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Not quite a Roald: Sophie Dahl

No other book is quite so completely and utterly worthless as a mediocre novel. A mediocre guide to trees or to cheese can have its uses for those who don't have anything better on the subject to hand. A history book or biography, however dull, contains some facts that may prove handy to somebody one day. Atlases, dictionaries, anthologies and instruction manuals, however uninspired, all have some little utility. But a lifeless novel has no value whatsoever.

Worse than worthless, it's positively a menace - for any time spent in reading dim, failed novels is so much time lost, time subtracted from life. In fact, a blank book is more desirable than a book defaced with such redundant type. At least blank pages can be used for shopping lists or doodles.

Yet duff novels continue to pour from the presses. Iain Duncan Smith's novel has been much ridiculed. We have just learned that Sandra Howard, the wife of his successor, is another novelist in the bud, having composed a thriller called Love in High Profile. Much of this unwanted fiction barely makes it into the bookshops. But for every novel worth reading that appears, there are dozens, hundreds even, of others published that really are not worth anybody's time at all.

Is it too cruel to say this, even though we all know it to be true? Every novel costs its author blood, sweat and tears to write. Isn't the mere effort deserving of some respect? No. A model of a ship in a bottle may take years to make as well, but that doesn't make it any good as a work of art.

Why do these bad novelists persevere then? The one good argument that could be made on their behalf is that many who are no good have, evidently, nevertheless managed to make money. There's no arguing with profit. If Jack Higgins and Robert Ludlum, say, can make successful careers as writers, and Amy Jenkins can get a big advance, then you could say that it's worth anybody who can type chancing his luck.

The novel enticement has proved irresistible to, among others who were bruised by reviews, Naomi Campbell, Sophie Dahl and the stand-up comedians David Baddiel and Robert Newman. Latest into the listings is Jimmy Carter who, with The Hornet's Nest, has the first novel ever to come from a former US president. Perhaps he is aiming to add the Nobel Prize for Literature to his well-deserved peace prize.

Bad novelists all believe they are good novelists. In fact, almost everybody believes he or she might just be a good novelist, even if he or she hasn't got round to trying it yet. The delusion is just as common among intellectuals, successful businessmen and knowing journalists as among the more naive. It is very strange. Nobody would attempt to give a piano recital without having first learned to play the piano. People realise they cannot make a satisfactory chest of drawers, or even a serviceable cheeseboard, without having acquired some skill in carpentry. They know they are not competent as dentists or plumbers, if they have not had any experience or training. Yet they think that they can write a novel by some natural gift.

In one dreadful sense, they are right, of course. They can produce long pieces of prose that look, at a glance, quite like novels, divided as they are into chapters, spaced out into paragraphs, with dialogue indicated and sentences regularly punctuated. Characters have been devised and named and stories told, up to a point. Then, if the author has some other claim to fame, such as having been briefly a ropey leader of the Conservative Party, these productions are printed and published. But nonetheless they bear about the same resemblance to true novels as the lines of meaningless type produced by Jack Nicholson's character in The Shining.

There is a peculiar paradox at work here. The novel as a form still has an extraordinary mystique. People continue to believe that fiction as such has some transformative power. At its best, the novel does indeed have such authority. There are stories, scenes, cadences in the great novelists - Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Proust, they scarcely need naming - that become part of one's own sense of life and death. At another level, contemporaries such as Coetzee or Houellebecq reveal the world we live in to us more urgently than any factual study. Then again, good genre novelists such as Elmore Leonard or James Lee Burke offer that greatest of treats, escape from ourselves.

But these powers can't be claimed simply by calling what you write "a novel". Yet many would-be novelists seem to believe that it is all they have to do to obtain all the respect that the novel as a form commands. More than a contemporary superstition, it is a mass delusion.

Why? The answer, perhaps, is that the novel, as it has developed since Cervantes, is the literary form closest to our comprehension of our own lives. We construct our sense of ourselves in time through stories. So we all feel that we have our story to tell and are novelists already, before we have written a word. You will never hear anybody proclaim he could never write a novel. People would as soon say they have no life.

And there's a sense in which this superstitious reverence of the very form of the novel is justified, most unfortunately for the duff novelists who manage to get their productions published. Even terrible novels reveal their authors. Allowing for sheerly technical deficiencies - inept novelists can no more create convincing characters and compelling action than a person who cannot play the violin can carry a tune on it - a novel invariably allows the reader to see exactly what the novelist understands human life to be. Only novelists with a mastery of their craft can escape these elements of transferred autobiography. The amateurs cannot.

None of this has ever been better put than by Evelyn Waugh in a piece written for the Daily Mail in 1930. "One does not just sit behind a screen jotting down other people's conversation. One has for one's raw material every single thing one has ever seen or heard or felt, and one has to go over that vast, smouldering rubbish-heap of experience, half stifled by the fumes and dust, scraping and delving until one finds a few discarded valuables. Then one has to assemble these tarnished and dented fragments, polish them, set them in order, and try to make a coherent and significant arrangement of them. It is not merely a matter of filling up a dust-bin haphazard and emptying it out again in another place."

Indeed not. There's even a chance that being a really good novelist is more difficult than leading the Conservative Party, not less.

 

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