Novel tv or televisual novels...

Aliya’s post yesterday about novels doing what novels do and not what television does in terms of cliffhanger, motivation etc (read the post, then I won’t have to synopsise) got me thinking.
Is it true that modern novels are more like the telly than novels written before Edison et al got their heads round the cathode ray tube? Or is telly, as it were, the new novel form?

Do we, in fact, only need one form of essentially visual, linear storytelling and is it now the telly?

Let’s say visual and/or linear because a Jane Austen novel is a linear narrative but not all that visual – she does a ton of showing us how people are but tells us very little of what they look like – and she does dialogue wonderfully. So wonderfully that Andrew Davies, in patches, just quoted it in the BBC tv adaptation of P&P. So, if she were writing today, would she go for telly? Or radio plays? Would she be writing chick lit? Or would she be experimenting with her characters’ voices, a la Nicola Barker in Darkmans?

And, now that we have telly to do our linear narrative (because anything non-linear is deeply confusing on telly, at least to the likes of me.(Aargh, double parenthesising! Oh, who cares? - Imagine the scene – we are watching tv with the Ultimate Frisbee and the Bassist. Something happens. I say ‘What just happened?’ One of the boys explains ‘It’s a flashback to the time before he was a superhero.’ I say ‘When did he become a superhero?’ They say ‘In one of his previous lives but then he’s found himself in this reality…’ I look confused. I am confused. They say ‘I’ll explain it all at the end of the programme, Mum. It’s deeply depressing. You get the gist. )
Where was I? Oh yes, now that we have telly to do our linear narrative, should novels be doing something else? People like Jeanette Winterson clearly think so. So, perhaps, does Ms Barker.

So, what do we think? Is it genre-specific? Is it OK to be non-linear or experiment with form in literary novels but not in crime, thrillers etc?

Or are so called experimental novels not actually novels at all but some other form of fiction?
Finnegan’s Wake anybody?
(And yes, I have read it…)

Jane Austen and the Missing War

When I was studying Jane Austen for ‘A’ Level, I remember reading some crass comment which criticised her for not reflecting any of the ‘big picture’ concerns of her time. From Austen’s novels, this person sniffily concluded, you would never have guessed that Britain was at war at the time.
Which seems to me pretty much like saying that Father Christmas doesn’t work on his tan enough.

Well, possibly ‘twas ever thus because you can look in vain for any mention of the current conflict in the Gulf in most novels published since we went to war in Iraq. Maybe, as with Jane Austen, authors fight shy of mentioning it because they don’t feel qualified to do so. Maybe it’s a case of 'out of sight out of mind', it’s a war that’s happening far away in another country, despite daily news updates on pretty much any medium you care to mention. It doesn’t actually impact much on us, here in Britain. In fact, it probably impacts less on us than the Napoleonic wars did on Jane Austen’s contemporaries. Think of her novels – half the men seem to be in the army and if there were no officers, who would all the silly women simper at?

Minette Walters’ recent novels have bucked this ignore-the-war trend. Both The Devil’s Feather and The Chameleon’s Shadow bring the effects of war right into lives lived here in England. And not just war in the Gulf. The Devil’s Feather concerns itself with current continental African conflicts as well as those in Iraq and the continuing effects of war on men who served in the Falklands comes up in the Chameleon’s Shadow. Chalky, a homeless Falklands veteran, provokes all sorts of unpleasant thoughts in the mind of the Chameleon’s main character, Charles Acland, recently invalided out of the army himself.

In both The Devil’s Feather and Tthe Chameleon’s Shadow, war both damages and attracts the damaged to it and the incursion of the brutality and damage of war into apparently ‘normal’ life back home is one of the fascinating things about the books.

The effects of the past – whether it be war or damaging family dynamics – is a theme which runs deep in all Walters’s books. And, when you know her back-catalogue it’s hard to read ‘The Chameleon’s Shadow’ and not feel a suspicion that Charles Acland will turn out to have been a very damaged personality before he was blown up by an Iraqui roadside bomb.

His anti-social personality – pre-existent or not - doesn’t necessarily mean he is a sociopath, or that he is responsible for a series of apparently homophobic murders. Or does it?
Walters teases us right to the end - is he guilty or isn’t he - asking us to search our souls and see if we would exonerate Charles of responsibility for his actions, given what has been done to him. Has his responsibility been diminished? If so, what diminished it, war or childhood? And would one provide more excuse for the commission of murder than the other?

Discuss.