The Guardian Readers' 100 Greatest Novels!

The Hundred Greatest Novels

(according to The Guardian readers)

Inevitably, this caught my eye on my MSM page. Intrigued, I actually printed out the List to see if I agreed with it. To start with, I'd never heard of 30 of the 100 books detailed. That is not a criticism, just an observation that the typical Guardian reader's tastes do not usually align with mine.

What were the top ten novels?

1. Middlemarch  2. Beloved  3. Ulysses  4. To the Lighthouse  5. In Search of Lost Time  6. Anna Karenina  7.  War and Peace  8.  Jane Eyre  9. Pride and Prejudice  10. Madame Bovary

Call me an old cynic, but I wonder how many readers had actually read the two Tolstoy books - Anna Karenina and War and Peace? Was it, more likely, a response to the silver screen version or to appear 'well-read'? Would that be true about Pride and Prejudice? As for Ulysses, well good luck to them! I'd never heard of Beloved, so I looked it up. Apparently, this 1987 novel by the American Toni Morrison  is famously challenging because the fragmented, non-linear narrative forces you to experience the disorienting, paralysing nature of trauma. It isn't a traditional novel... Unsurprisingly, it is also about slavery.  Well, just up guardianistas' street, then; but not for me.

Secondly, my dear old bête noire, Virginia Woolf is number 4, with that dreadful To the Lighthouse. Moreover, her Mrs. Dalloway (No.14); Orlando (No.54); The Waves (No.55); and Jacob's Room (No.92) are also in the List. It is worth repeating Philip Hensher's strictures: the idiotic The Waves, for instance, in which six incredibly uninteresting people engage in interminable and ludicrously over-written monologues, interrupted from time to time by fey prose-poems about the sun rising over the sea, or something. Orlando, an unstoppably arch fantasy about someone living for ever...is one of very few works of literature than can actually make the reader want to vomit. (see my 17 March Blog) Not to the typical Guardian reader, apparently. Five by Woolf and only two by Hardy; and just one each by William Thackeray, Josef Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, Albert Camus and Daphne Du Maurier.

Of course, Sir Walter Scott is not there; neither is Anthony Trollope or L.P. Hartley. On a more positive note, it was comforting to see Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (No.31), di Lampedusa's The Leopard (No.46), Jean Rys's Wide Sargasso Sea (No.50), and Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas (No.80). Such lists are really only useful for provoking arguments. We are not told how many readers actually responded to the request for their choices. Such lists are always highly subjective; what makes a 'great' novel anyway? What about detective and spy fiction (both of which I enjoy reading) or Science fiction (which I can't abide!). I suppose I should say "Well done, Virginia"; but it would be with gritted teeth.