How Novels Work Book

I do like a lot of literature, but strangely books about books are rarely as interesting or as compelling as the books themselves. If you've ever had the misfortune of picking up a big bulky guide to the literary canon, or flipped through the introduction to a penguin classic, you've probably experienced the very dry writing style of an english scholar.

So beginning to read, John Mullan's How Novels Work, I was apprehensive of delving into some of the technical and over-pretentious writing I'd associated with most books about books. And indeed, there are a lot of words that were entirely new to me upon reading them, chapters such as 'Ekphrasis', 'Heteroglossia', 'Parataxis' or 'Skaz', all of which are sure to help you out in your next game of scrabble. But despite this, there is an inherent accessibility to the book which I appreciated greatly.

John Mullan, in case you don't know, is a professor or English and columnist, and the book was sprouted out of various articles he wrote for The Guardian newspaper. The book is split into eleven chapters, and each of these are divided into even smaller sections of specific details in novels - each of these are about 2-10 pages and are very digestible. You get very concise yet informative sections on the use of swearing, chapter titles, villains, emails, false endings and aspects of the novel that you wouldn't even have thought to look at. The blurb of the book includes some of these specific ideas, asking questions such as 'Why is Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time printed in sans serif font?' Yeah, I had no idea either.

This book is also works really well for recommending future novels to read, and I myself have added more than a few to my Goodreads, although do be aware that many of the books are discussed and torn apart in great depth (I in fact haven't read the whole book technically, since I skipped the parts detailing the plot of Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone which I'm reading right now).

The one flaw I'd give to this is that it can be jarring to find out an entire plot of a novel in a couple of lines, in such an offhand way, and for a few of the books I failed to really take the examples in. Also I suppose structurally there isn't much that really holds it together, it has a lot of depth, but not much scope. I dipped into this book in and out over the course of 5 months, and it never really grabbed me enough to read chunks of all in one go - but to an extent that's fine, and it's great to use as a reference book. I have in fact quoted this in my A level coursework, so it has already proved useful in studying.