About novels

What is a novel ? These days I suppose we mean any long prose work of fiction (let’s say longer than 100 pages). Ultimately though a novel is anything the author wishes to call one. There have been plenty of experimental novels over the centuries, but the best loved and most successful novels tend to be straightforward in their story-telling.
The novel is the dominant genre of new fiction, what most people read. I read a lot of novels myself. On a rough estimate, I must have read about 400 novels, which is probably about half the books I have ever read. I read a fair number of recent novels in English so as to stay in touch with present times, but mainly I read the classics.

By classic, I mean a novel which is quite a bit older and has stood the test of time, transcending its immediate contemporary relevance so that it is still read for its enduring quality. This, for want of a better word, we may call its universality. These novels are by common critical and popular consent the best and there is no shortage of them. It seems to me to be a bit of a waste of time, when you can only read so many books in a lifetime, to take the risk of being unsatisfied with something recent and insubstantial when you could be reading a novel that has proven its value and staying power. Since writers willy nilly write within a tradition, it is also not a bad thing to be familiar with the major works of it, if only to catch the references. My preferences also have a lot to do with my having studied literature at university.

But you may ask: “Why bother to read fiction in the first place when there is so much to read about real life ?” The answer is that good fiction is a sublimation of real life. We believe the story because somehow it rings true. This also holds for fantastic and mythological stories that still require some truthful representation of human behaviour and the human psyche if they are going to work for the reader. Even some of the superficially most escapist novels are actually taking us on a journey into rather than away from ourselves.

Whether the account is factual or fictional, what the reader really craves is a good story that is well told. In the end, much biography and history is also the selective telling of a good story. “And what happened next?” is what keeps the reader turning the pages. The essence of a good novel is that it is a good story, most often with an end which is not immediately apparent, or even, in larger works, several good stories interwoven. Without that the reader’s attention will wander and the book will be put down.
Sometimes that story may well not be an exciting ‘adventure’ in the usual sense but rather the story of how a character grows older, how he is affected by life. It’s more a case of “what happened to so and so?” which is again a driving force of human curiosity, namely to see, of all the possible outcomes, how people turn out, what makes us what we are.
The real stuff of a good novel, then, is how the characters are shaped by their lives, their experience and environment, their interaction.
A novel therefore has to take the time to set its characters in context and needs a certain descriptive, material, tangible thickness to it, without which it can seem abstract and insubstantial. This “real” surface is important and attractive. It is the film-like quality that makes books of the film and films of the book so popular. However, it has to be said that the literary genre in many ways best suited to the film adaptation is not the novel but the short story; there is just too much going on in a proper novel to be done justice to in a film. A novel after all takes several hours to read and digest, a film just one or two.
It’s that extra depth behind the surface which gives the novel its added value; in particular the thought processes and motivations of the characters, in whatever way the author or narrator seeks to convey them. This goes so much further than just the dialogue. Dialogue is a crucial part of any novel but represents only the directly mutually perceived and possibly misunderstood tip of the psychological iceberg. “Why did he or she do that?” is a very important part of the story, and perhaps in adult books, the most interesting part.

So what are my favourite novels?

I am an inveterate re-reader of books. It’s not unusual to watch a film a second time, or to see a play or an opera a second time (even in the same performed version) and of course the essence of enjoying music is to hear the same piece several times. It just takes longer to read a novel, so some may baulk at the idea of doing it twice. However, in terms of quality rather than quantity, I believe you get more out of reading the same good book twice than out of reading four indifferent books once. I guess that’s paradoxical when I say elsewhere that one book read is several others you’re never going to get round to, but re-reading remains a valid choice. Also even if the book is the same, we are not, and at intervals of ten, twenty years, we react differently to it in the light of our experience. Many people make the mistake of reading the classics as set books when teenagers, when they are actually too young to grasp them fully, and then don’t bother to re-read them because they “know the story”.
In my own case, it’s odd, but there are so many things cluttering up my brain that frequently I can’t remember the names of the main characters and whole aspects of the plot, but I do remember if I thought it was a good novel. This means that I derive a lot of pleasure from re-reading novels I have previously enjoyed.

In compiling a list of my favourite novels the acid test then has to be “Have I read it twice ?” That gives a starting short list of about 40, from which I have to discard some only read twice for the purpose of study (a few German and French titles here), some read twice because read aloud to my children (eg “Harry Potter”, “Lord of the Rings”) and others that fall short of my 100 pages (notably , “Animal farm”, “The old man and the sea” and “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”). From the ones remaining I shall choose twelve.

Tolstoy War and peace
Dostoyevski Brothers Karamazov
Dickens Great expectations
Flaubert Mme Bovary
Woolf the Waves
Joyce Ulysses
Garcia Marquez 100 years of solitude
Conrad Heart of Darkness
Orwell 1984
Lawrence Lady Chatterley’s lover
Hardy Mayor of Casterbridge
Bulgakov Master and Margarita

“War and Peace” - can justifiably be claimed to be the greatest novel ever written. This huge and actually un-put-down-able novel is ultimately about how everyone’s lives are shaped by the vast unstoppable sweep of history.

“Brothers Karamazov” - Dostoievsky explores the darker side of the human psyche and belief. He shows us the disturbing truth that man does not pursue happiness alone but demands his share of suffering.

“Great expectations” - Dickens is probably the best novelist in English and this his best book. That’s because compared to his other novels its structure is tighter, its language more direct and the narrator’s, the older Pip’s, take on his own life refeshingly unsentimental for Dickens, as he reveals how his expectations are disappointed.

“Mme Bovary” - is on the face of it an unpromising story of adultery in the French countryside. Yet Flaubert observes everything acutely and weighs every word carefully (he used to shout them down his staircase to check they sounded ok read aloud); So there is a constant tension between the tawdry mediocrity of rural life and the aspiritational, but clichéd dreams of Emma who attempts to escape her surroundings but inevitably cannot.

“the Waves” - is the inner monologues of six childhood friends caught at key moments as they grow older framed in a description of the passing of a day. For me, the poetic beauty of the heightened language of Woolf’s masterpiece makes it endlessly re-readable.

“Ulysses” - Joyce’s book is to be savoured for the wonderful use of language. Every chapter explores a different style. It is a celebration of the everyday and all of life in one day, with Bloom notably attending a funeral and visiting the maternity ward as he navigates Dublin in a modern version of the Odyssey before returning home to Molly.

“100 Years of solitude” - is the great work of magical realism but at the same time it is a distillation of all that is Latin America. Garcia Marquez enthusiastically lets his baroque imagination run riot in a way that is totally engrossing. I love the way the plot finally works out.

“Heart of darkness” - all right, I know this is too short, but it is Conrad’s best and most powerful book, a tale of the sordidness of empire and the futility of some of man’s endeavours.

“1984” - is the greatest novel of science and political fiction, a truly prescient work, whose invention is now so familiar that we too easily take it for granted.

“Lady Chatterley’s lover” - is a much maligned book and is far from being just about sex. I think it’s Lawrence’s best novel as it covers efficiently and directly his favourite themes of the suffocating and dehumanizing nature of modern industrialized society and how it may be possible for the individual to rebel against it.

“Mayor of Caterbridge” - the opening scene where Henchard sells his wife, thereby triggering the whole story, has to be one of the most striking in any novel. The plot is beautifully worked out with a tragic logic in the true sense of the word that it all stems from the hero’s flaws.

“Master and Margarita” - describes a surreal visitation of the Devil to Bulgakov’s contemporary Stalinist Moscow alternating this with a realistic account of what may have been the last days of Christ. It is original, funny and profound.

I’m not making any claim here for this being a list of the greatest works of prose fiction, they are just my personal favourites which given time I would actually read a third time (if I haven’t done so already).