Whatever happened to light fiction?

O'Hara could type off a short story the way assistant editors used to type off editorials. Enjoyable writing. Making a simple point. And above all, short - and so well written

Back in the day when reading was a major form of entertainment, there was a type of fiction called “light” fiction. That genre seems to have died around 1970. 

Those were just simple stories, with no great philosophical message in them or woke or post-modern angst. They were what Graham Greene had called many of his own books: Entertainments. 

But the writing was so good that many of them became “literature’ in the course of time. And that’s the only criterion I have employed for the examples of writing I have used below. 

These light stories were like a thumri or an etude. Both are short musical compositions to demonstrate the skills of the player or singer. 

That sort of easy storytelling is not easy to find now. Even after allowing for individual tastes in reading, the stories today are far too long or third rate. Usually both. 

I have been collecting the better stuff for the last few years and now have a fairly large collection. A few new ones are good but they aren’t a patch on the old masters like Henry Cecil, John O’Hara, Lawrence Durrell and also a lot of translations of Prem Chand, Rabindranath Tagore, Satyajit Ray and writers in Tamil, Marathi, Oriya and so on. 

And, of course, there’s P G Wodehouse, the oldest practitioner of light fiction. His short stories still rank amongst the best. Remember Mr Mulliner and Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, not to mention Wooster and Jeeves? But he is so English that he is utterly untranslatable. 

The problem lies here. There’s quite a lot of nuance — that little something the author unconsciously puts in — that can be lost in translation. This is not to say the translations are not good. But apart from a handful, there aren’t all that many good translators. That’s the problem. 

I am also not talking about Indian writers in English. A few like Jhumpa Lahiri, Kiran Doshi and Keki Daruwalla are very good. But most of the rest don’t make the cut. 

So I am going to confine myself to Cecil, O’Hara and Durrell. Wodehouse is altogether too well-known for any further comment. 

The short story masters

Henry Cecil was an English judge who wrote very humorous and understated short stories and novels. Durrell was a professional writer, as was O’Hara, who is best known for his commuter reading type of short stories. 

Cecil wrote 22 books between 1951 and 1976. Some of these were short stories but all of them were light fiction. You can read a book over a weekend. 

The short stories are the best. 

Since he was a judge, the stories are all about the law and its practice and peculiarities. Nothing heavy, just stories. He holds a great mirror to south of England society of that era. 

Durrell was actually a writer of heavy stuff that could strain the reader a lot. I never managed to read more than 50 pages of any of his novels. 

But he did write three volumes of top class short stories on British diplomatic life. They are called the Antrobus series. If you haven’t read them — or even heard of them — it’s time you did. You will love them. 

As to O’Hara, well, what does one say? He could type off a short story the way assistant editors used to type off editorials. Enjoyable writing. Making a simple point. And above all, short — and so well written. Try them. You will not regret it. 

But what about…? 

You may well say, hold on, what about Jeffrey Archer or James Herriot or others like them? Surely there are scores of other writers of light fiction and prose who are very good, too. 

True, but sadly that’s not the point, which is that the number of writers who write such prose has dwindled hugely. Light fiction as a major source of entertainment barely exists now. 

And by light I mean light, and not just short. It also means good writing because the story itself doesn’t matter too much. What matters is that you keep the reader engaged and entertained for a few minutes or maybe a couple of hours. 

Let me also clarify. I am not talking about the entire universe of short story writers. Of those there are thousands. I am talking of light short story writers. The creators of literary soufflé, if you will. 

If you have come across any writers who have published stories that you think are like this and will become “literature” in due course, please do let me know. I will check them out.