Chris ElseMy Brother’s Keeper, by Donna Malane (HarperCollins, 2013), 272 pp., $29.99
All fiction is escapist. A reader of a novel looks to be transported into a special place that the late Nigel Cox called ‘Fictionland’. In addition, our approach to fiction wanders between two poles: we want the excitement of the new and the reassurance of the familiar. When we step out of our transporter onto the surface of Fictionland we are looking for adventure but we also like to know, at the very least, that we understand this world enough to make our way in it. This is the reason we return to a favourite author, be it Jane Austen or Ian Rankin. Given these general features of the reading experience, is there any meaningful difference between ‘popular’ and ‘literary’ fiction?
Maybe the difference lies in the quality of the writing or, more precisely, in the fact that the language of a literary novel is richer and more complex. Compare these two passages, though:
‘From the station there was a ten-minute walk through a neighbourhood of brick houses, each with a bit of fenced off land, and block walls, some covered in bad words my mum would have taken a scrubbing brush to. Or else she would have stared those words down until they curled up with shame and dropped off the wall in flakes. I passed a sports field where I saw some bird life – ducks, magpies, seagulls – and a gang in hoods, their bums hanging out of baggy trousers, cuffs lapping over sneakers. And when I left the park behind I walked past a number of cold wind-bashed houses with dried-up gardens.’
‘It was all beautiful in the way a previously ordinary place and time can suddenly seem to have meaning; can seem to be packed full of fragile life. Maybe it was the endorphins kicking in from the run. As I hit the boardwalk leading through the mangrove swamp I caught sight of a small plane banking into the curdled rain clouds, its titled wing catching the last of the day’s slanting sunlight. The voice in my head was drowned by the music and the harsh sound of my laboured breathing. I’d reached the stage of exhaustion when I was thinking about nothing; aware of the pain and exhilaration, conscious of the way the light hit the wing of the titling plane as it circled above, my thoughts freewheeling with it as I left the last of the light and dropped into the dense shadows of the manuka scrub, canopied over the mangroves.’
The first is from Lloyd Jones’s Mr Pip, a novel that achieves its effects through a remarkable simplicity of language; the second from Donna Malane’s My Brother’s Keeper, a follow-up to her prize-winning crime novel, Surrender. The point here is not that one passage is better than the other but that the experience that Malane evokes is more complex than that offered by Jones. Complex does not necessarily mean better, of course, but neither is it a quality one usually associates with popular fiction, which is often portrayed as something on a par with fast food — blandly or crudely flavoured, thoughtlessly consumed, and not altogether healthy. There is writing of this kind but it is not popular; it is just bad. A look back over the history of the novel shows no correlation, positive or negative, between popularity and quality.
More meaningful categories are offered through the concept of genres, which are, in effect, preset coordinates that ensure the reader will step out of the transporter into a particular fictional territory. Genres have nothing to do with the individual characteristics of a particular book; they are all about the characteristics common to a number of books. Hence, they have nothing to do with quality; although it is probably true that a badly written novel that belongs to no obvious genre is unlikely to find a commercial publisher whereas one that is clearly identifiable as, say, a sword and sorcery fantasy is at least in with a chance. This is because publishers know the audience for genre fiction and, hence, how to sell to it.
Genre labels create expectations of a certain kind of world: ‘science fiction’ or ‘historical fiction’, say; or a certain kind of plot: ‘romance’, ‘thriller’ or ‘crime’ — and, in consequence, a certain kind of (gender-neutral) hero. My Brother’s Keeper is, in many ways, typical. Its hero, Diane Rowe, is a private investigator specialising in missing persons. Her ex-husband and her current lover are both cops. She is strong-minded and independent with a sense of justice that can be inconvenient if not downright dangerous. Her strength of character is balanced, though, by a certain vulnerability, which derives, perhaps, from a conflict between her principles and an emotional need for love and security. With a tweak or two this description could fit Sarah Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski or Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone. The crime plot is similarly typical: a tightly wrought multi-layered story in which the prime suspect changes several times. There is at least one murder and Rowe gets beaten up now and again before her persistence and her street smarts lead her to the truth that conventional law enforcement has missed.
There are, however, significant differences. First, the crime has a curiously domestic quality. At its centre is fourteen-year-old Sunny whose brother, Falcon, drowned seven years before and whose mother was jailed for killing him. Then there is Sunny’s father and his new wife and son, Sunny’s grandmother, and an uncle. All the protagonists and potential suspects, with exception of sleazy body builder and an ex-con turned fundamentalist Christian, are related to one another. There are no drug-dealers, corrupt politicians or corporate crooks; scarcely a drop of blood is spilled and, in a tribute perhaps to New Zealand’s gun control legislation, not a bullet is fired.
A second difference is the role of the B-story. In much crime fiction the characters of the heroes derive their subtlety and depth from an ordinary world that underpins the main story. Sherlock Holmes would not be as compelling without the comparison with the pragmatic and commonsensical Watson and, more particularly, the goings on at 221B Baker Street, where he conducts experiments, injects cocaine and plays the violin under the tolerant eye of his landlady Mrs Hudson. Paretsky and Grafton provide similar domestic contexts: there are neighbours and landlords, nieces and aunts, lovers and ex-husbands who provide interactions that help reveal the hero’s off-duty character.
In My Brother’s Keeper, this second plot strand looms larger than one might expect. Rowe shuttles between Wellington, where she lives, and Auckland, where most of the suspects are. In her B-story home world she is in the process of selling the house she has shared with ex-husband, Sean, who now has a child with his new partner, and she is wondering whether to commit to long-term boy-friend, Robbie. Consequent to these relationship problems are the anxieties common to single, childless women in their mid to late thirties. Not only does this B-story take up more words and more emotional space than one might expect, it is also closely tied to the A-story, which hinges on Rowe’s deepening maternal bond with the psychologically orphaned Sunny.
I sometimes think that the smallness of the domestic market for NZ fiction has a tendency to push our literary novels towards the genre and our genre novels towards the literary. Overseas publishers are sometimes disconcerted by this but I don’t think it makes for inferior work. We can maybe think of such books as hybrid novels. My Brother’s Keeper is a fine example.
CHRIS ELSE is a novelist, and a partner in TFS Literary Agency and Assessment Service. He lives in Wellington.
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