Previously published in The Bangladesh Daily Star
On a
visit to New York, I meet an old novelist friend in a café in Greenwich
Village. He’s enthusing about Breaking
Bad, the acclaimed American drama series about a chemistry teacher with lung
cancer who, faced with prohibitive medical bills and an insecure future for his
family, starts cooking illegal methamphetamine. My friend tells me TV drama has
finally achieved the status of high art to rival the Victorian novel.
He suggests
that Charles Dickens was the TV dramatist of his age. Being serialised in
magazines such as Household Words brought
Dickens’ work to a mass readership. It also enabled readers to respond while
the story was still taking shape, just as modern dramas are subject to constantly
updated viewer ratings, reviews, blogs and fanzines.
But why
is Breaking Bad the break-through
drama, I ask him, the one that has elevated the form to Dickensian heights? He
tells me it’s because it achieves genuine artistic coherence. The Sopranos, though beautifully crafted
episode by episode, under the pressure to generate fresh story lines while maintaining
the essential dynamic on which its success depended, descended to the level of
soap opera. Most original dramas are like this. Expensive to make, they have to
be commercial products first and works of art second. And nobody knows if
they’re going to last one season or ten. Uniquely, Breaking Bad followed the logic of its opening premise, taking its
characters through life-changing experiences, resolving dramatic instabilities
by smashing through into even greater instabilities, and finally resolving into
a single coherent narrative structure.
Suddenly
my friends looks gloomy. ‘So where does this leave us?’ he asks me. ‘What are novelists for, now?’ I understand his
concern. But television is the least of our worries. On the plane from London I
was reading a piece by Will Self, arguing that the literary novel isn’t dying,
but only because it’s already dead. In fact it’s been walking around in a
zombie state for three quarters of a century, ever since James Joyce took it as
far as it could go, and beyond, in Finnegan’s
Wake. What does the future hold for serious fiction? In Self’s view, within
twenty years it will have been squeezed out of cultural significance by the
distractions of social media and our addiction to instant information.
It’s a
bleak outlook. Leaving the café, I console myself with the thought that among
anxieties about possible futures for the planet, the decline of the novel rates
fairly low. I find myself outside the Strand bookstore, the biggest, longest
surviving independent bookshop in Manhattan. Inside I find fiction prominently
displayed, heaped on tables labelled Modern
Classics, Just Arrived, and Best of the Best. I seem to be looking
at all the novels I’ve ever read, all the novels I’ve ever thought of reading,
and vast numbers of novels I’ve never heard of.
It’s a big scruffy space estimated to hold 2.5 million or 18 shelf-miles
of books. It’s crowded with young people. And they’re all buying.
