My Roman-Fleuve Comfort Reading

Does it sometimes feel like every new science fiction or fantasy book is the first in a series?

From my perspective as an aspiring writer, among the social media channels I subscribe to for writing advice, it is assumed I am or will be writing a series, because (as I am endlessly reminded) series sell.

Readers become invested in your characters and want to follow them through subsequent books. If they like the first one, you will have them as loyal readers for at least the next two (or is it three) novels — write one, sell four.

I wonder what George Orwell would have thought of that advice.

“George, what are you going to do with Winston Smith, now? He was just pretending to be beaten down by Big Brother, right? In 1984 Brave New Future the proletariat is going to rise and vanquish IngSoc, right? But not straight away, George! No, that wouldn’t do. Let’s string it out for two volumes before we have an apparent victory for the downtrodden. Then we get the reader with the real twist. The love of his life, Julia, is really XXXXXXX’s sister and a double agent and his betrayer.”

Perhaps more pertinently, what would Tolkien think of the mangling of his IP? My guess is, he would have (overall) liked Jackson’s LOTR trilogy, and would have understood that not everything in the books could have been crammed into even three long movies, but that Jackson made a good fist of it, honoring the themes and feel of the story..

I suspect he would not have liked The Hobbit, complaining that it was a simple, short child’s story, with none of the political/historical baggage that Jackson brought to it. He would probably have chided Jackson for the sin of hubris in making that small story a trilogy, too, just to match his LOTR triumph.

As for the TV spin-offs, liked by very few (I have only watched some excruciating extracts on YouTube), I image Tolkien, sitting in his comfy armchair, puffing on his pipe, would have said something like, I don’t watch television, and left the business at that.

My weakness in this regard — wanting to exhume a corpse and reanimate it — is Tintin, whose adventures were comfort reading for me when I was a child.

Occasionally, in my dreams, I imagine that Herge, in his will, allowed the best ligne clare graphic artists of the day together with highly rated storyboarding artists (if needed) to compete to generate a new Tintin adventure every five years, let’s say.

There would have to be continutity in character, presentation, and so forth. The adventures would be believable within the context of the time, and adhere to similar plotting pricipals that Herge used.

In this way, in my dreams, I imagine a raft of new Tintin books, as well drawn, written, and plotted as the best of the original series. Everyone would be a winner, surely?

No. The Tintin purists would hate such an idea. The new material would dilute the original, diminishing its impact. Some of it might come close to the original, but it wouldn’t be the original. It would be at worse, an imitation. (As is seen for the AI Beatles “songs” and cover versions that flooded YouTube a while back. Most of them were a very pallid imitation of the original — with one or two notable exceptions, though.)

My comfort reading as an adult has been Patrick O’Brian’s series of Aubry/Maturin novels, of which the author completed 20 between 1969 and 1999. These are historical seafaring tales, set between 1800 and 1815, during the Napoleonic Wars and ending after the Battle of Waterloo.

The 20 completed novels are in fact one long story, featuring Jack Aubry, an English seacaptain of the Royal Navy (although at one point he is briefly disbarred from the service), and his ship’s surgeon and fast friend, Steven Maturin, who is a natural philosopher, as well as a British intelligence agent and spy.

The series is considered as a roman-fleuve, or “river novel,” that is, a story spanning many volumes dealing with a central character or characters who move through a period of time where the world changes around the characters, as well as the characters themselves changing .

Unlike Tintin, and all his friends, acquaintances, and enemies, who are (rightly) ageless, the characters in O’Brian’s novels change with time, both in age and attitude. For some of them, we watch them grow up from children, the “squeakers” of the Midshipmen’s births, into young men with commands of their own.

We see Jack’s daliances with several women (at least one of whom, Molly Hart, is married to one of Jack’s naval superiors, bringing all kinds of peril), before finding and marrying his sweetheart Sophie. We see Steven steruggle with his love for the beautiful, independent, flighty Diana, who seems far out of his reach and yet between whom there is a strange and rather modern understanding.

What particularly amuses me about this incredible story sequence is that, prior to being introduced to the series by a friend who gave me the first book, Master and Commander, I had little interest in overtly historical fiction, or the Royal Navy during the Age of Sail.

I was completely hooked by the first novel and have never looked back. However, I have not yet completed the series, having gotten as far as book 14, The Nutmeg of Consolation, on my first run-through, before suffering a sense of series gluttony and having to find literary relief elsewhere.

Whenever I need to cleanse my palate of some drudgery of a book (In Ascension, The Incandescent Ones, Waldo, and so on) I would pick one of the first 14 books and read or listen to it again, with a favorite being Desolation Island. Indeed, I have run through them again, twice, pausing at earlier novels and not pushing on, but now, at last, I wish to finish the series entire.

Why haven’t I done this before?

Partly, as I say, from a surfeit of great writing that rather numbed me to its brilliance, which would have been a terrible disservice to such a fantastic act of imagination.

And partly because I knew there was an end, and I did not want to reach it. Once there, there would be nowhere else to go. The story would be ended, done, finished. Jack and Steven would themselves be consigned to history.

As a child, I had a similar experience with Tintin. I did not understand that Herge was dead and there would be no more Tintin. Instead, I consumed Tintin’s adventures as if they must necessarily continue to be produced forever.

They were not. I had in the blink of an eye read all the original books available in the stores. I started searching out and reading peripheral material — The Blue Oranges, a retelling of the live-action movie of the same name, and The Lake of Sharks, a retelling of an animated movie. But these were poor cyphers of the real thing and provided instead of a feast, the taste of ashes in my mouth.

On the day I must say goodbye to Jack and Stephen, when I come to the end of Blue at the Mizzen, I will be both happy and sad but I wont grieve.

Will I want to read the unfinished 21st book in the series? It was published in 2004, four years after O’Brian’s death, and is still available in print as far as I know. But would it only be like reading Alph Art, Herge’s unfinished final Tintin adventure, which left me wishing I had not? I will have to wait and see.

Anyone read The Grapes of Wrath — A Return?