Fiction
‘So how come we’re in the same book?’ Paul from The Stranger’s Child asked Florence from On Chesil Beach.
‘Apparently,’ replied Florence looking up from the introduction to The 21st Century Digested, ‘the parodies of new books that John Crace has been doing in the Guardian since 2000 are now so popular that 131 of them have been turned into a hardback collection.’
‘Impressive,’ murmured Paul. ‘But one thing worries me. Once even Crace’s fans see them all together, won’t they be forced to realise that he relies on the same handful of tricks for almost every novel he takes on?’
‘You mean, like simply having the characters point out what’s wrong with the book in their dialogue?’
‘That sort of thing.’
‘And what about the fact that Crace’s tone doesn’t vary much either? Personally, I like a short weekly blast of vitriol as much as the next caricature. Yet, given his apparent lack of affection for virtually any of these writers, mightn’t 329 pages of this stuff end up making him look merely mean-spirited, rather than thrillingly indifferent to received wisdom?’
‘I thought only one thing worried you.’
‘OK, so he throws in a few long words for Ian McEwan, and plenty of banalities for Dan Brown. But on the whole, he doesn’t pay enough attention to the language of the authors he’s targeting, preferring to make their plots seem arbitrary and improbable — something that’s never hard to do when you reduce a novel to 800 words.’
But in this, Paul and Florence weren’t being entirely fair. Crace’s parodies didn’t just rely on the characters telling us how rubbish their book is. Quite often a narrator came along to tell us how rubbish it is too — usually mentioning a big advance and the amount of padding that would be required to fill, say, 329 pages.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in