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When we finish reading a novel, there's generally one of three reactions:
1. bloody hell, that was good!
2. meh
3. that's an afternoon of my life I'll never get back.
But there's one particular kind of book that gives me another reaction, a sense of massive bereavement and a wish to start straight in again at the beginning. This isn't, entirely, related to the book's intrinsic quality, though a downright poor one won't do it. I've been thinking about which ones do it to me, and have realised it is, above all, the world-builders. They are often historical, futuristic or fantasy and they tend to be long, the sort of door-stops that in Victorian times would have appeared in three volumes. They have to be long (or a series), because part of what they are about is not just telling a story but building the world in which it happens, and if, as is generally the case, this is not the everyday world in which the reader lives, then more time and trouble is needed to bring it alive.
The result, if it's done well, is that on finishing the book, I don't just feel I have come to the end of a story but that I have been evicted from a world, and desperately want to get back in again. I re-read Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety about a week ago and, ever since, have felt nostalgic for the French Revolution; I daresay I shouldn't have much enjoyed being there in reality, but for some hours after I closed the book, I felt my life would be empty if I could not be the Lanterne Attorney or one of his colleagues. Mantel is good at this: I have read her two Thomas Cromwell volumes, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, several times each now, and always end up wanting to live at Austin Friars.
But world-builders don't have to be absolute top-of-the-range writers, as Mantel is, to achieve this effect. Tolkien is nobody's idea of a great prose stylist; his dialogue leaves much to be desired, his characterisation varies alarmingly depending on what he currently needs the character to do, and some of his plot devices.... But he can build worlds; he's very good at it, in fact, and has the same ability to draw the reader into not only the story but the world in which it happens, so that at the end you find yourself again outside looking in, rather like Adam and Eve.
Canny world-builders do it in series, so that the Desperate Reader can repeat his/her fix simply by buying the next one. I'm not sure how long this works for. I suspect the effect might diminish the more we are given of the world in question and that short series might be best, because the important thing is to leave us not only wanting more but feeling there is more to want.
1. bloody hell, that was good!
2. meh
3. that's an afternoon of my life I'll never get back.
But there's one particular kind of book that gives me another reaction, a sense of massive bereavement and a wish to start straight in again at the beginning. This isn't, entirely, related to the book's intrinsic quality, though a downright poor one won't do it. I've been thinking about which ones do it to me, and have realised it is, above all, the world-builders. They are often historical, futuristic or fantasy and they tend to be long, the sort of door-stops that in Victorian times would have appeared in three volumes. They have to be long (or a series), because part of what they are about is not just telling a story but building the world in which it happens, and if, as is generally the case, this is not the everyday world in which the reader lives, then more time and trouble is needed to bring it alive.
The result, if it's done well, is that on finishing the book, I don't just feel I have come to the end of a story but that I have been evicted from a world, and desperately want to get back in again. I re-read Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety about a week ago and, ever since, have felt nostalgic for the French Revolution; I daresay I shouldn't have much enjoyed being there in reality, but for some hours after I closed the book, I felt my life would be empty if I could not be the Lanterne Attorney or one of his colleagues. Mantel is good at this: I have read her two Thomas Cromwell volumes, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, several times each now, and always end up wanting to live at Austin Friars.
But world-builders don't have to be absolute top-of-the-range writers, as Mantel is, to achieve this effect. Tolkien is nobody's idea of a great prose stylist; his dialogue leaves much to be desired, his characterisation varies alarmingly depending on what he currently needs the character to do, and some of his plot devices.... But he can build worlds; he's very good at it, in fact, and has the same ability to draw the reader into not only the story but the world in which it happens, so that at the end you find yourself again outside looking in, rather like Adam and Eve.
Canny world-builders do it in series, so that the Desperate Reader can repeat his/her fix simply by buying the next one. I'm not sure how long this works for. I suspect the effect might diminish the more we are given of the world in question and that short series might be best, because the important thing is to leave us not only wanting more but feeling there is more to want.
