As a title, Faulks on Fiction is naff, loud and intolerable. Sebastian Faulks agrees: “I would like to point out that the title of this book is not my fault. A high-up person at the BBC decreed that the series should be so called because this year’s craze is for having the presenter’s name in the title. My choice, and not just because it was my wife’s idea, was for Novel People.”
Forget, if you can, the television series, the assorted rugged landscapes with Faulks moving about in them, great houses with Faulks in front, the snips and flips of BBC period dramas, all the things which made Alison Graham, queen of crass at the Radio Times, remark how sexy he looked. On top of which, snippets about the characters of Fielding, Hardy, Dickens and Orwell were scattered like cake topping. Forget the TV. The book’s the thing. Even here, though, after the tin title, comes the brass subtitle. This is the BBC we have now: cack-handed commercial, dumb brutalist, downwardly aspirant, getting in the viewers, its louder and ever-iterated internal advertisements making ads for car insurance and face cream on honest ITV look shy; Mark Thompson’s bonfire of the sensibilities.
Title and screen version are awful, but the book is very different – original thinking, real understanding, perception, finger-tips. Faulks has resolved to write about novels by writing about characters. Following Bernard Shaw who reckoned on writing the parts and letting the plot come out of them, he sets out four categories – “Heroes”, “Lovers”, “Snobs” and “Villains” – into which 28 characters must go. This map is necessarily edged with debatable lands. Mr Darcy of Pride and Prejudice, listed as lover, is a howling snob, Emma Woodhouse quite the reverse.
Categorisation, as Harold Macmillan said about exporting, can be fun, but it brings violently different characters oddly close. Lucky Jim not being quite 1984, when Jim Dixon follows Winston Smith as hero, the contrast is unbearable. Atrocity rules over a desolated soul cowering in an alcove to escape universal electronic supervision whilst, along the landing, annoying comic characters provoke the irked hilarity of an assistant lecturer. Does this tell us more about the developing novel or recent history?
Readers of any novel should remember that an annoying character is an authorial obligation, to be made for maximum impact, over 300 pages, less annoying. So with Mr Darcy, whom Faulks sees as a sick man stumbling about, his towering snobbery under siege from the clinical depression which defines him. That identity is then set in play against the combination of family loyalty, quizzical reservation, mild calculation and affront present in Elizabeth Bennett. The conflict induced will reliably send reassured Lizzie and a filed down Darcy to a technical happy ending. Which, thinks Faulks, will only stick (if indeed it does) because eirenic Bingley, “Darcy’s survival machine”, moves to within 30 miles of them, bringing with him Mrs Bingley, the equally soothing Jane, Elizabeth’s beloved sister. No one reading this interpretation can rest content with Pride and Prejudice as Mills and Boon with perfect prose. Perceiving depths, he charts them – Jane Austen taken seriously. She is also invoked for delight and, with Emma, rapture: “If you were to hear the Amadeus String Quartet playing Mozart on a summer evening in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles with your lover on your arm and a glass of Bollinger 1990 fizzing on your tongue, it would be vain to try to put the sensation into words.”
I prefer Persuasion, but that’s a nice way of putting it. Love for the novel provokes him again to bold and original thinking about its heroine. He sees in the meddling young lady of Highbury “a cleverer and more interesting person than Knightley”. Indulgent to her matchmaking immaturity, he thinks it willed – and shrewdly willed. “She wants one last go of the playroom of childhood and is using her status and charm for self-indulgent purposes… Like the rest of us, she will be grown up quite long enough.” Harriet Smith will just have to put up with being kindly misdirected.
On snobbery, out of which, he assures us, Emma will also grow, he refines the category. It is wrong of Emma to look down on Harriet’s suitor, Robert Martin, the yeoman farmer, but perfectly sensible to be snobbish about Mrs Elton, a display case snob, doing it obviously and thus badly. Mrs Elton does smart talk and possessions, “her barouche-landau, (some sort of nouveau riche carriage, the Chelsea tractor of its day), also the way she talks of her husband as Mr E or her caro sposo.” It would be wrong, Jane and Sebastian feel, not to be snobbish about such a person.
The cheerful decisiveness with which he decrees Darcy’s neurosis and Emma’s ultimate intellectual superiority to Knightley does not follow the critic to Wuthering Heights. His comment is humble. “I hope it is not a readerly cowardice to declare oneself, however admiring, defeated by a book.” Not so defeated that he doesn’t have a furiously unorthodox view of the main character. His Heathcliff is not ruggedly attractive and a bit wild. He is the animaline extremity at which a man can stand. The romantic hero of popular assumption “has the curse that rings in our heads as long and as terribly as any howl in Lear or Macbeth”. He could never have been played by nice young Laurence Olivier in that lovely film.
Faulks holds the exalted opinion of Great Expectations some of us reserve for Middlemarch, not mentioned here. Its hero, Pip, is a notable snob – a lower middle-class snob. For Darcy, Emma and indeed Tess Durbeyfield, the personalities determine the relationship which moves the novel’s action. Pip is a character whose judgmental responses to the doings of other people – Magwitch, Joe, Biddy, Estella and, finally, the soothing Herbert Pocket – establish him. He feels himself at first a common boy; then snubs, aspires, evades, does anguish and is finally, not quite satisfactorily, deposited at relative ease, with the wrong ending, marriage to Estella, the public wanted.
Graham Greene is sometimes read by people who read airport stories, but here gets serious, and thus rougher, treatment. Faulks thinks epigrammatically, making many of his responses self contained demissions. With the unlovable Maurice Bendrix of The End of the Affair listed as “Lover”, but fairly detestable, he pauses to put the producer of bestselling classics sweetly in place. “Greene hit on a pungent mixture for his cocktail: religious doubt, gloom, acidic comedy and a simplistic conception of character, delivered in a disciplined prose. But he is a barman who serves only one drink.”
Determined not to be a snob himself, Faulks spends time with characters not created by Jane Austen or Emily Brontë. Charles Pooter is handled with loving discernment, arousing no derision. No lower order snobbery is perceived in Brickfield Terrace, only a decent, unsmart man escaped from lower to lower-middle and happy about it. This is a fair case to argue, and good to see, although I’m not convinced it quite dispels the initial snobbishness of his creators, the Grossmiths, who came to jeer and slipped into empathy.
Perhaps Reginald Jeeves, gentleman’s supreme gentleman, keeps company in this collection with the demonic Heathcliff to cheer us all up. He is also supreme guardian of etiquette and the done thing, asserting, like a highly literate George V, the duty of absurdity with regard to clothes. “There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself ‘Do trousers matter?’ “The mood will pass, sir.” Also, one reads him for the punctuation.
The chapter on James Bond should have pleased the BBC and Alison Graham no end. I feel dissent coming on, having agreed, an age past, with the younger, left-wing, New Statesman contributor Paul Johnson in dismissing Dr No as fascist. So it is, crammed to the gills with the sort of violence we always call gratuitous, but which publishers know to be essential. A franchise Ian Fleming himself, with a novel he cheerfully advertises here, Faulks must be forgiven for his many other virtues.
