The Daily Telegraph - Features
Artworks are all too long – editors must be merciless
Earlier this week, the Canadian writer Alice Munro died at the age of 92. If you haven’t read her, I urge you to do so. Subtle, aphoristic and concise, Munro was able to convey whole worlds and draw out the complexities of human relationships through her short stories: her favoured literary form.
That form, however, has fallen out of fashion. It’s quietly flourishing – after Munro, you ought to read the likes of George Saunders, Tessa Hadley and Kathryn Scanlan – but the way much of the publishing industry behaves, you wouldn’t know it. “Statement novels” and endless “cosy crime” series receive the lion’s share of the attention.
This is no surprise. For we’re living in the age of the baggy monster, in which length is to be admired. This may seem curious, given that we also, supposedly, have far less time than previous generations to spend reading or going to the cinema; but either way, across the arts, whether it’s films, novels, TV or plays – they’ve all become much too long.
Aside from some of the great 19th-century novels, it’s rare for me to love any book that clocks in at more than 400 pages. Even with the likes of Bleak House, I sometimes wonder whether I’m being seduced by the teeming multitudes contained in Dickens’s sprawling narrative – originally published in monthly instalments – and overlooking the fact that some of his descriptive passages seem to last a day.
One of the most popular novels of recent years, for example, was A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, which runs to 736 pages in the paperback edition. It was beloved by critics too, and shortlisted for the 2015 Booker Prize. Yet to my mind it’s a shapeless beast, a long tale of sexual abuse in which characters come and go without much consequence and the agony of the main protagonist is prolonged to an unbearable degree. Even so, I’m not surprised by the novel’s success: first, tales of misery will always sell, and second, confessional works such as Yanagihara’s chime with our tendency as a society to overshare.
Emotional incontinence is never as insightful as the clipped phrase, the skilful handling of what’s left unsaid. Munro was the master of this, but there are many others: Muriel Spark, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford. They challenge you to think hard about the words, to use their intelligence to divine the meaning – and when you do, it’s all the more rewarding.
In theatre, meanwhile, the art of dramaturgy appears to be dead, given the number of plays I’ve recently seen to which editorial secateurs should have been taken, and weren’t. There was much to admire, for instance, in the National Theatre’s Standing at the Sky’s Edge,
which follows the residents of a Sheffield tower block over 50 years. Yet, at two hours and 45 minutes, there was also a lot that could have been shed. Again, emotional incontinence wrecked what could have been a taut piece of theatre.
Is it an ego problem, whereby those putting on a production are too scared of the writer? Is it laziness, in terms of not being sufficiently bothered to scrutinise the writing? Or is it, as I suspect, a lack of artistic confidence, meaning that you throw everything at a production and hope that something good will stick? The recent debacle of Opening Night,
the Sheridan Smith-starring play about an actress going off the rails, suggests that all three are possible.
As regards cinema, I have seen too many good recent films miss out on becoming exceptional due to a lack of rigour in the cuttingroom. Challengers, which I saw earlier this week, is a good example: a love triangle between three young tennis hopefuls set against the cruel march of time, it was hobbled by some longueurs, with the psychological power-play overstated. Nowadays, it seems, only a master such as Christopher Nolan is capable of conjuring a three-and-a-half-hour artistic vision which has you on the edge of your seat throughout. I accept that there’s an appetite from punters to sit through hours of film, perhaps to get value-for-money. Still, length doesn’t equal quality, and I would suggest that anyone who sat through all three hours and 12 minutes of Avatar: The Way of Water has been conned.
Finally, in television, the problem can grow exponentially. Length here is about the number of series commissioned, not just the duration of the episodes. This bloating gave us seven seasons of Game of Thrones, which was obviously one too many. In a world of limitless content, the shows that make a big noise are often those that are run and run and run, each new series more hotly anticipated and duly inferior to the last. The prolongation of some franchises, such as The Walking Dead or
Homeland, leads you to wonder whether the makers care about quality, or whether they’re merely content to feed the beast.
You get the idea. For the sake of brevity, I’m going to sign off. If only those working in the arts and in entertainment had the sense to do the same.