One of the purposes of the travel sections is to literally take us on a trip around the world during the 17th Century. Hitting all the stops, and making sure to include easter eggs retro-foreshadowing “Crytponomicon”. From England to the Ottoman Empire to Germany to France to the Netherlands to North Africa to Egypt to India to China to Japan to the Phillipines to the Americas and finally back to England. And hitting every strata of society from vagabond to pirate to artisan to merchant to priest to philospher to aristocrat.
Yes, none of it is neccesary, but no book is neccesary. The 17th Century was fascinating to Stephenson because the roots of the modern world were already in place…science, political liberalism, egalitarianism, globalism, capitalism. Yet at the same time the medieval era is still present. The aristocracy still rules, religious wars still exist, Europe despite the gold and silver pouring in from the Americas is still a backwater compared to the Ottoman empire, India, and China, people still fight with swords.
Yes, you could read encyclopedia entries about all these topics, then pick up a short page-turner about a vagabond in love with harem girl. Except neither the encyclopedia entries or the pulp page-turner will bring the 17th century to life like Stephanson’s books do.
Now, that’s not to say that you “ought to like” Stephanson if you don’t like him. I’m just saying the world tour is one of the major parts of the book, and if you’re not interested in touring the world of the 17th Century then the book isn’t going to appeal to you. But there are others like me that it will appeal to. Not everyone is going to like every book.
It’s certainly possible, but it’s far from guarenteed. And we’ve had threads before in which posters bring up their favorite examples of books suffering not so much from excessive “travel details” as from “bloat”. It’s been suggested, to name just one example, that J.K. Rowling’s later books in the Harry Potter series are appreciably longer than the earlier ones, but would benefit greatly by being trimmed to a smaller size. The complaint about lack of an editor, with the authority to overrule an author has been applied to many a prolific, popular author.
Many of these classic authors might write differently if they wrote today and had the opportunity to be influenced by the authors who have written in the years between then and now. But there is no guarentee.
And if you find an author is unbearably long winded, you can skim the boring parts, or try another book. There is no shortage of books out there to try.
“Once upon a time, there was an evil magic ring that got lost by the Dark Lord Sauron, but Bilbo found it and gave it to his nephew, who took some of his friends on a journey to destroy it before the Dark Lord could use it to destroy the world. It was a long, hard journey across some mountains and through a swamp, and they were almost betrayed in the end by a little frog dude, but they did it. The end.”
“Guy was a person who burned stuff, but then he decided not to. The end.”
“Some aliens in tripods invaded but we fought them off with our primitive weapons. The end.”
“A guy named Hari predicted the future, and it happened. The end.”
Yeah… uh… I begin to see the appeal of cutting out all of the unnecessary stuff. Look at that, you just read four well-loved, famous, and/or award-winning novels in about twenty seconds!
I generally have no problem with padding in novels - as others have said, more often than not, it gives the reader the feeling of actually being there, travelling with the characters. Certainly the later Harry Potter novels are guilty of this, but I wouldn’t cut a thing, despite there being ample opportunity to (as evidenced by the films). Also, while the majority of his novels are utter dreck, Michael Chrichton’s Jurassic Park’s extensive chaos theory padding worked well for me, as it made it more than just the “Oh no, dinosaurs are on the loose” thriller that the movie was.
Of course then there’s Thomas Hardy’s Far From The Madding Crowd. We studied this in English class, so unfortunately I didn’t just have the option of screaming and throwing the book against the wall, which is my usual choice when faced with a writing style I can’t stand (see We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver for a great example of this). I recall one very, very long paragraph going into great detail in (allegedly) describing the main character, although I still maintain it was utter gibberish. At the end of said long paragraph is the sentence “In short, he was twenty nine and a bachelor.”
I was not the only person to frustratedly yell in the middle of class “Well why not just say that!”.
Remember, back when many of these older classics were written, there wasn’t tv, there wasn’t photography, there weren’t travel magazines.
People had far less of a chance to know what distant places looked like, or the customs of foreigners. Novels were a way into other cultures that they had no other way of accessing and they wanted all the fine detail. Even the details of travelling would be interesting to people who had never journeyed far.
In the case of Dickens, he was wordy in part because of the way his books were published. They weren’t originally written and sold as complete works, but were done serially in newspapers and the like. If you were drawing out the story into weekly editions to go the length of a predetermined contract, you had to be judicious in your use of plot points. He was very skillful at making the ‘filler’ entertaining enough to keep people reading though.
Also, Dickens and many others were into realism. That is, not just telling a story, but cramming a whole world onto the page right down to the little knick-knacks on the shelf in the minor character’s drawing room, layer of years-old dust and all. It was the same sort of intent as Dutch Master’s painting–a mirror to reality–and it had to have all the little details present to be credible as such.
There are plenty of other kinds of wordiness too. Flowery poetic language is different from copious description, but it can be just as wordy. Then there’s the old ‘catalogues of references’ type of writing, as seen in Shakespeare and Milton. That seems really wordy and unnecessary to a modern reader, but at the time it was the peak of verbal economy. After all, if you could count on all your readers knowing Greek drama, it was easier to say “It’s like this thing in Aeschylus” than to laboriously describe it all over again.
Then there’s postmodern wordiness, which is a little harder to broadly characterize. Generally it does have a theory and purpose behind it, but knowing it doesn’t always make it any easier to slog through.
I think a lot of the novels mentioned here as being wordy are actually rather good and would suffer a lot if they were cut. Furthermore, I think that word-bloat is more of a problem with recent books than with older ones. More specifically, I think that there has been a slow rise in the average number of world in novels (at least English-language ones) for most of the late twentieth century.
Indeed, I would say that the greatest period for short novels was about 1950. The wordiness of late Victorian novels was quite out of fashion by that point, so even rather literary novels weren’t very long. Popular novels were even shorter, since this was the height of the pulp paperback period.
This doesn’t mean that there were no long novels at this time. The Gormenghast novels were being published around then and The Lord of the Rings was finished but not yet published. But these are examples of good long novels in my opinion. I don’t think the Gormenghast books are quite as great as The Lord of the Rings, but I don’t have any objection to the length of the books. I don’t think that the late Victorian novels were so bloated either. They were long, but often that length was justified because they were telling a long story.
What I do object to are more recent long novels. This is obvious in various genres. The average length of science fiction novels has been going up for the past fifty years. There are gobs of fantasy series that seem to go on forever. Long series are also quite popular in mysteries. I think more recent novels are more likely to be padded than older ones.
Some of the worst are those who feel the need to redo exposition over and over in the same book, or have a million characters and devote at least one paragraph to describing every single one. cough
