Yesterday I went to Borders in Speke to have a look around. Fair enough, except the place I should have been was a library. Although my wife would disagree, I don't really collect books, I buy them, keep the good ones and pass the others to charities or friends. The bookcase is small, but there's plenty of space in our loft for the stuff I don't need to hand.
We have a libarary here in Netherton. It is actually well situated - just past the main shopping area. Trouble is, I hardly ever use that shopping area because it's what I'd call a local shopping area. Liverpool city centre also has a library, I go there too, but there is something about it that makes me uncomfortable - I never feel like browsing when I am in there. Probably because I am using my lunch hour to get there and back.
So here I was in Borders, and I found myself looking through the D's and there was Bleak House.
Bleak House is by Charles Dickens and was recently dramatised on BBC 7 (available on t'internet). I used to hate Dickens, he loved to finish his books with the good guys living happy ever after - or at least learning a significant moral lesson, so I hated the lack of ambiguity and lack of loose ends. I also hated his expansive descriptions.
Andy has a project to read at least one Dickens book a year, and slowly but surely he (and Radio 4 and BBC 2) have persuaded me to give Dickens another try. There was a supreme adaptation of Our Mutual Friend on TV, then I heard Great Expectations on the radio, and then I decided maybe Andy had a point.
So here I am in Borders with it's pleasant coffee smell, and I sit down in an arm chair and read the first paragraph of Bleak House. What sumptuous writing it is. I wished I could just sit there and wallow in it for a while - but I can't commit myself to over a thousand pages of that so soon after Dombey & Son.
These books require your patience to enjoy them. They are sometimes pages turners, sometimes moralising (which I may not agree with); often some characters are ciphers, the social history they present is subjective, but you end up with an immersive experience from a writer who is not sitting on the fence nor in your life time.
Of course all that black and white stuff is not the stuff of real life, and yes, people like Salinger who tell their stories largely through dialogue are great too, but what I sometimes wonder is "where is the modern novel going?".
To me literature is not like classical music or popular music or other art forms. As life changes, the stories you can tell change as well: we need to hear of other peoples experiences in other parts of the world. Like film, because life changes, the stories change, so there must always be something in these mediums worth telling.
In music, there are only twelve notes and only so many palatable rhythms, so if you don't try too hard, it's easy to sound like every one else. Lyrics are one of the ways you can be different, but as the Pixies proved, you only have to make some very minor changes to the norm to come up with something very striking. That was one of the secrets of the Beatles' artistic success - and it's something we strive for as well.
But the medium of literature is a huge massive canvas. You can write about anyone, anything, anywhen and anywhere. The talent that you need is to find the words to convey your ideas convincingly. In reality I think this makes literature the highest art (although a good song will always beat a good book when the crunch comes). As long as you can express yourself (and that really is the hard part), you can write.
The modern novel is a world of hype, of Sunday supplements and kow-towing to the media. Like the other arts I love, it can be drowned because it is of its time - you can distrust The Curious Incident Of The Dog At Night Time, because the Observer says it is good and a whole publicity machine is shoving it down your throat. Well, you'd be wrong in this case, but what about next week when the machine moves on - maybe that time it will be A. S. Byatt or Zadie Smith or Michael Moore. The media machine is only interested in chewing up and spitting out what the publishers want to sell - i.e. NEW STUFF. If you're lucky, your mum or dad or school will point you at To Kill A Mockingbird or your elder brother might show you Solzhenitsyn - otherwise you are stuck with what's currently being pushed at you off the shelves by the publishers.
Granted sometimes due to film or TV tie-ins old stuff does get pushed.
Anyway: here's my conclusion. Just because it's new, it isn't good - obvious. It's good because it is well written; because it captivates *you*, it tells you something about someones experience that you can relate to. I think those values get lost in the rush to sell it all to us. Pop music has always been openly synominous with capitalism, so I am not surprised to find out that the next big thing is a bad thing or that there are thousands of great songs out there that I may never hear that would probably make me want to dance or swoon. But literature is held up above all that. But literature is the same. It only gets pushed if it can be sold - and (worse) it only gets translated to your language for the same reason.
Go back to your Observer review - notice that the name of the reviewer is always in bigger letters than the name of the author. Maybe we should all go to our libraries and just try something for the hell of it - who knows what you might discover.
And my twopennorth is Pat Barker and Rachel Seiffert are two of our greatest writers - but don't believe me, go to your library
- Neal 18/09/04