Three4Two Faulks on fiction: the SCR will hate it

After several breathless promo ads, Faulks on Fiction finally got under way this weekend. The four-part series aims (as Faulks explains during a fetching walk-and-talk shot on the Millennium Bridge) to weaken the mystique of authors; Faulks’ emphasis is on characters. The first programme occupied itself with ‘the hero’ in English fiction, or, more accurately, narrated the decline of swashbuckling brawn from Robinson Crusoe to John Self. With the rise of postmodernism, so the argument goes, the literary hero breathed his last.

Inevitably, Faulks has to paint with a pre-school sized brush. The seven heroes he selects – Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones, Becky Sharpe, Sherlock Holmes, Winston Smith, Jim Dixon and John Self – are meant to represent the varying fortunes of the literary type. And to do so, character complexity gets pared down to a headline. All become the butt of some shameless sloganeering: Sherlock Holmes is rendered as the ‘last hero to take on the world and win’; Winston Smith is ‘patriotic but passé; a bit of a loser’; while Jim Dixon is ‘middle England’s answer to Jean Paul Sartre’.