The Guardian's Blog, page 160

Rereading Stephen King, chapter 27: Four Past Midnight

These four novellas showcase the ghoulish range of King's compulsive techniques for terrifying his readers

The Langoliers - that's why I remember Four Past Midnight. There are three other novellas in this collection, but The Langoliers is the one that stuck with me, some of the images burned into my mind as brightly as any of King's stories. It's not just me: lots of readers seem to single it out, not necessarily aware that it's part of a collection of novellas.

King has published a few of these collections. Different Seasons, Hearts In Atlantis, Full Dark No Stars, even the Bachman Books – each features pieces that, for many writers, would be published as individual books. Four Past Midnight is no exception: four stories that cover many different facets of King's writing, but all intrinsically tied to this stage of King's career.

Still, The Langoliers is the one. It's harrowing. The main characters are all asleep on American Pride Flight 29, a red-eye flight across America. When they wake up, they're alone. Everybody else on the flight has disappeared, leaving the plane without a crew. They land the plane – one of the surviving passengers is a pilot – and step out into the airport to discover that they're totally alone. There's nobody in the terminal, nobody else anywhere. There's something wrong with the air, and with all food and water: everything is stale and tasteless. The survivors hear static, in the distance; some crackling that they can't explain. Then, the Langoliers appear: terrifying creatures that eat lost time, swallow up the past. Somehow, the plane flew through a rift, and the characters who survived the flight are trapped in that fragment of the past, waiting for the inevitable to happen.

It's a great idea, with the execution both grounded and terrifying. Several of our natural fears are preyed upon – flying, being alone, creatures with scary teeth – but there's a great second level of terror being worked into the story: the fear of losing (or wasting) time. (The concepts of wasting time and losing control are almost the primary antagonists in this story.)

So, that was what I brought to this reread: I couldn't really remember the other stories in the book. What I took away, however, were the other three. Secret Window, Secret Garden and The Library Policeman are fine novellas, about a mentally unstable, possibly psychotic writer accused of plagiarism, and an evil being who hunts down those who have overdue library books; but it's The Sun Dog that I most loved. A Castle Rock-set prelude of sorts to the grotesquely underrated Needful Things (coming up in a few weeks' time,), it features a camera that, whenever it takes a photograph, shows an unsettling black dog (another of King's recurring themes, especially relevant in his post-addiction times) The dog comes closer and closer to the camera with each new picture, until it eventually breaks free of the camera itself. Again, it'smaterial that King had played with before, and would do again – the possession (no pun intended) that gives the user more than they ever wanted, exposing them to a terror that they push themselves to explore through their own curiosity – but it's done succinctly here, and with real control. The inevitability is what pushes the story along – we want to see the dog escape, as horrifying as we know that will be.

It's a pretty strong collection, all told; while the middle two stories are perhaps slightly weaker (surprising, given that Secret Window was deemed strong enough to be turned into a Johnny Depp film a decade ago), the two tales that bookend the book are among King's best shorter pieces. The Langoliers won't ever not scare me, simply because it chimes with so many of my own fears – I've always had a thing about static – and The Sun Dog works beautifully as another addition to those metaphorical stories about King's own personal fears.

Next: Ka-tet assemble! For chapter 28, we will be back in the Dark Tower, for The Waste Lands.

Stephen KingFictionHorrorJames Smythe
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Choose December's Reading group book: Family

More than any other month, December belongs to kinfolks – so they're the focus of our next Reading group. Which family is up to you

Since 'tis the season to be seasonal, I thought we should do something related to Christmas this month on the Reading group – even if obliquely. This is a time of year when, traditionally, Hollywood and American sitcoms ask us to think about family, and we could do the same. Families, as Philip Larkin tells us, are always emotionally interesting – and ripe sources for fictional intrigue.

The first book that sprang to my mind is Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and the unholy mess surrounding Enid Lambert's attempts to bring her family together for "one last Christmas". But there's no need to keep it festive. The next text that occurred to me was Hamlet. Macbeth might do the trick too. And on a different note, how about The Godfather? Another brilliant suggestion came from the Guardian books desk: Gerard Woodward's I'll Go To Bed At Noon. Reading group regulars will be pleased to note that this is a book that references Under The Volcano. As well as the joys and terrors of family at close quarters, it also features plenty of pubs, which may tie it nicely to December.

That reference to irregular bedtimes made me also wonder if we might revisit Proust, and his grandmother, following the joy he gave us earlier this year. There's something very pleasing about the thought of book-ending 2013 with the divine Marcel. But that may possibly be too much of a (very) good thing. And as usual, I realise, I'm starting to get caught up in the fun of trotting out titles when really that's your job. So let's hear about your favourite books about families? I'll draw the nominations out of a hat in a few days' time …

In the meantime, watch this space for an interview with Albert Camus translator Sandra Smith.

FictionJonathan FranzenMalcolm LowryMarcel ProustWilliam ShakespeareSam Jordison
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Tips, links and suggestions: What are you reading this week?

What are you reading today?

Hannah FreemanGuardian readers

How to choose the 100 best novels

I'm only a tenth of the way through my Guardian/Observer list, and as I revisit old favourites from week to week I find my contemporary verdict refracted through past readings

The first classic of English literature I can remember reading is Animal Farm. I was about 11 or 12 years old and lying on my bed with the rough, tickling sensation of a bright red blanket on my bare legs. I still have my Penguin edition, spine broken, and with loose yellowing pages. Somehow, the combination of Orwell and a scratchy institutional blanket seems appropriate.

Compiling this Guardian/Observer list of 100 great novels in the English language, and rediscovering old favourites from week to week, has become as much an autobiographical as a literary process. I keep meeting my juvenile self in forgotten states and discarded guises: sitting in a cricket pavilion on a wet summer's afternoon with The Code of the Woosters; roaming Dorset on a bicycle, aged 15, with Jude The Obscure, or was it The Mayor of Casterbridge? Eking out the tedium of school with a copy of Vanity Fair; by the seaside with Middlemarch, and so on.

I'm also having to recognise how late I came to some of the very greatest entries in this list: perhaps twenty-something before I even opened The Great Gatsby; and at least 30 before I completed my reading of Austen's classic six. In advance of this project, I loosely sketched a draft list at the outset, but it keeps changing.

Now, having written some 10 entries, and got as far as 1838 with Edgar Allan Poe, and the Americans, I'm worrying about some of my omissions. No Horace Walpole.

No Tobias Smollett. And, perhaps most unforgiveable of all, no Walter Scott. I decided to omit Scott for the good reason that I have never finished one of his novels, though I have been lucky enough to sit in his famous writing chair in Melrose. At this late stage, it felt wrong to start speed-reading Waverley, Ivanhoe or The Heart of Midlothian simply to conform to expectations.

The books that go into my list have to pass a fairly searching scrutiny. How great is it, actually? And why ?

That's been a process to which readers of this blog have made a fascinating and often vital contribution.

myherojimmydainty's Scott quotation on Gulliver's Travels ("no work ever exhibited such general attractions to all classes …") added a wonderful extra dimension. tonymcgowan made an excellent challenge on Robinson Crusoe (why not Moll Flanders?) which echoed my own doubts.

Another regular visitor to the site, Jenny Bhatt, always makes a lively (and positive) contribution that I greatly appreciate. At the very beginning, apropos Pilgrim's Progress, degrus invited us to consider some writers (Greene, Nashe, Deloney, and Moore) I, for one, have never read properly. Thanks for that. PaulBowes01 never fails to join the thread with wisdom and insight. The commentary from our community of readers has certainly enriched my reading.

At the end of the day, however, I am alone with these classic volumes. Again and again, I find my contemporary verdict inevitably getting refracted through past memories.

As a critic, one has a duty to stand apart from conventional wisdom. At the same time, it must be pointless and stupid to give in to "the imp of the perverse" (Poe's phrase). Leave out, for instance, Laurence Sterne? Or Mary Shelley? That would be ridiculous.

While the list is in process (we have only just begun), friends and colleagues continue to make many suggestions, and to argue with the story so far. But (since it is chronological) once a date has been reached, there can be no going back, no revisions, and no second thoughts.

Now that I'm approaching the 1840s, it's time for Dickens, Thackeray and the Brontës. And beyond them, Stevenson, Twain and Thomas Hardy beckon.

The hardest decisions are to do with the giants of the past. Yes, they are self-selecting. But with the really big hitters, which title do you choose? Dickens is a case in point. Pickwick Papers (his sensational debut)? The ever-popular Great Expectations? The critically fashionable Hard Times? His perennial favourite, A Christmas Carol? In three weeks time, all will be revealed.

Finally, there are the wild cards. The other day I was having lunch with a friend. The conversation turned to this list.

"What are you going to do about Pearl Buck ?" she asked.

"Pearl Buck ?"

"The best-selling author of The Good Earth, and winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1938."

I replied that best-sellerism is no guide, but that one useful, first step might be actually to read The Good Earth.

Will Pearl Buck will make the cut? Who knows. I calculate I have about a year's grace before the moment of decision arrives. Meanwhile, all other nominations will be gratefully received.

Daniel DefoeEdgar Allan PoeSir Walter ScottCharles DickensJane AustenNobel peace prizeFictionRobert McCrum
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

What do maps mean to you?

Whether it's a beautifully illustrated treasure map, something scrawled on the back of an envelope, a conceptual brainstorm or even a palm reading, share your maps with us and explain their significance

Simon Garfield

Poem of the week: Cradle Song at Twilight by Alice Meynell

An unsettling picture of a young woman and her infant charge reveals a writer far less 'ladylike' than we might expect

The author of this week's poem, "Cradle Song at Twilight", might have been the first woman poet laureate: she was nominated twice for the position, in 1895 and 1913. Journalist, essayist, suffragist, and mother of seven surviving children, Alice Meynell has no small claim to being considered the immediate intellectual precursor of Virginia Woolf. Woolf herself possibly might not have agreed; she considered Meynell, idealised and promoted as the archetypal Victorian "Angel in the House", as an antagonist rather than a foremother.

Today, Meynell is best known for a handful of anthology poems that perpetuate her decorous, "ladylike" image. Formally, "Cradle Song at Twilight" has the usual fluent and restrained elegance, but it's not at all a safe or comforting poem. The picture it presents is too genuinely alive and complex, qualities engrained in some of the unexpected word-choices.

Christopher Ricks (to his credit) includes the poem in The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse, giving 1895 as its date of first publication. This means it's not one of Meynell's earliest poems; these were published in the collection, Preludes, in 1875. Meynell wrote the bulk of her poetry towards the end of her long life, and, on the basis of its psychological prescience, I'd guess "Cradle Song at Twilight" to be a work of her later maturity.

Its portrayal of a nurse, or nursing mother, quietly but decisively challenges the Victorian maternal stereotype. The girl isn't intent on her charge: she's "too young" and, implicitly, too "slender". The watchful speaker tells us she holds the child "laxly" – an observation made succinct by that illuminating and unexpected adverb. So convincing is the vignette of a young, careless, impatient girl that it's difficult to remember the poet possibly has metaphorical intentions.

"Twilight" is a word that alludes to the light cast when the sun is below the horizon. Although it usually refers to dusk, it can also mean the early light of morning. It's a strange word, when you think about it, implying "doubled light" when in fact the light would be diminished. Because the child is supposed to be asleep, the poem's "Twilight" seems more likely to be that of the evening.

To pursue the metaphor: if Night is the mother, who is the child? The sun, the moon, the speaker herself? As a Catholic and sometime metaphysical poet, Meynell might be expected to portray the Virgin and Child, but the notion of a Virgin Mary who longs to run off and play seems a too-radical revision. Perhaps, rather, this is a mythological portrait, depicting Cupid and Venus.

The second stanza certainly suggests a mischievous Cupid-like infant. Meynell, for all her Victorian decorousness, can't have been oblivious to the erotic undertones. The child's playing with the nurse leads directly to the nurse's own thoughts of "other playfellows" – which may, again, have sexual connotations, or simply imply that the playfellows she longs for are other children like herself.

I like the tenuousness of the relationship portrayed, the dramatic irony inherent in the fact that the child and nurse are, perhaps like Twilight itself, facing different ways Psychologically, there's an incipient conflict between the nurse's need for freedom and the child's need for secure sleep. At the same time, and so far, no harm has been done.

Something even more mysterious occurs in the last two lines. The poem seems to mutate into a prayer: "An unmaternal fondness keep/ Her alien eyes." What is the nature of this "unmaternal fondness"? Is it God the Father's love that is being invoked, or the affection of a sexual partner, patron or employer?

The word "alien" is the final surprise. It's so beautifully devoid of sentimentality. Yet the Night (or nurse) has never seemed closer to being a real person than in this description. Motherless as well as un-motherly, this young woman now seems displaced on every level. Ruth, who "stood in tears amid the alien corn" in Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale", might be a relevant figure.

Could "Cradle Song at Twilight" be a poem that disguises its subject - a dark-skinned young nurse the Meynells once employed? Or is the poet remembering herself as a reluctant young mother? These are tempting interpretations. Yet it seems a pity to try and press a haunting and un-homely poem into some purely naturalistic mould. Bathed in their own twilight, the two stanzas are like a hinged icon, where, instead of a rapt, mutual exchange, the eye-contact between the Child and the Virgin flows only one-way. The child is happy in the loose hold of his young nurse, the nurse is restlessly dreaming of another life. How convincing and unsettling they are – whoever they may be.

Cradle Song at Twilight

The child not yet is lulled to rest.
 Too young a nurse, the slender Night
So laxly holds him to her breast
 That throbs with flight.

He plays with her, and will not sleep.
 For other playfellows she sighs;
An unmaternal fondness keep
 Her alien eyes.

PoetryCarol Rumens
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Time travel's impossible destinations

Whether used to critique the present or to rearrange the past, this kind of SF has an irresistible, eternal appeal

We love time travel because it is impossible. There is no scientific rationale for the idea that a human can travel forward or backward in time. Physicists like to dabble with the idea in the way stage magicians like to pretend they can actually make things disappear. But wormholes, faster-than-light travel or the folded geometries of space-time are about as likely to send me on a journey through time as Paul Daniels is to be voted most popular man in Britain.

But as The Time Traveler's Alamanac aptly demonstrates, at the heart of every great science fiction story is an impossible idea. Editor Ann VanderMeer and her Igor-like assistant novelist Jeff VanderMeer bring together a veritable Frankenstein's monster of an anthology featuring the best time travel stories in the history of SF. But if science fiction is impossible, what is it that gives these stories their allure?

HG Wells's Time Machine is the grand-daddy of time-travel allegories. Just as War of the Worlds wasn't really a story about Martians invading Woking, Wells's time travel classic isn't really about time travel. The journey we take with the story's nameless narrator to the year 802,701 AD is only a way for Wells to show us the classbound society of 1895 in a new light. The Eloi and Morlocks are the bourgeois and the proletariat of industrial Britain. A society soon to be radically disrupted by socialism, for which Wells was a leading advocate.

The paradox is one of time travel's greatest … paradoxes. Take the grandfather paradox. Let's say a reader of this column became so enraged by my claim that presentism is the only way to understand time travel, that they invented a time machine to go back and kill my grandfather. Would I still be able to write this column? If not, how would the reader read it and decide to murder me? Would eternalism suddenly be proved correct? The real paradox is that if time travel is impossible why do people take its consequences so seriously?

The Time Traveler's Wife is a notable absence from The Time Traveler's Almanac. Audrey Niffenegger put time travel back on the bestseller lists and gave it a veneer of literary credibility with her 2003 debut novel. It's a novel that sometimes angers the time-travel purist by dedicating very little time to the nonsense science often used to give the idea credibility. Instead Niffeneger weaves an intelligent study of absence and loss from the tale of a frustrated wife dealing with the frequent disappearances of her time-travelling husband.

Change, loss and grief are the real heart of the time-travel metaphor. It is time that takes things away from us – the places we know, the people we love, even our own selves when time brings that inevitable consequence of life – death. We're terrified of time, so it's hardly surprising we dream stories in which we have the power to change it.

But stories where time travel changes time – like Stephen King's 11/22/63 – tend to focus on the great moments of history. If you had one chance to change time, would you really save John F Kennedy from the sniper's bullet? Or would you travel back to give a parent an earlier diagnosis of cancer and a few more years of life? Or to stop your callow younger self walking out on the person you only later realised you loved? Those are the time-travel stories we tell every day, in the private world of dreams.

Science fictionFictionHG WellsAudrey NiffeneggerDamien Walter
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Ebooks need more attention from their publishers

The industry is supposedly embracing a digital future, but too scant attention is too often paid to the basics of organising ebooks

The bright hopes of digital publishing are gathered in London for the latest FutureBook conference and the future looks, well, familiar. As the new boss of HarperCollins, Charlie Redmayne, gave his keynote speech, previewed on this site, one bright spark petulantly tweeted: "This headline is 'news'? Charlie Redmayne: 'publishers must embrace change' #fbook2013 thebookseller.com/news/redmayne-…

Redmayne regretted that publishers, "historically … the most innovative and creative of organisations", had lost the plot. "I think that when it came to the digital revolution we came to a point where we stopped innovating and creating. We thought, we've done an ebook and that is what it is."

Much the same thought occurred to me at the weekend when a book failed to arrive, forcing me to buy the Kindle edition to mug up for a public event. The book in question was a memoir by the veteran film critic Barry Norman recalling the "53 years 3 months 2 weeks and a day" he spent with his redoubtable wife Diana, before her death two years ago.

Not much scope there for digital wizardry, but I would at least have expected some thought to have been put into how the text would flow on a tablet.

Perhaps a horror of "widows" (single words at the top of a page) is a bit of a niche hang-up – it's common among old-fashioned print journalists – but, whichever way I tried to read it, a distressing number of them popped up. Having missed the index, I didn't even realise there were any pictures until the end of the book, where I discovered a puddle of them.

I've never been a fan of the print tradition of clumping glossy pictures in standalone sections, but I can see the technical reason for it, since they call for a different quality of paper. Ebooks offer a chance to reintegrate text and image that wasn't taken here. This isn't just a question of improving a book, but of preventing it from getting worse. At one point, Norman wonders if his account of family life might be disintegrating into "one of those awful round-robin letters people send their friends at Christmastime" – and the disaggregation of text and pictures does indeed have that effect. At the point when you want to find out what people look like, you don't have a chance. Then you're treated to a lifetime of happy family snaps.

I paid £9.49 for the download, which is only 50p less than Amazon's hardback price (though admittedly a lot less than the £18.99 list price), so it feels wrong to be treated as a second-class reader.

PublishingEbooksKindleE-readersClaire Armitstead
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Irish literature's books of the dark

History has given Ireland's writers deep acquaintance with darkness – and the gifts to find its poetry

Patrick Kavanagh, in his stark poem "Dark Ireland", wrote: "We are a dark people, / Our eyes ever turned / Inward / Watching the liar who twists / The hill-paths awry". In a slant way, he exposes a genre of writing that is concealed in plain sight, what might be called the Irish book of the dark. It comes out of the persistent tendency of Irish writers to occupy the shadows of the mind, often pushing the English language out of shape in the process. Last week's winner of the inaugural Goldsmiths prize, Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, is only the most recent example of this compulsive, unsettling tradition.

Ireland's history of colonisation, famine and flight, a collapsed revolution, a dominant church and the vitalising deformation of English by the Irish language have created conditions that occasioned writers to follow the twisting inward paths, and for the courageous, to look at the darkest of human behaviour and bring it to some form of light.

One might start in 1820 with Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer. Within the billowing gothic excess of this madly-plotted tale of a fatal bargain with evil powers is a novel of great psychological acuity that explores the terrors of loneliness, failure and madness in ways that make it seem peculiarly contemporary. The denseness, strange colouration and wild febrility of the writing pre-figures much "experimental" writing, encompassing surrealism and modernism alongside work that doesn't belong to any "-ism" at all. Melmoth haunts novels as different as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Patrick McCabe's brutal, sharp-etched The Butcher Boy and John Banville's laconic and unsettlingly funny Birchwood.

Turning from the lost mind to a blighted society, William Carleton's The Black Prophet of 1847, through a powerful melodrama of prophecy and murder, forced the gaze of its largely well-fed readers onto the terrible scenes of famine that were endemic in Ireland even before the Great Hunger. In the decade following the book's publication the death or desperate flight of millions of people left a legacy of loss and silence that shaped the narrative landscape of Ireland.

The centre of obscurity in modern literature is James Joyce's Finnegans Wake which is, as he intended, a book of the night. Samuel Beckett's The Unnameable inhabits the limits of knowing and saying the self. It is a voice "blind in the dark", but somehow Beckett makes us see and feel this and move, if we are able, beyond despair. John McGahern, in contrast to Joyce's late work, achieved an unmatched mastery of simplicity in language and with a compassionate and unwavering gaze wrote bravely of what was commonplace but could not be spoken of. This included, in The Dark, the quietly devastating revelation of the sexual abuse of children and the complicity of those, in the church and elsewhere, whose duty to them was love and protection.

Elizabeth Bowen was a great novelist (sometimes seen as too "Anglo" to be Irish), but it is her stories of the 1940s, many of the best of which are set in wartime London, that seem the strongest candidates for her books of the dark.Each short story is short in extent but massive in depth and presence. The Demon Lover and Mysterious Kôr are, in Bowen's phrase, "words to the dark", haunted and haunting accounts of loss, love and what comes after in the interval before death.

A book I particularly want to draw attention to is Dorothy Nelson's In Night's City, published in 1982 and largely forgotten now. It's a desperate, visceral novel of domestic violence, cruelty and complicity. Beneath the Irish idiom, Nelson's shifting, benighted voices seem to owe much to two great writers of the American South, William Faulkner and Carson McCullers. As with McGahern, Nelson broke the taboos around secrecy and denial and convincingly, painfully, showed how the abused self withholds from itself what it knows and yet cannot bear to know, to the point of breaking into pieces, very much prefiguring Eimear McBride's startling A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.

McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is fully deserving of its laurels. Written out of the body with total conviction and amazing virtuosity, it has a great, headlong music, both harsh and beautiful, and a grip on its own senses that makes vivid the darker places that realism rarely reaches. The novel doesn't offer consolation, but leaves the reader with the sense that they know something essential, vital even, that they could not have come to know by any other imaginative means. Without question, McBride's novel belongs in the company of the best books of the dark.

FictionOscar WildeJohn BanvilleSamuel BeckettJames Joyce
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Weighing up the virtues of long novels

Aristotelian poetics suggest that a big story is automatically better than a short one. Does his theory measure up?

I blame Proust, or at least last week's tributes to his massive achievement. But after waxing lyrical over the pleasures of a novel big enough to contain the world, I was brought up short by Aristotle's bold assertion in the Poetics that when it comes to writing, bigger is better.

He's talking about tragedy, which in SH Butcher's translation he defines as "an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude". With the pioneering freshness that comes of exploring unmapped cultural territory, he's trying to establish from first principles how poets should construct what he calls "the soul of a tragedy" – the plot. Not only should a tragedy be complete, with an orderly arrangement of beginning, middle and end, he argues, but it must also "be of a certain magnitude", for beauty depends on both "magnitude and order" …

"Hence a very small animal organism cannot be beautiful; for the view of it is confused, the object being seen in an almost imperceptible moment of time. Nor, again, can one of vast size be beautiful; for as the eye cannot take it all in at once, the unity and sense of the whole is lost for the spectator; as for instance if there were one a thousand miles long."

Of course each story takes its own time to tell, Aristotle continues, but providing that the length can "easily embraced by the memory … the greater the length, the more beautiful will the piece be by reason of its size".

You might quibble with his reasoning – perhaps all he needs to appreciate a wider range of beauty are the changes of perspective provided by, say, a microscope and a helicopter – or maybe you're unwilling to suppose a novel can be "embraced by the memory" as easily as a play, but let's suppose for a moment Aristotle's argument applies straightforwardly to a form which was invented two millennia after his death. Is he seriously suggesting, all things being equal, that Don Quixote's thousand-odd pages makes it simply better than Death in Venice's measly 72? Perhaps Cervantes's melons are a little too different from Mann's pears for any thing in such a comparison to ever be really equal, but do A Farewell to Arms's 300-plus pages see off The Old Man and the Sea, barely a third the length? Does Moby-Dick (600 or so) monster Billy Budd (less than 100), does Gravity's Rainbow (more than 900) destroy the comparitively minute The Crying of Lot 49? I'm the first to acknowledge the special pleasures of long-form fiction, but isn't this kind of aesthetic bean counting a little one-dimensional?

It's not hard to find writers who resist this kind of logic. For George Saunders "A novel is just a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief," while Borges seems to suggest Aristotle's argument actually favours the short story, arguing that short fiction has the advantage because it "can be taken in at a single glance". For the novelist Ian McEwan – who made the 2007 Booker prize shortlist with his 166-page "full length novel", On Chesil Beach – the novella is "the perfect form of prose fiction … the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant".

"The poem and the short story are theoretically perfectible, but I doubt there is such a thing as a perfect novel (even if we could begin to agree among ourselves on what comprises a good sentence). The novel is too capacious, inclusive, unruly, and personal for perfection."

The novella, which according to McEwan has much in common with "watching a play or a longish movie", can at least be envisaged approaching perfection, "like an asymptotic line in co-ordinate geometry".

It's hard to imagine Aristotle settling for anything less than perfection, but perhaps he would suggest that if the short story, or the novella is capable of perfection then all the novelist requires is a little more elbow grease. After all, for Richard Ford the novel is "a lot harder to write … Because they hold so much more stuff, and the stuff all has to be related and make one whole". He remembers debating the merits of short and long-form fiction with Raymond Carver:

"I used to say that a novel was a more important, a grander literary gesture than a story. And when Ray Carver would hear me say that he'd vigorously disagree, and then I'd always cave in. But he's gone now, and the fun's gone out of that argument."

Is a week in Paris more important than 24 hours in Chinook, Montana, if in Chinook "your life changes forever", he asks. "Forms of literature don't compete. They don't have to compete. We can have it all."

It's hard to see anything wrong with this 21st-century reasoning – maybe there's something suspect in trying to judge different works of art as objectively better or worse at all. But despite all that, despite the obvious absurdity of judging novels by their word count, I can't shake off the feeling that Aristotle's cultural exploration has unearthed some kind of valuable insight. Maybe the younger Richard Ford would agree.

Literary criticismPhilosophyFictionShort storiesRaymond CarverThomas PynchonRichard FordMiguel de CervantesRichard Lea
theguardian.com © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds