A lot of work for you, thank you, very interesting, as much as for your take as Hensher's. Makes me want to read everything mentioned! Thank you for the Common Reader, never fails to inspire me.
Thesis: the novel itself has a central idea: that individuals are the basic unit of society; that they have a unique interior psychology; that they are capable of change and growth over a period of time. In other words it’s a highly WEIRD genre. Maybe I’m wrong and there are non-western works like “The Dream of the Red Chamber” that also meet that description.
I think that’s a good description of what’s accepted as literature.
I’d throw back P G Wodehouse. Your individualism point stands, but the last thing we want is for any of the characters to grow or change.
I like the idea of a history big enough to contain both, though - the British Novel as broader category than a history of British Literature, and the guilty pleasure is a trap.
(worse, rather than admitting our authentic enjoyment, we try to justify things as ‘beyond genre’)
I will happily defend the value of Scott, but I'm not sure Ivanhoe would be at the top of my list. I loved it in my teens, and I still have warm memories of it, but it seems to me far from his best. Waverley would probably be my first choice, but also Old Mortality, The Bride of Lammermoor, Guy Mannering, and Redgauntlet.
"Whether AI becomes a new medium of fiction, a spur to new innovations in human writing, takes the place of “conduct books” and philosophical inspiration, or is merely the foil against which many writers define themselves, we do not yet know."
An unexpectedly open-minded observation/reflection by a traditionalist like Oliver--or at least that's the way I see him from his pages on Substack.
I agree with him wholeheartedly. The reception of Modernism in English language literary forms a century ago could give us a hint of what's to come. We had Eliot employ modernist style and mood in The Waste Land to deplore the fragmentation of "civilization" and lament the passing of a unified and stable European sensibility, while Joyce, Woolf and Ford adopted it not merely to mime the fast-changing world but also deform our consciousness of it. I expect nothing less in the age of AI.
How much writing about horses can you stand? There’s a reason the TV adaptation started with Rivals rather than Riders, because the latter is VERY horse-centric.
Terrific read. I was a bit thrown by Hensher’s Sacred Fount claim you cite, and since I don’t have full context or access to the book, I took your reporting at face value and mentioned it on my upstart James channel on YouTube, @completehenryjames (5am James). If Hensher was tongue in cheek, do tell! :)
Here is the quote: “In my view The Sacred Fount is the most diffi cult novel in the English language, Finnegans Wake and The Making of Americans not excluded.”
Jane Austen is almost certainly middlebrow. She just happens to be a genius. I prefer several mystery writers to Agatha Christie, but what she accomplished is of Dickens-like proportions. LIke him, she is a category of one.
Netflix, I feel, has taken time that maybe went watching BBC - hasn’t the average time spent watching television, generally, fallen?
What I find interesting, having a 13 year old, is they are reading Fitzgerald, Orwell, Dickens - some introduced by school - they know who Melville and Tolstoy are, and the other day talking to me about Finnegans Wake -
which a friend was reading.
In contrast, they know very little about the canon of cinema, or pre-Netflix TV. ‘Fawlty Towers’ might have been handed down to my generation by my parents, but it doesn’t work for the next. ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ did, and Graham Linehan’s sitcoms despite knowing he’s ‘been cancelled’.
What I’m driving at here is long term culture - we are at a point where its reasonably easy to access film from the 20s to 60s, but I would wager more people read 1930s novels than watch 30s film.
(Although we did watch the new Joan Crawford at BFi a couple of weeks back - never seen before in the UK due to copyright issues with a play)
Excluding modern film and TV set in the past, my instinct is novels are showing greater longevity - that it’s easier for a modern reader to immerse themselves in a book than a 1930s or 60s film, where things like acting style get in the way.
Radio might make this even starker - as someone who has watched a lot of film and TV from before my birth, Will Hay and George Formbie films and 50s screwball comedies filling those 70s TV schedules - radio never repeated 30 year old programming.
So the question is about canon formation and transmission - music and literature have it, with many genre specific canons. Cinema does, but to a lesser degree. (Ask a teen to name 3 films older than Star Wars). Radio? A century reduced to ‘oh the humanity’, the Kennedy assassination and Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds’.
An excellent review of what sounds a fascinating book. I will certainly read it. Your point about ideas might also be seen as a concern with language and the quality of sentences, which definitely obsesses Philip Hensher. The novel and literature in general, though they may become 'smaller' in the culture, will never lose their significance precisely because they are the highest embodiment of language. And the possession of language, as understood from Heracltus and Aristotle through St John's Gospel to Hegel, Novalis, Heidegger, Chomsky and Wittgenstein, is the peculiar distinction of human beings alone. In short, literature is the seed, root and trunk without which the other media can't flower.
The Elizabeth Taylor passage is the one I keep returning to. Lily sinks into the book as if under an anaesthetic, and Taylor lets both things stay true at once, that the reading is an escape from the fish smell and the dusty shops, and that it's the land of the living. That's the odd work a novel does. It gives people somewhere to put what they can't yet look at directly. Nobody weeps at the end of a novel about a stranger. They weep because something of their own has been let out under cover of someone else's story.
An informative and inspiring piece. especially reminding me to put that Elizabeth Jenkins book on hold at the library. and a piece that contain a line that made me laugh out loud: "i have seen Michael Gove light up in discussions about fiction." Indeed, The $350 million line about the NHS dollars available after Brexit would be enough to make anyone light up, but what they would be lighting up probably would be laden with THC. As the Guardian headline read 10 years ago, "And informative and inspiring piece. especially reminding me to put that Elizabeth Jenkins book on hold at the library. and a piece that contain a line that made me laugh out loud: "There are liars and then there’s Boris Johnson and Michael Gove."
Well if ever a review made me immediately buy a book, this is that review and this is that book. This will be enjoyable autumn reading.
I'd be interested to know others' assessment of the overall quality of this new Pelican series, which looks great: https://www.penguin.co.uk/series/PELBKS/pelican-books
A lot of work for you, thank you, very interesting, as much as for your take as Hensher's. Makes me want to read everything mentioned! Thank you for the Common Reader, never fails to inspire me.
Thesis: the novel itself has a central idea: that individuals are the basic unit of society; that they have a unique interior psychology; that they are capable of change and growth over a period of time. In other words it’s a highly WEIRD genre. Maybe I’m wrong and there are non-western works like “The Dream of the Red Chamber” that also meet that description.
I think that’s a good description of what’s accepted as literature.
I’d throw back P G Wodehouse. Your individualism point stands, but the last thing we want is for any of the characters to grow or change.
I like the idea of a history big enough to contain both, though - the British Novel as broader category than a history of British Literature, and the guilty pleasure is a trap.
(worse, rather than admitting our authentic enjoyment, we try to justify things as ‘beyond genre’)
Evelyn Waugh said that human beings hadn’t fallen in Wodehouse’s happy world and so weren’t in need of being saved.
I will happily defend the value of Scott, but I'm not sure Ivanhoe would be at the top of my list. I loved it in my teens, and I still have warm memories of it, but it seems to me far from his best. Waverley would probably be my first choice, but also Old Mortality, The Bride of Lammermoor, Guy Mannering, and Redgauntlet.
"Whether AI becomes a new medium of fiction, a spur to new innovations in human writing, takes the place of “conduct books” and philosophical inspiration, or is merely the foil against which many writers define themselves, we do not yet know."
An unexpectedly open-minded observation/reflection by a traditionalist like Oliver--or at least that's the way I see him from his pages on Substack.
I agree with him wholeheartedly. The reception of Modernism in English language literary forms a century ago could give us a hint of what's to come. We had Eliot employ modernist style and mood in The Waste Land to deplore the fragmentation of "civilization" and lament the passing of a unified and stable European sensibility, while Joyce, Woolf and Ford adopted it not merely to mime the fast-changing world but also deform our consciousness of it. I expect nothing less in the age of AI.
I am less of a traditionalist than some of my writing suggests
my take on reading novels still is that we instinctively know that every revolution begins with literature. i appreciate your writings.
How much writing about horses can you stand? There’s a reason the TV adaptation started with Rivals rather than Riders, because the latter is VERY horse-centric.
oh… horses might be like ships for me (Swallows and Amazons, Patrick O'Brian, all unreadable), so maybe I’ll start with Rivals. Thanks!
Terrific read. I was a bit thrown by Hensher’s Sacred Fount claim you cite, and since I don’t have full context or access to the book, I took your reporting at face value and mentioned it on my upstart James channel on YouTube, @completehenryjames (5am James). If Hensher was tongue in cheek, do tell! :)
Here is the quote: “In my view The Sacred Fount is the most diffi cult novel in the English language, Finnegans Wake and The Making of Americans not excluded.”
Thank you.
Jane Austen is almost certainly middlebrow. She just happens to be a genius. I prefer several mystery writers to Agatha Christie, but what she accomplished is of Dickens-like proportions. LIke him, she is a category of one.
Netflix, I feel, has taken time that maybe went watching BBC - hasn’t the average time spent watching television, generally, fallen?
What I find interesting, having a 13 year old, is they are reading Fitzgerald, Orwell, Dickens - some introduced by school - they know who Melville and Tolstoy are, and the other day talking to me about Finnegans Wake -
which a friend was reading.
In contrast, they know very little about the canon of cinema, or pre-Netflix TV. ‘Fawlty Towers’ might have been handed down to my generation by my parents, but it doesn’t work for the next. ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ did, and Graham Linehan’s sitcoms despite knowing he’s ‘been cancelled’.
What I’m driving at here is long term culture - we are at a point where its reasonably easy to access film from the 20s to 60s, but I would wager more people read 1930s novels than watch 30s film.
(Although we did watch the new Joan Crawford at BFi a couple of weeks back - never seen before in the UK due to copyright issues with a play)
Excluding modern film and TV set in the past, my instinct is novels are showing greater longevity - that it’s easier for a modern reader to immerse themselves in a book than a 1930s or 60s film, where things like acting style get in the way.
Radio might make this even starker - as someone who has watched a lot of film and TV from before my birth, Will Hay and George Formbie films and 50s screwball comedies filling those 70s TV schedules - radio never repeated 30 year old programming.
So the question is about canon formation and transmission - music and literature have it, with many genre specific canons. Cinema does, but to a lesser degree. (Ask a teen to name 3 films older than Star Wars). Radio? A century reduced to ‘oh the humanity’, the Kennedy assassination and Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds’.
An excellent review of what sounds a fascinating book. I will certainly read it. Your point about ideas might also be seen as a concern with language and the quality of sentences, which definitely obsesses Philip Hensher. The novel and literature in general, though they may become 'smaller' in the culture, will never lose their significance precisely because they are the highest embodiment of language. And the possession of language, as understood from Heracltus and Aristotle through St John's Gospel to Hegel, Novalis, Heidegger, Chomsky and Wittgenstein, is the peculiar distinction of human beings alone. In short, literature is the seed, root and trunk without which the other media can't flower.
The Elizabeth Taylor passage is the one I keep returning to. Lily sinks into the book as if under an anaesthetic, and Taylor lets both things stay true at once, that the reading is an escape from the fish smell and the dusty shops, and that it's the land of the living. That's the odd work a novel does. It gives people somewhere to put what they can't yet look at directly. Nobody weeps at the end of a novel about a stranger. They weep because something of their own has been let out under cover of someone else's story.
Your bio is interesting and provocative.
Our new PM has an English degree from Cambridge, so all isn’t lost.
An informative and inspiring piece. especially reminding me to put that Elizabeth Jenkins book on hold at the library. and a piece that contain a line that made me laugh out loud: "i have seen Michael Gove light up in discussions about fiction." Indeed, The $350 million line about the NHS dollars available after Brexit would be enough to make anyone light up, but what they would be lighting up probably would be laden with THC. As the Guardian headline read 10 years ago, "And informative and inspiring piece. especially reminding me to put that Elizabeth Jenkins book on hold at the library. and a piece that contain a line that made me laugh out loud: "There are liars and then there’s Boris Johnson and Michael Gove."
Enjoy Jenkins!