David Mitchell on Literary vs Genre Fiction

David Mitchell is an unusual author. He has been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 3 times, shortlisted twice, and was also the author of Bone Clocks, which recently won the World Fantasy Award. His recent novel, The Slade House, is a haunted house story. As such, he is uniquely qualified to speak on the separation of literary fiction from genre fiction, a topic that has been of substantial interest to me on this blog (see my posts on the views of  C.S. Lewis, Terry Pratchett and Ursula Le Guin).

In a recent article in The Guardian, based on a Wired podcast and entitled David Mitchell: separating literary and genre fiction is act of 'self-mutilation', he spoke at some length on this topic. The title pretty much sums up his views, but I think the arguments are worth repeating.

He starts by listing some of his childhood influences, listing Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin (I recently reported on David Mitchell's stirring tribute to Ursual Le Guin's Earthsea books), Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, British SF comic 2000AD and EE “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series. These were all books I read as a child, too.

He then goes on to talk about the “ghettoisation” in bookshops:

“It’s convenient to have a science fiction and fantasy section, it’s convenient to have a mainstream literary fiction section, but these should only be guides, they shouldn’t be demarcated territories where one type of reader belongs and another type of reader does not,” said Mitchell. “It’s a bizarre act of self-mutilation to say that ‘I don’t get on with science fiction and fantasy, therefore I’m never going to read any’. What a shame. All those great books that you’re cutting yourself off from.”

He also pointed out that many books accepted as literature, such as Dickens, are “shot through with fantasy” and argued that works that “become sanctified in the canon of English literature, people then forget – conveniently – are what we now called genre”. He listed George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the works of HG Wells and Margaret Atwood. I would add Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, much of magical realism, and many, many others.

He also had a lot to say about Kazuo Ishiguro’s distancing of his novel The Buried Giant from the fantasy label (for which he was criticized by Ursula Le Guin):

Mitchell said he admired both writers. On Ishiguro – and those readers and critics who also sought to downplay the fantasy elements in his novel – Mitchell said: “There was just this big, big, big brouhaha in the press. In the admittedly tiny corner of the press that the book world occupies, there was this, ‘How dare he? Has he lost his marbles? What does he think he’s doing?’ A lot of people just didn’t get it. But this is what the book wants to be. You’re personally entitled to not like the book because you don’t think it works, you’re allowed to not like the book because you don’t get on with his style of writing, you don’t like the book because of its absurdity or strangeness – but don’t not like it because it’s got a dragon in it!”

Le Guin remains a personal favourite: “I visit Earthsea about once a decade, and I read myself when I’m there – my earlier selves, reading them as a boy of nine, as a teenager of 15, as a young man of 26 or so, as a writer of 35, and as a person who re-read them to write an introduction to the Folio Society’s recent hardback reprint of A Wizard of Earthsea. So it’s kind of come full circle.”

 I've not read any of Mitchell's works, but will seek some out in the near future.