After several breathless promo ads, Faulks on Fiction finally got under way this weekend. The four-part series aims (as Faulks explains during a fetching walk-and-talk shot on the Millennium Bridge) to weaken the mystique of authors; Faulks’ emphasis is on characters. The first programme occupied itself with ‘the hero’ in English fiction, or, more accurately, narrated the decline of swashbuckling brawn from Robinson Crusoe to John Self. With the rise of postmodernism, so the argument goes, the literary hero breathed his last.
Inevitably, Faulks has to paint with a pre-school sized brush. The seven heroes he selects – Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, Becky Sharpe, Sherlock Holmes, Winston Smith, Jim Dixon and John Self – are meant to represent the varying fortunes of the literary type. And to do so, character complexity gets pared down to a headline. All become the butt of some shameless sloganeering: Sherlock Holmes is rendered as the ‘last hero to take on the world and win’; Winston Smith is ‘patriotic but passé; a bit of a loser’; while Jim Dixon is ‘middle England’s answer to Jean Paul Sartre’. But Faulks knows exactly what he’s doing. The tea-table slang comes with a rebellious twinkle and a grin: the Senior Common Room won’t like it.
The show uses clips from recent film adaptations of the books in question to gloss the analysis, the segments from Vanity Fair and Nineteen Eighty-Four working especially well in this first episode. And the roster of supporting critics was equally impressive: Robert Harris on Winston Smith, Simon Schama and Ruth Rendell on Sherlock Holmes and Simon Armitage and Brian Keenan on Robinson Crusoe. By far the most intriguing was Boris Johnson on Jim Dixon, not the most obvious go-to man for thoughts on life at a redbrick campus. Typically, the Mayor of London offered an individual contribution, sketching out his thesis on Jim Dixon’s parallels with Odysseus. A comparison, it must be said, that has escaped most monographs thus far.
The main triumph, however, is the twinkle-toed Faulks himself. Kitted in a dégagé pink shirt throughout and with a faintly continental trim to his beard, Faulks poses before the camera in a very non-writerly way. And he certainly gets around: treading tropical sand for Robinson Crusoe, moodily eyeing lamp-lit London when considering Sherlock Holmes and embarking on a John Self-style bender in New York. He even dons tennis whites at one point, demonstrating the strength of his forehand volley, all in the name of critical analysis.
Episode two will take on ‘the lover’. Thankfully, this being fiction rather than poetry we will be spared any birds-and-the-bees stuff on Elizabethan innuendo or Augustan puns. Though with a literary history like ours (Elizabeth Bennett, Jane Eyre and Dorothea Brooke) get prepared for lots of polite courtship, matronly chaperones and professions of courtly devotion.
And the incomparable Sam Leith reviews the accompanying book in this week’s magazine. He concludes that the academics are going to hate it absolutely.
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