when an author writes a book about something they don't just come out and say what it's about. They paint it into the characters and setting, and let the ideas blossom over the course of the story.
I don't think you can defend it by making some sort of argument towards verisimilitude and historical speech lengths. Assuming that's what you're driving at.
I'll (mostly) grant you that the speech is "really just a disguised essay that summarizes everything you already have figured out", but I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Good rhetoric is redundant.
I also don't think it's a problem that it "does it really slowly" or that the book itself, overall, has "taken its sweet time".
Because of all of the above, I disagree that "it's a waste of the reader's time".
But of course I can defend it by arguing that it's realistic in its length or tone. Real people really do give long-winded political speeches! And the story supports it too! And look, there I went, defending that part of the book.
I'm not sure you can state that as an absolute. And certainly we can agree there's degrees of redundancy, a threshold that once crossed, is belaboring the point rather than expanding on it.
>I also don't think it's a problem that it "does it really slowly" or that the book itself, overall, has "taken its sweet time".
I've got no problem with the length of the book. I found it moved at a pretty good pace for me after the first 100 pages or so.
As for the length of the speech, how long would it take to deliver those hundred or so pages as a speech? Hours probably? Can you point to an example of a political speech that has gone on that long? It's news to me, but I'm no historian.
>I disagree that "it's a waste of the reader's time".
You're welcome to obviously. Everyone is welcome to their opinion.
>And look, there I went, defending that part of the book.
Honestly, I don't find your arguments compelling though. You made a questionable claim about rhetoric, and showed that other authors have exhibited the same pathology. Coming to defend that part of the book doesn't actually prove that it's defensible, just that you felt compelled to try (as much as any of this is possibly provable).
I think the essay could have been kept to, say, 10 pages and it would have felt like the climax to the book it was intended to be. Rather than some waffling blowhard thinking anyone in the country is going to sit and listen to his 4 hour pirate broadcast.
eh, could've condensed the whole book to about 1/3 the size. It took me about 8 months to read it cos it was so hard to keep trudging through. In hindsight I do somewhat like the gist of the book though.
