I have been musing on fictional series because I spent part of the winter reading “A Dance to the Music of Time.” It’s a series of 12 novels by the British author Anthony Powell (1909-2000). They tell the story of a generation of men and women who were children, like the author, during World War I and follow their subsequent adventures for the next 60 years.
It is not my purpose to review the series here, but suffice it to say that it begins slowly with public school and university friendships and enmities, gathers steam in the 1930s as the characters try to establish themselves in career and marriage, takes them through the second World War, and concludes with time winnowing their ranks in a changed postwar world.
As is often the case in series, plot is secondary to episodic adventures of a gaggle of characters. Indeed, the title of the work points to its essentially musical structure where themes and leitmotifs recur. We watch the downward spiral of Stringham, the dashed hopes of the likeable composer Moreland, the rise of the odious Widmerpool, and follow the havoc-wreaking path of Pamela Flitton among dozens of lesser characters. Fans of this sort of thing make a hobby of scouting out real life models for the each and probably visit locales mentioned in the books.
I enjoyed the books, which have been called an English “Remembrance of Things Past.” I wouldn’t know. I have started that marathon many times but have never reached the finish line. The aesthetic appeal of these endless series can be questionable. I have read and enjoyed the Trollope Palliser and Barset series, but they are slightly different kettles of fish.
Indeed, all series are not created equal. Those of Powell and Proust seem to be one huge unspooling story, broken into publishable pieces only for convenience. But many series are made up of stand-alone books with beginnings, middles and ends.
The idea of the series has a long history. At the time of Dickens, novels were first published in magazine form in parts, that is, as a serial. And the clever author made sure, like Scheherazade, to make each part end in such a way as to compel the reader to come back for the next. Thus a novel could be turned into a revenue stream for as long as 18 months, then published in book form for another paycheck. At this time Willkie Collins is credited with ending each episode so dramatically, with what we now call a cliffhanger, that readers could barely endure the wait for the next.
The same serial technique was adopted early by the movies, with weekly shorts, such as “The Perils of Pauline” in which the damsel found herself in distress over and over again. This became the basis for soap operas on radio and TV which reel out episode after episode without ever reaching a conclusion. They may be addictive, but are ultimately absurd after a character’s fifth marriage or third case of amnesia.
A related form has been adopted by TV series, some with long arcing plots that never seem to arrive at a conclusion. This seems to me less aesthetically pleasing than a form that is contrived to reach a denouement and travel to a satisfying finish. In other series, the same cast engages in weekly episodes, but each has a beginning, middle and end. These own an obvious debt to the detective story that dates back to the 18th century in China, but in the West begins with Poe and of course Sherlock.
The appeal of a series in this instance is obvious. Each tale a new case solved by the same detective. The same form has been endlessly extrapolated to include private eyes. Police detectives, forensic pathologists, investigators who are medieval monks. little old ladies, art historians, you name it. And since medicine and the law also have cases, series have been spun from them starring everyone from Perry Mason to House.
Many series that cover multiple volumes tend toward the adventure end of the fictional spectrum. They can be finite and concern a single tale – The Ring Trilogy, Harry Potter, Foundation, Cities in Flight, Game of Thrones, and many more. Often the motive appears to be pecuniary as much as artistic. Write one story, get paid three or four times.
In more serious fiction, the real protagonist in a series of linked novels often seems to be time itself – which is certainly true of the Powell books and Proust. Balzac called his enormous output “The Human Comedy” and characters recur from book to book and there are several books with actual sequels, but there is no overarching story that connects them all. Most stand alone. He presumably saw his life project as an attempt to capture the entire social fabric of his time. Faulkner’s conceit that almost all of his work concerns the lives and history of the inhabitants of Yoknapatawpha County is similar.
As in Faulkner, the essential link between books in a series can be a milieu or place that the characters inhabit. The Oz and Tarzan books are of this sort. The Palliser books revolve around Parliament and politics, the Barsetshire books around churchmen. The Raj and Alexandria Quartets tell you in their names what’s up with them. The last example is interesting in that the first three books focus on different characters but take place at the same time and place. The fourth is a true sequel in which the reader sees what has happened to the characters after a lapse of years,
Some series simply follow the adventures of a single main character or chart his progress over time. The Leatherstocking Tales are separate adventures of the Deerslayer. The four books under the title “Parade’s End” follow the life of Christopher Tietjens, the last Tory, a great character in a great tetralogy. The Rabbit Books are of the same ilk.
The diseases to which serial productions are prone are tedium and repetition. They can easily degenerate into little more than one damned thing after another, aesthetic potato chips. Yes, you can’t eat just one, but they lose their savor eventually, the author’s inventiveness can flag and the reader can begin to feel that the whole shebang adds up to nothing.
This is hardly surprising. Even a single large novel requires an architectural brilliance that is uncommon. Dickens’ “Bleak House” is an impressive example. For well over two-thirds of its length a huge number of characters are introduced, every strata of society is woven into a tale that seems to be vaguely related to a court case, but the reader can begin to wonder what, if anything, it’s all about. Then suddenly he realizes he is in the hands of a magician. All those disparate characters and plot strands are connected and have been artfully arranged to lead to a climactic finale.
To do something like this over a series of novels, to orchestrate a large cast, a complex plot and sustain it over many years and even generations is an amazing feat. And thus a rare one. Too often a series seems like a cheap marketing trick to sell more units, rather than an artistic necessity. On the few occasions when it does work, you reach the final page not necessarily wanting more, but entirely satisfied that the journey has been worth the pains.
Sometimes you are even tempted to read it all over again to discover how the trick was done. But magicians rarely divulge their secrets. Perhaps they don’t know themselves, because few, perhaps none, have ever repeated such a feat twice.