Mid Life – I will give it a go but I suspect it won’t appeal to me; it’s a matter of taste, relevance, interest etc. At least one person on this thread has said they found they couldn’t put The Da Vinci code down but acknowledged that it was a dreadful work of literature. On the other hand, the chap who thought Foucault’s Pendulum was turgid, pretentious nonsense might have a point but it doesn’t detract from the clearly intellectual basis of its construction.
You end up in the age old debate of what constitutes ‘good’ with regard to literature. Most people can agree on a few headlines – plot structure, narrative voice, character development etc. Personally what I really look for is insight into the human condition, a book that really tells us something about ourselves as people. The Da Vinci code fails to really do that but it’s a great read nevertheless, whereas something like Ulysses, The Grapes of Wrath or William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, while almost impenetrably difficult for the average reader, will nevertheless yield glorious, tragic and heart wrenching insights into the human condition if persevered with.
Personally I think the biggest problem with this question of what constitutes a great book/terrible book, is the that it has almost nothing to do with whether it’s an enjoyable read or not. The very best books are the ones that are both but that quality has almost universal rarity; Dickens’s books would be a very good example of this quality as would Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy etc. These are not difficult books to read and for many people they are simply . The subject becomes deeply contentious when people feel that a book that hugely popular must therefore be saying something important about life thereby establishing a set of values that are almost imposed on us, whether we have read and liked the book or not. It’s a bit like reading the Sunday papers and becoming vexed with the constant barrage of messages that we should all be aspiring to fabulous life style of fashion, cool chic, property, cars, clothes etc. I hate those values, which is why I don’t read the Sunday papers, but clearly a lot of people do.
For me Chocolat was a dreadful book not because it was a bad story so much as because I felt it was just plain wrong in its values; it struck me as being almost a socialist/liberal polemic that described a world that just didn’t exist. But that is not the same thing as saying that it couldn’t ever be enjoyed by a wider audience than just me. Ultimately though history will be the judge of its quality; complexity and depth will almost always win out over facile superficiality in literature and books like Chocolat will probably never make it onto the syllabus of anything other than a ‘popular fiction’ sub unit of a second class cultural studies degree.
