I find that reading Patrick O’Brians books is like carving off pieces of a solid block of delicious cheese; or indeed like any kind of hearty meal, except that at the end of it, one’s hunger has not abated, but grown.
There are quite few authors I would put in the same category, in terms of pure narrative solidity; a quality I find has little to do with a masterful grasp of language (although O’Brian has that, too) or suspenseful plots (ditto – even reading about Jack Aubrey’s children or Stephen Maturin’s beetles is fascinating stuff). Indeed one of the pleasures in discovering O’Brian was the subversively ramshackle structure, subplot upon subplot, of his novels, the way they seem less like stories with subplots than subplots with a story; and how well he hides his myriad of themes in the cracks and nooks of his plain prose, and how they’re rarely visible except in the aggregate. Profundity is something you can rarely intentionally aim at, I find.
Common to these authors is a wonderful honesty and modesty, a lack of pretension, unadorned prose. For example, I have been planning to read Eugenides’ Middlesex, but its artful, artificial opening line (“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974”) immediately put me off, relegated it to the end of my reading queue, regardless of its probable value. Certainly there is artistry here to be enjoyed, but for me, the prose so often feels constructed, with cleverly-formulated sentences and Big Themes getting in the way of the reading experience.
Most recent or contemporary authors, regrettably, fall into this category. Among the ones that don’t, and whom I consider to be master storytellers, are Terry Pratchett, J. R. R. Tolkien, Rohinton Mistry and William Trevor.
Now that I have stated my preferences, I would like to hear about authors who might be said to be as interesting and readable as the aforementioned. Genre is unimportant to me; I don’t care whether a book is about the Napoleonic wars or missions to Mars, as long as it’s intensely readable.