My Top 10 Novels

And why they are relevant.

Are novels rubbish?

This was a terrible thought I had the other day. Having read hundreds of novels, particularly in my youth, I realised I could barely remember anything about them, and that most of them now seemed irrelevant. 

This may be due to the novel being a virtually dead form, or because we live in such a politicised world that all of the arts have become a sideshow. Or it may simply be that, having read these hundreds (thousands?) of novels largely in my 20s, I tended to favour ‘coming of age’ works (the Bildungsroman, to literary types) that now no longer interest me.

Or perhaps, as Pareto shows us, most of anything is rubbish, and one must always wade through the 90% of archetypal chaff to get to that precious wheat.

With that in mind I decided to list my top ten novels, without reference to the internet or even my own bookshelf, only choosing those which have left a lasting impression. I will now share this precious list with you, my wonderful readers, thus saving you much agricultural wading time.

I was going to do this as one article, but the first one has already taken up enough words (and time) for an entire piece, so I am going to release them one by one. 

There is no particular reason to embark upon this series, other than it is something I’ve been thinking about, and perhaps because, as I tried to express in my recent piece on Jonathan Bowden, art is something we need to embrace rather than eschew when it comes to winning the culture war. 

Remember, the other side believes we are blockheaded, shouty philistines. And frankly some of us are. But many of us are refugees from a time when artistic pursuits still mattered. When the barbarians weren’t at the gate and we could focus on higher things. 

But that is the wrong way to think about it because, as C.S. Lewis tells us in The Weight of Glory:

Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life’. Life has never been normal.

Therefore let me begin with the first choice in my ‘Top Ten Novels’ series.

Since this is based on those that left the most lasting impact, I will list them in the order in which they occurred to me.

1. Thomas Bernhard - The Loser

This was the immediate and clear winner for me. In case you haven’t heard of Bernhard (and most people haven’t) he was an Austrian writer, born in 1931, who developed an extraordinary literary style that is philosophical, bleakly hilarious, and extremely modern, arguably bordering on postmodern in a formal sense. 

On a personal level he was an odd mixture of cantankerous and ebullient, probably stemming from a naturally vital nature blighted by a horrendous lung illness, which was made worse by a disastrous stay in hospital, chronicled in his seminal five-volume memoir, Gathering Evidence. 

I have chosen The Loser (original title Der Untergeher) as Bernhard’s best novel, though they are almost all excellent. If you like this you will also enjoy (if that’s the right word) Concrete, The Lime Works, Old Masters, Wittgenstein's Nephew, Gargoyles, etc. In fact I recommend everything except Frost, where Bernhard was yet to find his distinctive voice (which seems to spontaneously erupt in part two of Gargoyles). 

The Loser is about a piano player who, confronted by the genius of the young Glenn Gould, immediately perceives his own mediocrity and decides to give up playing the piano for good. Their mutual friend, however, fails to accept his musical inadequacy and as a result is eventually driven to suicide. 

This is not a spoiler because it is announced from the first sentence, as Bernhard’s works do not exactly feature plots in any conventional sense. The entire story is told via the reminiscences of the narrator as he walks into an inn. Only at the very end does any forward action occur, as for nearly 200 pessimistic, dense, and darkly hilarious pages the narrator repeats variations on the phrase “I thought to myself as I entered the inn”. If you want to get all literary theory about it, you could say Bernhard is a master of pushing the limits of ‘Récit’ versus ‘Histoire’, but I’ll stop before any chicks reading this get too excited.

Bernhard’s depiction of Glenn Gould is of course fictitious, though it draws on much real biographical detail, such as Gould’s famous humming, audible on many of his recordings. But you don’t have to care about Glenn Gould or the piano to enjoy (or ‘enjoy’) the novel, as for Bernhard Gould becomes just a symbol of the ideal artist, single-mindedly, monstrously dedicated to his art:

Basically we want to be the piano, he said, not human beings but the piano, all our lives we want to be the piano and not a human being, flee from the human beings we are in order to completely become the piano, an effort which must fail, although we don't want to believe it, he said. The ideal piano player (he never said pianist!) is the one who wants to be the piano, and I say to myself every day when I wake up, I want to be the Steinway, not the person playing the Steinway, I want to be the Steinway itself. Sometimes we get close to this ideal, he said, very close, at which point we think we’ve already gone crazy, think we’re on the highroad to madness, which we fear like nothing else.

If you like Dostoevsky, Hamsun, or even Schopenhauer, I highly recommend this novel by a criminally underrated literary genius.