Writers should never be afraid of exercising their imagination
What colour hair has Jane Austen’s Eliza Bennet? In what way is the prettiness of Henry James’s Isabel Archer “unexpected”? As readers, we are given the briefest account of the looks of these imaginary young women. But we are left in no doubt that their creators intended to convey a powerful sense of their allure – and that they succeeded in doing so with a minimum of information about their appearance.
Every fiction reader has a vivid mental image of the characters about whom they are reading. Often, that image can be as powerful as the recollection of an acquaintance or friend. Hence the peculiar sense of alienation when film or TV adaptations cast actors who fail to embody our own particular vision of the character (Keira Knightley as Lizzie Bennet? Get away!).
So there is something unexpected about the novelist Sebastian Faulks’s recent account at the Cheltenham Literature Festival of how criticism of his depiction of female characters had led him to eschew description of Lena, a principal character in his latest novel, Snow Country. Instead, readers are to infer her physical presence from oblique details.
As a novelist who has been praised (by a female critic) for his “hallmark tenderness towards female characters” it is disconcerting to find Faulks applying that problematic phrase “the male gaze” to his writing. There are, it is true, a number of distinguished contemporary novelists who could use a touch of Faulksian self-criticism, including the highly regarded one in whose recent novel his hero feels his “sphincter loosen” at the sight of his love interest’s “small breasts beneath the silk [dressing-gown]”.
But great writers have always used physical description precisely as it suits their purposes to delineate character. George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver, tossing her hair out of her eyes with “the air of a small Shetland pony” tells us all we need to know about that steadfast young person. And on recently rereading Anna Karenina, I was surprised to find a detailed description of her appearance: black velvet dress, garland of pansies, pearl necklace and all. “Her charm,” Tolstoy writes, “lay precisely in the fact that her personality always stood out from her dress.”
It is unfashionable (bordering on heresy) to say it, but the real issue is not whether novelists should stay in their lane when it comes to depicting experience, but how well they do it. Tolstoy offered a wealth of description of his heroine; Austen a minimum. Both are still read with passionate engagement. Thank goodness, then, for the wisdom of Booker-prize winning novelist Bernardine Evaristo, who briskly dismissed as “nonsense” the idea that writers should not exercise the essential fictional muscle known as imagination.
A recent correspondence in The Daily Telegraph Letters pages has addressed the important topic of pointless biscuits. Rich Tea biscuits, in particular, have been given a hard time for their dreary blandness.
It is odd that these characterless discs should be so tenacious of their place on the supermarket shelf – someone must like them (see also: Nice biscuits, those banes of my childhood teatimes). Friends in the West Country, who feed Rich Tea biscuits to the cattle in an adjacent field assure me that they are a bovine favourite.
Meanwhile, as any fule kno, Fox’s Party Rings are top biscuit.