Isn't hating the Pope paying like it used to?

To be fair, someone named Philip Hensher, whom I do not know and have not read (enlighten me?) isn't keen on the present tense in the novel either...

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Philip Pullman and Philip Hensher criticise Booker Prize for including present tense novels
By Laura Roberts
Published: 7:30AM BST 11 Sep 2010

Philip Pullman and Philip Hensher claimed that the use of present tense is becoming a cliche.

Pullman, the best-selling children's author, was scathing over its use.

He said: "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?"

He added: "I just don’t read present-tense novels any more. It’s a silly affectation, in my view, and it does nothing but annoy."
The six authors listed for this year's prize are Peter Carey, Andrea Levy, Howard Jacobson, Tom McCarthy, Damon Galgut and Emma Donoghue. The first three authors' novels are in the past tense while the others written in the more "fashionable" style.

Hensher, whose novel The Northern Clemency was Booker shortlisted in 2008, said that writers were mistaken by thinking that using the present tense would make their writing more vivid. He said: "Writing is vivid if it is vivid. A shift in tense won't do that for you."

He added: "What was once a rare, interesting effect is starting to become utterly conventional. Some of the novels on the Booker longlist just seemed to me to be following fashion blindly.
"[The present tense] is everywhere in the English novel, like Japanese knotweed."

However, Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, chairman of the judges for this year's prize was certain that the judges had provided a fair shortlist.

He said: "We feel sure we've chosen books which demonstrate a rich variety of styles and themes - while in every case providing deep individual pleasures."


So, what, if we write in the old, established past tense, we're okay, but the silly affectation that is now normal is still bad?

I myself tend to not notice either way - I mean, I notice the tense I'm reading in, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but I am no longer at a point where I go, Oooooooh new and original! It's a writing tool, just as the past tense is.