Television - Andrew Billen is impressed by a wised-up, self-confidently intellectual history of the novel

What a fickle lot we critics are. Having for years championed the authored documentary, I suddenly find myself, now that serious factual television is full of little else, wearying of them. Do I really want to see Alan Yentob on Imagine plucking a peach from a market stall to illustrate something about Charles Saatchi's barrow-boy sensibility? Do I need to be distracted by Michael Wood's hair as he walks through Warwickshire "in search" of Shakespeare? How much information can my brain take about Brian Sewell's sex drive before it starts to reject what he has to say about medieval cathedrals?

One of the many good points about Channel 4's The Story of the Novel (Saturdays, 8pm) is that although this new four-parter is clearly authored and, indeed, has one of the most literate scripts you will have heard for years - and fittingly so - the author is not the hero. The author never even appears, except in the final credit: "Written and directed by Tim Kirby". A deus ex machina occasionally speaks in the incarnation of Professor John Carey, the series adviser. But the hero, all the time, is the novel itself.

In fact, the novel is almost an anti-hero. We soon learn that even if not mad or bad, it is certainly dangerous to know. An early image has Daniel Defoe in the stocks for inventing a satirical version of a wild Protestant preacher whom people not only believed existed but, humiliatingly, agreed with. Episode two (19 July) recalls the Bishop of Wakefield burning Jude the Obscure, which provoked Thomas Hardy's retreat into poetry. There will be plenty more examples, I am sure, of exaggerated responses to novels, but I did not know that even Mrs Gaskell had banned her daughters from reading Jane Eyre.

As it aggrandises its subject, the programme suggests we are right to be afraid of the power of the novel. The introduction shows a man on a park bench. The novel he is reading, the voice-over intones, "effortlessly infiltrates the imagination", reducing the real world to "background noise". Defoe's The Shortest-Way With Dissenters "invaded the consciousness of innocent readers" but Robinson Crusoe also swept its author aside, so that his viewpoint disappeared from the novel altogether. The cult around Walter Scott's Ivanhoe was, apparently, responsible for the Houses of Parliament being built in mock gothic. The novelist Kate Saunders charged: "I think the Brontes have a lot to answer for in respect of the men we find attractive in the 21st century. I really do." Perhaps Mrs Gaskell was right.

Story . . . regards the novel as a mental virus whose life began in the "primeval soup of literary, intellectual and economic possibilities". This is the highbrow end of pop academic lingo, and frankly, I prefer it to the bottom end, which is what we usually get on TV ("Shakespeare's amazing achievement", etc). In any case, Kirby does not script anything for which he does not have witnesses. The literary historian Simon Eliot is soon explaining the shift in reading styles that made the novel possible, a move from reading in company to reading alone, from reading aloud to reading silently and from the "intensive" reading of a few texts to the "extensive" reading of many texts once.

The first two programmes take us from the beginning of the 18th century to the end of the 19th, from Defoe to Henry James. Strains of the virus are soon at war with themselves. Some novelists such as Fielding, Dickens, Scott and Thackeray look at people from the outside. Others such as Richardson, the Brontes and James examine their mental interiors. The series, being a little bit solemn (no mention is made of Swift or Sterne), favours the second bunch, but reserves special praise for Jane Austen, who, it claims, unites the two tendencies. A S Byatt more or less says that without Austen the novel would not have attained its greatness, although this comment is at one with the show's pro-woman bias, which gives us two great literary heroines (Pamela, Clarissa) for every one male (Tom Jones), and manages to use "chick lit" as a term of praise not abuse.

This is the kind of argumentative, self-confidently intellectual storytelling we see too infrequently. It is talking-heads television but the talking heads are all first class - be they the actors, such as Amanda Root and Oliver Ford Davies, who read the extracts, or the academics, from Claire Tomalin to David Lodge. It is radio with pictures, but the pictures are strangely evocative. To illustrate Dr Johnson's observation that Fielding was "a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate" but Richardson "a man who knew how a watch was made", we are shown, fair enough, the clicking insides of a watch. But when we hear about Henry James's infiltrations of his heroines' inner minds, a scarlet ooze squelches across the screen. See how the virus mutates, doctor.

By the way, there is not a bookcase behind a talking head in sight. They address us from within some sepulchral temple, presumably of high learning. Such belligerent wising-up is a mysterious thing to observe on Channel 4 on a Saturday night before Big Brother. Maybe BBC4 has bought second rights. I don't know. I just keep expecting to see Melvyn Bragg's floppy brow pop up. But it never does.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website