So that's where fantasy epics came from.
I always thought JRR Tolkien invented the fantasy novel, but turns out it was Victor Hugo. This New Yorker piece, which is actually about some famous but now widely unread Italian epic literary novel, starts off with a shout-out to Norman Denny, the translator of Hugo’s Les Misérables, who took to cutting huge slabs out of the English version because old Vic, he sure does go on a bit.
“It is not uncommon to find eight or ten adjectives appended to a single noun,” Denny complained.
It’s not just adjectives. It’s everything. This reminded me of a long meandering passage in The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, entirely concerned with essaying at length about the excellence of cloaks. Yes, it was funny, and yes, it was taking the fantasy piss. But also not.
This fullness, overfullness, was endemic to the genre to which “Les Misérables” belonged, the nineteenth-century historical novel, a form that was immensely popular in its day. It recorded sweeping changes: kingdoms rose and fell, peoples were enslaved or freed. For great events, great language was needed. But, from what I can tell, even readers of that time occasionally grew tired of the grandiloquence, and when they did they were not afraid to skip. Likewise their children and grandchildren. A friend of mine told me that once, when he was talking to a group of Russian-literature professors, he confided to them that he and his American colleagues often had difficulty with the many highly detailed accounts of battles in “War and Peace.” Oh, the Russians answered, we skip those parts! So boring! You should skip them, too, they said.
…
At bottom, it’s not about length but about whether it’s O.K. for the novelist, having dealt with his story from one angle, to wander off and then come back to it from a different angle. In the mind of your typical nineteenth-century historical novelist, this is obviously O.K. He’s a great writer, so why should anyone object if he interrupts his story to give us a lesson on the whiteness of the whale or the succession wars in northern Italy in the seventeenth century? He’ll come back to the main story. What’s the problem?
In fantasy writing, there is no problem. Endemic overfullness is a feature not a bug. I’m not complaining. I love a good meander as much as the next bloke. And it’s not just fantasy. I had to dig into Peter F. Hamilton’s The Reality Dysfunction last week, only to realise that the story doesn’t actually get going until 257 pages in.
What had never occurred to me before I read this New Yorker bit was the origin of the practice.
If you want a novel that regularly meanders into arcane points that are not needed by the plot, then it’s hard to top Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). There are 135 chapters in the book. It has been worked out that you can get the full doomed narrative of Captain Ahab and the crew of the Pequod’s pursuit of the white whale by reading just 35 chapters and ignoring the other 100.
The less necessary 100 includes chapters like
CHAPTER 56. Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of Whaling Scenes.
CHAPTER 74. The Sperm Whale’s Head—Contrasted View.
CHAPTER 77. The Great Heidelburgh Tun.
Damn it as an author yourself I thought you would have realised. If as the good Victor Hugo had spent weeks learning about the form and nature of the Paris sewer system just so he could lend authenticity to his 2 sentence descriptions as Jean Valjean carries Marius then the reader can jolly well enjoy the other 8 pages of exposition on what he has learned.