Names to conjure with

Golly gee. Academic literary critics are going to hate Faulks on Fiction like sin. Here is Sebastian three-for-two Faulks, if you please, clumping onto their turf with a book of reflections on a couple of dozen great novels. And he declares in his introduction, with some pride, that he intends to take ‘an unfashionable approach’ and examine characters in these books ‘as though they were real people’.

And he then divides them into four character types — Heroes, Lovers, Snobs and Villains — without so much as footnoting a structuralist ethnographer, instead declaring ex cathedra that these are ‘the four character types that British novelists have returned to most often’. And he blithely describes how ‘we’ react to books. And he uses the words ‘universal human truth’. And he describes how he, personally, blubbed at the end when he reread Emma. And it’s the tie-in to a blasted TV series.

The introduction alone is enough to keep the correspondence columns of the TLS filled with words like ‘jejune’ and ‘under-theorised’ and ‘palaeolithic’ and ‘intentional fallacy’ for a good six months. And don’t think he doesn’t know it. You have to salute that.

We’re in the library with the large Scotch rather than in the seminar room with the magnifying glass. The tone is conversational, airy, not afraid of the odd cliché — a ‘slow-motion car-crash’ here; a ‘firework display’ there — and not afraid of gush. ‘Nothing made by humans can be perfect, but surely Emma comes as close as any novel in English,’ he writes at one point; not 20 pages later, he’s on to Great Expectations, which ‘probably comes as close as anyone in Britain contrived in the 19th century to the perfect novel.’