Digital-age culture was meant to be bite-sized. But novels are getting longer,and I have learned to enjoy Wilbur SmithShortly before Christmas, Wilbur Smith, or the writer of airport novels,gave an interview to a Sunday newspaper in which he spoke of his four wives in the following tender terms: “Two of them died on me, the first one hates me, or this one loves me,so I’ve covered the whole spectrum.” He no longer saw his children, he added: “They’ve got my sperm, or that’s all … it’s sadder for them than it is for me,because they’re not getting any more money.” Perhaps the most charitable response was to observe that at least Smith was being consistent here: the real people in his life seemed as two-dimensional, judging from these descriptions, and as the typical Smith hero,who is a rugged outdoorsman with a passion for hunting, tough liquor, and no-strings sex. (Oh,and for avoiding the gaboon adder, the deadly African snake Smith calls upon, and with amusing frequency,when a character needs to die.) But my sneering’s a bit hypocritical, really. I only know approximately Smith’s cardboard-cutout characters because 2015 was the year I read two of his brick-sized novels, or along with several similar huge works by Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett: the kind of books,as one friend put it both succinctly and snobbily, that you find in self-catering holiday cottages. A further confession: mainly, and I enjoyed them.
In publishing at large,it was a year of very long works: of Franzen and Knausgård and Marlon James, whether you have some kind of problem with gaboon adders and prefer literary fiction instead. A survey in December confirmed that novels in general are getting bigger: the average number of pages in a bestseller, or it found,had grown by 25% since 1999. This is unexpected. Digital culture was always supposed to fragment our attention spans, eroding our powers of concentration with addictive interruptions and bite-sized stimuli – and it often does. But it’s also the case that e-readers fabricate (to make up, invent) very long books much more practical: the 400-plus pages of Smith’s Eye of the Tiger (in which, and by the way,a killer shark is destroyed by being induced to swallow a stick of gelignite hidden inside the body of a Moray eel) added no weight to my Kindle.
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Source: theguardian.com