by Irum Shehreen Ali

Novel:
   • noun a fictitious prose narrative of book length. ORIGIN: from Italian novella storia [new story] and/or French nouvelle (new).
   – Compact Oxford Dictionary
   
   Someone wise once glibly stated that there was nothing new under the sun, and the canniest of fashion designers know that it’s only a matter of time before what’s old will soon become new again. And so it has been with that venerable stalwart of literature, the novel. In the aftermath of 9/11 emerged a world where certainties were tossed aside, and our understandings of terrorism, war, democracy, and even normalcy were challenged. The cultural pessimists were legion, claiming that in this new post-apocalyptic reality the fictitious microcosm of the English novel was no longer relevant. That whatever fiction could generate was no competition for the stuff of ‘real life’ on our TV screens, computer monitors and newspapers. That in the wake of reality TV would come reality literature. However, one must beg to differ. Lead by the authors of Britain and that anachronism called the ‘Commonwealth’, the genre which some have called the ‘principal artistic form of our times’ has been undergoing a renaissance. The preponderance of high-profile book prizes, global bestsellers and the sheer quality of the contemporary novel re-establishes, if it was at all lost, the novel’s place as the repository of humanity’s innermost dreams, desires and dysfunctions.
   From its earliest days as the ‘romance’, the novel has intrigued audiences the world over due to its versatility and perpetual ‘newness’. To attempt to encapsulate the history of the novel in any limited way is foolhardy, but necessary to demonstrate its versatility and durability. The very first romances which were written in high language and spoke of epic deeds and heroic adventures set imaginations aflame. These were duly followed by tales of virtue and purity that were used as aides to spread morality among the people of 15th century Europe. The 16th and 17th centuries saw the prevalence of satires, intrigues and commentaries on the morals of the time, with authors Count Machiavelli, Miguel Cerevantes, Honoré d’Urfés and Madame de La Fayette leading the way. The 18th century brought with it classics such as Robinson Crusoe, Telemachus and The Thousand and One Nights.
   By the end of the 1700s, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, as well as Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy had revolutionised the world of prose. The novel had jumped headlong into the interior drama of its characters’ heads and into the minute detail of their milieus. Other than any other fictional form, the novel allowed the slow, dramatic accumulation of detail to present a finely nuanced final picture. Jane Austen’s gentle romantic satires of the early 1800s; Thomas Hardy’s dramatic renderings of human folly; Dickens’ magical descriptions of what was later known as ‘Dickensian London’; the Bronte sisters’ great contribution to letters and DH Lawrence’s heady representations of moral ambivalence and sexuality firmly put the novel on the map. French heroes Balzac, Hugo and Flaubert, aided by their Russian counterparts Pushkin, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky led a Europe-wide surge in prose. These works comprehensively destroyed the myth that prose could not represent reality or construe human experience in a meaningful way. By now, the world was most definitely hooked.
   The 1900s saw the novel flourish on both sides of the Atlantic, and gain new heights in Asia. By the end of the 20th century, we had witnessed the birth of the great American novel, the modern British novel, the science-fiction novel and the post-colonial novel. The past century also saw the emergence and worldwide recognition of many authors of non-Western backgrounds: Marquez, Rushdie, Rhys, Kincaid, Ghosh, Seth, Desai, Allende to name but a few. During the past century, the novel perfected a complex trick. It managed to encompass all the shades of human experience within a single genre without being limited by its stylistic rules. Novels of the past century unleashed society’s inherent transformative power. We saw those that expanded the human consciousness with new ideas of what was possible, such as Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, as well as those that explored the minute interior reflections of particular characters in detail, Virgina Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. And we had everything in between, from the magic of Rushdie’s metaphor for a nation’s history, Midnight’s Children, to the stinging satire of Phillip Roth’s reflections on modern day America, exemplified by American Pastoral.
   And all without compromising style. As the novel’s reach expanded over the past century, so did its idiom, its stylistic bravery and its reluctance to be bogged down by rules. The world, which witnessed two World Wars, the crumbling of empires, the birth of myriad new nations, as well as the beginning and end of the Cold War took the novel to new heights. The cataclysmic changes wrought by history only served to ignite authors’ imaginations to stretch the parameters of the text. There were multi-volume epics epitomized by JRR Tolkien’s critically ignored Lord of The Rings Trilogy. There were massive doorstoppers such as Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. Literature also embraced slim narratives that hardly qualified as novels — Chinua Achene’s Things Fall Apart. The novel threw us stylistic challenges such as William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and James Joyce’s Ulyses, which refused to be bound by the rules of time. Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things taught the world a new way of using a language that it thought it already knew. And of course, there were the fantastical adventures of a talking tiger and a boy on a boat in Yann Martel’s The Life of Pi. At the beginning of the 21st century, the novel stands in the rudest of good health — both topically, and stylistically.
   But there are the naysayers who predicted the untimely death of prose fiction at the altar of reality. Lately, the world has endured changes that were judged to be different from all those that preceded them and had produced great literature. The previous centuries’ wars, disasters, betrayals, reconfigurations and challenges had all followed certain tenets. Wars were fought within the rules of engagement, political dealings followed a time-honoured system of alliances and loyalties, disasters that befell man could somehow be rationalised. But then came September 11, 2001. On a scale of one to disaster, it was by far not the worst disaster the world had witnessed. Murder, terrorism and ideological warfare the world had seen — but somehow this was different. The cynical among us say that it was different because it happened to the US, a country relatively untouched by the horrors that had been visited on the rest of the world so very often. But really, it was different because we all knew in that one moment that the world we had heretofore known would no longer exist. We knew that the new wars would be different, the new politics would be different, the new frontiers of the world would be different. It was almost as if fiction could no longer compete with the soap opera complexity of the world that was unfolding before us. The melodrama on our TV screens and newspapers was dystopian in nature, bewildering in scope. New rules were being made, and they stated that there were no longer any rules. Could fiction keep up?
   The answer, as proven by the past few years’ Man Booker Prize Shortlist and the vibrancy of worldwide book sales, is a resounding yes. Today’s leading novelists, ably abetted by their upcoming peers, have risen gracefully to the challenge. They have proven that their visions remain sharp, their worlds remain compelling and their job remains as important as ever. The huge amount of international sales generated by novels of varied subject matter and style has proven that this is not only for the intellectuals or the critics. The novel is firmly within the grasp of and written towards the common man.
   The main reason for the novel’s continuing success lies in the very reason that was purported to be its downfall — the growing complexity of global reality and the need to articulate a response to it. The world’s increasing diversity, coupled with the current moral and political crises have made the novel all the more vital as a means of exploring the changing consciousness of our time.
   If there was a time when the political was increasingly important, it is now, when the aftermath of terrorism, war and misguided ideologies lie at our very doorsteps. The post-9/11 world has brought with it a world devoid of certainty. We now live in a time where power is exercised without question or reason, and where politics has been recast from a game of strategy to a naked display of dogma. In his masterpiece of modern storytelling Saturday, Ian McEwan follows Henry Perowne, a brain surgeon, on 15th February, 2003, around a London that is busy protesting the Iraq war. On every page he shoves his protagonist into a moral dilemma that can be read as a greater metaphor for the struggle between isolationism and interventionism — both at the personal and political level. Do we remain ensconced in our insulated lives, ignoring the fundamental clashes of the world around us, or do we engage with it? And if so, at what level? In this novel, McEwan demonstrates one of the genre’s greatest traits — the ability to reflect the greater concerns of a changing world via the interior transformation of a single character.
   On the opposite end of the spectrum is David Mitchell’s sprawling Could Atlas which uses the metaphor of the past to ask questions of our present. The novel is an epic that simultaneously tells the stories of unrelated characters in disparate geographies and time periods. Cloud Atlas is a stylistic success because it manages to pull off a trick that is both commendable and highly pleasurable — it tells many stories at once, completes them all, and leaves the reader satisfied at the end that he has experienced something meaningful. Mitchell’s past is completely relevant in showing us that the way human beings respond to destruction, change, fear and suppression remains the same across time, despite varying circumstances.
   As boundaries of nationality and ethnicity both blur and become all the more sharply demarcated, contemporary novelists have created poignant, timely and sharp ruminations on the multifaceted human relations of our time. Nadeem Aslam’s masterful Maps for Lost Lovers draws a pitch perfect rendition of a sleepy Northern town whose predominantly Pakistani population is torn apart by the scandal of unsanctioned romance and its bloody aftermath. The social norms that are antiquated even in the Pakistan they left behind rule the characters’ lives with an iron grip. Aslam articulates the immigrant struggle between retaining an identity and carving out a future through a conflict between assimilation and religion, without once resorting to cliché. Add to that Aslam’s ethereal metaphors; his characters’ intriguing way of renaming the landmarks of their adopted homes with lyrical Urdu names like ‘Dasht-e-Tanhaii’ (the Desert of Loneliness) and his way of showing how even great cruelty is usually borne out of great love, and you have a modern classic.
   Exploring similar identity-based territory in two totally different ways are Zadie Smith’s pretentiously titled On Beauty and Salman Rushdie’s latest magnum opus Shalimar the Clown. Both illustrate a world where characters drift in and out of ideologies, where geography is at times merely incidental and where the future is full of absurdity. Smith and Rushdie both dazzlingly map the ways in which the political continues to shape the personal, and how humanity’s struggle to be free of a conflict-marred past can never be achieved. The reader is reminded that it is to fiction we have always turned to understand the challenges that ethnic complexity throws at us.
   And what would happen if ethnic complexity was made even more convoluted by the possibility of genetic uncertainty? It is this possibility that Kazuo Ishiguro delves into in the quietly gripping Never Let Me Go. Narrated by Kathy H, the book tells the story of an idyllic childhood in an elite boarding school that is slowly poisoned by the knowledge of the student’s eventual fates. As the book unravels, we see through the school staff’s euphemisms and realise that the children are replica human beings, created so that their vital organs can be harvested to save ‘real’ humans in the outside world. This knowledge oppresses the students’ attempts to lead a ‘normal’ life in the time that is allotted to them before and between organ donations. To watch the characters love, hate and try to create some sense of meaning from their preordained lives, try to fight the inevitability that will render their existence useless, is to have your heart broken on every page. Ishiguro questions the very essence of humanity, and reminds us that we are experts at the art of inhumane behaviour.
   Then there are those novels which through their singular character focus illuminate the world in previously unrecognised ways. Tarun Tejpal, in his debut novel The Alchemy of Desire takes us inside the head of a nameless narrator who is consumed by two things: writing the definitive Indian novel and his desire for his beautiful wife, Fiza. As his obsessions with both unravel in the face of a journey into the past, Tejpal juxtaposes the changes in the narrator’s life with the transformations in India during the Indira/Rajiv years. Even as we become more and more embroiled in the protagonist’s endless mental torment, we see his life and how it compares to those around him all the more clearly.
   Interiority of a completely different stripe is explored by Mark Haddon in his delightful and heartbreaking journey of an autistic 15-year-old, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Singular in his authorial voice, the narrator of Haddon’s novel sees the world far differently that the people around him. Due to his autism, he struggles to understand the emotion displayed by people around him, understand their deeper motives and to bring order to a vastly disordered world. For Christopher trying to negotiate a crowded train platform presents the same difficulty as construing motives for people’s propensity to lie — the challenge of illogic and deception. Haddon’s book is revelatory, not only because it presents a world heretofore closed to us, but that it presents it in a style of prose that is illuminating in its simplicity. In the best tradition of novels, Haddon’s book shows us that no matter how complicated the world around us becomes, at the very heart of human existence everywhere is the struggle to find hope, meaning and fulfilment.
   So, by no means past its sell-by date. The current crop of authors has demonstrated without a doubt that their work remains as topical as ever. Whether to provide order in a disorderly world, to remind us of values lost, to explore the limits of the human mind, to emphasise unpleasant truths, to celebrate living, to elaborate on pain, to re-create what we knew to be real — they have shown that it is via the vast scope of storytelling that we can truly know ourselves. The novel has ably demonstrated that whatever the real world can throw at us can be thrown back richer, more focused and more deeply in fiction. That while the news on our TV screens is strong on shock, it is abysmally weak on analysis of consequences. Using the narrative freedom granted by prose, contemporary authors have revealed truths about our existence that gets lost among the babble of stimuli that we are assaulted with. As book sales sky-rocket, as worldwide best sellers prove to be as compelling in Kalamazoo as in Kensington, we can say without a doubt that the novel is once again in its finest hour. Now, more than ever, the guiding hand of fiction helps us to unravel the disparate strains of moral, social and political reality. Today’s novels still transform, reflect and remind us of the world that has gone before, the world we live in, and the world that awaits us.