Some sorts of books and dramas have very strict rules. We like a lot of things to be absolutely predictable. In romantic comedies, a girl chooses between a charmer who turns out to be a rotter and another man she hates at first but then falls for. In the BBC’s long-running Casualty, if a worried patient turns up with his put-upon wife who coughs twice, it’s the wife who’s got an undiagnosed fatal disease. Bertie Wooster falls for a girl that Jeeves doesn’t care for and the valet goes to some lengths to detach his employer.
We like these things because they’re safe and a little bit cosy and we all know what the rules are. One of the most rigid genres at the moment is slightly different. Even though it’s got a set of incredibly strict rules, it’s regarded by its adherents, not as an exercise within conventional boundaries, like an episode of Midsomer Murders, but as a radical demonstration of rule-breaking. I’m talking about the experimental novel. After a while, the sceptical reader has to ask: if the same rule is being broken in exactly the same way, novel after novel, at what point does that turn into a new and very strict rule?
Earlier this year, the Irish-British novelist Eimear McBride published a new novel, The City Changes Its Face. I single her out but, to be honest, there is no shortage of other exemplars. It was greeted with rapture by book reviewers. The Guardian observed with awe that ‘she uses verbs as nouns, nouns as adjectives’. This magazine’s reviewer wrote: ‘To say that it is “experimental” doesn’t do justice to its flexibility and force.
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