The novel, usually comprising a long, fictional prose narrative, has been the dominant literary form since the 18th century. Typified by relatable characters engaged in involved plots and normally in settings with at least parallels to the everyday world, the novel has served as a means of undertaking in-depth studies into the human condition free from the formal and thematic constraints of, say, epic poetry. In the words of Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner: ‘Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.’
The great novelists
The roll call of great novelists is long, illustrious and indicative of the influence the novel has had on moulding our cultural identities. A hardly exhaustive list might include, for instance, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Agatha Christie, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene, Dashiell Hammett, Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, Henry James, James Joyce, Jack Kerouac, D. H. Lawrence, Harper Lee, Ian McEwan, Vladimir Nabokov, George Orwell, Philip Roth, J. D. Salinger, Vikram Seth, John Steinbeck, Evelyn Waugh, Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf. It is an extraordinarily adaptable format too – Woolf called it ‘this most pliable of all forms’ – catering for genres as disparate as science fiction, the picaresque (i.e. episodic tales of roguish heroes) and gothic horror to crime fiction, Westerns and ‘chick-lit’.
The origins of the novel are disputed. Some point to Petronius’s Satyricon, written in the 1st century CE, and Lucius Apuleius’s Golden Ass a century later as bearing many of the hallmarks of the novel – notably the use of prose and stories set in the ‘ordinary’ world and concerned with non-heroic themes. Others, however, regard it as having emerged from the tradition of medieval chivalric romances – with Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1470) considered an early candidate. Indeed, the word for novel in French is roman, and in Italian romanzo. Others alternatively cite publication of Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote in the early 17th century as marking the start of the era of the novel, with the likes of John Bunyan, Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe trailblazing the English-language variant.
By the 19th century, the novel had firmly superseded poetry in popularity if not respectability. Into the 20th century, modernism allowed novelists to reinvent the format again, moving it away from the formalist, realist approaches of the Victorian masters to render the novel essentially independent of rules – a fact most famously attested to by James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), the tale of a day in the life of a Dublin man told using such revolutionary techniques as stream-of-consciousness.
G. K. Chesterton once said: ‘People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.’