The Persistence of Epic Novels

Plato and Aristotle, depicted by Raphael

Aristotle, in the Poetics, records a sentiment probably shared by 3,000 years of classical studies students: the epics of Homer are too damn long. The Iliad and the Odyssey each comprise twenty-four “books,” each book running hundreds of lines. In the ancient Athenian recitation competitions, one speaker would memorize one book, and one or two would speak per day, meaning recitations lasted anywhere from nearly two weeks, to nearly a month.

To Aristotle, this was excessive, and he asked for “epics” which a single performer could recite in one or two nights. But Aristotle, writing half a millennium after Homer, might’ve missed something important. Classicist Barry B. Powell suggests, in the introduction to his translation of the Odyssey, that Homer’s performances probably did last only one night. Today, when Homer is “required reading,” we forget he was pop entertainment in his day.

Powell postulates that Homer was probably illiterate, and didn’t have his massive epics memorized. Instead, Powell suggests that Homer improvised his poetry on well-known themes, and each performance was unique. They probably lasted for one- or two-night engagements, But when somebody finally pledged to transcribe Homer’s poetry, Powell believes, Homer composed in long-form, unpacking details usually elided, to create a sweeping saga intended for the page.

This difference matters. Even three millennia ago, Homer realized that people reading a book committed themselves to something vaster, with a willingness to persevere across the span of days. Works intended for public recitation generally run much shorter—it takes approximately two hours to read the entire Gospel of Mark aloud. But books are a different order of beast, and Homer, transcribing early in the medium’s history, already knew that.

Now, as then, we have conflicting desires for short-form and longer entertainments. There’s nothing new under the sun. We want stories we can devour in one sitting, often already prepared for the next one, and we want stories that take days to consume, which we must pursue doggedly. But the changing media market has split our interests. First television, and more recently the internet, swallowed up the market for short-form, one-evening entertainments.

An undated traditional depiction of Homer

Authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote short stories for commercial purposes. The magazines in which they published, like The Atlantic, the Saturday Evening Post, and The New Yorker, had large audiences and paid handsomely. At his peak, Fitzgerald notoriously tore off short stories for magazine markets to get paid, and wrote the novels for which he’s now more famous to indulge a literary inclination that wouldn’t have paid particularly well.

Since Fitzgerald’s time, the magazine market has become considerably less lucrative. The Atlantic no longer publishes fiction and The New Yorker mostly only publishes well-known names or controversial content that drives engagement. A handful of genre magazines pay moderate rates, and art purists still regularly launch small-circulation “zines,” but the short-form entertainment market has moved mainly onto electronic media.

Conversely, contra Aristotle, the book continues to harbor the epic format he thought Homer overstretched. From Dante and Milton to J.R.R. Tolkien and Tom Clancy, authors preserve Homer’s physical length and dramatic sweep, because people really want that scale and that depth of immersion. People want an “entertainment” that will take them out of themselves and their own lives for literally days, even weeks, at a stretch.

And electronic media largely can’t provide that. Compare the prose and streaming versions of one of our time’s greatest epic authors. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series certainly has its detractors, but Jordan’s audience remained loyal, even when many felt his middle novels lagged. Not only were the books physically and thematically massive, but his story unfolded across multiple books, and readers remained immersed in his milieu for years.

But the streaming media adaptation of Jordan’s books largely fell flat. Not only did it take two years to produce a second season, even with the storyline already written, but when the product finally emerged, it suffered from cost overruns and content bloat. The audience from Jordan’s novels disliked the compromises which the transition between media forced, and the series has struggled to find a non-book audience.

Simply put, Aristotle was wrong. Audiences don’t find the length, density, and complexity of Homer’s epics off-putting. Indeed, as TV and Netflix continue consuming our short-form entertainments, audiences not only still buy books, but they support longer books and convoluted book series. Aristotle thought the hoi polloi weren’t lettered enough to follow stories that took days to develop, but given the choice, that’s apparently what audiences want.

Slow-Burning Fantasy and the Non-Start Story

Robin Hobb, Fool's Assassin: Book One of the Fitz and the Fool Trilogy

FitzChivalry Farseer, former king’s assassin and royal advisor, has retired to anonymity, posing as a yeoman farmer. But palace intrigue draws him back in. A cadre of pale-skinned cutthroats and an impossible soul-capturing curse reveal treachery deep within Buckkeep Castle. Ageless and lethal, Fitz resumes the one occupation he’s truly mastered, drawing blood to defend his king. But these events portend the return of Fitz’s supposedly long-lost confidant, Fool.

Hobb’s publisher calls this the start of a new trilogy, but be aware: it’s Hobb’s seventh novel featuring FitzChivalry Farseer, and her fifteenth set in the Six Duchies. I didn’t understand this, initially. Hobb generously provides newcomers with a brief orientation, probably useful to seasoned readers too, as her last Farseer novel debuted eleven years ago. This novel isn’t freestanding, but it’s sufficiently independent for momentary purposes.

Therefore, your response indubitably depends on your expectations. Hobb’s publicity professionals compare her to George RR Martin, a fairly merited analogy, but perhaps too spot-on: her opening scene musters foreboding that would’ve seemed ominous before the Red Wedding blew up the Internet. Now it just seems really, really long. Readers who followed this story from its 1995 debut called it pathbreaking. Us neophytes will find it over-familiar and derivative.

We’ll also find it wordy and digressive. Hobb’s first two chapters promise drama: strangers invade Fitz’s festival, slaying a messenger, burgling his royal artifacts, and disappearing unmarked. Ooh, auspicious. But Hobb halts the action mid-chapter, suddenly announcing: “But over the next few days…” Not even a line break. Chapter Three commences three years later. Something Red Wedding-ish almost happens, then Hobb immediately dissipates all tension. It never quite returns.

Stylistically, Hobb is surely her own worst enemy. She makes weird choices that slow reading way down, taking readers out of the moment. At key moments, she displaces action or exposition with small talk that, presumably, reveals key character traits, but drains all momentum. Conversations take several pages and serve no purpose. Hobb seemingly deflects energy from her narrative, holding audiences’ attention in limbo indefinitely.

Story elements constantly remind me I’m reading prose, not sharing an experience. The lack of historicity: Hobb, through her first-person narrator Fitz, describes clothing from the Renaissance, late medieval metalsmithing technology, an apparently Dutch Colonial manor house, and remarkably modern record-keeping practices. The languages: Fitz speaks with Americanisms and present day argot. Hobb’s setting doesn’t just lack place and time, she actively avoids having any recognizable domain.

Even character names draw attention to Hobb’s strange authorial choices. She mostly uses characternyms: King Dutiful, Lady Patience, royal advisor Steady. (These characternyms are frequently ironic.) Then she drops them irregularly, giving certain characters made-up-sounding names like Kettricken and Burrich. And Fitz’s pseudonym in retirement is Tom, with his wife Molly. It’s almost like Hobb wants us to pay attention to her typography rather than her storytelling.

(One characternym bears especial notice. FitzChivalry earned his name as his father Chivalry’s illegitimate son. The Anglo-Norman patronymic “Fitz” means son of, but herein, it means bastard of. So whenever Fitz’s wife Molly, his daughter Nettle, his housemen, his king, various friends, honored kinsmen, and others address him as “Fitz,” they’re calling him “Bastard.” Imagine if everyone you loved called you “Shitstreak,” and you answered to it. That’s Hobb’s approach.)

I have difficulty commenting upon Hobb’s story, because I’d read five pages, set the book down, and start making excuses not to resume reading. In a book pushing 700 pages, such fitful reading makes slow progress, but Hobb gives so little to hang my attention on, besides the physical fact of her prose, that I didn’t want to read. Her story lacks tension, her characters lack interest, and nothing happens.

Apologies to Hobb’s fans, who are legion. Many friends talked up Hobb to me, expounding her glamourless, austere narratives. This, they claim, reflects what life would really resemble in a magically imbued feudal kingdom. Hobb eschews either Tolkein’s Christian idealism or William Morris’ Romantic assurance. I imagine this seemed revolutionary in 1995. Two decades on, when distrust and moral uncertainty are widespread in fantasy, it just feels ordinary.

This novel chugs and wheezes for hundreds of pages, like an engine failing to turn over, never gaining traction, never rolling forward. I kept expecting something to arrest my attention, because I wanted to understand why my friends celebrate Hobb’s storytelling. But finally, exhausted, I set the book aside and hadn’t touched it three days later. I realized, that may be all you need to know about this novel.

Scott Lynch's Exposition Epic

Scott Lynch, The Republic of Thieves

Career swindlers Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen have made many enemies in the city-state of Camorr. But a junta of wizards offers them sanctuary if they help throw an election. Ancient Kashain’s rulers maintain power by keeping secrets and buying massive conspiracies, so Locke and Jean shouldn’t act surprised when the city proves to be a dagger pointed at their hearts. What kind of dagger, though, is an ever-shifting mystery.

If I had to describe Scott Lynch’s third Gentlemen Bastards novel in one word, I’d pick “long.” It’s physically imposing, at over 650 pages, but that’s fine. As James A. Michener observed beaucoups years ago, books’ ability to tell epic stories with generational scope remains their chief advantage over cinema. But while it starts strong, it eventually resembles an uphill slog through a molasses swamp, in Wellingtons full of superglue.

Locke and Jean are resilient losers, the Captain Mal and Zoe of heroic fantasy. Their sheer refusal to surrender to normality makes them staunchly heroic, especially when the law proves arbitrary and oppressive. Locke, always shrewd and quick with a sarcastic rejoinder, thinks he’s grown scars over his heart, but remains capable of humane insight. Jean restrains Locke’s often fatalistic tendencies; between them, he’s the one who wants to live.

Lynch’s writing has drawn comparisons to, and praises from, George RR Martin, in both its sweeping scope and foreboding tone. But Lynch’s actual prose more closely resembles British author M. John Harrison’s Viriconium novels, and he also includes occasional nods to other renowned fantasists, both point-blank and obliquely. I counted Fritz Leiber, CS Lewis, and Joss Whedon, among others. He’s a portmanteau of historic and contemporary sword-n-sorcery fantasy.

Unfortunately, Lynch’s storytelling style visibly mimics daytime television and X-Men comics, stumbling forward episodically, propelled by successions of cliffhangers and shocks. He intersperses the characters’ present, which unfolds with remarkable lack of haste, with scenes from his heroes’ history, contextualizing the suffering they now endure. Which would be fine, but he lampshades his big reveals so blatantly that, by the time they arrive, we’ve grown bored waiting.

When Lynch appropriates narrative cues from existing stories, he takes necessary gambles. Seasoned genre readers may recognize hints of Leiber’s Grey Mouser or Harrison’s Lord tegeus-Cromis, and cheer the knowledge that we can join a story contiguous with existing fantasy. But we pay for that familiarity when his narrative divulgences don’t differ sufficiently from his archetypes. This book openly courts readers who don’t like surprises.

Which is a shame, because for all his predictable plotting, Lynch’s prose is remarkably good. Locke Lamora uses impudent charm and gallows wit to extract other characters’ deeper secrets, while Jean translates suppressed rage into compelling action. Lynch’s incisive, dynamic writing propels action with such understated drive, and surprising humor, that even this jaded reader didn’t notice how many pages had passed without anything actually happening. At first.

Until I did. Somewhere around this massive, brick-like book’s one-third mark, I noticed Lynch was still setting the scene. Really. Well past page 200, Lynch kept spooning out exposition so slow and erratic, we practically hear the soap opera organ music. Yet his actual story remained in future tense, while the flashback scenes portended revelations in Locke and Jean’s present. Free semi-spoiler: love which goes unrequited long enough becomes hate.

Remember, in episodic drama, if characters mention some dead companion often enough, events will prove that character still alive. Or, since this is fantasy, undead. If characters hate some villain with sufficient passion, the person our heroes absolutely need to turn the tide will have some unacknowledged connection to that villain. And every question the MacGuffin character answers will omit some information our protagonists desperately need.

Lynch, sadly, exploits all these tropes. Amid his funny, grim, energetic flourishes, Lynch and his characters do little we haven’t seen before. Which perhaps isn’t bad; some people like the package tour, where everything’s pre-screened to guarantee customers find nothing shocking or unnerving on their trip. If that’s you, Lynch wraps a relatively familiar fantasy in eloquent prose and delivers it, like the stork, ready-made to your doorstep.

But that’s not me, and maybe not you. To paraphrase Doctor Who, I want to get lost on foreign streets, use wrong verbs, kiss the wrong people. Lynch keeps promising such jarring exhilaration imminently, but always shifts it into the future. His actual product cloyingly resembles every paperback fantasy from the last half-century, never really shedding its prototypes. And we never end up feeling we’ve really gone anywhere.