Literary circles are agog at James Thackara’s new novel. But would they care if it were 80 pages rather than 800?
DJ Taylor
The recent revelation that after two decades of sweat and expectation the novelist James Thackara is ready to publish his 800-page work, The Book of Kings, will come as no surprise to anyone who follows literary gossip.
Rumours about Thackara and his labours have been circulating since the early 1990s. A New Yorker profile dwelt on the panoramic window the book apparently offers on Europe in the build-up to World War II and since then there is a sense that the book has virtually been written in public, rather in the way of Victorian novelists who sat down to work in their club smoking rooms.
What might be called the Thackara tendency – the urge to spend long years hatching some fabled masterwork whose eventual publication is a matter of hope rather than certainty – is an enduring feature of the literary landscape. The late Harold Brodkey spent most of his adult career on The Runaway Soul, eventually published to somewhat muted acclaim in 1991. The absolute record must belong to Henry Roth, who brought out the first volume of a long-meditated six- novel series 60 years after the appearance of his debut, Call It Sleep, back in 1934.
Why write long books? Does it make you more of an artist (slow resolution of endlessly sifted thought)? Or less of one (plenty of people, after all, would agree with TS Eliot’s line on the artist having to discriminate to do any good)? Broadly speaking, the average English literary novel-blockbuster clocks in at something under 300 pages. Yet every so often some thousand-page monster will lurch out of the syntactical undergrowth – Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Don DeLillo’s Underworld. Their bid for critical respect seems almost consciously linked to their sheer volume. I have written a third of a million words, runs the sub- text. It is your duty to take me seriously.
Certainly these kinds of attitudes readily commend themselves to prize juries. Groaning behemoths thrown up by the Booker Prize over the last 10 years include AS Byatt’s Possession (Byatt is rather an oddity – “epics”, for some reason, tend to be written by men), Ben Okri’s The Famished Road and Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger. (Ian McEwan’s slimmish Amsterdam, the 1998 winner, seemed flimsy by comparison, and JMCoetzee’s Disgrace, last year’s winner, is not a long book.)
The unspoken assumption among certain publishers that “length counts” will be brought home to anyone who takes the trouble to examine the hardback edition of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, joint-winner with Unsworth in 1992. On the surface it is ambitiously big; in fact at least 50 of the 300 pages are blank.
There are sound historical precedents for these rivers of print (or in Ondaatje’s case rivers of white space). With certain well-known exceptions (Sense and Sensibility, Silas Marner) the history of the English novel until about 1890 is the history of long books. There are a number of reasons for this: aesthetic and also economic. Mid- Victorian bestsellers habitually appeared in serial parts or in the pages of monthly magazines before re-emerging between hard covers, compelling the author to write 24 episodes, like it or not.
The three-volume novel, over which writers knitted their brows until practically the end of the century, was largely a result of the stranglehold exerted over the book trade by libraries wise to the fact that they could force readers into three separate borrowings to finish one story.
Contemporary writers frequently complained about this. Some of the saddest scenes in George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), a savage expos of the conditions of the late-Victorian literary marketplace, are those in which the failing novelist Edwin Reardon forces himself to bulk out the work-in-progress to acceptable length. The book is a failure and as a consequence his career is finished and his marriage wrecked.
Curiously enough, the great aesthetic changes that took place in the late 1890s and early 1900s – the revolt against length and the demise of the labyrinthine Dickensian plot – had an economic background. Literary historians often ascribe the advent of the slim early 20th- century novel to the rise of modernism (Henry James’s attack on the “loose, baggy monsters” of the Victorian age), but the immediate reason was the libraries’ sense that the public appetite for three-deckers was sated.
Inevitably, loose, baggy monsters continued to get written – notably in the United States, where the works of inter- war American masters such as Theodore Dreiser (An American Tragedy, 1925) and John Dos Passos (my copy of USA, 1930, weighs in at 1 184 pages) could be measured by the inch. Insiders used to joke that Thomas Wolfe’s enormous manuscripts were delivered to his editor Maxwell Perkins in an armoured car.
This tendency to gigantism, to scope, grandeur and occasionally folly, was reinforced after the war by the rise of the US campus novelist.
Tenured academics expected to spend much of their time getting on with the work in progress. At any rate it is difficult to imagine that the inky marathon that is John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) would have checked in at quite the same length if its author had worked in a drugstore. British campus novels by Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge and co are significantly shorter – largely, one imagines, as a result of more demanding teaching schedules.
Here in England we tend to view with considerably disquiet the author who, having produced two or three slimmish volumes suddenly whips out an epic. It can be done – Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve-Up! was longer(and perhaps better) than his three previous novels put together. On the other hand, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled (which appeared six years after the much frailer Booker- winning The Remains of the Day) was the literary equivalent of wading through treacle. Some critics were similarly unimpressed by Adam Thorpe’s mountainous Still, the follow-up to his appreciably slimmer and more successful Ulverton.
For the most part the best “long novels” of the post-war era – Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time and Simon Raven’s Alms for Oblivion sequence – have been broken up into discrete volumes.
And to the aesthetic bodybuilding practised by the kind of novelist to whom a book of less than 500 pages is somehow a loss of virility can be added simple prolixity. For some reason this is usually marked down as a youthful failing – literary agents’ offices are stuffed with unpublishable 600-page novels by 28- year-olds – but in fact by far the worse culprits are the over-50s. Look at Norman Mailer for example (the hardback of Ancient Evenings must be nearly three inches thick) or Thomas Pynchon’s infinitely drawn-out Mason & Dixon.
The late John Wain, having spent a blameless 30-year career producing standard 250-page books, suddenly succumbed to this mania for excess detail in the last decade of his life: Where the Rivers Meet (1988), the first part of a shelf-distending trilogy, was a horrifying 600-plus.
None of this is to say that more will necessarily mean worse. Anthony Burgess produced slender novels from the 1950s until 1980, when his huge Earthly Powers (649 pages) declared itself a masterpiece. George Orwell remarked that his great regret, on finishing War and Peace for the first time, was that the novel wasn’t twice as long.
I feel exactly the same way about New Grub Street (479 pages, Everyman edition) and Vanity Fair (878 pages, Oxford University Press edition), yet as any William Makepeace Thackeray scholar will tell you, there are several quite long passages shoe-horned into Vanity Fair’s text for no other reason than its author, his deadline looming, had to find some way of filling up his 32-page monthly number.
No one who cares about novels or the fraught, lonely business of novel-writing (a touch less lonely in this case, apparently) can fail to wish James Thackara luck with The Book of Kings. Let’s just hope that within this 800-page leviathan there isn’t a 250-page novel screaming to get out.