The novel is a magnificent tool—truly a Swiss Army knife of tools—capable of many jobs while always being a knife first. This is a fact that was discovered early on, toyed with by Miguel de Cervantes in Don Quixote, and more recently by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville is certainly not just a lecture on life or death, or whaling. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo manages to be both a sociology of France as well as a love story. And War and Peace, written by Leo Tolstoy as a jealous reaction to Les Miserables, is very much a history of what went wrong in Russia under the Czars. In the Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne you learn what was wrong with Britain as it arose to world power. And Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift is more than a modest proposal of what was so disproportionate there. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll offers little guide for those lost upon the mores but much entertainment at your own expense. Technically speaking, Ireland is not a part of Britain, but because the Irish have for too long been slaves to that mentality, Ulysses by James Joyce is a wallow in those discontents.
All of these are uses of the novel as tool and not ‘mere’ entertainment. Mere is said sarcastically here. The ‘mere’ is the more difficult thing to do. My own recent effort in that vein, ‘The Invention of Man’, is available on my website. And unable to find a publisher in these covid times, I will be publishing it myself very shortly. Another attempt in that regard, ‘Whatever it takes,’ went awry and became too much more an entertainment than a rant and so I have to set it somewhere betwixt, in a semi-detached limbo perhaps, within hearing of the cries and moans of those others that don’t quite meet their intended mark while being unable to afford an estate of their own. This is not a judgement. One may be better by some standard than the other, but, like children, I love them both. ‘Whatever it takes,’ will also be available shortly. Judge for yourself.