Readers of John Mullan's articles in the UK newspaper The Guardian (called “Elements of Fiction”) will know of his gift for helping the common reader understand the critical and narrative intricacies of reading novels. He is professor of English at University College London and well‐versed in the language of literary critics. In How Novels Work, he sets himself the challenge of talking about novels, old and new, in a way that is, he says, “intelligible without being glib”.
And he succeeds, even though, browsing through the side‐headings to the chapters, and through the index (which is particularly relevant in the circumstances), readers can find all the arcane terms they want (narratology, meta‐narrative, prolepsis, inter‐textuality, and montage). More down to earth are his helpful elucidations of plot/narrative/story, setting/location, and much else: he explains style (or tone of voice) with plenty of examples (from writers as diverse as De Lillo and James, Roth and Martin Amis), and he explains structure by looking in a direct clear way at David Copperfield and Carol Shield's Unless, John Le Carré and Ian McEwan's Átonement.
You would think that by now the novel would be dead but it is very much alive: many get published, awards attract attention, reading clubs multiply. There is a real interest in novels old (like Defoe and Fielding, Burney and Trollope) and new (like Hollingshurst and Highsmith, Rushdie and Zadie Smith, Spark and Coetzee). Mullan, then, offers a short and unpretentious guide to what is actually going on in all these books. His chapters deal with beginnings (titles and prologues do not come out of thin air), narrating (first and third‐person voices, narrators who know it all and know only bits, the multiple narrators of Pamuk and the use of past and present tense), and people (types in Dickens, characters in Austen, villains in Ian Fleming, alter egos in Powell and Roth).
Then through genre (idiosyncratic for anyone wanting a systematic approach, but good things on thrillers and magical realism) and voices (speech in fiction, including dialect and dialogue, phone conversations and swearing), structure and detail ( perceptive insights into William Trevor and Jonathan Franzen), style and devices (like those “real” plague documents in Defoe and weird names in Martin Amis), to literariness (including epigrams and novels within novels) and endings (questions answered and uncertainties resolved, sometimes dénouements or false endings or sententious postscripts as in The Constant Gardener). The focus is English‐language works – Swift, Dexter, Highsmith, Sterne, Defoe, Dickens, Tartt, Amis, Mark Haddon, McEwan, and Michael Cunningham – though Kafka and Pamuk and a few others from elsewhere are woven in.
This is a work likely to appeal to keen users of the fiction shelves in the public library (and for UK readers the charity shops) as well as students in schools, colleges, and universities keen to get a clear survey of how the characteristics of novels can be identified and examined without going over the top with critical subtleties. Comparing new with old works well is not a new approach but it is fresh here, being agnostic about critical theory is refreshingly direct and inclusive, and providing lots of examples makes it all clear. Teachers and lecturers in literature will find this a useful addition to the curriculum. Editions are clearly listed at the back, and, as I said, the index allows the reader to pick out the deconstructions without interrupting the flow of the chapters.
I read it at one sitting and then went back over it again several times to get the detail. It is that sort of book – literate without condescension, real value at the price, and picking up on points about the novel that are not merely ephemeral. Those reading club members will love it and find plenty to discuss in it. The original pieces for The Guardian have been rewritten and rearranged, so if you have the originals this work will be different.
