Why do modern novels have to be so long?

I’ve just finished White Teeth by Zadie Smith (I always like to be at least a decade behind the curve). I’m surprised to report that it is one of the funniest, wittiest, best-written novels I’ve ever read. It was 541 pages long and every one of them is a delight. (Naturally, it failed to win the Booker Prize back in 2000.)

I recently tried to read Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, which won the Booker Prize last year. It’s the one about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chancellor. Some good bits, but they quite soon get lost amidst all the historical background stuff, a lot of which we know, and the stuff we didn’t know isn’t really worth knowing. It slipped from my nerveless fingers somewhere around the 200-page mark – not even a third of the way through. It clocks in at a whopping 650 pages.

Were novels always this long?

I just went to check my shelves, and my suspicions have been  confirmed: books generally used to be considerably shorter. Brideshead Revisited, the longest Evelyn Waugh novel, is a relatively piddling 331 pages. The whole of his Sword of Honour trilogy is only slightly longer than Wolf Hall. In fact, most of the 20th century fiction I possess weighs in at much less than 300 pages, and there are very few novels longer than 400 – and quite a few under 200. 

Next time you’re in Waterstone’s, never mind the quality, feel the width. Ignore 19th century classics and fantasy fiction (skipping Vol.6 of theAxewielders of Tharg series shouldn’t prove much of a hardship). Literary novels of the past 25 years are, on average, much longer than those published in the previous fifty years. I’m guessing we’ve gone from an average of 70,000 words to somewhere well north of 100,000. (Even thrillers regularly top 500 pages, which seems counter-intuitive, somehow.)

Before being accused of Philistinism, let me state that my favourite novelists are Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, neither of whom were exactly noted for brevity. I’m not objecting to this trend on aesthetic grounds – a bad 150-page novel is still a bad novel, and a great 150-page novel is not necessarily better than a great 850-page novel.

I’m just bemused by the phenomenon.

Because we have much less time to read now than we did 25 - let alone 50 - years ago. Yes, Victorian novels tend to go on forever – but many of them were written in serial form to fill magazines, so they tended to be read in monthly gulps. Why do people who are always complaining about how short of time they are buy books which most of them, if they’re to be believed, won’t have time to finish? 

Certainly, readers who don’t read many books are probably looking for value for money – no doubt that’s why non-literary blockbusters have always been on the porky side (e.g. the works of Harold Robbins, Arthur Hailey, Jeffrey Archer and Jackie Collins ). But we regular readers know that books represent real value for money compared with most other forms of entertainment, especially now that we’ve got Amazon.

I suspect literature has been on steroids for a number of reasons – none of which have anything to do with what the reader wants.

First, I imagine that literary editors, bookstore buyers and fiction prize judges feel less vulnerable opting for hefty tomes: considerable bulk suggests weight, seriousness, profundity. 

Second, the use of computers by novelists makes the very act of writing considerably easier (the first book I wrote using a word processor was almost a hundred pages longer than the previous effort – and far duller as a result). You can go on changing your novel and adding stuff without having to retype whole chapters (a slow, painful process, believe me!)

Third, novelists, confused by the modern world (aren’t we all, dear!) increasingly take refuge in the certainties of the past, where no 9/11 or Credit Crunch can appear at the last minute to make a nonsense of what they’ve just written. And when they write about the past, they get to do tons and tons of lovely research, which so reminds them of their halcyon college days, and it would be such a shame to waste any of it, so why not bung it all in? (I suspect that’s why Wolf Hall ended up as the literary equivalent of one of those freakishly fat people who feature in Channel 5 documentaries.)

Fourth, I presume that those legions of Oxbridge-educated editors who used to suggest to authors that certain chapters might be de trop or that a detailed 25 page analysis  of the Edict of Nantes might just hold up the action a teensy bit have been swept away in the name of efficiency. (Similarly, our quality newspapers now seem to be full of items rendered impenetrable by the lack of a sub-editor to apply the old “who, what, when, where, why” test.)

I attended a book group meeting last night where one of the main concerns was choosing a book short enough for us all to get through during the next few weeks. 

Obviously, we’re not doing Wolf Hall!