The Mill on the Floss Nytimes Book Review
NINETEEN EIGHTY FOUR has arrived, but George Orwell's glum prophecy has not been fulfilled. Some of us one-half-feared that, on the forenoon of Jan. i, nosotros would wake with our seasonal hangovers to come across Ingsoc posters on the walls, the helicopters of the Thought Police force hovering and our television set sets looking at us.
For 35 years a mere novel, an artifact meant primarily for diversion, has been scaring the pants off us all. Plain the novel is a powerful literary course which is capable of reaching out into the real world and modifying it. It is a form which even the nonliterary had ameliorate take seriously.
This seems a practiced moment to wait back upon what has been done in the novel over the by 45 years. Why not expect for the round fifty? Because it is more poetic to begin with the beginning of a world
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Anthony Burgess's nearly contempo novels are ''Earthly Powers'' and ''The End of the Earth News.'' state of war and to end with the nonfulfillment of a nightmare. How far has the novel in English reflected the menstruum accurately? How far has information technology opened our eyes to the future? How much entertainment has information technology given?
Allow me bargain, every bit briefly as I can, with problems of definition and esthetic assessment. Earlier I ask what makes a good novel, I must ask what makes a novel at all. A novel, we know, is a piece of work of fiction, but and so is a short story, and so is an anecdote or a comedian's blue joke. The shortest piece of science fiction ever written is: ''That morning the sun rose in the west.'' But a true novel is an extended piece of fiction: Length is clearly 1 of its parameters. Yous can expand a short story into a novella, a novella into a novel, but where is the dividing line? A novel can be as long as 1,000 pages (expand that to more than 3,000 - don't forget Proust) or as brief as 100 pages. But if 100, why not xc? Why non l, forty? The only possible answer is a shrug.
Merely wait - the practical answer is provided by the publishers, printers and binders who process a manuscript into printed copy dressed in an overcoat. If a work of fiction can exist bound in hard covers, its pages stitched and not stapled (as a pamphlet is), we had amend take that it is a novel. This is a matter of convention only. Information technology would exist possible to publish a novel in the format of The Times. Indeed, I one time had the notion of writing a fiction of a dying man who sees the unfolded Times on his bed and deliriously traces all his past life as though it were the content of that newspaper - news items, editorials, crossword puzzle, everything. If I did not write that book, information technology is considering the novel is a commercial form that is not intended to lose money.
Presently nosotros may get our novels on floppy disks. Already I receive recorded readings of my novels intended for the bullheaded. As, having begun my career as a kind of musician, I retrieve of the novel every bit an auditory form, I am happy to listen to my work vibrating through the dark. But at this moment in history I take to accept, with everyone else, that a novel is a visual experience - black marks on a white folio, many of these bound into a thickish book with a stiff material comprehend and an illustrative grit jacket.
Its paperback version is a poor simply necessary thing, a concession to the pocket, the sickly child of the original. When we think of ''War and Peace'' or ''David Copperfield'' nosotros see a fat spine with gilt lettering, the guardian of a swell potentiality (signs turned into sense), proudly upright on a shelf.
Book can be taken as an acronym standing for a Box of Organized Knowledge. The book chosen a novel is a box from which characters and events are waiting to emerge at the raising of the hat. It is a solidity; a paperback is a ghost.
THERE are more novels published than the average reader tin can possibly realize. At that place are fifty-fifty more - many more than - novels submitted to publishers and unpublished. When I first began to write fiction, I had piffling thought of the competition I was facing. I began to see, physically, the spate of fiction in English when I started to review novels for The Yorkshire Post in 1960. I received by mail all the current fiction. I lived in an East Sussex hamlet at the time, and the local mail service function had to take on extra staff to cope with the inundation of volume parcels. I was paid lilliputian for my fortnightly reviews, simply every other Monday I was able to stagger to the railway station with two big book-crammed suitcases and take the train to Charing Cross and then a taxi to Fifty. Simmonds on Fleet Street, at that place to sell all my review copies (except the few I wished to keep) at one-half the retail toll.
The banknotes I received were new and crisp and undeclarable to the Inland Acquirement. They paid for the groceries and the odd bottle of cognac. This was the real reward of reviewing. Every other Mon, seeing my trudge to the train with my loads, the villagers would say, ''There he goes, leaving his married woman again.'' In fact, this was 1 way of keeping my married woman, and myself.
When I opened my packages, it was clear that certain novels had to be reviewed whether I wished to review them or not. A new Graham Greene or Evelyn Waugh - this was the known brand-name which would grant an expected satisfaction. Simply the unknown had to be considered also. After all, both Greene and Waugh produced first novels. Five. Due south. Naipaul's first novel went totally unreviewed. The reviewer has a responsibility at least to dip into everything he is sent, and this is a reflection of the responsibleness of the literary editor who does the sending. It is dangerous to ignore anything that is non clearly an ill-written bodice-ripper for a half-literate audience; even a best seller similar ''Princess Daisy'' demands consideration then that one may observe what makes it a best seller.
In my time I accept read a lot of novels in the way of duty; I have read a bully number for pleasure as well. I am, I think, qualified to compile a list like the i that awaits you ahead. The 99 novels I have chosen I have chosen with some, though not with total, confidence. Reading pleasance has not been the sole criterion. I have full-bodied mainly on works which take brought something new - in technique or view of the world - to the form. If at that place is a great deal of known excellence not represented hither, that is because 99 is a comparatively low number. The reader can decide on his own 100th. He may even choose one of my own novels. When I say that I have read a slap-up number of novels for sheer pleasure, as opposed to common cold-eyed professional person assessment, I take to acknowledge that some of these novels never stood a chance of being placed on my list.
I am an avid reader of Irving Wallace, Arthur Hailey, Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett and other practitioners of well-wrought sensational fiction. The authors themselves practice non look considered reviews or academic theses, though, as I know, they are happy when they receive a kind word in a serious periodical. They exercise non pretend to be Henry James; they expect, dissimilar James, to make coin out of a pop commodity. The fashioning of the commodity entails the jettisoning of certain elements essential to what is known as the serious or art novel - prose which essays effects beyond the mere conveying of basic information, complex psychology, narrative which is generated past the clash of character or of ideas. The popular novel of our mean solar day provides much technological information; information technology often depends on research more than than insight; its clashes are concrete; its graphic symbol involvement is minimal.
LESLIE FIEDLER, of the State University of New York at Buffalo, recently published a book called ''What Was Literature?,'' in which he seems to say that the study of the art novel (Joyce, James, Isle of mann, Edith Wharton, Dorothy Richardson, Robert Musil ) is an outmoded subject; that in that location is something wrong with our approach to reading if we cannot accommodate the spy novel, the pornographic fantasy, the comic strip. I am inclined to hold with him and to justify my own pleasure in the kind of book that is not represented on my list by referring to a new set of sub-literary criteria that has non yet been formulated. We have to guess ''The 24-hour interval of the Jackal'' or ''The Crash of '79'' by standards which neglect the Jamesian desiderata and make judgments in terms of the writer's capacity for fulfilling the known expectations of the reader. Is this climax managed well? Is this technical information given with clarity? Are these characters sufficiently uninteresting not to interfere with the move of the plot? Is this a practiced read for an invalid with a short attention span whose head is muzzy with medicine?
Professors of literature neglect certain works because they perform their declared office (to entertain) all too thoroughly. At that place is nothing to discuss, there are no symbols to dig out, no ambiguities to resolve. It often seems to me that literature departments in universities depend on a certain inefficiency of technique in the works they set up for report. In ''The Mill on the Floss'' the last flood is somewhat cursorily presented. Expert, this means that the flood is purely symbolic and Floss clearly means Fluss or flux: George Eliot studied High german philosophy. ''Ulysses'' and ''Finnegans Wake'' are studied because they contain difficulties. A professor can spend his life unknotting the problems that Joyce probably sardonically knotted for the professor'southward benefit. If ''Ulysses'' succeeds every bit a novel, it may well be in spite of the willful obfuscations that gained the professor his doctorate. A novel is primarily a presentation of human beings in action. The difference between the then-called art novel and the popular multifariousness is perchance that in the first the human beings are more than important than the activity and in the second it is the other way about.
I believe that the chief substance I have considered in making my selection is human grapheme. Information technology is the godlike task of the novelist to create man beings whom we accept as living creatures filled with complexities and armed with gratis will. This free will causes trouble for the novelist who sees himself equally a kind of small God of the Calvinists, able to predict what is going to happen on the concluding folio. No novelist who has created a credible personage can e'er be quite sure what that personage will do. Create your characters, requite them a time and identify to exist in, and leave the plot to them; the imposing of activeness on them is very difficult, since action must spring out of the temperament with which you take endowed them. At best there will exist a compromise between the narrative line you have dreamed upwards and the class of activeness preferred by the characters. Finally, though, information technology must seem that action is there to illustrate grapheme; it is character that counts.
The time and space a fictional character inhabits ought to be exactly realized. This does not mean that an art novelist need, in the manner of the pop novelist, get all his details right. Frederick Forsyth would non dream of making the Milan Airport out of his skull, but Brian Moore, in his recent ''Cold Heaven,'' equips Nice Airport with a security check system that it does non possess. This is not a grave fault, since the rest of the C^ote d'Azur is realized aromatically enough. Many novelists rightly consider human probability more of import than groundwork exactitude. Information technology often happens that a created background, similar Graham Greene'due south West Africa in ''The Heart of the Matter,'' is more magical than the existent affair. Information technology is the spatio-temporal extension of graphic symbol that is more important than public time and location - the hair on the legs, the agonized eyetooth, the phlegm in the voice. It is non enough for a novelist to fabricate a homo soul: There must be a body as well, and an immediate infinite-time continuum for that body to rest or move in.
The management of dialogue is important. At that place is a sure skill in making speech lifelike without its existence a mere transcription from a tape recorder. Such a transcription never reads like fictional oral communication, which is artful and more economic than it appears. 1 could forgive Dennis Wheatley, who wrote well-researched novels of the occult, a good deal if only his characters sounded like people. There is too much, in the novels of Arthur Hailey and Irving Wallace, of the pouring out of information cribbed directly from an encyclopedia as a substitute for real speech. The meliorate novelists write with their ears.
A good novel ought to have a shape. Pop novelists never fail to gather their strands of action into a climax: They are helped in this by the comparative inertness of their characters. The characters of an art novel resist the structure which their creators try to impose on them; they want to go their own style. They do not even want the book to come to an end and and so they have, sometimes arbitrarily, every bit in East. Thou. Forster, to be killed off. A skillful novel contrives, nevertheless, somehow to trace a parabola. It is not merely a slice of life. It is life delicately molded into a shape. A picture has a frame and a novel ends where it has to - in some kind of resolution of thought or action which satisfies as the end of a symphony satisfies.
I now tread unsafe ground. A novel ought to leave in the reader's mind a sort of philosophical residue. A view of life has been indirectly propounded that seems new, even surprising. The novelist has not preached. The didactic has no place in good fiction. But he has antiseptic some aspect of individual or public morality that was never so articulate earlier. As novels are about the ways in which human beings acquit, they tend to imply a judgment of behavior, which ways that the novel is what the symphony or painting or sculpture is non - namely, a class steeped in morality.
The outset English language novels - ''Clarissa Harlowe'' and ''Pamela'' by Samuel Richardson - were highly moral. Nosotros still cannot prevent a moral mental attitude from creeping into our purely esthetic assessment of a book. Oscar Wilde, who said that to write immorally could only mean to write badly, withal produced in ''The Picture show of Dorian Gray'' a black-and-white morality novel which almost preaches a Sunday sermon. Oscar Wilde's Miss Prism says of her own novel that the practiced end well and the bad finish badly: ''That is why it is chosen fiction.'' To many readers of fiction, and not necessarily naive ones, at that place is profound dissatisfaction when the deeper morality is subverted. Joyce's Leopold Bloom can masturbate without his olfactory organ dropping off, and H.G. Wells'south Ann Veronica can break the sexual taboos, but very few fictional characters tin can kill - except in revenge - and get away with information technology. The strength of a novel, still, owes cypher to its confirmation of what conventional morality has already told us. Rather a novel volition question convention and suggest to the states that the making of moral judgments is difficult. This can exist called the higher morality.
Orwell, in his essay on Dickens, said that, with whatever author he found sympathetic, a portrait of the author seemed to rise from the page - not necessarily similar the writer as he really was but more the author as he ought to be. Orwell saw Dickens as a bearded man with a high color, angry only laughing, with the generosity of a 19th- century liberal. The implication is that the personality of the novelist is important to us - the personality as revealed in his work and not in his private life (the private lives of many artists do not bear looking at).
Some novelists, like Gustave Flaubert and James Joyce, accept tried to obliterate themselves entirely from their fictions, seeking the anonymity of the divine creator, but they reveal themselves in style and imagery and cannot altogether hide their attitudes toward their characters. It is clear that Joyce is on the side of Bloom, though he never intrudes to brand a comment, as Thackeray and Dickens always did. The author is nowadays with us on every folio, sometimes, equally with Somerset Maugham, as an idealized portrait ranking as a graphic symbol - rational, tolerant, traveled - though more than frequently as the human being whose heavy animate nosotros can hear as he puts his words together. We have to like our author. Information technology is hard to like Marilyn French when she uses her fiction (as in ''The Bleeding Center'') to desexualize innocent men; it is very hard indeed to like Harold Robbins, who evidently loves violence while pretending to detest it. Information technology is not easy to beloved Judith Krantz, who, on the evidence of ''Princess Daisy,'' has never tried a philosopher or heard Beethoven and imposes on her personages a like cultural nullity. It is difficult to like an writer who knows too much and shows off.
We do non demand of an author that he exist an intellectual (though my own temperament prefers Johnson'south ''Rasselas'' to Jane Austen'southward ''Sense and Sensibility,'' something I can practise little nigh), but we take a right to intelligence, a knowledge of the homo soul, a certain decency - quite apart from professional person skill. Probably this imputation of decency is important: All the keen novels have been about people trying to be kinder, more tolerant. Aldous Huxley concluded at the terminate of his difficult-thinking life that all you could ask of people was that they effort to be a little nicer.
This does non mean that authors have to be nice to their characters. Geoffrey Firmin in ''Nether the Volcano'' has a wretched time and ends by beingness killed and thrown like a expressionless dog down a ravine. Only the fashion of tragedy is the way of arousing non but terror but pity. Some characters have to suffer to demonstrate the horror of life, only the writer takes only a technical pleasance in delineating those sufferings. Novels are nigh the man condition, which is not like shooting fish in a barrel, and how, if possible, to cope with information technology. The author is concerned most this, and he is concerned that you, the reader, be concerned.
As yous start on my list, you will notice that few of these attributes seem to utilise. ''Afterward Many a Summer Dies the Swan'' is bitter satire. Where is the human business concern? The business organization seems negative: a desirable globe for human being beings defined in terms of what it is non. Flann O'Brien's ''At Swim-Two-Birds'' is little more a game. In his writing, Henry Light-green tries to make a kind of novelistic verse form out of the surface of life. ''Finnegans Wake'' is a comic nightmare. Afterward you will find Ivy Compton-Burnett using most unrealistic linguistic communication and showing an interest only in the structural consequences of sin.
IT is very hard indeed to devise universal parameters for the novel. The novel, one supposes, is almost human life, but the French anti-novel (which, of course, cannot figure here) appears to deny even that. Certainly Nathalie Sarraute volition not accept the traditional view of the human personality every bit a unity. So nosotros stop with some such definition equally: a verbal construct in which invented human characters appear positively or negatively, act or do not human activity, speak or practise not speak. I do not know.
Just I do know that we conduct a calibration of values whereby nosotros know that ''Anna Karenina'' is a neat novel and ''The Carpetbaggers'' an junior one, and that our standards have something to do with the management of language and business with the human personality. Sometimes the direction of language will be so remarkable that nosotros will be prepared to forgive the lack of human interest; sometimes graphic symbol involvement will condone verbal and structural incompetence. Judging a novel is a rule-of-thumb matter; we cannot appeal to whatever esthetic tribunal which will lay down universal laws.
Anyway, all the novelists listed here have added something to our knowledge of the human being condition (sleeping or waking), have managed language well, have clarified the motivations of action, and accept sometimes expanded the bounds of imagination. And they entertain or divert, which ways to turn our faces away from the repetitive patterns of daily life and look at humanity and the earth with a new interest and even joy. Though I take, with right modesty, excluded myself from my list, every bit a practicing novelist I recall I know my own aims, and I do not think these are very different from those of my colleagues in United kingdom, the Commonwealth and the Us. Nosotros want to entertain, surprise and present the preoccupations of real man beings through invented ones.
I like to think of these novels, and all the other expert ones that are non here, equally products of a more or less common culture expert in the place called Anglophonia - the world where English is spoken. But, having mentioned above the national distributions of this linguistic communication, information technology is in order to regret that some English-speaking countries take to be represented more that others. New Zealand, alas, is not featured at all; Canada appears just twice and Australia only once; the output is shared mainly by the British Isles and the United States. This cannot be helped. I would be delighted to run across the Nobel Prize for Literature become to Canada or New Zealand, as information technology has already gone to Australia, but such considerations of Democracy pride are probably unworthy. It is the work that counts.
You have here, so, 99 fine novels produced between 1939 and now. There are, yet, slightly fewer than 99 fine novelists. Though nigh are featured one time but, some announced twice, and Aldous Huxley three times. Some novels are romans fleuve or river novels in several volumes, but they are treated with piddling more than anniversary than works of 100 or so pages. The books are non bundled in order of merit simply in gild of date of publication. When more than ane novel was published in the same twelvemonth, I have not observed a pedantic chronology involving month of publication. I have merely placed the authors in alphabetical lodge. The multivolumed novels are dated co-ordinate to the appearance of the first volume.
If you disagree violently with some of my choices, I shall be pleased. We arrive at values only through dialectic. 1934 Party Going Henry Light-green After Many a Summer Dies the Swan Aldous Huxley Finnegans Wake James Joyce At Swim-Two-Birds Flann O'Brien 1940 The Ability and the Glory Graham Greene For Whom the Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway Strangers and Brothers (to 1970) C. P. Snow 1941 The Airport King Warner 1944 The Equus caballus's Mouth Joyce Cary The Razor'due south Edge W. Somerset Maugham 1945 Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh 1946 Titus Groan Mervyn Peake 1947 The Victim Saul Bellow Nether the Volcano Malcolm Lowry 1948 The Heart of the Thing Graham Greene The Naked and the Expressionless Norman Mailer No Highway Nevil Shute 1949 The Rut of the Day Elizabeth Bowen Ape and Essence Aldous Huxley Nineteen Lxxx-Four George Orwell The Body William Sansom 1950 Scenes from Provincial Life William Cooper The Disenchanted Budd Schulberg 1951 A Dance to the Music of Time (to 1975) Anthony Powell The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger A Chronicle of Aboriginal Sunlight (to 1969) Henry Williamson The Caine Wildcat Herman Wouk 1952 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison The Old Human being and the Sea Ernest Hemingway Wise Blood Flannery O'Connor Sword of Honor (to 1961) Evelyn Waugh 1953 The Long Bye Raymond Chandler The Groves of Academe Mary McCarthy 1954 Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis 1957 Room at the Peak John Braine The Alexandria Quartet (to 1960) Lawrence Durrell The London Novels (to 1960) Colin MacInnes The Assistant Bernard Malamud 1958 The Bell Iris Murdoch Saturday Night and Sunday Morning Alan Sillitoe The Once and Future Male monarch T. H. White 1959 The Mansion William Faulkner Goldfinger Ian Fleming 1960 Facial Justice L. P. Hartley The Balkan Trilogy (to 1965) Olivia Manning 1961 The Mighty and Their Fall Ivy Compton-Burnett Catch-22 Joseph Heller The Fox in the Cranium Richard Hughes Riders in the Chariot Patrick White The Old Men at the Zoo Angus Wilson 1962 Another Country James Baldwin An Error of Judgement Pamela Hansford Johnson Island Aldous Huxley The Golden Notebook Doris Lessing Pale Fire Vladimir Nabokov 1963 The Girls of Slender Means Muriel Spark 1964 The Spire William Golding Heartland Wilson Harris A Single Homo Christopher Isherwood The Defense Vladimir Nabokov Tardily Call Angus Wilson 1965 The Lockwood Concern John O'Hara Cocksure Mordecai Richler The Mandelbaum Gate Muriel Spark 1966 A Man of the People Chinua Achebe The Anti-Decease League Kingsley Amis Giles Goat-Boy John Barth The Late Conservative World Nadine Gordimer The Last Gentleman Walker Percy 1967 The Vendor of Sweets R. M. Narayan 1968 The Image Men J. B. Priestley Pavane Keith Roberts 1969 The French Lieutenant's Woman John Fowles Portnoy'due south Complaint Philip Roth 1970 Bomber Len Deighton 1973 Sweet Dreams Michael Frayn Gravity'south Rainbow Thomas Pynchon 1975 Humboldt's Gift Saul Bellow The History Human being Malcolm Bradbury 1976 The Medico'southward Wife Brian Moore Falstaff Robert Nye 1977 How To Salve Your Own Life Erica Jong Farewell Companions James Plunkett Staying On Paul Scott 1978 The Insurrection John Updike 1979 The Unlimited Dream Visitor J. G. Ballard Dubin'south Lives Bernard Malamud A Bend in the River Five. Due south. Naipaul Sophie's Choice William Styron 1980 Life in the West Brian Aldiss Riddley Walker Russell Hoban How Far Tin You Get? David Gild A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole 1981 Lanark Alasdair Gray Darconville's True cat Alexander Theroux The Mosquito Coast Paul Theroux Creation Gore Vidal 1982 The Rebel Angels Robertson Davies 1983 Ancient Evenings Norman Mailer
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