Shantaram

Making a Case for the Long Novel

Over a period of five years I have written only a very few poems. In the paragraphs below I hope I will be able to convince you out of reading or writing poems at all. Granted: it may be impossible. At the very least I hope to help you reconsider the titles on your TBR, and help you slot in more literary-fiction novels >500 pages.

Anywhere I am, I always try, often unsuccessfully, to tell people that I am a novelist, without being anything else—not a poet or an essayist. A novel to me seems to be a combination of journalism, poetry, and anything else. So the title of a novelist has a sacral ring to it. However, a novel is hard to write and to complete. Thus it is difficult for people to see that you’re a novelist. My acceptance of the label of a poet is therefore a result of this difficulty. A product of my own despair.

My childlike prioritization of the novel above poetry comes from my teenage experience. I am writing about it now because, as much as I think it is a prejudice reasoned out to an extent, subjecting it to public criticism will afford me and hopefully you the needed distance to re-consider our biases. In the meantime, I also want to use it as a kind of response to the qualms I have with our recent direction as writers, contemporary Nigerian writers. That is, our easy tendency for the quotable text. Evaluation over analysis. Brevity over length. Thoughtlessness over insight. And the paranoia peculiar to us in a time when everything moves speedily over.

My antique thinking and even more antique prose may come from the circumstance of my first encounter with writing. I was fresh out of secondary school. Going to the university didn’t concern me. I had no idea social media existed. Failing my WASSCE also didn’t bother me much. I just stayed at home trying to get the most knowledge out of the least available resources. Whether novels or legal textbooks, my only criterion was length. Length seemed coterminous with knowledge.

Of course, even at the time, short things also had their insight. Nevertheless, their insight always seemed contestable. They seemed to invite argument rather than attentiveness. Due to their brevity too, there were less chances of boredom, therefore the impulse for response is condoned and even encouraged. For a child or a teenager, this is terrible, and even then I knew it was bad for me. In a lengthy literary-fiction novel nonetheless, this is different. Acknowledgement, the ability to hear another person out, seems like the most important criterion to finish reading this kind of a novel. There is boredom there, and tenacity, and the privilege to observe how reason happens, ingredients that seemed essential to building the perceptive intelligence of a young creative.

My earliest encounter with length was Gregory David Roberts’ 933-paged novel, Shantaram. The book began like this: “It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.” So begins by extension the torturous journey of both the reader and the protagonist across Australia, India, Afghanistan, a universe extremely populated with things and ideas.

Nothing on the author’s part could sustain the reader’s interest for that long. At least not entirely. Towards the middle of Shantaram for example, the narration eases expectedly into comatose prose. A symptom of the author’s fatigue. For a lengthy novel, even for a good book like Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the extent to which the author can sustain the reader’s interest is tragically limited. Fortunately, one can separate the writer’s ability from the reader’s, and identify what is lacking in both and what is surfeit—these two of which refer to and affect themselves.

To write anything at all seems to be a race against fatigue. Anybody who has tried to write anything seriously for long will understand this. At the peak of one’s energy, the writing just starts its slow downward curve, retreating into technically neat, and comatose prose. Variation, both in language, plot, and so on, might be a cure. I am thinking here of Vera Mutafchieva’s 1967 novel, The Case of Cem. Merging history with the polyphony of the court room without giving voice directly to the central character of Cem is an artistic ingenuity in the novel, because it allows Mutafchieva to experiment continually on the different layers of plot, language, slants, characters, and so on.

But this is a difficult skill. Harder both to get and to keep. Primarily because it takes time and attentive reading and an unending cynicism towards the surety of the novel’s architecture. It is more so for the writer that wants desperately to publish and move on to the next book, and equally for the reader itching to flip the page up till the end and give a “hot take”. In both cases, the idea and the playfulness of the novel remain lost.

As a consequence, what is lacking in all this? For both the writer and the reader, it is our ability to listen.

A novel possesses the power of play. Play as a way of thinking-through and thinking-with things. Speculation aware of its own speculativeness. A way of pointing towards the unstable in a world fixated on fixity. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book are novels that have taught me the importance of attentiveness. For Lolita, I solemnly believe Humbert Humbert is a pervert. He should be hanged, if possible. But all these thoughts are possible and even advised when they are being done in society, where categories, power structures, and marginality are important strategies of survival. Never, not in writing a novel or in reading one.

In the novel, everything is permitted. This freedom is dizzying. And it accounts necessarily for the vulgarity of the novel form. It possesses a contradiction, like the dialogue between the Ottoman sultans in The Black Book, which is supposed to be an advice to Galip, a fledgling writer if one thinks of the fledgling writer as a person trying to wear the shoes of dead or lost writers who are famously disciplined in their writing.

There, in the scene Adli advises Galip: “Do not use epigraphs; they will only kill the mystery in the piece.” In reply, Bahti says: “Go ahead, kill the mystery; kill the false prophet too who pushes mystery.” As Galip, himself on a twisted journey of self-discovery, merely observes, the most we can do is listen attentively, without the opportunity to affect Galip’s personality out of which comes his actions. We do not therefore need to resolve these contradictions, seeing that we cannot. We only acknowledge them.

From here it is easy to guess the personality of the writer of lengthy novels. That they are people who can sit down for years with other people holding caustic ideas without getting into conflict with them and even falling in love with them. Nowadays every contradiction needs a resolution or conflict. Even in a book, a character has to be politically correct. The reader can no more condone a book standing confidently on the other side of their ideas about the world and how the world works. We have become an unthinking mass. A work of art has to be for or against; it can’t be positional and provisional and playful.

Many things happen in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. For me, the most poignant of those things are precisely those things that offend me: the laughable cluelessness of Angel Gibreel, for example. Yet it is the novel form that most encompasses this playfulness around spectral entities, where this sacrilege is most trenchant! Where else can anybody think without censorship from the paranoia of causing offence? The violent response to that book is anticipated. One may anticipate it too, a replica of it, in novels that refuse to submit.

A poem falls short in this regard. In its different function, time is not a factor, and thinking is fragmented. I am considering Tade Ipadeola’s The Sahara Testaments and the equivalent in novel form, of the thing that the collection has tried to do. Ipadeola is a poet trained in the face of an enormous landscape. Thought equidistant with sound. A compulsory collection for any young poet or novelist serious with educating themselves. But the very thing the collection fails to do is the thing the form of the work cannot do. Suppose we examine the book and judge it on its merit, its success or failure would be another argument. Since here, I am trying to compare it with the novel form, and to argue that it is merely a component in the enormous architectonic possibility of the novel form, it is possible to talk about a lack, contiguous to that of the reader’s too. Which is, partly because of its limited range of personalities, its polyphony, the collection does not consider the provisionality of its knowledge. In other words, the element of play in the collection is rigidly unaware of its own playfulness. Its personality, like the personalities in Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, plays so as to decry, plays only to the extent of achieving an aim without creating a leeway towards a contention to its own play. They assume that they have anything important to say.

It is in the field of postmodernism that one may try to consider whether this element of play and continuous self-reflexivity should be encouraged. I am not a theorist, and I am hardly a novelist. After all my talk above about why you should consider starting a very lengthy literary fiction novel, as a reader or a writer, I am thinking of Erskine Caldwell and Milan Kundera. Both of these writers are playful, and seem complementary. For Caldwell, he is playful, without showing his awareness. A slight human impulse becomes elaborate, and comic, alongside his sparse prose—as in, God’s Little Acre. It is Caldwell that says something along the lines of: a poet is a failed novelist. For Kundera, that playfulness gains a meditative, philosophical bent. He is conscious of the provisionality of knowledge in his works. To him a character is an object to think with, and he makes you aware of this, and that character is not a definitive thing—in the same way one can speak of, say, Azaro.