The child sex abuse scandal that’s rocking the Roman Catholic Church guarantees that Linden MacIntrye’s The Bishop’s Man will continue to chart the bestseller list for a while longer.  Winner of the Giller Prize last fall, it’s well worth the read, topical or not.  In an interview last fall, in connection with his winning the Giller, MacIntyre talked about what draws him to the novel.  As a journalist with CBC’s ‘The Fifth Estate’ he has covered the story of the church’s attempts to cover up incidents of sexual abuse.  The novel allows him to do something that he cannot do as a journalist.  It allows him to go inside the minds of his characters.  It allows him to inhabit his characters and bring them to life as full human beings, with all their virtues and vices.

In his book This Is My Country, What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada, Noah Richler takes up this same question as to what makes the novel special and seemingly immune to constant threats to kill it off.  “What sets the novel apart is the ‘imaginative leap’ that its author makes in order to create and then inhabit a character, and that its readers make in turn.  This simple dynamic is what gives the novel its identity. … And in this assumption that readers make – that we are all, at some base level, alike – lies the magnanimity, but also the aggressive and even colonizing impulse of the novel.   For the novel is a hegemonic thing, righteous on behalf of a certain conception of humankind’s place in the world.”

The novel does what other forms of storytelling (such as the epic and the mythic stories that we associate with “oral” societies’) cannot do.  Again quoting Richler: “The novel says, ‘For me to know you and portray you in good faith, I must remember that you and I are fundamentally alike.  Perhaps only circumstance is what has made us different’.”  Novelists do their work by “putting themselves in their protagonists’ shoes and making that imaginative leap, no matter their creations’ extremities of character.”  There is no absolute evil in the novel, as there is in the epic and in creation myths.  The worst characters in a novel are still human beings, like all the rest of us.  “This quality puts the novel close to be an ‘end of narrative,’ if you like – a form of story that is as versatile and enduring as the belief in human rights that it reflects.”

Others have less faith, or no faith at all, in the novel’s versatility and endurance.  Books heralding the death of the novel are nothing new, and the latest is David Shields’ Reality Hunger.  The novel as we know it, with its linear plot and defined character, is, Shields believes, dead – or worse, irrelevant.  “Conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole that concludes in a neatly wrapped-up revelation.  Life, though – standing on a street corner, channel surfing, trying to navigate the Web – flies at us in bright splinters.”  Our reality is fragmented, chaotic, asymmetrical, elusive and noisy, and since reality is what we hunger for, the conventional novel is obviously inadequate for the task.  It’s a throwback to a bygone era.  We need something new.  Shields’ prescription is what he calls the ‘lyric essay’ – based on the collage technique, the structural equivalent of our splintered reality.

Continue reading →