IAN McMILLAN Novel developments from the Land of Nod Off
THIS may be apocryphal but I’m sure I remember reading a Sherlock Holmes story where the great detective’s assistant, Dr Watson, was “dozing over a novel” in his room. Apocryphal or not, it always struck me as a bit odd because I’ve always found novels to be exciting and enduring cultural objects, not something you’d doze over at all.
What I find very interesting and almost moving about the novel is that it carries on being written and read through all kinds of changes in literary and cultural fashion and these days more novels are being published than ever and they still have a crucial role to play in our literary discourse.
In one sense the novel is an antique form that should have just faded away years ago; the great American writer Ambrose Bierce defined the novel as “A story, padded” and “A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art”. In other words, novels are too big and long and unwieldy to be any good, or any use.
And yet, here they are, still arriving in bookshops and libraries to take up tantalising amounts of our time in an era when our attention spans are meant to be getting smaller and more fragmented because of social media and on-demand entertainment.
Who, these days, has the time to get to know a cast of characters intimately at the same time as trying to work out an intricate plot at the same time enjoying the multifaceted language that the novel is written in?
Well, the answer is, plenty of us. On a random train trip the other day I saw three people in a not-that-crowded carriage reading paperbacked novels; there may have been others reading novels electronically on their tablets and that woman writing feverishly in her notebook could have been working on the first draft of her novel because one feature of the novel is that as well as still being read it’s still being written.
Not only do we want to find out what happens to those people in those places over three hundred pages, a lot of people want to write three hundred pages of a novel to make things happen to those people in those places.
They do say that everybody has a novel in them, that we’ve all got a fiction-making gene or a novelistic itch that we all need to scratch and maybe that’s why the novel refuses to lie down and die: something deep inside us not only a storytelling urge, but a complicated and nuanced storytelling urge.
We need stories with layers to them, tales that take a while to meander from first page to last.
Maybe this is the time I started my novel. Well, I’ll just read a few first. Just to get a few tips.
PS Tell that about not dozing over a novel to my wife who often has to nudge me awake when I’ve nodded away on the settee as I’m reading a novel. Mind you, that’s my fault not the novel’s. The book itself is gripping but I’m not gripping the book and it’s crashing to the floor. And even if it’s a substantial hardback the noise isn’t sufficient to wake me up. Let me emphasise again, though: I’m to blame, not the novel. I got up at 0500 and I’ve been busy all day so wonder my eyes are getting heavy. The novel, as a form, is wide awake but Ian McMillan is in The Land of Nod Off, which is next door to The Land of Nod.