Writing a novel? Then make sure it has a story
iterary papers do not take novels seriously as a rule. But they don't ignore them either. The Times Litermy Supplement and the Literary Review, for instance, each review a dozen or so in every issue. But their writers never actually ask, 'What is a novel for?' Now I have no doubt about the matter. A novel is to tell you a tale, and in the process cause you to forget about everything else. It is not, primarily, a work of art, though if it is, of course, so much the better. It is not performing the same function as Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling or Beethoven's last Quartets or Bacon's Novum aganunt It does not, or should not, pretend to stretch the mind either of the author or of the reader. Nor does it elevate: it is not the Book of Deuteronomy or Hume's Enquily concerning Human Understanding or Newman's Idea of a University. It is an entertainment.
We know when a novel works in exactly the same way that we know when a car starts or a dishwasher begins to hum or an aircraft takes off: we can feel, hear, see the machinery do its job. When, aged 14, I first picked up Jane Eyre, I had only read half a dozen sentences when the boarding school in which I lived mysteriously ceased to exist. The muddied oafs clattering to the rugby pitch in their studded boots were miraculously silent. I no longer smelt the dust of the silent schoolroom, or heard the caretaker whistling with his broom, or sensed the master prowling about the empty corridors looking for slackers not playing games. I was lost in the mind of Jane as she faced the cruelties and jeers of the hostile children in a hard world. I was the happy captive of the novel form, the cheerful prisoner of that most enrapturing of drugs, first-class fiction, written in this case by a genius. And when I pick up Jane Eyre now, as I did a few days ago, I still feel Charlotte Bronte's powerful imagination closing on my own like a steel trap.
We don't have to be in a classic either. I am in southern California: 'I drove east on Sunset but I didn't go home. At La Brea I turned north and swung over to Highland, out over Cahuenga Pass and down on to Ventura Boulevard, past Studio City and Sherman Oaks and Encino.' Here is the topographical magic of Raymond Chandler, so totally different from Bronte's but so equally compelling — not frightened governesses or horrid rich children but 'fast boys in stripped down Fords', 'tired men in dusty coupes'. He notices 'the big eight-wheelers and sixteen-wheelers were streaming north, all hung over with orange lights', while 'on the right [was] the great fat solid Pacific trudging into shore like a scrubwoman going home'. I am there, hopelessly lost in these places, alongside Marlowe as he sits at the wheel gripping it grimly, then eats tad but quick' and drops 'a brandy on the top of the New York cut', turns into his office 'past the slobbers/ hum of a vacuum cleaner', and then is abruptly visited by 'a large man and wide' called Joseph P. Toad — 'the neck of his canary-yellow shirt was open wide, which it had to be if his neck was going to get out' — who is accompanied by a junkie called Alfred, 'thin as a broom straw' with 'a heavy automatic'. And so it goes on, my eyes strapped to the text, my mind in that dusty office gazing down the barrel of the Luger in the twitching hand.
I have read the tale before — it is The Little Sister — but I forget the details or even the labyrinth-plot; I am hooked again and I want to be. It is not merely my 'willing suspension of disbelief' (though there is nothing wrong with that) but also my complete absorption in the details, which make it more real than the quiet Bayswater street in which I am actually living and reading the book. A novelist is someone who raises a curtain and instantly summons you on to the stage, so you are there, alongside little Pip, for instance, visiting his dead parents and siblings in the little churchyard and beginning to cry in pity for them and pity for himself until, suddenly, 'a terrible voice' shouts 'Hold your noise!' and a man 'started up from among the graves':
A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A roan who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles and torn by briars; who limped and shivered and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.
There has never been an opening like the first half-dozen pages of Great Expectations, which grab you in one masterly hand by the scruff of your neck and with the other by your squirming vitals and drag you into the tale. You smell the damp churchyard and peer into the fog and hear the guns and the bloodhounds, seeing the fearsome figure of Magwitch as he hangs you, alongside Pip, upside-down over the gravestone and searches your pocket, and demands from you a file and wittles or 'I'll have your heart and liver out'.
A tale does not have to terrify you, however, to trap you in its toils. The first 3,000 words or so of Mansfield Park, for instance, are an almost perfect piece of fictional narrative — written by Jane Austen, I hazard, in a single sitting — which begin with Miss Maria Ward's 'good luck' in captivating 'Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park in the County of Northampton and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income'. What gives this announcement the delicious, intriguing twist is not just that 'all Huntingdon exclaimed on the greatness of the match', but that 'her uncle, the lawyer. himself, allowed her to be at least three thousand pounds short of any equitable claim to it'. A magic sentence, with its delightful precision — so typical of Jane Austen — and its intimate picture of 'her uncle, the lawyer', proud of his beautiful and successful (though also stupid) niece, doing his sums at his desk, and conceding that Miss Ward was a most fortunate young woman. The key word here is equitable, a splendid lawyer's word which Jane Austen pounces on with her habitual accuracy.
I love the way in which a great writer carries you confidently into the story, like an irresistible ocean wave buoying you up, sweeping you out of your depth and not depositing you on dry land again until the tale is told and you are ready to rejoin the real world. This is indeed art of a high order, and I can do without the purely artistic, the art for art's sake as opposed to the tale's sake. I often relish those wonderful stories in Dubliners, one of the best collection of tales ever put together by one writer, which hold you a happy prisoner in their (often anguished) emotions; and contrast them with the longueurs of U4,sses, so pretentious, so vastly and thunderously overpraised, so singularly underadhesive in getting and keeping a grip on your attention. As Dr Johnson said of Paradise Lost, `No one ever wished it longer.' I picked up, the other day, a volume of Proust's A la recherche, and experienced exactly the same inability to surrender myself. There was Monsieur de Norpois, the diplomat, dining with the narrator and his parents. It is characteristic of Proust that, unlike Raymond Chandler, he misses out a key detail, the main course of the dinner. More important, however, is the way the story glides away into an abyss and you put the book down, unsatisfied. Oh Marcel, mon viewc, why didn't you pay a little more attention to the story?
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