Vote for the GOAT British novelist
Time for run-offs
Last week I spoke about Second Act to the Atlas Society. Here are links to YouTube, Facebook, and Spotify. I also spoke to Meghan Murphy.
Based on the voting, we have a shortlist of GOAT British novelists, in order of current popularity.
Dickens
Eliot
Austen
Joyce
Woolf
Tolkien/Ishiguro (=)
Conrad
James/Swift/Bronte/Waugh(=)
Some of you, like me, will baulk at a shortlist with no Hardy, nothing earlier than Austen, and with Waugh in contention at the top. Such were the votes. By fiat (and based on various emails and comments) I am adding Anthony Powell, the English Proust, and Hilary Mantel, because she was exceptional at narrative control. Polls for run-off voting are at the bottom. I randomised the list to make elimination groups. First, I have written a few notes on the two new authors, the case against our front runner, and some notes on Tolkien. I have previously written about Silas Marner, The Remains of the Day, James Joyce, Mrs Dalloway, and the very great Jane Eyre.
Mantel’s narrative control
For the first few hundred pages, I thought The Mirror and the Light was, like the previous two volumes, some of the best fiction written in my lifetime, but then it got long and heavy and dissappointing. However, Mantel was an oversight. Look at this passage.
‘A cushion, Majesty?’ Lord Audley suggests.
Henry closes his eyes. ‘Thank you, no. Today there is only one matter —’
‘A more capacious chair perhaps?’
The king's voice shakes, ‘—one salient matter... Thank you, Lord Audley, I am comfortable.’
He catches the Lord Chancellor’s eye, and presses a palm across his own mouth. But Richard Riche is not so easily suppressed. At the sight of Edward Seymour: ‘You here, sir? I did not think you were sworn?’
‘Well, it appears—’ Edward says.
‘It appears I want his opinion,’ the king says.
Initially, we might think the phrase “he catches the Lord Chancellor’s eye” would refer to the king. After all, the pronoun comes immediately after the king speaks. But in the Wolf Hall trilogy, he means Cromwell. It’s a very effective way of keeping the narrative focus in an environment where people are always wondering who else is in the room and why—and where Cromwell’s controlling presence can always be assured.
Powell’s great scope
It is no exaggeration to say that Powell was the English Proust. Twelve lightly-autobiographical novels about the sweep and scope of English society, which are at turns comic, poignant, and darkly observant. Widmerpool is easily the great character of twentieth century English fiction, akin to the great creations of Dickens. Powell carefully keeps his narrator (and thus himself) in the background. We often hear his news second hand, in his dialogue. The novel is a panorama of society. Powell can hardly be explained, only experienced. Here is the opening of the first novel.
The men at work at the corner of the street had made a kind of camp for themselves, where, marked out by tripods hung with red hurricane-lamps, an abyss in the road led down to a network of subterranean drain-pipes. Gathered round the bucket of coke that burned in front of the shelter, several figures were swinging arms against bodies and rubbing hands together with large, pantomimic gestures: like comedians giving formal expression to the concept of extreme cold. One of them, a spare fellow in blue overalls, taller than the rest, with a jocular demeanour and long, pointed nose like that of a Shakespearian clown, suddenly stepped forward, and, as if performing a rite, cast some substance — apparently the remains of two kippers, loosely wrapped in newspaper — on the bright coals of the fire, causing flames to leap fiercely upward, smoke curling about in eddies of the north-east wind. As the dark fumes floated above the houses, snow began to fall gently from a dull sky, each flake giving a small hiss as it reached the bucket. The flames died down again; and the men, as if required observances were for the moment at an end, all turned away from the fire, lowering themselves laboriously into the pit, or withdrawing to the shadows of their tarpaulin shelter. The grey, undecided flakes continued to come down, though not heavily, while a harsh odour, bitter and gaseous, penetrated the air. The day was drawing in.
Somewhere in The Biographer’s Moustache (iirc), Kingsley Amis had a character describe Powell as the only living English novelist he now liked to read. No doubt there was something of a poke in the eye at Powell implied, as there almost always is with Amis, but that line is spoken by one of the few genuine and good characters in the novel.
The case against Dickens
I have spent so much of my time telling you Dickens is The Great Novelist it’s only fair to give the other side. One correspondent summed it up like this: “despite his abundant genius, there is a subtlety of thought and perception beyond his reach— the sorts of qualities one finds in James and Cather.” Personally, I think this is a difference of mode, rather than ability, as such, but it’s a strong argument, so let’s give another version of this case, the one made by George Henry Lewes (he of the Great Beard) in 1872.
…his characters have nothing fluctuating and incalculable in them, even when they embody true observations; and very often they are creations so fantastic that one is at a loss to understand how he could, without hallucination, believe them to be like reality. There are dialogues bearing the traces of straining effort at effect, which in their incongruity painfully resemble the absurd and eager expositions which insane patients pour into the listener’s ear when detailing their wrongs, or their schemes.
Lewes goes on to be more charitable, but towards the end of his essay he sets out another case against Dickens—the lack of thought.
Thought is strangely absent from his works. I do not suppose a single thoughtful remark on life or character could be found throughout the twenty volumes. Not only is there a marked absence of the reflective tendency, but one sees no indication of the past life of humanity having ever occupied him; keenly as he observes the objects before him, he never connects his observations into a general expression, never seems interested in general relations of things. Compared with that of Fielding or Thackeray, his was merely an animal intelligence, i.e., restricted to perceptions.
Lewes knew Dickens and said he remained completely outside “philosophy, science, and the higher literature.” Lewes was George Eliot’s partner and was clearly making a contrast with Dickens’ style and hers—it’s a distinction that has held ever since, to a greater or lesser degree. Lewes is not entirely right about the lack of ideas in Dickens: he deals subtly with utilitarianism and he encoded Copperfield with Carlyle’s idea of heroes. In any case, I think the question is one of temperament. Lewes says Dickens “mingled verisimilitude and falsity”. I would say he “mingled verisimilitude and fantasy”—and that we come at the truth through many crooked, fantastical ways. Lewes’s essay (14 pages) is well-worth reading in full. It is essentially an apology for Dickens, but it also contains the case against.
Why Tolkien?
If Tolkien’s books were not about elves and dwarves, many people would rate them very differently. This is a foolish, uncritical attitude. It is not the case that because Shakespeare has a wizard, we dismiss his work, or that Chaucer is deemed a lesser poet for writing about magic. If you believe that good art is realistic art, you will never be able to see Tolkien for what he is.
And you will have no basis for that belief other than your preferences. No canon of criticism can make that case successfully: we are not going to dismiss Homer or Dante. It is feeble to say “oh but they believed different things back then” as if the two great poets of Western Civilization were helplessly in thrall in some unseen dogma of unreality. Get real! Dante invented the modern idea of Hell and Purgatory. He gave his angels magic wands and set in motion centuries of fevered imagination without sticking faithfully to doctrine. It is simply unknown how many people in the audience of Hamlet believed in ghosts or thought they were a mad, old-fashioned superstition, or who wanted to go back to the old beliefs but dared not. People who think The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a classic poem will scoff at Lord of the Rings—but Coleridge wrote that poem with the intention of reviving the fantasy elements poetry had lost in the age of reason.
As I said with Dickens, this is a question of temperament. Many people do believe that “serious” literature is not concerned with the happenings of The Winter’s Tale. In a choice between those critics and Shakespeare, I choose Shakespeare. In a choice between respectable realism and Tolkien—I deny the choice. The Lord of the Rings is made of old materials, the matter is wrought from the language and poetry of the Saxons and the Norsemen. It is a work of deep philology. And it recasts the moral dilemmas of good and evil that the twentieth century had to face in a story that encompasses a vast world of mythology. It has a better chance of surviving than probably anything else written in English in the twentieth century. It can be footnoted, analysed, and interpreted; it can be traced in old sources; it can be stripped to its components and revealed as a complex machine.
Some people think Tolkien’s prose is ghastly. I say, read it out loud. It is euphonic like a hymn, resonant like a folk tale, lilting like an ancient tale. If you don’t see that he stands shoulder to shoulder with Dickens, it is a question of temperament, not taste, and certainly not a critical attitude.
To everyone who thinks Joyce was Irish. Yes, obviously. But he wrote Ulysses while Ireland was united with Britain and he kept his British passport until his death in 1941.
Well, that was agony, having to chose between Austen and Tolkien. Yes, very different writers, but I'm an eclectic reader.
FWIW in the end I chose Austen because she wrote six great novels and Tolkien only wrote one (or three if you regard LOTR as a trilogy (it was originally published in three stages)).