Over the weekend I started to read Will Self’s most recent novel, The Book of Dave. Like so much of Self’s work, this volume could quite comfortably be racked in the science fiction section of your bookstore. Set five or six centuries in a post-apocalyptic future, English culture has evolved based on its sacred text, the recovered letter from a divorced father, Dave, to his son.
It took me the better part of two hours to read the first chapter, which is only 27 pages long. In addition to creating a new religion, Self created a new language, an educated guess as to how English would mutate over the centuries. He thoughtfully provided a glossary in the back, but it still required me to extrapolate a great deal from my limited knowledge of English geography and manners.
This is my idea of fun.
Self is a writer who speculates in the most outrageous ways. In Great Apes, he created an England in which apes are the most evolved primates, and the culture is adapted accordingly. In How the Dead Lives, he imagined that, when you die, you get a dull, clerical job in the suburbs of London.
You won’t find Self’s books in the science fiction or fantasy sections of your bookstores or libraries. You also won’t find Riddley Walker, a book by Russell Hoban that’s a clear antecedent to The Book of Dave (Self wrote an introduction to a reissue of Hoban’s classic in 2002). You won’t find Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings, a novel about the pharaohs that includes mental telepathy, magic and time travel.
No, these are “literary” fiction, and they get racked with other novels that, allegedly, belong to no genre, like Waiting to Exhale, Oliver Twist, or Portnoy’s Complaint.
Genre is a useful construct. Sometimes, you want to find a book about a particular subject, whether it’s true love or rocket ships or murder. Putting those books together is a service to the reader. If prose books were racked all together, in simple alphabetical order, you might find Dickens next to the Dummies guides.
That’s about as useful as putting all the graphic novels together.
It’s not as bad as it used to be. Ten years ago, you’d find Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen next to Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury in the Humor section. Booksellers now realize that just because something is called a “comic book,” it’s not necessarily funny. (more…)
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I’m a big fan of The Dresden Files. Which is why I can’t take The Dresden Files.
