What is THE great British Novel?

[prendrelemick]

Why not? Wodehouse was interned after being captured by German troops in France. Being fully aware that there were a great many people who were afraid for his safety, he made a broadcast, at the Germans' behest , that he wasn't being ill-treated in any way. Of course the Germans knew he was a famous author and used it as a propaganda exercise, but what else could he do but tell the truth?

According to his MI5 file, recently released, he was in the pay of the Nazis and would've stood trial for treason had he returned to England.

However I agree with WICKES, he conveyed that essence of English humour that makes us such poor material for dictatorships.
In fact if you were looking for the Great British Character, rather than Novel, a mixture of Jeeves and Bertie would do.

[Emil Miller]

According to his MI5 file, recently released, he was in the pay of the Nazis and would've stood trial for treason had he returned to England.

However I agree with WICKES, he conveyed that essence of English humour that makes us such poor material for dictatorships.
In fact if you were looking for the Great British Character, rather than Novel, a mixture of Jeeves and Bertie would do.

A more unlikely spy it would be difficult to find. I attach as much importance to that file as I do to the British intelligence report of WMDs in Iraq.
In one of his pre-war novels he lampoons Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, just as he did to communism in another when one of his silly-*** young gadabouts falls for the daughter of one of the 'Heralds of the Red Dawn' who's an orator at Speakers Corner in London's Hyde Park.

[prendrelemick]

On balance, I think I agree with you.

It was the irony of WICKES' post - that he used Wodehouse to make his point - when the man himself became embroiled with the nazis, that struck me.

[Emil Miller]

On balance, I think I agree with you.

It was the irony of WICKES' post - that he used Wodehouse to make his point - when the man himself became embroiled with the nazis, that struck me.

The facts surrounding Wodehouse and the Nazis are almost as farcical as one of his own stories. When his internment was over and he was free to go, he couldn't get out of Germany as it was still at war. So he put up at the Adlon, the best hotel in Berlin. He could easily afford it as he was a very wealthy man.
This led some over zealous MI5 personnel to assume that he was being paid by the Germans, but he was using his own money that could only be transferred to him through German channels because of the war.


Even after the war, his life continued to be like something from one of his books if this extract from his Wickipedia entry is anything to go by:

Wodehouse's characters, however, were not always popular with the establishment, notably the foppish foolishness of Bertie Wooster. Papers released by the Public Record Office have disclosed that when Wodehouse was recommended in 1967 for the Order of the Companions of Honour, Sir Patrick Dean, the British ambassador in Washington, argued that it "would also give currency to a Bertie Wooster image of the British character which we are doing our best to eradicate."

[MarkBastable]

Much as it pains me to agree with Emil, I agree with Emil.

Another candidate: London Belongs to Me

[WICKES]

On balance, I think I agree with you.

It was the irony of WICKES' post - that he used Wodehouse to make his point - when the man himself became embroiled with the nazis, that struck me.

Wodehouse was no Nazi. He was completely uninterested in politics and bewildered at all the fuss. Everyone who knew him thought him extraordinarily unwordly. He was a product of a more innocent age- an Edwardian stranded in a world of screeching dictators. The world that shaped Wodehouse might have been insular, smug, complacent and so on, but it was not a place that fostered extremist thinking. It was a place that took peace, liberal democracy and scientific progress for granted. Nazism was so alien to Wodehouse that I don't think he was able to really understand it. I very much doubt he took it (or communism) seriously.

My point was that when the Fascists marched in some countries there were arguments and street battles. When they marched in Britain, people laughed (alright, a generalisation, but there is a lot of truth to it)

[Emil Miller]

Wodehouse was no Nazi. He was completely uninterested in politics and bewildered at all the fuss. Everyone who knew him thought him extraordinarily unwordly. He was a product of a more innocent age- an Edwardian stranded in a world of screeching dictators. The world that shaped Wodehouse might have been insular, smug, complacent and so on, but it was not a place that fostered extremist thinking. It was a place that took peace, liberal democracy and scientific progress for granted. Nazism was so alien to Wodehouse that I don't think he was able to really understand it. I very much doubt he took it (or communism) seriously.

My point was that when the Fascists marched in some countries there were arguments and street battles. When they marched in Britain, people laughed (alright, a generalisation, but there is a lot of truth to it)

One of the things that has long puzzled me is how Wodehouse, being from an ultra English gentleman's background, could have worked in American show business during it's most raucous period, that of the 1920s. Writing songs for shows among cigar-chomping producers and the denizens of Tin Pan Alley seemed to have left him completely unchanged whereas one might have thought 'unhinged' would have been the case.

[MarkBastable]

One of the things that has long puzzled me is how Wodehouse, being from an ultra English gentleman's background, could have worked in American show business during it's most raucous period, that of the 1920s. Writing songs for shows among cigar-chomping producers and the denizens of Tin Pan Alley seemed to have left him completely unchanged whereas one might have thought 'unhinged' would have been the case.

He learned at Dulwich College - as any bright kid will learn at an English public school - that you work with the system and thrive, or you oppose the system and strive, or you ignore the system and do what you like.

Wodehouse went for the last of the three, his entire life - though his diaries suggest that he thought he was doing the first of the three.

There's an argument that any artistically and commercially successful writer owes his success to failing to resolve those two approaches.

[Kjetil]

I believe no British novel could parallel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick or The Great Gatsby as an iconic book in the popular culture and literary tradition of its nation. Charles Dickens and Jane Austen composed several classics which are even today immensely popular and widely influent, but even their most famous works such as David Copperfield and Pride and Prejudice aren’t as effective in constituting a national myth as any of the three books previously cited, even though the complete works of Dickens may be able to surpass any competitor to the title of Great American Novel in that respect. Middlemarch, Tom Jones, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy and Vanity Fair are narratives of great scope in their own particular ways, but none of them is equal to Austen’s and Dickens’ works in that sense.

Perhaps the concept of a nation’s great novel is more intrinsically related to a cultural inclination of the American reading community than to a general literary pattern. Since the US began as an expansive country, but had no consistent literary tradition before the nineteenth century, the “great novel” may have been an American substitute to the national epic. As there is a certain preoccupation in the US about defining a national identity and creating popular icons, other works have been suggested in their respective periods as possible candidates to this title probably because of this.

Well, the English are in good company. What's the great French novel, in the above sense? Or German? Italian? Spanish? There isn't one. The notion seems peculiarly american, and even there, there is little consensus. Or maybe the notion is fundamentally only possible in a demoratic culture, which really only the american has been for the whole length of its existence?

[WICKES]

Well, the English are in good company. What's the great French novel, in the above sense? Or German? Italian? Spanish? There isn't one. The notion seems peculiarly american, and even there, there is little consensus.

Good post. I would suggest the Russians have such a novel in War and Peace...maybe.

In a way, although Britain is a much smaller and less populous country than the USA, it is more complex. For a start it is a very old culture. England has an unbroken culture going back to at least Chaucer, 700 years ago.


I do think anglo saxon literature (Beowulf, the Battle of Maldon etc) captures something of the British, and especially English, national character: a pessimistic, cynical, dark (but also cheerful) willingness to endure. It's extraordinary how that attitude lingers even to this day.

[Lykren]

Good post. I would suggest the Russians have such a novel in War and Peace...maybe.

In a way, although Britain is a much smaller and less populous country than the USA, it is more complex. For a start it is a very old culture. England has an unbroken culture going back to at least Chaucer, 700 years ago.

I agree that England's older culture would tend to produce multiple representative works reflecting the diversity of influence inevitable with such a long history.

However, in terms of single books representing a language - what about Don Quixote, I Promessi Sposi, Faust, and In Search of Lost Time?

[Eiseabhal]

There isn't any such thing as a British novel.

[mal4mac]

There isn't any such thing as a British novel.

This may be right - not British novel, but English novel, Scottish novel, etc...

Rob Roy & the Waverley Novels by Walter Scott range across England and Scotland, might they fit? Or are those Scottish novels providing a much wider perspective than Sassenach works

[manuscript]

it is 1984.

[kelby_lake]

Well, the English are in good company. What's the great French novel, in the above sense? Or German? Italian? Spanish? There isn't one. The notion seems peculiarly american, and even there, there is little consensus. Or maybe the notion is fundamentally only possible in a demoratic culture, which really only the american has been for the whole length of its existence?

The French have Les Miserables.
I can't think of a great Italian novel but The Divine Comedy has to be the great Italian literary work.