Top 6 - Fiction Writers

 The Hardy Project proceeds at some pace. He is such a pleasure to read. A Pair of Blue Eyes is so far at least as much as any other but both that and the Thomas Hardy Novels Ranked, which thus involves a TOP 6, will come later. I don't think I've done Novelists as a category before and although this is prompted by reading the remainder of him it is not so that he can be included because he always would have been since circa 1975.

While I'm very clear about my Top 6 Poets, I'm much less so about prose fiction which is what we must call it here because the paragon example's best work is not a novel. 

It's been proclaimed more than once in this place that Dubliners is the finest prose fiction in the language - for its idiom, for its themes and tones and understatement. James Joyce must be first on the teamsheet on account of that, and the Portrait, his devotion to his art and for being so impossibly himself rather than on account of where his outlandish invention took him later. I wish it hadn't, in one way, but he put the novel out of reach once and for all with the Wake and maybe allowed others to grope their way back from it to sanity. I've been informed in recent years that Dubliners, or maybe just The Dead, is 'sentimental'. Well, if so, so be it.

Thomas Hardy is being discussed in ongoing fashion here for the time being but I have recently credited my full conversion to literature as a way of life to being introduced to his work at school which only goes to show that education serves some purpose and isn't only something that one has to spend the rest of one's life recovering from. The stories are rich in detail and 'poetry', conceived on an immense scale and usually but not always doomed to tragedy which is what life is like and literature is worth so much less if it doesn't reflect back on life.

After which two incontrovertible selections, the six begins to become more of a scramble for places.

Albert Camus didn't apparently consider novelist as his primary activity given his politics, philosophy and role as Humphrey Bogart look-a-like but, heaven knows, L'Etranger, La Peste and La Chute are almost brutally brilliant examples of spare, uncompromised writing. At the time it might have seemed as if it was Camus who broke ranks with the Existentialist doctrine and somehow gave way but it was Sartre, wasn't it, who failed to denounce the Soviet Union and so, even if he was the more complete philosopher, he was not the better man and certainly not the better novelist. If sainthoods were awarded by an institution that was not the Catholic church, he'd be a candidate.

A work like Middlemarch was essential to the Victorian Literature course at university but probably wasted on 19 year olds which is a good reason for anybody who has a good reason to do an Eng Lit degree to get a job first and appreciate the B.A. (Hons) work later when they have more capacity to do so. My year of George Eliot was some years ago now, although belated, but I was profoundly impressed. If Dickens is more readily adapted to film, in writing he is in comparison a cartoonist. The theme in Eliot, it always seemed to me, was great potential having to compromise with what the world is like and ain't that the truth.

There are a few things that France has generally done better than England. Revolution maybe, football sometimes, philosophy one might think, wine definitely and films. Perhaps not usually poetry but probably the novel. Zola, Balzac, Flaubert, Gide, maybe Stendhal, Maupassant. I've abandoned the rule in TOP 6's that one can't mention anything outside the six. It's Proust I'm putting in, though, after being so thoroughly impressed with him as the lockdown project - all-encompassing and such a compellingly complete picture of social and emotional interaction and shortcomings. It seemed to me at the time that nobody else did it quite like him.

But there remains America, Russia, Germany, Japan and the Rest of the World, not to mention contemporary Brits. Julian Barnes is the business ahead of Graham Swift and Ian MacEwan. Katherine Mansfield, dear Virginia, George Moore, Salinger, Turgenev, Chekhov, Murakami, The Glass Bead Game and Narziss and Goldmund by Hesse, Donna Tartt, I'd better say Tolstoy. Fitzgerald, Daphne du Maurier.

On another day it might different but today it's Virginia Woolf.