Let me compare thee to a homicidal fried egg

What is instructive is how many aspiring writers struggle to master the form. Similes are fiendishly difficult and are as accurate a barometer as any of the descriptive powers of a writer.

Authors stand or fall by them. Here are three examples from my reading. "He could still remember the estate like the back of his hand." This commits the ultimate solecism of being a cliché and, what's more, it doesn't even stand up to scrutiny. When did you last study the back of your hand, let alone remember it? I would find it hard to identify my own in a hand parade.

"Snow crouched like puppies on the trees." Did it work for you? No, me neither, but perhaps that is because I have never seen a puppy up a tree (unless perhaps it was in an Andrex ad). And here's a third: "His eyelids hang like the blank shutters on the departures boards at the station." Now this one sort of works but you still have to work at it. It's trying a little too hard.

A perfect simile should require no effort from the reader and you should certainly not stumble over it. Ideally, it will strike an immediate chord of recognition.

Ah, yes, that's how it is. In Michael Ondaatje's new novel Divisadero the author refers to the "the clouds turbulent like oil". It's not original but it is exact. You get the drift immediately or the drift of the clouds.

Nabokov was a genius at similes. They seemed effortless and they came close to poetry. A puddle was "like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver". Raymond Chandler was a sorcerer of the demotic simile: "His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish." The undoubted 20th-century master was PG Wodehouse. He wrote similes as the grass grows. A woman has "more curves than a scenic railway"; a character's "face was shining like the seat of a bus driver's trousers"; "a tubby little chap ... looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say 'when!'" ; another person has "a slow, pleasant voice like clotted cream made audible".

Even at his most surreal and offthe-wall you can still understand Wodehouse: "She looked like a tomato struggling for selfexpression." Any aspiring writer would do well to immerse himself in Plum's oeuvre. I can never ever walk past a pram these days without thinking of his comparison of a baby to a "homicidal fried egg". Just three words and yet it captures the whole mewling, puking and spitting albumen of babyhood.