How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland

Author:John Sutherland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

chapter 15

On the rack: know your genre

‘LET YOUR FINGERS do the walking’, the advertisements for the business telephone directory the Yellow Pages used to advise. That is also the implicit inducement offered by the electronic webstores which, increasingly, are the fiction reader’s first port of call – as, thirty years ago, was the public library; and, thirty years before that, the cornershop ‘tuppenny libraries’ and, fifty years before that, the ‘circulating libraries’ and, a century before that, the ‘colporteurs’ or itinerant pedlars.

Things get ever more convenient for the fiction reader (but not, for that reason, necessarily easier). You can, for example, read a strong review of a novel in an online newspaper, or register its presence on the just-released Times bestseller list and, with a few clicks, order the same work, healthily discounted, from Amazon or www.whoeverelse.com for next morning delivery, without stirring your stumps from the chair. Hemiplegic shopping.

Bookshops, requiring as they do the use of eyes, legs and hands, still have an advantage in one respect – their physical layout. Most large bookstores are compartmentalised – and, within the general category ‘fiction’, novels are further sorted. ‘Romance and gothic’ will, disproportionately (although not entirely), attract women readers. Their male counterparts will, generally, find their way to ‘male action’, science fiction and – preponderantly, but not overwhelmingly so – crime (why? Look at the population of the nation’s prisons). Although, following on their pioneer ‘cosy crime’ predecessors, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, contemporary writers like Patricia Cornwell, Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky have made this area less of a male preserve than it once was. Gays will go proudly to their annex. Smut hounds will slink to erotica. But with the arrival of crossover lines such as Richard Branson’s (yes) Black Lace (Mills and Boon without the chastity knickers), segregation is crumbling even in that naughty corner of the bookshop. Students, if they are dutiful, and retired school teachers gravitate to the classic reprint shelves. George Eliot here we come. Horror is often mixed in with sf and fantasy. Writers like V. C. Andrews and Dean Koontz, I suspect, have gender-specific constituencies, but their titles will be found nestling alongside each other, like vampire bats in a cave.

Genre differentiation offers a useful and easily handled geography of fiction – something that allows readers to find their bearings, to choose within the known area of novels they prefer, or are curious about, and avoid those that do nothing for them. Few middle-aged men of decent moral character will find themselves in teen fiction. Not many teenagers, I suspect, buy Andy McNab and the other SAS warrior scribes who have found the pen, if not mightier than the SA80, then substantially more profitable. Pity the country, said Brecht, which needs heroes; or, I might add, novels about heroes by Sergeant McNab.

Legs, where books are concerned, can walk you to what you want more efficiently than fingers. The webstores, for all their techno frills, are very poor at mapping and serving up genre.

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