At last I come to a conclusion that satisfies me, though many others have already reached this conclusion long before I began to think about it and to examine the evidence.
The evidence is this .. ..
For at least 65 years I have read, on average, at least one novel each month. That’s an awful lot of novels. More than enough to constitute a body of evidence from which to draw conclusions.
My conclusions are these .. ..
Novels are products of the imagination. They are, in very simple terms, story books – the likes of Robinson Crusoe, Alice in Wonderland, Westwood Ho!, and The Last Days of Pompeii – all of which I had read and cherished long before I was ten years old. In general practice, novels are long stories. Sometimes they are very long stories. How long is up to the author, though the publisher and the buyer may impose their own limits. That said, the writer is free to roam at will in the very real realms of the imagination. And the degree to which we, the readers, are able to share the same paths, meet the same people, experience the same sights sounds tastes smells and bodily contacts will depend partly on the skill of the writer and partly on our own willingness to travel through the words on the page to the surroundings which exist because the writer has created them for us. And when the imagination of the writer is ill-nourished or too little exercised, our own contribution may need to be all the more energetic and persistent. That is not the whole of the story. There are other considerations to take into account. But these will do for starters.
A set of points ..
I have beside me as I write, the 647 pages into which the typographer has transposed, tantalisingly metamorphosed, the vast expansive imagination words of Salman Rushdie in his 1981 novel : Midnight’s Children. I have been compelled to read it slowly, chew over every sentence, masticate every phrase, every alternative specification, until the full flavour of this pudding, this intoxicating dessert, this feast for the nose the eyes the ears, the ready-to-receive palate, the anticipating gullet, the floreat resonances of inconsequentiality, convey in harmonic intervallic sequences of immeasurable sensation, the love and kisses, the wholeness, the totality, the enormity of my inner and outer beings combined into one great chromatic experiencing of the author's intentions, his recollections, his amalgamations, his swoopings into realms beyond the tabulations of mundane reality.
© francis cameron, oxford, 14 february 2009
