Dublin Opinion

Thomas Jones unpicks James Wood’s How Fiction Works and finds that a critic who declares himself an enemy of literary theory can also find himself out of the loop when it comes to history too.

He has a strong sense of literary history - divided into two periods, pre- and post-Flaubert - but his sense of other kinds of history is less reliable, and sometimes fails him dismally.

He spends two pages earnestly unpicking a sentence that amuses him in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: ‘Mr Casey… got those three cramped fingers making a birthday present for Queen Victoria.’ For Wood, this sentence is full of ‘comedy and liveliness’ because it is ‘made up of two mysterious details’, with ‘insufficient detail in one area and over-specific detail in another’.

But the joke here is entirely on the fact-deprived Wood. There is no mystery. What Mr Casey means is that he was an Irish revolutionary prisoner, detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, sentenced to hard labour picking oakum in a British jail.

Fiction works by means of a complex, continuous, three-way interaction between writers, readers and the world, leaving none of them unchanged. Novels can help us to read the world better; but sometimes the world, all too often absent from Wood’s criticism, can help us to read novels better, too.