Vote for the GOAT British novelist
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
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