Jonathan Franzen, Tony Blair and Ken Follett are all guilty of crimes against brevity, writes Robert McCrum.
One of the most remarkable things about Amanda Foreman's magnificent study of British involvement in the American civil war is both its length - A World On Fire comes in a few folios shy of 1000 pages - and also, almost as telling, that virtually no one has commented on
this, perhaps out of respect for the fact that Foreman devoted more than 10 years of her life to it. Film, video, television and radio all accommodate our diminished attention spans, along with the fragmentary nature of modern life, but books are definitely getting longer.
There are some precedents here. "Another damned, thick square book," the Duke of Cumberland is said to have remarked to the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?"
Today, however, Foreman's book is just the biggest beast in a menagerie of fatties.
To take a random sample, Keith Jeffery's history of the British secret service, MI6, is more than 800 pages. Tony Blair's A Journey tops 700 pages, while Orlando Figes' history of the Crimean war is almost terse at 575 pages.
This trend is not confined to non-fiction. Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap is almost 500 pages and Ken Follett's doorstopper Fall of Giants, if anyone's counting, is about 850 pages, probably to appeal to his American readers. Is anyone editing these books?
The truth is that they all bear the imprint of marketing, not editorial, values.
Literary elephantiasis starts across the Atlantic. North America has a lot to answer for. In the "pile 'em high" tradition, US bookshops love to display big fat books in the window.
The cut-and-paste technology of word processors must bear some of the blame, but overwriting is part of the zeitgeist. Jonathan Franzen's Freedom is highly enjoyable but who's finishing it? The novel is at least 100 pages too long.
Whatever happened to brevity?
Once upon a time, it was not just the soul of wit, there was a strong literary preference for the shorter book, from Utopia to Heart of Darkness. More recently, The Great Gatsby, for my money the greatest novel in English in the 20th century, comes in at under 60,000 words, a miracle of compression. The novels of that great triumvirate - Waugh, Greene and Orwell - average 60-70,000 words apiece. Even 1984 is not much over 100,000 words. That neglected genius, Robert Louis Stevenson, used to say: "The only art is to omit." In a letter to a friend, he declared - in words that should be nailed over every writer's desk - "If there is anywhere a thing said in two sentences that could have been as clearly and engagingly said in one, then it's amateur work."
If it's a choice between the tight-lipped or the windbag, give me the aphorist every time. Most novels do very well at about 250 pages or fewer.
Seriously, what history or biography needs to exceed 500 pages? Some public-spirited cultural patron - the Man Group, perhaps - should sponsor a prize for short books.
This, by the way, is not an original point of view. As I was researching the history of brevity, I found this, attributed to Samuel Johnson. "Was there ever yet anything written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe and The Pilgrim's Progress?"
But let's concede that War And Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, In Search Of Lost Time, Vanity Fair, Middlemarch and The Portrait Of A Lady are all substantial books that earn their length.
Against the bulging library of "damned thick, square books", here's my top 10 of slim volumes:
1. George Orwell: Animal Farm
2. Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea
3. Evelyn Waugh: The Loved One
4. Henry James: The Turn Of The Screw
5. R.L. Stevenson: Treasure Island
6. Joseph Conrad: Heart Of Darkness
7. Marguerite Duras: The Lover
8. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
9. Graham Greene: The End Of The Affair
10. Muriel Spark: The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie
- OBSERVER
