What is THE great British Novel?

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Originally Posted by kelby_lake

Part of it is to find out how people see Great Britain. Do you see miners from DH Lawrence or figures from Noel Coward plays? Scottish? Irish? Welsh? English?

We can use books to see how people see the world differently.

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And the main point of difference, is one perspective is perhaps no better than the other. Perspective implies that there is no one "true" answer but many. In that sense, the tradition creates a general idea, and the more specific you get, the better sense you can have a time period, or location. Therefore, someone who is a Milton expert, would most likely know the major players of and around Milton, in order to sense where he is coming from, and what his role in the tradition of the time period was. They would also know his influence, and the effect he had on the culture. They would note his influences, and where he got ideas - the politics of his time, his childhood, etc. That is how you know something, not by saying one thing is greater or not. The more you look into something, the better you understand it.

To see how the world sees things differently, you must get rid of the assumption of one truth, since clearly difference negates that notion. In that sense, each novel is a perspective, and some perhaps are better to the current taste, but I can't think that one is truly the best.

I didnt read through the entire thread, but I'm assuming it wasnt mentioned.
Money by Martin Amis

In my humble opinion it is Wuthering Heights. The power of Bronte's masterful plot, descriptions, characterizations, dialogue - EVERYTHING - makes me wish the book was 1000 pages long every time I finish it. I imagine her writing a book like 100 Years of Solitude using those families and having the length of Karamazov or Don Quixote. I think such a book would go down as the greatest book ever written on many critic's lists.

It has the frankness of a television soap opera and the complexity of a 4th year coarse in rocket science. I am often saddened by the fact that she died so young. Hers is one of the most tragic early deaths in all history, literary or otherwise. That book marks a high ridge in the progression not just of literature but of feminism.

I love that book. Even with its short length it would still be one of my "desert" island books.

Hi,Friends;
I will like to suggest Austen or Hardy, and of those I prefer Hardy.

I don't know. As an outsider I'd say it's got to be something by Dickens or George Eliot or Jane Eyre. As an insider it is got to be something by Irwine Welsh. The fact of the matter is that Britain is many countries. Class system still rules supreme in spite of all the rhetoric from the Liberal Left. British class system is one of the uglier realities of life. Which Britain are we talking about? Britain of Welsh or the hooligans or the middle class Guardian-reading chattering class or the snobs. There is a whole gamut of human situation to be seen lying between the extremities of yobs and snobs. If America is about different regions and locales, Britain is all about different classes.

I have a favourite British novel though, John Cowper Powys's A Glastonbury Romance:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Glastonbury-...2625377&sr=8-1

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Originally Posted by Kafka's Crow

If America is about different regions and locales, Britain is all about different classes.

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I like the concept of class as a feature of British literature.

I would go with Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy which plays with... deconstructs the elements of the novel... at the point of the novel's very inception. The book is also outrageous, outrageously funny, and one of the best tales of friendship ever penned.

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Originally Posted by kelby_lake

I like the concept of class as a feature of British literature.

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There are loads of novels that are class based, or class reverential, or which deal with the peculiarities of certain aspects of class from Austen's books on the societies of middle and upper to Orwell's socialist The Road to Wigan Pier to, dare I say Rowling's HP series. It has proved a fantastic vein to mine, but the real fact of the class system is at best annoying but worst prejudicial and discriminatory. I suppose the best literature comes from conflict.

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Originally Posted by Paulclem

There are loads of novels that are class based, or class reverential, or which deal with the peculiarities of certain aspects of class from Austen's books on the societies of middle and upper to Orwell's socialist The Road to Wigan Pier to, dare I say Rowling's HP series. It has proved a fantastic vein to mine, but the real fact of the class system is at best annoying but worst prejudicial and discriminatory. I suppose the best literature comes from conflict.

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And British class system becomes even more complicated with the arrival of immigrants and ethnic minorities. They are consigned to the working class by the huge broom of British system but then there are the second generation immigrants who are doing amazing things, deconstructing this life-sentence that their parents had to spend their lives in regardless of their capabilities and aspirations. In this respect America is a hugely more mobile and benign society. The lack of class system gives Americans freedom to write about their natural surroundings, their territory, its history (Southern novel), its sense of wonder and fear ("Woods are lovely dark and deep" or Hemingway's Lost Generation, lost but never too lost to mention and wonder at where they are at the time the narrative unfolds, whether in Spain or Cuba or Paris or Kenya, the sense of locale is concrete.) The New York Trilogy is all well and good, can you imagine some one, some day writing a Manchester Quartet?

British novel, compared to novels written in other literary traditions, feels ossified by the struggle of fitting in or surviving in a class. This gives English novel in particular and literature in general its typical parochialism. Nobody would have written The Moviegoer in Britain. There would never have been a Walker Percy or Dostoevsky or even Leo Tolstoy in Britain. Life is too concrete, in your face and and real here as nothing changes. Zola would have felt suffocated in this environment. Life is so concrete and static that no other system of thought but utilitarianism would have survived here hence the Great British traditions of Realism and Utilitarianism. Heck, even Joyce would have killed himself here by jumping off Putney Bridge into sluggish and dirty waters below. No wonder the great Irish novelists chose France, Italy and even Germany over England as their workshops.

"Bleak House" by Dickens

I always thought that the Great American Novel was supposed to be the work that best represented the zeitgeist of a particular era in American history.

If we're looking for a British equivalent then I'd probably pick something by Dickens, although it's hard to choose one title. Then there's Vanity Fair by Thackeray and Middlemarch by George Elliot and maybe even something like E.M. Forster's A Passage to India. They're all cliched answers but I think they all fit the description rather well. Sure, they may neglect to mention huge sections of society but so do all the Great American Novels.

The only problem I can see is that the United Kingdom has a very old and very convoluted history, whilst the United States is a relatively young nation that was founded on a specific set of ideals. Being British myself, I don't think that we have any equivalent to the American Dream or 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'. There's not much of a sense of being British or even of being English unless it's during the World Cup or something like that.

Somerset Maugham's - Razor's Edge was way ahead of it's time.

His short stories caputure the British Colonial experience perfectly - "The Outstation" springs to mind.

The book I would most like to be The Great British Novel is White teeth by Zadie Smith. It ticks most of the boxes -Colonial Past, Class, Religion, Immigration, Ecentricity, Liberalism, Comedy - it's all there, it's how I'd like us to be, it's how I would like us to be seen. But because it is so recent it already feels dated and doesn't feel Great. And that's the trouble, in 50 years it may become a timeless classic.

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Originally Posted by tonywalt

Somerset Maugham's - Razor's Edge was way ahead of it's time.

His short stories caputure the British Colonial experience perfectly - "The Outstation" springs to mind.

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Totally agree, the Outstation is brilliant in that it shows that the upper-class snob turns out to be right while the socialist with a chip on his shoulder gets murdered for his pains. Other great stories within the genre are Footsteps in the Jungle, The Door of Opportunity and P&O, but any of Maugham's stories are not only immensely readable but full of human psychology as well.

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Originally Posted by Kafka's Crow

And British class system becomes even more complicated with the arrival of immigrants and ethnic minorities. They are consigned to the working class by the huge broom of British system but then there are the second generation immigrants who are doing amazing things, deconstructing this life-sentence that their parents had to spend their lives in regardless of their capabilities and aspirations. In this respect America is a hugely more mobile and benign society. The lack of class system gives Americans freedom to write about their natural surroundings, their territory, its history (Southern novel), its sense of wonder and fear ("Woods are lovely dark and deep" or Hemingway's Lost Generation, lost but never too lost to mention and wonder at where they are at the time the narrative unfolds, whether in Spain or Cuba or Paris or Kenya, the sense of locale is concrete.) The New York Trilogy is all well and good, can you imagine some one, some day writing a Manchester Quartet?

British novel, compared to novels written in other literary traditions, feels ossified by the struggle of fitting in or surviving in a class. This gives English novel in particular and literature in general its typical parochialism. Nobody would have written The Moviegoer in Britain. There would never have been a Walker Percy or Dostoevsky or even Leo Tolstoy in Britain. Life is too concrete, in your face and and real here as nothing changes. Zola would have felt suffocated in this environment. Life is so concrete and static that no other system of thought but utilitarianism would have survived here hence the Great British traditions of Realism and Utilitarianism. Heck, even Joyce would have killed himself here by jumping off Putney Bridge into sluggish and dirty waters below. No wonder the great Irish novelists chose France, Italy and even Germany over England as their workshops.

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I agree with the effect immigration is having. I was talking to my wife about it yesterday - the immigrants coming into our poor working class areas are having a beneficial effect. We're onto second and third generation Indians and Pakistanis, and their extended family structures are so very strong that they are now developing into a significant part of the middles classes.

I think for that reason I don't think you can say that life is so static now - in urban areas anyway. There's still the ossification you talk about in various strata in the country - and this has been embodied in the countryside alliance supporting foxhunting, but seeming to think they embody something timeless and "natural" about the country. As a result they refer to urbanites like myself as townies... as they strut about in their 4x4 s.