Brevity in consideration - does length ever equal quality

It is far from being a new phenomenon, but it seems that to be successful writer of fiction these days, you need to put out a vast amount of product.  What would have been seen as a perfectly reasonable length novel from the thirties to the eighties now seems to be dismissed as a ‘novella’ and not of suitable substance for serious consideration.  Can a work that is limited to around two hundred pages have the same impact as one that runs to a thousand or more?  Does limiting pages lead to better, more considered writing or place too many restrictions on authors with unlimited imaginations. Let us consider the place of the vast tome through the ages.

I’ve always been aware of ‘Clarissa’, published in the mid-eighteenth century and written by Samuel Richardson, which weighs in at a not insubstantial 1534 pages and as near as dammit a million words.  Most impressive from a time of limited literacy and lower levels of printing technology, mere chicken-feed in the world of the internet and fan fiction.  But, and here is the important question, is it any good?  I am sure that there are many devotees of Richardson’s work around, but I can’t ever recall meeting any.  A work of that length, written such a long time ago, somehow doesn’t seem worth the effort.  I may be wrong and hope one day to find out, perhaps on a trip on the Trans-Siberian with heavy delays that free version I have put on my Kindle will come into its own.  Until then, I will only be able to ponder and consider starting with Richardson’s previous effort ‘Pamela’ which is almost a short story in comparison at 594 pages.

The real reason behind this question was a recent reading of ‘1Q84’ by Haruki Murakami.  Now, before defenders of his work jump up to declaim that the work is in fact three books and by reading them together in one volume, I am not really reading it as the author intended, I will hold up my hands.  I did by the 3-in-1 version and ploughed through it reasonably quickly, questioning as I did whether it was actually any good or just a very long book that didn’t really get anywhere.  Had I read the first two books together and had the twelve month gap that the original readers had before part three appeared, I think my reading experience would have been enhanced.  It was too much as one vast tome and would have been better sold and indeed promoted as three short, linked novels.  I wonder how much marketing pressures from publishers have led to that brick of a book, a veritable Readers Digest compendium of a publication, being on the shelves of bookstores both virtual and physical.

This got me thinking even further about the size of books.  The ‘Harry Potter’ series is another case for consideration here.  I have to admit here to only having read the first two. Reasonably sized, nicely plotted and very enjoyable they were too. As the series continued, the width of the spines increased and with that my desire to read them decreased at a roughly equal rate.

Continuing with historical considerations, almost a century after Richardson’s heavyweight offering, Charles Dickens opened his account as a novelist with ‘The Pickwick Papers’.  Take a trip to the book store today to purchase a copy of that work and you will leave with a volume of around 750 pages, which at first glance seems to support a theory that long novels have been around for centuries and are a legitimate form.  Consider, however, the form in which that work was conceived and released to the public.  Even more so that in the case of ‘1Q84’ above, ‘The Pickwick Papers’ was developed to be read in instalments, in this case monthly oned. Reading the whole thing today as a continuous narrative is a bit like watching all twelve episodes of ‘Fawlty Towers’ back-to-back and coming away wondering what all the fuss was about.  I concede that in both those examples the quality of the work is high enough for that not to happen, but the idea still stands.

More recently, I blame the rise of both the airport novel and the ‘bonkbuster’ for perpetuating the idea that size is everything in fiction.  Jackie Collins, Jilly Cooper, Arthur Hailey et al, you are to blame.  The idea that all your holiday reading could be sandwiched between two luridly illustrated covers is surely one that has gone forever in the era of the e-book?

Another set of books that got me puzzling over this conundrum were the three that make up ‘The Millenium Trilogy’. Stieg Larsson’s doorstop collection amazed me (and the publishing industry no doubt) by their ‘reach’ into the range of people I know.  A word-of-mouth hit too, no multi-million pound advertising campaign there, not until the recent film anyway, and little good did it do there.  I liked them; I have to admit that from the start. The premise of the first book carried me along (it harks back to the locked-rooms of the likes of John Dickson Carr) and the slightly clumsy written style I put down to being a mass-market book delivered in translation.  Yet, when I looked back at them and considered from a distance, my feeling was that there was at least one very good book indeed in there, possibly two and definitely not three.  Careful editing would have produced a very different result.  Was the published version a result of the publishers having a free hand due to the unfortunate demise of the author, or am I reading too much into it?

My position on this question is that books should never be sold or read on the ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’ principle. A book should be as long as it needs to be, whether it is ‘Clarissa’ or ‘Kidnapped’.