Is the trend for epic movies and hefty novels getting too much? Our critics redress the balance with a classic compilation of shorter works – plus 10 long ones that are worth your time
, the third highest-grossing film of all time, spills on for three hours 12 minutes. Is the idea that sitting in a cinema interminably makes it more of an event, earns you epic stripes as a cinema-goer – makes you a co-hero along with Batman ? Or are you more likely to be furtively checking the time in the dark?
Length seems to be becoming dangerously confused with artistic prestige – as though short equals superficial or critically lightweight. According to publisher Flipsnack, novels have been getting longer for a couple of decades. The average length of those on the Booker prize shortlist, in 2019, was 530 pages.
Evelyn Waugh once said there was nothing, no matter how momentous, that you couldn’t fit on to the back of a postcard That might be positive, but the dangers of valuing length in and of itself could not be clearer. We seem to be coming adrift from the trim advice that dominated a generation of early and mid-20th-century writers. EM Forster championed brevity, once remarking, “One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.” Ernest Hemingway advised: “To be successful in writing, use short sentences.
Evelyn Waugh once said there was nothing, no matter how momentous, that you couldn’t fit onto the back of a postcard. He would have loved Dorothy Parker’s joke of a poem, entitled Two-Volume Novel:Shakespeare’s compulsive talker Polonius declared “Brevity is the soul of wit”, but his garrulous inability to embody his own wisdom indirectly killed him.
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