Wielding the Critical Scalpel

Apparently there is now an algorithm that can predict with certainty that you've got a best seller on your hands. Whether the authors just write best sellers instinctively or not is a moot point, but publishers will be thrilled. Whatever, it's not good news for writers.

The analysis of best sellers not as potential moola but as indicators of cultural mores reached it's highpoint, I would suggest, with Umberto Eco's brilliant 'The Narrative Structure in Fleming' published on the subject of the 007 in 1965. I finally got hold of a copy after all these years and it  was hardly a disappointment, except that it made me think we'd all gone way downhill since.

At a time when the critical world, especially in Italy, must have been highly charged, Eco manages to be extremely deft and funny as well as insightful. It reads as if he's got inside Flemings rather unfortunate head and started rattling things around, and the fun he's having is enormous:

  'And here let us introduce a further opposition with affects not so much the structure of the plot as that of Fleming's style; the distinction between a narrative incorporating wicked and violent acts and a narrative that proceeds by trifling acts seen with disillusioned eyes.

   In fact, what is surprising in Fleming is the minute and leisurely concentration with which he pursues for page after page descriptions of articles, landscapes and events apparently inessential to the course of the story; and conversely the feverish brevity with which he covers in a few paragraphs the most unexpected and improbable actions. A typical example is to found in Goldfinger, with two long pages dedicated to a casual meditation on a Mexican murder, fifteen pages dedicated to a game of golf, twenty-five occupied with a long car trip across France, as against four to five pages which cover the.....coup de theatre.

   In Thunderball a quarter of the volume is occupied by descriptions of naturalist cures........but the most disconcerting passage is perhaps that in which Domino Vitali, after having told Bond her life story in the bar of the Casino, monopolizes five pages to describe, with great detail, the box of Player's cigarettes.'

So when you are reading Bond, you think you are reading about action and suspense, but you are not! 

Well this is brilliant in itself, but Eco goes further, suggesting that in describing the things we know, and not those we have no experience of (such as like robbing Fort Knox) Fleming accommodates the pleasure of reading, he establishes that necessary empathy.