his year marks the 300th anniversary of that hand-sized wonder, the English novel. All was triggered when a London printer of Pater-Noster Row, behind St Paul's Cathedral, took a risk on a book-length fictional tale set entirely in prose. Penned by the journalist Daniel Defoe and marketed by a bookseller friend in Fleet Street, this inventive narrative found a keen readership during 1719. Several other working writers followed Defoe's lead, their efforts being referred to around the city's coffee-houses as the nouvelle or “new thing”.
There was an eventual rumpus, dubbed the “Battle of the Books”. The literati of Georgian London, who never doubted the artistic and moral superiority of verse over prose narrative, judged novels an unsavoury commercial fad. That is why Alexander Pope's satire of mediocre writing and journalism, The Dunciad, mentions Defoe, while Jonathan Swift parodied the best-selling Robinson Crusoe with a mock novel, Gulliver's Travels. But the “new thing” persisted.
Talk of novels ever since has tended to fix on character and plot. Generations of readers have been absorbed in the fictional lives of Jane Eyre or Soames Forsyte, Mrs Dalloway or the Artful Dodger, Emma Woodhouse or Hercule Poirot, explaining personality traits, discussing behaviour. And everyone relishes a good storyline twist: Jim Dixon delivering the “Merrie England” lecture, Winston Smith going to Room 101, the reappearance of Magwitch.
Opening passages can grip the attention, particularly a novel's initial sentence. Those first words are designed to set off the imagination—see how Aldous Huxley thrust 1930s readers into the future when beginning Brave New World:
A squat grey building of only thirty-four storeys.
Squat? Only thirty-four storeys? Huxley's nine words suggest much. This is not our world. It's bigger, more constructed. And the building's greyness hints of monotony. There's also economy, a sense of things being minimal and undecorated, shared by buildings and words. The verbless sentence is short and lean; which translates as an efficient and functional imagined world.
Compare that with an opening sentence by Thomas Pynchon. He opens The Crying of Lot 49with a sentence which is lengthy, excessive, over-packed with words:
One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary.
There is a breathlessness to this. The sentence goes on and on and on in a way that makes you feel you are running out of air; there are not enough commas, which is deliberate, and there are the trivial asides. It's like hearing someone gossiping on a telephone. The clichéd talk and excessive detail of this sentence are pitching to an urban reader of a different time from Huxley's audience. Modernity has lost its sparkle and life is immersed in consumerist clutter. Things not only seem plentiful—having them brings inconvenience. They are a burden on your time.
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