The Last Novel
Artistic journeys don’t have destinations.
Rome 2016
Desk Notes explores writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.
A careful reader is like a detective at a murder scene. They arrive, take a skeptical glance around, and try to figure out what happened. There’s always a clue within the words. Fingerprints from the author. A message between the lines. A careful reader dissects paragraphs, sentences, looks for the revelations inherent to the language. And every writer knows that they can’t truly hide: the words always hint toward the truth.
Last night, I started Silverview, the final novel by John le Carré—a writer forever confined to the espionage shelf, despite his literary flair. Final novels imply unreasonable expectations, especially from a writer with a large stack of past novels. Thus final novels are particularly suited to detective work. A reader wants to discover the grand conclusion, a mark of exclamation that shuts the oeuvre. And Silverview, completed just before the author’s death, arrives with the intrigue of any lost scroll. Here’s an early line that caught my eye:
Last night, after hours of solitary stocktaking, he had climbed the stairs to his newly converted attic flat above the shop to discover he had neither electric power nor running water.
If granted time for a full edit, would the word solitary be struck from the above sentence? I’m not feverish to strike down all adjectives—an unfortunate fashion today—yet this word seems misplaced. In past novels, John le Carré had no ambivalence about fiddling with tenses and grade-school grammar for a more lively effect; rather than any allegiance to a stuffy rulebook, he rightly preferred clarity and spice and intensity in his narrative voice. Would he have also removed the first had in the above sentence? The had serves its purpose to establish the past perfect tense, but le Carré found that purpose inadequate in previous novels—when he favored a spirited narrative voice over the meretricious accuracy of the past perfect tense. A single word or sentence is a trifle, though my sense is that this novel isn’t quite done. All the ingredients are primed, there are characters and conflicts and a sharp storyline, yet it has been taken from the oven a bit too early.
Explore writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.
An unfinished manuscript should give a reader an indelicate sensation. You are peeping: staring at a naked text, one full of blemishes and faults. Perhaps there’s no greater horror for the writer—that peculiar person who obsesses about the perfect order of words—then the exposure of unpolished sentences. Of course history is filled with examples of incomplete, imperfect, unresolved works. We find Albert Camus’ final novel, The First Man, in a sloppy manuscript beside the car crash that killed him; Vladimir Nabokov’s final novel, The Original of Laura, comes to us thirty years after his death and against his wishes; we can include Mark Twain, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, David Foster Wallace, and countless other writers to the list.
If you make writing your life, it’s worth considering, the odds are slim that your last novel will conclude right when your time concludes. Because tomorrow will always bring a new idea. A fresh question. Another impulse to chase. Artistic journeys, alas, don’t have destinations. There’s always another train, and there’s always a distant station, as the journey itself never ends.
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