INANIMATE CARBON GOD

So the Graun’s done a 100 greatest novels list. And it’s… fairly obvious? I mean, these things always are, you make a poll with input from (in this case) 172 participants, and obviously the usual suspects tend to dominate. It’s how these things work, and there’s not usually a lot of surprises (in this case, probably the biggest ones are the absence of Tolkien and Rowling and the amount of Virginia Woolf, and maybe the high placing of Ulysses); I’ve only read about a fifth of the books on the list, but I recognise most of the other titles at least, and most of them are the sort of thing that you’d expect from a list like this, with Middlemarch at the top and Proust, Tolstoy, the Brontes, Austen, Flaubert, Dickens, Marquez, Rushdie, H. James, Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, Conrad, Thackeray, Ishiguro, Faulkner, Hardy, Baldwin, Lawrence, Hemingway… you know.

This is not what bothers me about the list; it’s in the nature of lists like this to be kind of predictable, as I said, but there’s also probably good reasons why these particular titles become “canon”, and sometimes they just are that good. I mean, Madame Bovary can fuck RIGHT off as far as I’m concerned, and I may always be perplexed at The Great Gatsby‘s enduring popularity, but I know why most of these books are here and that’s because they’re widely considered classics irrespective of what I might think of some of them. It’s their avowed rationale for the list that irritates me:

Never has such a list been more needed. Dwindling attention spans, screens, Netflix; whatever we blame, reading for pleasure is a dying pursuit. Half of adults in the UK say they never read, and levels among children and young people are at their lowest in 20 years. This year has been declared the National Year of Reading to address this crisis. “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all,” Henry David Thoreau advised. We are here to help. […]
Our list includes any book published in English, but originally written in any language. It is still partial – all lists are. Neither can we make a claim to being definitive – this is literature, not science. Is the best novel one that changes the genre, society or the individual? One that captures the zeitgeist, or has an afterlife far beyond its pages. Or a novel that scorches itself so deeply into your soul you can remember exactly when and where you were when you first read it? None of these criteria on their own is enough. My Proustian madeleine will be your raw potato. My Mrs Dalloway your Mrs Bridge. But we hope that in asking those who devote their days to the craft and understanding of fiction from around the globe, the result is as authoritative, ambitious and far-reaching as possible.

But it’s… not? It’s mostly the usual suspects you generally see on lists like these. It doesn’t reach that far beyond the US/UK/Europe axis (even Ishiguro is British). And authoritative? Well, that’s what the editors like to think. Cos I find something dreadfully smug in that “never has such a list been more needed” line; books need to be saved from other forms of popular entertainment and distraction, and THE GUARDIAN is just the… people for the job! Hang on, literature, WE’LL save you with this… list that should get the kids back into reading books! An unfinished four thousand epic about a guy eating a cake, THAT’s what The Young People These Days need…

OK, so I’ve never read In Search of Lost Time and it may well actually be the fifth-greatest novel(s) of all time, I’m being somewhat snide; and indeed, as you may have noticed, I haven’t read anything for nearly two years so I’m probably not the right person to be looking down on a list like this… but I’m not really looking down on the list itself, I’m more looking down at the self-important assumption behind it. And the assumption that 100 titles is enough, when 500 or even a thousand usually has a much broader and more interesting range cos the really interesting and less obvious stuff lurks somewhere outside the top 100. This is true of almost every list of this sort, books, films, music, etc. I’d be more interested in a full list of all the books nominated, really. Still, I suppose I should finally read Middlemarch and see if it is that life-changing…