Bookplanet: some truths about fiction

From the Sydney Morning Herald: Fiction as reality check -- by Malcolm Knox

Is the term 'literary' fiction redundant? Popular does not necessarily mean poorly imagined, writes Malcolm Knox. It's the innovative language and ideas that define truly great writing.

What is literary fiction anyway? Usually it is posed as an opposite for "commercial", and so commercial fiction is what sells in large numbers, and literary fiction is what doesn't sell. But this ignores the fact that most fiction that is written to a formula, for a mass audience, does not sell any more than non-formula fiction. Your average Australian thriller or chick-lit novel sells no more than a work of literary fiction. And sometimes, as in the case of Tim Winton, non-generic fiction sells in large quantities.

We are confused because we have no viable working definition for what is "literary". Let me propose such a definition. The American writer David Foster Wallace said popular culture is what tells us what we already know. By contrast, what we might call "original" culture seeks to tell us what we don't know. When we're talking about fiction, "original" is a more useful word than "literary".

But I don't believe there is "original" or "high" culture in one box, and "popular" or "low" culture in another. Most novels will have some of both. When I read a Shane Maloney book, I see many of the status quo, conservative hallmarks of popular culture: property developers are bad, politicians are craven, the dogged everyman is the hero, the villains get their comeuppance. But in the line-by-line reading, I find real literature with a transformative power.

When Maloney writes something such as, "My breath came in short pants, dressed for the weather," I sit up and cheer. When he unleashes an epigram like "Acquired with parenthood, the habit of compulsive deception is not easily shed", I sit up and read it again. This is what the best fiction does for us. Raymond Chandler, for all the weak plotting and the "when in doubt, get Marlowe beaten up", was one of the great line-by-line prose writers of the last century.

To be specific, I want to give four examples in ascending order of what I would call "original" or "artful" writing, and I want to compare specific phrases rather than entire books. To compare like with like, I've chosen the depiction of birds in four different novels.

The first is The White Earth , by Andrew McGahan, which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award last year. McGahan writes:

"William saw crows take flight as the utility approached, heard their harsh croaks over the engine."

At another point he writes:

"The piping of birds, crystal in the high air."

This is prose that doesn't want to get in the way of story. Note also that when things are black in The White Earth , they are "pitch black". The air is "perfectly still". The sky is a "clear blue sky".

This is prose that we've heard before. You don't need to go into the bush to imagine that a crow has a "harsh croak". As writing, it confirms what we already know.

The White Earth is popular fiction. At micro level it uses stock phrases, in its characterisation it presents people we've already read about and it dramatises an agreeable set of politically correct storylines. It is a well-executed work of popular fiction and deserves its commercial success. This novel's receipt of the Miles Franklin made it, I believe, the first popular commercial novel to do so, an event that passed with no commentary.

Incidentally, it is not strong sales that make a book "popular" rather than "original". I think that, for all its shortcomings, Nikki Gemmell's The Bride Stripped Bare , which has sold more than 100,000 copies in Australia, is a bona fide work of "original" fiction. It seeks to transform its readers' knowledge of themselves and their world. It strives to avoid the stock phrase. Whether or not it does this well is beside the point. It remains "original literary fiction" that happened to be very popular with readers.

Back to birds. My second example is from The Secret River , by Kate Grenville.

"The black bird watched him from its branch. He met its eye across the air that separated them. Caaar, it went, and waited as if he might answer. Caaar. He saw how cruel its curved beak was, with a hook at the end that could tear flesh."

"A pelican, serene with its broad wings and great beak, planed through the sky over the river."

The anthropomorphism - birds are "cruel" and "serene" and "wait as if he might answer" - is a little old, but this is the bird seen through the eyes of a man 200 years ago. The language does its job, it does it well, without cliche, yet, for me, these passages are effective rather than thrilling or transformative. (There is, by the way, plenty of thrilling and transformative original language elsewhere in The Secret River .)

My third example is from The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers , by Delia Falconer. Two passages. In the first, the character Benteen is throwing bread into a duck pond:

"Two crows as sleek as big black cats linger on the edges of the quacking, and take it in turns to hop in with pointed ease to steal a mouthful. He throws a crust to a drake that has lost a foot to a trapper or a fish."

The second refers to birds and animals collected by the soldiers and the sounds they make around the camp at night:

"Their sense, at night, of those small chests pulsing in the darkness as they slept; a soft moonlit telegraph of watchful hearts."

In the McGahan and Grenville examples, the birds are part of scene-setting. Both serve an incidental purpose in the narrative, dashes of colour to enhance story. In Falconer's passage, the creatures are brought to life. They have histories. The drake has lost a foot to a trapper or a fish. They communicate - the soft moonlit telegraph. They have an existence independent of mankind, independent of the story. This is writing that regenerates the world and makes me think differently of the sounds I hear at night. And, in my opinion, the phrasing is so original - not one pre-used sequence of words - that I, as an experienced reader, derive real pleasure from it.

When I speak of what I enjoy, I don't just mean fine language. I'm not necessarily a fan of the pretty-writing school. The last example I'll give, of wonderfully original fiction, is not pretty at all. It's from No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, in which the author makes a passing comment on redtail hawks. The character, Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, has just found a dead redtail and is picking it up off on a desert road somewhere in Texas.

"They would hunt the blacktop, sitting on the high powerpoles and watching the highway in both directions for miles. Any small thing that might venture to cross. Closing on their prey against the sun. Shadowless. Lost in the concentration of the hunter. He wouldn't have the trucks run over it."

It doesn't have any fine or difficult words, but this writing, like Falconer's, makes my skin prickle. For me, this is what Nabokov meant when he said that we read not with our heads or hearts, but with our spines. McCarthy has taken a dead bird and given it personality, given it strategy. It watches the highway. It positions itself relative to the sun so it won't throw a shadow. It is lost in concentration on its hunt. I might have gathered this information from the Discovery Channel, but what endows it with magic is how it is contextualised in the novel, in a passage that is not about the bird at all, but about the compassion of Sheriff Bell.

The durable characteristic in the best "original" or "literary" writing is that it's drawn from life. I feel that McCarthy has gone out there and studied those hawks. I feel that Falconer has studied her birds and agonised over each word to renew and refresh the language.

Original writing speaks from the real world, from the concrete. The hostility to cultural elites is based on a supposition that they are detached from real life, that their art is only answering other art. Another supposition is that cultural elites have no standards, that everything is relative.

I reject both suppositions. The best original writing, for which I have tried to mount a case, is grounded entirely in life. Cormac McCarthy bringing a dead hawk to life on the page, and raising it off the page, is a writer who has gone out and looked at it. Falconer and Grenville, likewise, are saying, "here is a crow, you may think you know what a crow looks like, what it does, but I am giving you that crow afresh".

Formulaic writing, on the other hand, is entirely grounded in other writing. This is what cliche is - writing that mimics other writing. The most market-friendly writer in Australia is Matthew Reilly, who writes highly entertaining action thrillers. He is very good at it. He's out to divert, not subvert. His originality is not in his phrasing or characterisation or storylines or situations. Where Reilly differs from other action thriller writers is that he takes out the pauses - no breathers, no breaks.

It has nothing to do with life. It is writing responding to other writing. It is writing that the political right, I imagine, would love, because the market loves it. Yet it is writing that pushes against other writing, not against the real world.

As for relativism, I have made a case for the superiority of the "original". Does this make me an elitist? Well, yes. I respond to quality. So I am not relativistic. The relativists are those who say that the only measure of quality is found on the scoresheets of BookScan. The relativists, in other words, are those who say today's fashion decides what is good and what isn't.

It would seem that the political left has allowed the right to steal the high ground of standards and connectedness to real life. How on Earth can this happen? How can a government that helps set off the homicidal inferno of Iraq claim to be connected in any way with reality? How can a government that seeks to commodify workers claim any kind of moral or family values? It is to the left's discredit that it has allowed the political language to be so thoroughly inverted.

Original writing is always going to threaten such inversions. Formulaic writing on the other hand is going to entrench them, and entertain us while entrenching, by repetition and cliche, what we think we already know. Original writing strives to assign words their true value, not just today's market price.

So why bother? Because art - invention, original thinking - is the answer. Why write? Because the alternative - silence - is unbearable.

Is the "literary" novel dying, or its audience shrinking? For the moment, perhaps. Are new media taking over? In a sense, yes. But when was I last moved in my guts by something I read on a website? When was my vision of the world transformed by an SMS? When did I feel a common purpose with another person from another age in another place, when did I last feel renewed, by something I read on my phone?

If books are the greatest influence, outside our loved ones, on our world, if books form us, we will write. But the medium is less important than the urge to look at things afresh. Saying something new is always worthwhile for its own sake, and I'm optimistic enough to believe that the market, for all its flaws and in all its guises, will always value originality.

(Malcolm Knox is the Herald's Literary Editor. This is an edited version of his Overland lecture.)