What makes for a good fiction novel.

One of the benefits of growing old is that you get to examine your long held beliefs; you can subject your pet peeves and ad-hoc judgements to a greater scrutiny in the light of your long years of experience with people, situations and places. If you are intellectually honest, you would modify and indeed discard some of your old beliefs or prejudices. In my case, while I have changed many of my earlier ideas, I just could not get rid of one of my strong negative assessments, held since my twenties. It has to do with books, or more precisely books which get awarded in a big way: Nobel for literature, Booker prize or even WH Smith prize. My beef exactly is why these awards to to authors and books which are largely unreadable, while there are so many wholesome fiction done by authors, and books which are ‘unputdownable’ to coin a phrase. Why I could not get past the first few chapters of big name authors like Salman Rushdie, Arundathi Roy, Vikram Seth and Ohman Pamuk, I could never understand the reasons. Oh, I missed out Amitava Ghosh and you can add him to this list. I used to think it was something to do with me; perhaps I was not sophisticated enough or educated enough to understand the writings of these great writers. Salman Rushdie who is said to combine ‘magic realism with historic fiction, dealing with connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western civilisations’ never seemed to speak to my inner soul. May be there is something wrong with my intellectual make up.

Two people put me out of this misery of self flagellation. One was George Orwell who first pointed out that struggling with unreadable writings is not your fault, they are genuinely unreadable. Orwell took the example of Sartre for convoluted writing style. The second man was a professional fiction writer, Elmore Leonard, sometimes known as Dickens of Detroit. He opened my eyes to good writing and it has nothing to do with pretentious high sounding nonsense.

As a result I continue to hold that good fiction does not get the popular or global acclaim it deserves; or conversely, bad fiction oftentimes gets elevated to levels far beyond where they should be placed by the awards committees who should know better. Therefore I thought I should provide a helpful guide to the awards committees, though they have not asked for one. One can have a long debate on what constitutes good fiction, but everyone would agree that many of the ingredients outlined below would find a place there. So much for the background to what I really want to say, and here I go:

1. A strong plot line is must. It can be a complex plot with twists and turns, but not too complex that the reader is lost in the technicalities. ‘Understandable complexity’ is what I really meant to say and too simple a story line such as ‘boy meets girl’ would not cut it. For example, in Robert Harris’s The Ghost a simple minded writer uncovers the fatal secret of a recently retired British Prime Minister.? In The Last Days of America Paul Erdman outlines a German plot to re-unify Germany, about five years before it actually happened. Eric Ambler traces the transformation of Piet Maas in A kind of Anger, chasing a lovely looking woman who has stolen state secrets, all over the French Reviera. Now compare these three plots with a prize winning plot: an American fights for the allied in the Italian front as an ambulance driver, falls in love with a beautiful English nurse, escapes with her to Switzerland where she dies during childbirth. Yes, this is the whole story and the writer got a Nobel for literature for this and other writings.
2. A Robust narrative style is the one that elevates the plot into something readable. From a strong, dramatic opening to the sudden? and unguessable ending, an efficient narrative takes the reader through all the twists and turns. There is no slackening of pace and there is no need to skip pages. Believe Elmore Leonard when he says ‘if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.’ What he means is that great fiction need not or indeed should not have to support posh and sophisticated language. Unnecessary descriptions about the weather or location are to be avoided because they intrude into the story without any effect. As a result every sentence in books by Len Deighton, Robert Harris and the like mean something, and add something to the story.
3. Great perspectives woven effortlessly into the story, through conversations or characters’ rumination adding value to the reading experience. For example, after witnessing a tense domestic scene, Bernard Samson reflects ‘Men marry thinking their women will not change, and women marry expecting their men will change. Both are invariably disappointed.’ When you come across this Oscar Wildish assertion you have to pause for a minute to absorb this wisdom. Likewise, when Mickey Murphy a Len Deighton character thinks aloud ‘the beneficial interactions of urban American life are possible only because we don’t know what to expect’ it makes you reflect on the true nature of modern life. Great fiction writers like Len Deighton, Elmore Leonard, Robert Harris, Paul Erdman and the like are masters of ‘free indirect discourse, a third person narrative technique that gives gives the illusion of immediate access to a character’s thoughts’.
4. Strong characterisation is the basic hallmark of story telling.? It is not necessary to write long paragraphs to describe characters and their identities in the story. Rather it is the other way around: you paint a picture of characters using their dialogues, choice of words, how they see or treat others in the story and the epithets they employ about the situations they find themselves in. The characters, including the protagonists, could be opinionated, egotistical, strong-willed, arrogant, weak and diffident, romantic, cynical, confident, contemptuous or any number of such things. Only thing is the reader gets the impression of such characters through very casual, charcoal drawings and not full blown word portraits.
5. Set-piece dialogues or situations are employed at critical turning points in the story and give an unexpected twist to the story as it moves forward. This can be, for example, a long discussion between a renowned Talmudic scholar and a diligent but diffident student in a tense classroom drama. Chaim Potok portrays a young scholar disagreeing with a well known authority on the finer interpretations of Talmud to great effect. In another case, in a tense business setting, a senior industry leader tries to browbeat an adviser? to his point of view, but the adviser stands his ground and prevails. In yet another case, some senior colleagues try to pin the blame for a big fiasco on a field officer in a national security agency, but the spy involved artfully dodges their accusations and turns the table on them. If you want to see a really great example of a set piece situation, you should google George Galloway versus the US Senate sub-committee. Galloway effortlessly skewering the senators is where real-life scores over any fictional imagination and is worth watching.
6. Believable endings are more easily attempted than actually achieved in fiction. In the first half many stories flow smoothly and authors display a lot of imagination and flair in building up their stories; however, it is in the second half or closer to the ending, their narratives fall flat and come to a tame ending. Many famous authors, Lee Child to take one famous example, are afflicted with this malady and they cannot credibly end their stories which they built up in the first part. As a contrast look at the endings of Len Deighton or Robert Harris: they match the suspense built up in the first half of their books in equal measure. At this point Tamil movie buffs would remember a movie called ‘Neethikkuppin Pasam’ or more memorably the critic’s line ‘Paathikkuppin Mosam’. Don’t let that happen to your book.
7. High Educational Value: Some of you may wonder why one should expect education from fiction, as we don’t expect to learn from stories, but hold your thought for a moment. If I asked you where you got your ideas on the Chola period in Tamilnadu, it is most likely from reading Kalki’s Ponniyen Selvan you learned the details. On American mafia, your mental picture is mostly drawn from Mario Puzo’s Godfather. Cold War and East-West tension? Your ideas are an off take of Len Deighton or John Le Carre who painted vivid pictures of that period in history. You get the point of course. Your most durable knowledge of places, people and situations came not from text books or even scholarly works, but from well researched and imaginatively done fiction. You may not remember what you read in text books after the term has ended, but you will remember what the protagonists said or felt decades after you finished reading their stories.
8. No gratuitous sex or violence: Serious fiction writers know that sex happens in real life from time to time; or indeed violence among those trained in the martial arts. However, they refrain from filling up pages with steamy stuff or the cut and thrust of a violent physical encounter. Sex or indeed violence is handled in a sophisticated way: the reader knows what had happened through very brief? sentences suggesting some such action, and the details are left to the reader’s imagination. Contrast this elegant and allusive approach with that of Harold Robbins (79, Park Avenue) and you will know what I mean.
9. No particular respect for grammar: Many good authors took great liberties with grammar, Elmore Leonard foremost among them. His books mostly described the American underclass who made up their grammar as they went along. With great ear for their dialogue Elmore Leonard wrote as he heard them speak, with no effort to clean up their errors. No wonder he was celebrated as ‘the poet laureate of American thugs with revolvers’. People like him put readability and realism ahead of posh language. At this point in our dialogue, do me a favour. When you go to a coffee shop next time, just examine how many people speak in full and complete sentences. You will be amazed at how much gets done without the aid of language police!
10. Memorable phrases: Some authors inject the right phrase or epithet to match the seriousness of a dialogue, and that phrase stays with the reader forever. There are several examples to choose from, and my personal favourite is this: when Bill Hitchcock wants to talk to the Governor of Bank of England, the governor’s secretary tries to fob him off. Bill tells the Secretary ‘Quit buggering around with me; put the Governor on the line’. There is no other way to get around a determined personal assistant, let me tell you, than to empty the magic words Q B around! That and ‘snookered’ are phrases I had used with great effect in my professional life.

Rereading these guidelines, I realise these are personal to me and they may not find universal appeal. People read what they read and there is no accounting for taste. About twenty years back when JK Rowling’s Harry Potter was lighting up the bestsellers list, prominent British critics could not explain the reasons for the sudden popularity of such fantasy themed novels. ‘People read Harry Potter because people read Harry Potter’ was the best they could come up with. Therefore it is possible to succeed while ignoring these guidelines and that’s what makes the whole business very interesting.

Fantasy novels aside, I have also ignored romantic novels in my list. I may be among the few who considers romantic themes are a case of extreme self indulgence, without any redeeming virtues of the guidelines I so thoughtfully outlined above. As a thought experiment, think of one serious novel of romance and answer this question: what did you really gain from reading it, apart from having had a good time? …….. That’s what I thought. I rest my case.

A V Ram Mohan ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 19th April 2024