Ben Butler: Lucy, novels are terrible and you’ll never convince me otherwise.
Genre fiction can be OK, provided it doesn’t go on for too long. I haven’t finished the Game of Thrones books, but as I recall they increasingly resemble a building material in shape, dimensions and weight as the series wears on.
On the other hand, Ian Fleming’s Bond series is agreeably slight, both physically and intellectually.
What I really object to is anything with pretensions to literary merit – the novel with a capital N if you will – the sort churned out by writers with a capital W (and/or a trust fund).
The point of this kind of stuff seems to be to reveal to us a hidden truth of the world, to which I say: isn’t there quite enough of that out there in reality already?
After all, we live in a world where an orange-painted reality TV show host became president, our prime minister melts down because a Chinese propagandist was mean to him on Twitter, and we’ve all been locked up for six months because of a plague. Oh yeah, show me your exotic possibilities, O novel. You can’t.
Lucy Clark: Hi Ben. I know, you’re right; truth has been way stranger than fiction during this ridiculous year. “You literally couldn’t make this stuff up” has been a popular refrain. Except … Except … people have been making this stuff up for years. It just wasn’t supposed to become reality.
I agree about writers with a capital W. It’s a fine line between appreciating someone’s mastery of the language and clever-clogs Writing interrupting the created world of the novelist. The best authors are the ones willing to sublimate the self in service of the work … but these writers are hard to find; everyone wants to be clever.
You’re also right about what is sometimes said about the point of novels being to reveal a hidden truth of the world. But I would go one step further and say that novels are there to reveal the hidden truth of ourselves.
This brings me to one of my favourite things about novels – that there is only one writer, and the book is written in only one way, but with really good literature there are potentially millions of ways in which it can be read. We all bring ourselves to the reading of a book – our emotional baggage, our morals and ethics and our crazy or boring or unimaginative ideas about the world, and this is the filter through which we sift the novelist’s work. So what you read in one novel will be completely different to what I read. That’s a kind of alchemy that doesn’t exist in works of nonfiction.
Finally, there is the art itself. It’s extraordinary that a language more than 1,000 years old could be worked by different practitioners in different ways to come up with wholly new configurations of words, some of which stop you in their tracks with their beauty. That in itself is a wonder, and also a kind of solace. And I haven’t even broached the old arguments about the value of escaping to other worlds, or of walking in another’s shoes, or, in my case, rededicating myself to a certain amount of novel-reading every day as a way of rebuilding my decimated attention span.
OK, so you’ve mentioned two authors you’ve read: George RR Martin and Ian Fleming. Do you know how daunting it is to set you some homework that will somehow result in a 180 degree backflip in your thinking on novels? This basically puts me on a hiding to nothing … but here goes. I have two exercises for you.
First, let me introduce you to my queen, Margaret Atwood, who talks a lot about the need to grab the reader in the first pages of a book. Given you like a bit of genre, I’m going to suggest reading the first chapter of Oryx and Crake, the first in a trilogy. I hope you’ll be intrigued enough to want to continue reading after that.
And second, this is a wild card I’m going to throw at you. I tried to think of something that is as different as you can get from both the Martin series and Fleming books. Swallow the Air by Tara June Winch is the book I came up with, one I think of all the time although it is 17 years since I read it. Her extreme economy of language to convey such emotion and meaning blew me away at the time. I’m not going to tell you any more about it except it’s a short book, 118 pages – can you read 20 of them and tell me what you think?
Ben Butler: I have to confess I am not unfamiliar with Margaret Atwood, having previously read precisely one of her books – and precisely the one you’d expect, The Handmaid’s Tale.
It’s been a while but I remember it being pretty good and I suspect there’s a reason why it’s generally regarded as a classic. I do feel able to claim the genre fiction exception for it. Obviously it has a lot to say about our own society – but then again, so does a lot of genre fiction.
Oryx and Crake also looks interesting even if the words “first in a trilogy” strike fear into my heart these days. Even a fool like me can recognise that Atwood is a fantastic writer, but if I was going to be churlish – why stop now? – I would say the chapter you assigned takes rather a long time to get to the point and unfortunately my attention span has been destroyed by years of journalism.
That said, I wouldn’t say no to reading the rest of the book – I read ahead a bit and it gets going soon enough, with ideas pinging off all over the place.
Swallow the Air, though – I’m afraid I balked on the first couple of pages and found it hard to go on. Sentences like “Sheltering over the eagled remains, I inhaled its salty flesh burning under the afternoon sky” are exactly what I object to. I have no idea what’s happening and little interest in putting in the work of figuring it out.
It’s a pity, because there are also some really interesting images in there – I like the one of two kids being shuffled out of the house like cards – and the story of the book seems fascinating. I just feel like this kind of writing is a barrier to understanding, rather than an aid.
To summarise: as Meat Loaf never said, one out of two ain’t bad. Maybe “I hate novels” was a little strong, but I fear the bar is still high.
• Prove Me Wrong is a summer series in which Guardian Australia colleagues argue over whose tastes on popular culture, food and leisure activities are right … and whose are wrong
