Most dedicated readers develop ways of organising their bookshelves, so that they can easily find the books they need.
Early on in our marriage, my husband and I recognised that we would never be devotees of the alphabetical method. (Achebe and Atwood on the same shelf made sense; but William Faulkner and Ian Fleming cozying up together was just plain wrong.) Instead, we did a rough categorisation, separating literary fiction from science fiction, poetry from pulp.
This worked reasonably well, until we both acquired a taste for the works of Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union). Chabon is one of the most consistently rewarding writers of our time — he has an inventive mind, an unfettered imagination and serious literary skills. The only problem with him is that he defies genres.
Take The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, for instance. It’s set in an alternate post-World War II reality where Israel was destroyed in 1948 and where a temporary settlement for Jewish refugees from Europe in Alaska brought the death toll from the Holocaust down to two million. The novel’s protagonist, Meyer Landsman, is a detective and a drunk on the trail of a murderer. The Yiddish Policeman’s Union was treated as literary fiction by mainstream critics, nominated as a brilliant crime novel for the Edgar awards, and this week, it won the Hugo — science fiction’s most coveted gong.
Given that Chabon’s other novels could be classified as fantasy or detective fiction or even, in one case, as a historical novel, we gave in and gave him a shelf to himself. It was the right thing to do, and when you’re on Chapter 21 and completely immersed in his world, you couldn’t care less what genre it’s supposed to be.
But his Hugo win made me question the idea of genre fiction and the various headings under which we publish books. I’ve lost count of the number of intelligent and well-read people who tell me that they don’t read science-fiction (SF). Pressed, they’ll admit to having read at least one and often several of these books — 1984, Lord of the Flies, A Clockwork Orange, Brave New World, Slaughterhouse-Five, Gravity’s Rainbow. All of these novels belong on any list of the classics, and all of them are also part of the SF canon.
What these readers are actually saying is not that they dislike SF. They’re saying that they’re wary of the idea of SF, that they expect poor writing, spaceships and little green men from this category of literature. Replace “SF” with “crime writing” or the “graphic novel” and the same wariness and caution will surface.
The odd thing is that the self-proclaimed literary reader will actively embrace good (and even indifferent) science fiction so long as it’s presented to him/her as inventive literature. This works very well in the case of a novel such as Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, where readers would have shied away from her intensely imagined parallel universe if it had been presented to them as “fantasy” rather than unusual literature.
It works less well in the case of Margaret Atwood, whose determined forays into science-fiction have brought a collective groan to the lips of SF fans the world over. And it works in strange ways with a writer like Cormac McCarthy. SF fans were quietly pleased that his dystopian, darkly SF novel, The Road, won critical acclaim last year — but annoyed that critic after critic praised his premise for its originality, when the idea of a post-apocalyptic world has been kicking around the halls of science-fiction for only around five or six decades.
Chabon summed up the issue succinctly in a recent interview:
“… The vast preponderance of art created for a mass audience is c**p. It’s impossible to ignore that. But the vast preponderance of work written as literary art is high-toned c**p.”
If you’re a serious reader, our publishing culture steers you in the direction of high-toned c**p — even book covers signal the difference. I’m an SF junkie, but I hate buying SF because the cover art doesn’t appeal to me. It’s all androids, spaceships and twin-sun landscapes in lurid colours — the classic SF cover is still aimed at the teenage boy, which makes anyone who’s not a teenage boy feel slightly weird. Instinctively, I prefer buying Iain Banks’ SF because the covers are discreet and inventive, or the new Tor line of classics because the covers are respectful of the novels inside.
I’m grateful for the very few writers out there who’re like Michael Chabon, who might seduce readers into reading SF or other genres despite their best intentions. Perhaps once they discover that SF can be fun — and can also be Literature with a capital L — they’ll discover a brave new world out there.
The author is Chief Editor, Westland/ Tranquebar; the views expressed here are personal
