...the fundamental aspect of the novel is its story-telling
aspect...
-EM Forster, Aspects
of the Novel
I liked this collected series of lectures on what makes for good novel writing much better than almost any of the novels that Forster actually wrote (A Passage to India [see Review] being the lone exception). Forster treats seven different aspects--the story, people, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern, and rhythm--in a breezy conversational style. Along the way, he offers examples, both good and bad, from literary history. I found myself agreeing and dissenting about equally, but the whole thing was immensely interesting and entertaining.
Here are some of the observations that I agreed with and why:
A story "can only have one fault: that of making
the audience not want to know what happens
next."
One inevitably thinks of James Joyce's Ulysses, which by now has surely
retired the title of "the book most likely to remain unfinished". No matter
how revolutionary the technique, how insightful the observations or how
compelling the characters, a book that you can put down and not care what
happens next has failed in its most basic task.
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The constant sensitiveness of characters for each
other--even in writers called robust, like
Fielding--is remarkable, and has no parallel in
life, except among those people who have plenty of
leisure. Passion, intensity at moments--yes,
but not this constant awareness, this endless
readjusting, this ceaseless hunger. I believe
that these are the reflections of the novelist's own state
of mind while he composes, and that the predominance
of love in novels is partly because of this.
Forster elsewhere sites DH Lawrence favorably, but he seems to me to
be an author whose characters are so obsessed by passion as to be too novelistic,
if not completely unrealistic. But, the example I would site here
actually is not a case of love predominating to excess, but rather Crime
and Punishment (see Review),
where the characters' constant awareness of the philosophical and moral
implications of their every thought and deed is such that it could only
be the product of an author in intellectual overdrive. If real people
truly lived their lives this way, nothing would ever get done.
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In the losing battle that the plot fights with the
characters, it often takes a cowardly revenge.
Nearly all novels are feeble at the end. This
is because the plot requires to be wound up. Why is
this necessary? Why is there not a convention
which allows a novelist to stop as soon as he feels
muddled or bored? Alas, he has to round things
off, and usually the characters go dead while he is
at work, and our final impression of them is through
deadness.
Anyone who's ever read one of his books will instantly call to mind James Clavell. I recall the jarring sensation of finishing his great novel Tai-Pan when, many hundreds of pages into the book, unwilling to see it conclude, but obviously noticing that their were a dwindling number of pages; I could not imagine how he would conclude the main plot line so quickly, let alone tie up all of the remaining loose ends. And then, BOOM!, our hero is dead and the book is over. And why? I was ready to read on for as long as he wanted to keep writing. Or, at worst, he could have just stopped in mid story and said: "To be continued..." But Forster is right; the conventions of the novel almost require authors to let the tiger out of the cage at the end, and, more often then not, it leaves a bitter taste in the reader's mouth, regardless of how much we'd enjoyed the book up until that point.
There is much food for thought of this kind in this witty, opinionated,
fascinating survey of the novel. Add to that a really fine hammer
job on Henry James and the fact that said hammering upset Virginia Woolf
and we're talking big thumbs up here.
(Reviewed:25-Dec-99)
Grade: (A-)
