Serial entertainers

Literary fandom in East Asia is certainly of a different, and usually more intense, quality than elsewhere

It is now nine months into the pandemic, or several centuries, depending on whether you consider time objectively or subjectively. One thing that has somewhat startled me is that, in spite of all the time we are spending at home finding ways to entertain ourselves, there has been no big breakout novel as yet. No particular book has been discussed, read simultaneously, and become an instant cultural staple. This seems unusual, and not what I would have expected. On the other hand, there have been plenty of television serials that have accomplished this in the past nine months — from Tiger King early on, in March, through Indian Matchmaking a couple of months ago and now the fourth season of The Crown. These are the sorts of things that people are discussing. Why has it happened with TV serials, and not with books?

The easy answer is because this is now the golden age of television, with so many production houses, networks, and streaming platforms; or that people in 2020 just prefer television to novels. Neither of those answers are convincing, though; we aren’t talking here about novels that are more popular than TV, merely novels that become popular by the standards of novels. What is it that we could be missing?

I think one aspect here is the word “serial”. The thing about television serials is that they are, indeed episodic. They may have a clear narrative arc — the best ones do — but they allow for both binge-watching and for more steady, intermittent consumption. In 2020, that isn’t what you get from novels any more.

But it used to be. If the golden age of the novel was the late 19th century, that was also the period when it was assumed books would emerge in instalments. Sometimes the anticipation for the next chapter became a national craze: Famously, when the last chapter of Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop arrived in New York, the ship carrying it was stormed by a frenzied crowd as it docked, demanding to know if Little Nell had died. (She had.) The only parallel I can really think of to this in recent years is the three-year wait between Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the fourth and fifth books in J K Rowling’s series. Previously, books had come out about once a year, paralleling the school years that Harry and his friends were supposedly spending in Hogwarts; but Ms Rowling took a little longer over the fifth. Starved Potter fans called it the “three-year summer”, and it gave rise to a little industry of fans writing unofficial side stories or completing the series in their own way.

One aspect of serialised writing is that it allows for this sort of interaction with the audience. In the past, responding to audience preferences was an essential task of the serialised novel. As with TV serials today, authors would keep track of which characters, sub-plots and episodes were popular, and consequently build them up or take them offstage. In today’s times, this interaction is of course, particularly strong in speculative fiction.  Ms Rowling may have magisterially ignored her audience’s preferences and deductions about the direction of the plot. But other SF writers have not been so fortunate; George R R Martin, the writer of the Song of Ice and Fire series, has not released a book for almost a decade I suspect partly because his vast audience has already analysed previous books threadbare for every little hint about where he is taking his characters and it would be stupendously difficult for him to keep surprising them.

I thought many years ago, when the Internet was young and blogs were a thing, that we would see the return serials in the form of online, intermittent chapters from amateur authors. But it seems I was wrong; 20th-century publishing has fought off this amateur challenge, and has stuck to its way of doing things.

One place, however, where major literary forms are serialised is Japan. The opaque Japanese popular publishing market includes the graphic novels known as manga — which are carefully subdivided into multiple genres targeting different age groups, genders and interests, each with their own tropes and even visual styles. These are, typically, serialised in various anthology magazines, as are what are known as “light novels” meant for a young audience. Japan has even perfected the only real innovation in the novel genre in the past decades, the “cell phone novel” in which each chapter has between 150 and 200 words (which would be, presumably, a single text message in pictographic scripts).

I still don’t know what makes East Asia different in terms of its willingness to embrace serial literature. It certainly means that literary fandom there is of a different, and usually more intense, quality than elsewhere. But I can’t help thinking that publishers in the rest of the world are missing a trick if they don’t look more carefully at the Japanese example.