I don’t collect old books just for the pleasure of faded daffodil yellow linen covers or sepia photographs of English villages in the 30s – although that has a lot to do with it. Nor do I collect them to make a killing Ebay. Just because a book was printed in 1936 doesn’t make it valuable.
I actually enjoy reading them – I enjoy the flavour of the writing, the subject matter and the luxurious sense of having time to read it. Back then, there were not a dozen other leisure activities demanding your attention. No TV, no `must see’ Friends episodes, no Internet – you could read while the radio played in the background.
Writers then were very well aware of the attention and respect people brought to their reading. It wasn’t just something you did to while away the time in waiting rooms, trains and planes.
Authors like Charles Dickens, H. Rider Haggard and Jack London – and later, AJ Cronin, Elizabeth Goudge and JB Priestley knew that their audience was waiting for this novel with the eagerness of today’s audience waiting for the next Ridley Scott movie, and so they wrote to this audience, not to someone browsing through the paperbacks at an airport terminal.
These novels had something else that the audience expected – besides a rattling good story, rich characterisation and locale – they had the authentic voice of their creator.
Today’s novels, churned out with the airport browser and the film rights in mind, have no author’s voice to speak of – they are too formulaic, too “this is Chapter Three so it’s time to make the hero face his first big challenge” kind of formula.
If you want to write a modern best seller, there are any number of successful authors who have written books showing you how – formula sells, and once you know the formula, you too can hang a plot and a few wooden characters on it.
But older novels had more of the author’s character and style, and each author took a difference view of what makes a good story. So Nevil Shute will whirl you along with a great plot, while Elizabeth Goudge will meander slowly along any number of by roads in search of her character’s soul. Both will make it quite clear to you – the reader – who is telling this story. You never know who or what they will be writing about either, maybe a flying doctor in one novel and the end of the world from Shute, or from Goudge, the denizens of an English country village, or a vast saga that spans the globe from the Channel Isles to New Zealand. Who needs a formula when you have something to say, and the courage to take your audience on a risky ride?
Of course, the homogenized flavour of modern western life, with its transatlantic accent and emphasis on stuff, may also be to blame. Perhaps western people are too much alike to make interesting characters. It’s easier now, to define them by their professions and the clothes they wear. Ever noticed how many modern novels have some variety of professional as the lead character – a lawyer, a doctor, an archeologist? Everybody does something for which the pay is presumably excellent because they all wear expensive clothes as well.
Beside the older authors, modern authors have flat, dull voices. They follow the formula almost without exception. Try picking up a fantasy novel these days – does it excite you when you read the blurb on the back? Or does your brain start going `da de da’ at some point – usually when you read `now Urlich (or Finbarg, or Synfonia) sets out on a quest to (kill the Archmage, become a dragon rider, find the Lost Kidney Stone of the Druid Dentist)…whatever.
There are exceptions, of course – and I have a new Isobel Allende begging to be read, and savoured. My planned reread of Green Dolphin Street will have to wait.
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