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| Middlemarch: So good I bought it twice |
Lists of the allegedly best British
novels crop up from time to time but the most recent poll (7 December 2015)
gives us ‘The 100 greatest British novels’ as seen by foreign critics. Jane Ciabattari, who contributes to BBC
Culture, asked critics ‘from Australia to Zimbabwe’, but not the UK, to
nominate their favourite British novel.
According to the BBC Culture article, she polled 82 critics, but it
seems more likely that that was the number who responded. The terms of reference were specific. As Ciabattari puts it: ‘This list includes no
nonfiction, no plays, no narrative or epic poems (no Paradise Lost or Beowulf),
no short story collections (no Morte D’Arthur) – novels only, by British
authors (which means no James Joyce).’
That seems reasonable, and there is
a little about the critics as well:
‘The critics we polled live and
work all over the world, from the United States and continental Europe to
Australia, Africa, Asia, India and the Middle East. Some of the critics we
invited to participate are regular book reviewers or editors at newspapers,
magazines or literary blogs – Lev Grossman (Time), Mary Ann Gwinn (Seattle
Times), Ainehi Edoro (Brittle Paper), Mark Medley (Toronto Globe and Mail), Fintan
O’Toole (The Irish Times), Stephen Romei and Geordie Williamson (The
Australian), Sam Sacks (The Wall Street Journal) and Claiborne Smith (Kirkus
Reviews). Others are literary scholars,
including Terry Castle, Morris Dickstein, Michael Gorra, Carsten Jensen,
Amitava Kumar, Rohan Maitzen, Geoffrey O’Brien, Nilanjana Roy and Benjamin
Taylor. Each who participated submitted a list of 10 British novels, with their
pick for the greatest novel receiving 10 points. The points were added up to
produce the final list. The critics
named 228 novels in all. These are the top 100.’
The first sentence sounds
comprehensively global, but we are not given a breakdown by region. The set of names, if representative, answers
one question I had, but poses another. A
concern had been that critics would have been reading the books in translation,
which raises the issue of availability, the danger that only selected titles have
been translated into that particular critic’s language and skewing the sample
in favour of a narrow range of classic titles; that is aside from the
possibility that the evaluation of a book is affected by the competence of the
translation. That was not the case, as
judging by the names listed they would generally have been reading the books in
English. The fact that they were though creates
an anglophone bias; there is no indication here of how many respondents primarily
spoke a language other than English. How
many of them were German, French, Italian, or Igbo for that matter? How big was the Latin American contingent? This is a selection of mostly
English-speaking critics (and some academics), probably those who could respond
to Ciabattari’s invitation emailed in English.
Considering the statistically
dubious start, the resulting 100 titles are generally familiar, with a few
surprises thrown in. Middlemarch comes out on top, and I can
see why a group of foreign critics would consider it a quintessentially English
novel (Daniel Deronda is also present
further down). Middlemarch won by a ‘landslide’, with 42% of the critics including
it. That and numerous others sound the
sorts of books that appear in university English literature courses, probably where
a lot of these were read.
Female authors are well represented
throughout and take the top three slots, Virginia Woolf punching above her
weight at numbers two and three with To
the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway
respectively. I like both those
enormously, but if you locked me in a room and threatened me with death if I
didn’t name the writer of the second and third greatest British novels, I can’t
imagine Woolf would immediately spring to mind. The
Waves and Orlando also make the
list. Naturally the Victorians are
heavily represented, particularly in the top half, with Dickens (Great Expectations, Bleak House and David
Copperfield) in the top ten, along with Jane
Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Vanity Fair. Dickens also has Dombey and Son, not normally considered one of his finest, on the
list. Austen appears four times,
otherwise the pre-Victorians are fairly sparse – Frankenstein
(in the top ten), The Private Memoirs and
Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Clarissa,
Gulliver’s Travels, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy,
Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe.
Some of the entries one suspects
are better known from their film adaptations and that may have led them to be
top of mind (Atonement, Never Let Me Go – not even Ishiguro’s
best, let alone in the top 100 British novels – and The Buddha of Suburbia stand out in that respect). The presence of The Remains of the Day compensates for Never Let Me Go. There are
some curious choices, including for my money the tedious Under the Volcano, and recent books that have not had the chance to
establish a consensus on their value (four date from 2011-12). Jeanette Winterson and Zadie Smith both
appear twice – does that make them among the most significant British novelists
who have ever lived, and will their reputations stand the test of time? Some plumb the depths of obscurity, such as
Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Jane
Gardam’s Old Filth. On the other hand it is nice to see titles which
deserve to be better known, such as Sybille Bedford’s A Legacy, Henry Green’s Loving
and (Dublin born) Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the
Heart.
Anyway, what criteria do you use to
decide on how ‘great’ something is? Is
it how it moves you, how it lingers in the memory, was it something that stayed
with you from a formative period, was it influential on the literature that
followed (in which case how does one assess fairly recent novels?); is how much
it has been written about by previous critics a useful guide, or the extent to
which it has captured the zeitgeist, how ‘real’ it seems, how ingenious the
plot, how subtle the characterisation, how fresh its view of the world…. Taking all these potential elements of
greatness into account the value of such a list must be dubious, but if it
sparks discussion, and encourages readers to try something they hadn’t thought
about before, it has to be worthwhile.
Of course I went through and totted
up the ones I had read, and was a little embarrassed at how many I have yet to
get round to, and there were more than a couple of which I had never even heard. We can grouse about novels we deem less worthy
included at the expense of writers who have been omitted or underrepresented,
or about writers who are represented by what we consider to be the wrong
book(s), and there are a few of all those in this list, but it is still an
interesting snapshot of what springs to mind when critics put their collective
feet up with a cup of coffee and jot down what at that moment they think are
their top (however defined) British novels.
Sometimes it helps to have an outsider’s perspective to refresh our
own. With all its flaws they have
nominated a collection of novels to be proud of, as well as a timely incentive
to pull my finger out and cross a few more off my list of those books I really
should get round to reading.
