More than the level of crime, it is the sheer gratuitousness of the violence that is shocking.
Yet the compliment is not merely inverted, since even freakish mastery of such tricks does not account for those impalpable gifts — the tremor of presence on the page, the overflow of vitality — which rival the abundance, even gratuitousness, of nature itself.
The tradeoff between openness and security is never easy to figure out, but what struck me about my friend's ordeal was its sheer gratuitousness.
But I discovered that I was one of the many readers who found, in the gratuitousness, something recognizable and true.
Violence is released in quick, concentrated bursts that convey cruelty without gratuitousness.
Consequently, while there are torture scenes in the book, with enough detail to make a weak-stomached reader wince, they avoid gratuitousness.
Of course, if there were some sort of intelligence behind all this – a brain, perhaps, with a clipboard, an agenda and Something To Say – one might have some patience with the gratuitousness and the excess splattery.
The Bibles and religious icons once awarded by a sponsor have escalated in scale and gratuitousness to iPods, Nintendos and Wiis.
The plotting was extraordinary, and Wainwright's care with scenes of violence – tell, don't show – just pointed up the gratuitousness with which it's so often managed in more (wilfully?) clumsy hands.
Harriet chose her male foils carefully, to represent different aspects of the gratuitousness of male artistic fame: first a young, photogenic wunderkind named Anton Tish; then the "nearsighted, mulatto, queer" mask of Phineas Eldridge; and lastly the iconic persona of an artist named simply Rune, who is its macho essence.
Not least because it has collections that enable people to see how "once women's rights are on the agenda, once the gratuitousness of women's secondary position becomes obvious, you have continuous movements; it is only the tempo and focus that changes.
