This week I chanced upon watching the movie ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society’, based on the recent bestselling novel. A relative rarity among novel forms of late, Guernsey Literary Etc. took the form of an epistolary novel, a conceit of plot and character-construction through letters from various characters. The movie version is a decent little movie; a relatively faultless evocation of a historical period, filmed mostly in charming rural locations and unscathed by any actor in it feeling a need to loudly bloviate on current social trends and controversies, at least as far as I know about.
Anyway, the epistolary novel isn’t much done these days; the last mega-huge bestseller in that form that I remember reading of my own free will was 1965’s Up The Down Staircase – a chaotic year in the life of an idealistic young schoolteacher on her first year in an interestingly dysfunctional urban school. Dysfunction then meant smoking cigarettes out behind the trash cans and dropping cherry bombs in the boys’ lavatory toilets, which seems rather charmingly retro, in comparison to present-day open riot in the hallways and violent assault in the classroom. Staircase was also made into a movie starring Sandy Dennis.
But the epistolary form was once overwhelmingly popular, especially in the 18th century. What has been accepted as the first-ever novel in English, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; Or Virtue Rewarded established the form. That novel began as a series of template letters, newly-literate, newly-well-to-do gentlemen and ladies, for the use of, only Richardson wished to incorporate moral lessons in the template letters and so created a narrative and characters to hang the letters upon. Pamela turned out to be so wildly popular on that merit that Richardson followed it with another such, even longer and more operatic: Clarissa Or the History of a Young Lady. This featured a young woman of imperishable virtue and her moral victory over a scheming vile seducer, who was not above kidnapping, drugging and rape of the heroine. This was also made into a miniseries in 1991, with Sean Bean as the vile seducer. He dies in the end, as is his customary habit in most (not all) movies and miniseries episodes in which he appears.
There are advantages to telling a story thusly; it is outright fun for a writer to basically create a character monolog and put on another voice and style, for however long or short – and sometimes very short. I’ve done a partial-epistolary in My Dear Cousin, and incorporated letters from characters in some of my other books. (Truckee, The Adelsverein Trilogy, That Fateful Lightning.) It’s also an excellent means of incorporating a necessary info-dump or inserting a shorter account of what would be a tediously lengthy scene or account of a necessary sequence if done in full narration. There is scope for a modern version, with emails, memos-for-record, messages and blog posts, so the format is not exhausted by any means.
There are some disadvantages to writing a completely epistolary novel; it is all a sequence of monologues, and with a good writer, the character voice of every letter-writing character ought to be distinctive, differentiated from each other on the page. Given that not many scribblers of letters are given to write like a reporter, descriptions and conversations are … often sketchy, and more implied than actually included verbatim. I suspect that totally epistolary novels must be carefully planned and plotted in advance so as to be certain of including every necessary detail. The other disadvantage shows up more clearly in novels like Richardson’s Clarissa, wherein a five-minute long incident or conversation becomes the basis for a pages-long letter describing it in exhaustive detail. A brief sliver of action is measured off in yards, and yards and yards of verbiage which would have taken hours to write, giving one to wonder if these characters really did anything without a ream of paper in one hand, and an inkpot and pen in the other to memorialize the moment, rather like 18th century verbal selfie.
Discuss as you will – what other interesting epistolary or semi-epistolary novels are out there today?
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