Myth Conceptions

In an otherwise standard post about the misguided longing of readers for an imagined Golden Age of book publishing, Robert McCrum

Myth Three: In the good old days, books were longer, and more demanding. Today, given the minuscule attention span of the Twitter Age, the classics of yesteryear will inevitably slip off the modern reader’s radar. This is simply not true. For every mammoth Dickens or Henry James (and yes, there are plenty of those), there were also miracles of brevity. The Great Gatsby is barely 60,000 words long. Most Graham Greene novels come in at about 220 pages; Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall is barely 175 pages in my edition. With the exception of 1984, George Orwell rarely wrote more than 250 pages. Michael Ondaatje’s brilliant first book, Running in the Family, is scarcely 180 pages; Elizabeth Taylor’s marvellous novel The Wedding Group just 230 pages. And so on.

What’s interesting is that this supposedly common “myth conception” (thank you Robert Asprin!) is the direct inverse of a common complaint of older science fiction readers. Hang out at any sf blog or forum and sooner or later you’ll hear some old fart complaining about how nobody writes short books anymore like they did in the Golden Age when a novel had a good idea, great characters and a proper plot and only needed 150 pages to do so! Readers who sample these classics without the benefit of nostalgia will quickly notice how shallow most of them actually were, with cardboard characters and barely developed plots, but that never stopped the old farts. One wonders what the current science fiction and fantasy reader, having grown up with fat fantasy bricks and 700 page space operas will moan about in thirty years….