I'm reading Julian Barnes' Arthur and George because it's real-people historical fiction and his project in writing it was the exact opposite of mine, so that's interesting stuff for my PhD.

Picked up a copy of Gyles Brandreth's Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders today at Tescos and it looked a fun read. I notice he's written a series of them, all starring Wilde.


- NaomiM

Ooh, that does sound fun. This thing of using real characters as detectives seems to be a real fashion. I guess it's easy to sell because the concept is clear. There's a truly, truly dire series using Jane Austen (the plots are quite good, but the pseudo-Austen English is appalling) but I'm enjoying Josephine Tey as detective on R4 after Front Row at the moment.

I heard Julian B. lecture about Arthur & George and he was very interesting about why and how he wrote it.

Emma

Fair point, Traveller. I do respect them both as writers. I did read Banville's The Sea and have to agree he is a very fine writer. I thought that a much maligned book at the time.

As for Amsterdam, I'm afraid I really did not like that book. Sorry. Part of the strength of my reaction to it was undoubtedly disappointment because I thought he was such a great writer and had expected something better from him. I'm prepared to accept the fault is mine.

It's also true that I have only seen Toibin's comment out of context.

To offer a contrast, a writer who is by no means in their league, but has nevertheless published a number of books, recently said to me something like, "You mustn't ever think you're creating great art. It's bound to all go wrong as soon as you start thinking that."

"You mustn't ever think you're creating great art. It's bound to all go wrong as soon as you start thinking that."

What a great quote, and true, I'm sure. In fact, I suspect setting out to create anything with a book-trade label is probably a mistake, whether that label is 'great art' or 'bestseller'. It's so much more likely to work if you set out to tell a story the way you want to tell it and as well as you can.

Emma

Yes, I think your blog post EmmaD hits the nail on the head in answering the original question.

Cornelia - regarding that article - interesting, but I think there's always been this "the novel is dead" panic from the 70s onwards? And then something like Harry Potter comes along - thick chunky books that sell millions (without the use of blogging or any kind of internet media). Maybe "literary" novels are dying out, but fifty years from now, I doubt very much if anyone will remember Jordan and those works that last the test of time will be literary work.

Rogermorris - good point about thinking of creating art - I often have these thoughts, especially when I think people don't understand my work - but, yes, it is dangerous to have pre-conceived ideas that affect your writing (but that's what Toibin is alluding to anyway, isn't it? A purity of creativity without reference to any kind of outside influence). I wouldn't expect the same people to understand Dostoevsky or Faulkner (or even to have read them)...perhaps literary fiction is naturally elitist (but only because a lot of lit fiction works are necessarily cerebral and difficult and have to be read in the context of the western literary canon - putting off most readers who have become lazy after being fed a diet of corporate mass-marketed rubbish).

Yes, Traveller, I take your point about the novel is dead debate having raged for some time, and the point about the possibly mythical decline of the 'literary' reader. However, I am more inclined to believe because of my exerience as a teacher. Over twenty years or so I gradually made the switch from teaching Literature to teaching Media. It didn't happen overnight but seemed obvious to me in the seventies - I've written about this before - that TV and films were becoming more influential than books as sources of entertainment and information, not just for young people but for adults. When I started teaching there were no Media or Film degrees. It became important to know how these relatively new areas of mass communication achieved their effects. The over-riding concern was to protect the young against them, much as once it was once considered dangerous for the lower classes to be exposed to reading. As a film-enthusiast since childhood I happily anticipatd the government's attempts to drag unwilling English teachers down the Media path.

Now its interesting to see the interaction between the different media - TV, films and books, with the Jordan example to illustrate.

Yes, I also agree that most published writers are to be congratulated for the sheer hard work and self-belief in the face of much discouragement. Publishers have always had their reactionary tendencies - something else I've written about in the past. In other words, they've always favoured social celebrities with a claim to fame over and above the jobbing writer; its not a recent phenomenen.

Sheila

I write literary fiction. If there's a writer on this board who has achieved HALF (or even a quarter?) of what Banville and McEwan has achieved, I'll be willing to listen further. Both are great writers - it's so easy to criticise, but harder to actually go out there and do what these writers have been doing for years. I think people should perhaps show more respect to those who spend their time writing and actually getting books published and read (something that can't be said for most of the members on this site).

Come off it, traveller, that's one of the lamest arguments I've ever seen.

I've got no problem with showing respect where it's due, but I certainly don't accept the idea that the mere fact that authors have had books published and been successful should somehow innoculate them from all criticism. Where would that leave us? Praise or keep silent, I suppose. That's not how things work in a democracy.

The implicit idea that one needs to be qualified in terms of one's own successes in the same field before criticising someone else's work is also pretty suspect. Dr Johnson once remarked that the fact that a person is not personally capable of making a table doesn't mean he or she isn't entitled to criticise the carpenter who makes them a bad table. He was undoubtedly right. Imagine taking a rickety table back to the shop you bought it from & having the manager say, "Well, I bet you couldn't make a table yourself, so we're not going to give you a refund". What would you do? You'd get angry. You'd leap up and down. You'd tell him where to get off. And you'd be right to do so.

As a reader - and in a sense as a customer - I reckon I'm entitled to criticise an author who makes (what I regard as) a bad book. It's highly subjective anyway & I doubt Ian McEwan is going to lose much sleep over a few people mildly remarking that Amsterdam wasn't much cop.

Yes, I take your point RJH - I just feel that these authors are being criticised without a just cause. It's very fashionable to criticise McEwan without actually acknowledging his great achievements. The same with Banville - who has been writing for many years before achieving recognition with the Booker. I'm not saying these writers are beyond criticism, but that people should look at themselves before criticising others.

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Criticising the manufacturers for the supply of a defective product is an entirely inappropriate analogy for literary criticism by the way...

When there was the fuss about Banville's 'The Sea' winning the Booker, I was appalled that it was getting mauled on a writer's forum (not this one) by people who hadn't actually read it. So I bought a copy and read it so I could make my own mind up, and thought it excellent. Extremely well written, IMO.

I didn't get on too well with McEwan but then I recently read Chesil Beach and loved it. Some of his other books might not be to my taste, but I do think he's a fine writer.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, I personally wouldn't want to read a Jordan ghost-written novel. But some of my students read things like that and, to be honest, I'm grateful they do. Reading anything at all strikes me as far, far better than reading nothing. It helps with their language skills and gets them into the reading habit.

Horses for courses, isn't it. Celeb memoirs and Jordan novels aren't going to reduce the market for literary fiction, as they appeal to very different types of readers. I don't imagine many people stand in a book shop trying to make their mind up between a Kerry Katona autobiography and the latest Salman Rushdie! Surely there's space for both. And as Emma has pointed out, when a publisher does well out of a popular mega-seller, it provides them with the funds to take a few more risks and take on some debut authors.

I don't imagine many people stand in a book shop trying to make their mind up between a Kerry Katona autobiography and the latest Salman Rushdie! Surely there's space for both.

And, yes, there is. And if there isn't, it's awfully tempting to think that if only Katie P. wasn't sitting there on the shelves, that space would be filled by your novel, that's just been turned down by a dozen publishers on the grounds that they love it but don't think they'd sell enough... Only it wouldn't.

Fundamentally, most of what's published/filmed/written/sung/played/painted/sculpted in any given generation is not great and enduring. There was some reason for making it, it has its merits, it's of interest to cultural historians, and quite a lot of the time the maker was sincere in their desire to do good work, however they define 'good'. But it's unlikely to appeal much beyond the generation that made it. This is true whether you're listening to Pick of the Pops for 1976 - such incredible rubbish, in among the two gems which have stayed in our heads - or looking at the contents of a railway bookstall stocked by that canny Mr Smith c. 1876, or the play bills of the Rose Theatre, c. 1576.

The same is true today. In a couple of generations one or two of most Booker longlists, say, as a fairly representative sample, will still be around, but I don't think most of us would be right in our guesses of which one or two it would be. (Least of all me, because I don't read them). Who knows whether the pick of Mills & Boone will also be around, just as the trashy westerns and pulp crime of the 20s and 30s are now cool again.

Emma

Criticising the manufacturers for the supply of a defective product is an entirely inappropriate analogy for literary criticism by the way...

It seems to me entirely appropriate, for the reasons given, but I'd be interested in any counter arguments.

If books seem to me more commodified it's because I'm old enough to see a change in the way books are marketed. It's hard to believe that not so long ago only children's books or American gangster novels would have pictures on the cover, for instance, or that grocers sold foodstuffs and soap; if you wanted a book you went to a library or a bookshop.

Nowadays the persuasion element is an obvious component: the cover images and colours that signal genre; the 20% off stickers and the emphasis on the sensational or the bizarre; the pictures of the authors, familiar from TV and newspapers images, on the front.

Of course I believe it's a good thing that books are more accessible and I too was glad if my school students would read anything (More or less, that is. I used to get fed up withthe popularity of books on weaponry when I ran the school library). It just struck me as odd that Toibin could be so removed as to advise writers to ignore the market.

In any case, even if a writer were to be so detached as soon as she submitted the work to an agent, commercial concerns would kick in.

Sheila

it's certainly a brutal and deliberately provocative analogy, but not entirely inappropriate i think. after all, we have to pay money for this stuff...

Not sure who said it, above, but I also find myself disapointed with authors that have been hyped up with reviews and awards, feeling their prose should be on some other astral plane to the common-or-garden crowd, but finding that they, like any other writer, have used off the peg plot devices, or tacked on self-indulgent waffle, etc. Salman Rushdie was one, Pullman another. That's not to say they are bad writers, obviously they have a great talent, but when one's perceptions of their craft have been hightened by hype, then they begin to look like false prophets when you get down to the nitty gritty of the prose and the story.

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Often it is better to come to a novel with no preconceptions about it at all, and just enjoy it for what it is. With regard to craft there is little difference between a Mouseman table and a Chippendale except that one would grace a kitchen and the other a parlour.

Yes, some of the best novels I've read have been ones I've picked up on holiday, left behind by a departing reader. No doubt circumstances have something to do with it.

Great to have so many different opinions.



Sheila

It seems to me entirely appropriate, for the reasons given, but I'd be interested in any counter arguments

I didn't follow this at the time - busy writing my new novel! But I shall attempt to show how the analogy is wrong.

A manufacturer of a product such as a chair and table is creating a functional object to be used by customers. Chairs and tables can be distinguished from books on the basis that they have a purely functional purpose. Although a book is a physical object, its pages consist of "literary work" which can be distinguished from an object. When a manufacturer creates a product, they can be criticised if they make a defective product, because they are failing to supply a product that meets its functional requirements (which also contravenes statutory laws).

A writer, however, can be distinguished from a manufacturer, in that what she creates is "art" or literature - literature is distinguishable from say, instructions on a washing machine, as it does not serve a purely functional purpose. There is an element in writing that transcends the ordinary and reaches the cultural, artistic and metaphysical worlds. Therefore there is no such thing as a "defective" novel - there may be books that you like or dislike, but this is purely subjective and there are no universally approved criteria to judge a piece of work. The defectiveness of an object is a factual situation - either it works or it doesn't. Literature cannot be objectified in the same way.

Therefore one does not have the right to "complain" about a so-called "defective" piece of art, as if it is a product. Whereas, one has every right to complain about a defective product which serves a functional purpose! Novels are not intended to be functional. Writers are not analogous to manufacturers!

I hope the above makes sense, but any comments/disagreements are welcome.