Genre Fiction and Literary Fiction

Perhaps I was always naive, but when I was growing up I didn't really pick up on the differences between literary fiction and not literary fiction. Probably this had a lot to do with my strongly trashy reading tastes: from Anthony Horowitz to James Patterson via Jodi Picoult, I was never in much danger of accidentally bumping into a Booker Prize winner.

Two things have opened my eyes to this gap. Firstly, I very strongly considered studying Popular Literature at Trinity College Dublin. The course (which, from what I saw of it, I enthusiastically recommend) covers everything from horror to erotica (which was the case before Fifty Shades of Grey), but with the puzzling caveat that if it's something you could study in an English degree, it's probably not an option.

Secondly, my exposure to the publishing industry has backed up this division. Without leaking any details, it's striking that, even before a book is acquired, there is a keen focus on working out who it's to be targeted at. This obviously makes a great deal of sense, but it did surprise me that on more than one occasion concerns have been raised that a book will struggle because it is neither a genre book nor a literary book, but rather a blend of both. The consensus (which, I would stress, I see no reason to doubt) is that the readers of these books have very different tastes, indeed to the point they are not compatible.

Now, genre distinctions make a great deal of sense most of the time. Some readers like romances, while some readers like crime novels - we have long-established conventions in areas like titles and cover designs that enable you to quickly tell which of these categories any single book falls into. Equally, there is almost certainly a sub-genre of 'romantic crime' (or at least there will be, once the current trend for publishing fan fiction expands to include Holmes/Watson slash fiction), and this can again be compartmentalized. You might think it would be nice if we all branched out a little more, but we don't seem to want to, and that's what it is.

My problem is more with the concept of literary fiction as a distinct genre in it's own right, and the implication that if something is 'crime' (or romance, or horror...) it by definition isn't literary. This kind of distinction might look loosely appropriate from a distance, but up close it is both illogical and counter-productive.

To start with, literary books throughout history obviously do have genres. We need only look to Shakespeare, who wrote comedies, histories and tragedies. Even if we follow more recent genre distinctions the same point is true: Hilary Mantel's novels are indisputably historical fiction; Toni Morrison's Beloved is a family saga (with horror elements). The supposed distinction doesn't work.

But the bigger problem is the implication that goes with this mistaken assumption. A typical argument would be that genre fiction is about people doing, and literary fiction is about people being. Genre fiction, you could argue, is all about following through a particular situation, obeying convention and producing a satisfactory conclusion. Everything is predictable, even (in the case of spy thrillers, for example) the necessity of it being unpredictable. It is left to literary fiction, then, to explore big questions. Most readers aren't interested, of course, they just want their weekly dose of angsty romance, masterful sleuthing or kinky sex.

The problem is that all of the best bits of literature lie in the gaps between these two categories. It's all well and good that we have deep-but-inpenetrable literary fiction furthering the minds of the pretentious elite, and that the vast majority of us are reading happily away. But wouldn't it be better if our best, most interesting writers were targeting the mass market - able to lure in thriller readers with a gripping plot that also had time to reflect on the infinite complexity of human life?

This, of course, is what many great writers do - just this week we reviewed Justin Cronin's The Twelve, which is both indisputably apocalyptic sci-fi horror, but simultaneously in many senses a literary book in its grasp of character. But this might well be more true if the book industry desegmentalised itself a touch, which of course is contingent on readers being willing to push themselves from time to time, rather than reaching for the book with the most similar cover to their last read.

Review: The Twelve by Justin Cronin

The Passage, the book which precedes The Twelve, had more fanfare attached to its release than any non-JK Rowling book I've seen. Waterstones not only had huge piles of it at the front of their shop in Reading, they also produced a free booklet including the opening chapter and heaps of positive reviews. I was persuaded to purchase it, and loved the book so much it leaped to the top of my all-time favourites list.  Needless to say, I was keenly anticipating the sequel.

Of course, sequels have a tendency to struggle, not least when they are the second book in a planned trilogy, as is the case here. The Passage ultimately ends with the death of Babcock, the first of the Twelve - my worry here was that this follow-up could only repeat the same story as its predecessor over and over and over, or would have to sacrifice the sense of difficulty which made that first triumph so sweet. Refreshingly, Cronin takes the decision to go in a very different direction - I believe I read somewhere that Cronin compared the first novel to a travel book, and the second to a spy thriller, and the distinction in tone is clear.

That being said, the opening takes us right back to The Passage, in more ways than one. The first chapter is a godsend to those who haven't re-read the former novel in a while, as it recounts the events to date in a quasi-biblical fashion. This tantalising hint at the far-future is one of many tantalising strands you hope will be explained by the end of the series. From here we plunge back into 'Year Zero', when the 'virals' are rampaging across America. The Passage made a habit of investing in characters and then abandoning them - here we abandon our entire cast to pick up a whole new cast, although connections slowly become apparent. The sense of fear builds slowly, but the cumulative effect is still chilling.

The Bookshelf is being reassembled...

Apologies the recent lack of posts here at The Bookshelf.  Tim is beginning a Masters Degree, while I (Joel) has just started a new job working for Quercus, the UK publisher - part of the excitement of moving to the big city is coping without internet while the good people of Tesco Broadband fight the good fight to set it up.

To give you a flavour of what you can look forward to when we're back in business, there's the promised analysis of the politics of JK Rowling's The Casual Vacancy (check out our review here).  A lot of attention has focused on the novel's perceived left-wing politics, which so displeased the Daily Mail, but I'm inclined to think it's actually a lot more complicated than that - check back in a week or three for more.

We're also very excited about the upcoming release of The Twelve, by Justin Cronin.  The novel is the second in an anticipated trilogy, which began with The Passage - a wonderful book which fused apocalyptic vampires with literary fiction.  Look out for a review of The Passage, as well as Cronin's award-winning earlier novel The Summer Guest, which might well be the best book I've read this year.  Of course, once The Twelve is released it'll be read and reviewed as quickly as professional life makes possible.

Finally, while the professional world is hampering my reading time, it's also giving me more of an insight into the world of publishing. I won't be leaking any trade secrets, but hopefully I'll be able to share some interesting news about what's going on in the book world.

Happy October!

Review: The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling

I think it's fair to say a lot of people came to The Casual Vacancy determined to hate it.  Some people were going to attack it for not being Booker Prize worthy.  Others were going to loathe it for not being Harry Potter.  Many, judging by Amazon reviews, were more interested in the Kindle price than the book itself.  Motivated partly by these naysayers, and partly by my love of her earlier work, I would admit to being equally stubborn in my determination to love the book.  I wasn't disappointed.

Make no mistake, The Casual Vacancy is a strange book - at once very contemporary and deeply old-fashioned.  Only a few weeks ago I was celebrating the long-and-slow virtues of Anna Karenina, written at a time when novelists were unafraid of meandering merrily along with a big cast of characters and a slow-burning plot.  Rowling's new book is in that mould.

Review: The Lighthouse by Alison Moore

At the risk of being flippant (and, more certainly, the danger of releasing spoilers!), my initial forays into this years Booker Prize shortlist has suggested there's a very simple formula for obtaining a nomination - write a depressing novel about depressed Brits holidaying in Europe, have it published by a small publisher, and finish it off with a surprising death.  Success is assured!

Joking aside though, where The Lighthouse clearly outdoes Swimming Home (which for all its potential I can't say I enjoyed) is in creating a pair of protagonists with whom we can feel great pity.  Whereas Levy's prose style in Swimming Home swerved off towards obscurity, Moore uses a calculatedly blunt style to reflect the emotional stuntedness of the book's central character Futh - a newly single middle-aged man hiking in Germany, whose tragic back story emerges bit by bit as the novel goes on.

At times, Futh's character seems almost overdetermined.  Not only does he experience Oedipal desires for his long-departed mother (he eventually, and wisely, stops telling his long-term partner and his readers the ways in which she reminds him of his mother), he also obsessively remembers his father's sexual encounters which he was forced to watch as a boy, leading to a cloying physicality in the books opening chapters across both storylines - one highlight (or lowlight) being the memorable 'He bites into his egg and she hears it being wetly masticated in his mouth'.  Charming.

Review: The Good, The Bad and the The Multiplex by Mark Kermode

[Photo Credit: Jorge Royan]

If you hadn't ever listened to Mark Kermode's radio reviews, you would be able to predict the tone of his latest book by its subtitle: 'what's wrong with modern movies?'.  The magic of the man is that what might simply be a Grumpy Old Man rant (and it certainly is that) manages to remain wonderfully entertaining.

Kermode (or 'The Good Doctor', as he is often called on his Radio 5Live show) ostensibly turns his attention to a different topic in each chapter: multiplex cinemas, the role of the critic, the British film industry, 3D movies, and so on.  In actual fact this only provides a sliver of fixed ground from which he can roam freely, spinning off anecdotes and name-dropping movies, directors and actors at a quite mind-boggling rate.  Suffice to say in chapter one, which purports to be a story about a trip to a multiplex to watch a Zac Efron movie (we like Zac Efron, we do not like multiplexes), it takes 28 pages of diversionary activity (and, to be fair, descriptions of queuing) before we even make it to the cinema screen.

Forgotten Bestsellers: Where are they now?

Today I stumbled across a fascinating website, or rather, section of a website.  It lists the top 10 bestselling books in the USA for each year from 1900 to 2005, based on the Publishers Weekly figures.  Look at it here!  In the absence of a similar list for the UK (tell us in the comments if one exists), I found it so interesting to scan through history at these former chart toppers.

Obviously it's fascinating to skim through and see big names appear and disappear.  The Hound of the Baskervilles makes the top 10 in 1902, Joseph Conrad rather surprisingly only cracks the top 10 with The Arrow of Gold in 1919, Gone with the Wind achieves two consecutive years at the top in 1936 and 1937, in 1983 not one book managed to sell a novelisation of Star Wars' Return of the Jedi by an American "medical specialist" named James Kahn.  I was probably most surprised to see Winston Churchill topping the charts in 1901 with The Crisis; unfortunately a little research revealed this to be a different Winston than our celebrated bald prime minister.