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| What to look for in a novel When you read a novel for study, what should you look for? First of course find out whether it is entertaining. Did you enjoy reading it? Novelists don't write only to provide texts to be studied in schools (Some even forbid their novels to be used in this way!). Novelists write mainly to entertain, so that the reader will enjoy himself, but also to express something they want to say. However, when we are studying literature we are trying to find out how the writer entertains us. So it is useful to find out what he has done. These are the aspects of the novel we look at: Plot Characters Setting Ideas None of these exists on its own. All need to be there in the novel. It is rather like a fly: it has legs, wings and a body. But if you pull them apart you don't have a fly any more. Length A writer who has decided to tell a story has a choice of how long to he wants to make it. If he writes only two or three thousand words it is a Short Story. If it is long enough to fill a whole book it is called a novel. There are lengths of stories between these two. If two or three stories can fill a paperback book they might be called novellas - or Long Short Stories. A short novel might be called a Novelette. You need not worry about these terms; they are only important if you want to sell stories. It used to be easier for writers to sell short stories because there were more magazines publishing them in the past. Nowadays short stories are less popular with writers, though the BBC radio and women's magazines take quite a lot, often not of literary quality. Most of the books of fiction you will see on sale in shops or in libraries are novels. However you need to know about Short Stories because sometimes a book might look like a novel but in fact be composed of short stories which may even share characters. Since the stories may not follow each other you may get confused if you think they are chapters in a novel. Some example of this kind of book: Chinua Achebe - Girls at War Kingsley Amis - My Enemy's Enemy |
Ursula le Guin - Orsinian Tales Each of these books consists of stories on the same theme. Achebe has written a series of stories about the war in Nigeria. Several of Amis's stories are about British soldiers during the second world war, belonging to a particular signals unit. Some characters appear in all the stories. Ursula le Guin's stories can be thought of as sketches for her novel Malafrena. They all take place in the same imaginary Central European country but at different periods of history. The novel itself is set in this imaginary country, Orsinia. This writer often writes a short story and then uses it as the nucleus of a full scale novel and has published several other collections of stories, mostly SF (see Genres). How to tell if you are reading a novel Earlier I said that fiction is a work of the imagination. How can you tell that what you are reading is a novel and not a work of history or autobiography? Here are some tests: 1. Has it an index? If it has, it is non-fiction. Novels very seldom have anything like an index. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R.Tolkien has a glossary which is not a complete index. The author calls it a "fictional history". But it is clearly fiction because, like Science Fiction, it has non-human characters in it. But not all non-fiction books have an index. Most should but until the use of computers it was expensive to make an index. 2. Has it a Table of Contents? Modern novels don't have tables of contents like those found in non-fiction books. However, some, especially older, novels have a list of chapter headings and even a summary of the plot for each chapter. 3. Look at what the publisher has to say about the book (the Publisher's Blurb). This will usually say clearly whether or not it is a novel. 4. Look in the text Look for dialogue, that is conversations between people. In most novels conversations are shown by means of quotation marks. Example "Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat." "O! Don't cut my threat, sir," I pleaded in terror. "Pray, don't do it, sir." |
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