Culture Clashes

The latest Carnival of the Criminal Minds entry almost slipped past my radar. It seems the tents and elephants and leering clowns have landed this time at the blog of Michael Walters, the British author of two crime thrillers set in Mongolia. In addition to pointing readers at a few interesting crime-fiction-oriented blogs, Walters remarks on the difficulty some critics have in recognizing the respective values of plot-driven and “literary” fiction. Writes Walters:

My impression is that novels which display the traditional virtues of plot, character and atmosphere (but especially plot) remain undervalued by the mainstream media and that, conversely, many reviewers still display something of a cultural cringe towards what is perceived as ‘literature’. I was struck by a passage in James Lasdun’s unenthusiastic review of Benjamin ‘John Banville’ Black’s The Lemur in last Saturday’s The Guardian. In preparing the ground for his pejorative comments on Black’s latest, Lasdun refers more positively to Black’s first two books, while accepting that ‘the solution to the various puzzles … is fairly obvious, fairly early on, and intentionally so’. His conclusion is that ‘both books leave one with the sense of a highly skilled literary novelist using the mystery format on his own terms and shaping it to his own purposes’.

Well, maybe. I must confess that I was left with the sense of a highly skilled literary novelist who just isn’t particularly good at one aspect of crime fiction--creating a tightly constructed plot with unexpected revelations that raise the narrative game. Lasdun himself later acknowledges that the final twist in a crime novel should make ‘the villainy seem suddenly larger and more chilling than you ever imagined’. There’s no particular reason why Banville--who’s a wonderful writer in other respects--should be good at this, any more than we’d expect Agatha Christie to be a fine prose stylist or to create complex rounded characters. But let’s give credit where it’s due, and withhold it where it isn’t. One might even begin by asking why The Guardian thought it worth devoting half a broadsheet page to a negative review of what is, by any measure, a pretty slight novella.

You’ll find the full post here. Next stop for the Carnival is Gerard Brennan’s Crime Scene NI.