What sense does it make to write a novel in the 21st century? As tools for expressing ideas, novel lost their usefulness at some moment during the second half of the 20th century, and from then on they were no more an art form of much significance. Maybe it was the TV, maybe the decline of literacy, maybe something else. Whatever it was, it had to happen because it happened.
Yet, it is still possible to write novels. I have been exploring a few modern attempts to do just that and the results are usually dismaying. Mostly, recent novels are hopelessly amateurish, some are so convoluted that only their authors can understand what they wanted to say.
So, I read this novel by Simon Sheridan, Australian writer who blogs at http://simonsheridan.me/. I had been reading his post on the Covid epidemics and I was impressed by his capability of dissecting the myths surrounding the story. I also read his book "The Devouring Mother," also dedicated to the epidemics. Sheridan is not a professional psychologist, but he has clearly delved in depth into Jungian psychology and myth examination.
How about this book, "The Order of the Secret Chiefs?" Well, unlike most modern novels, it is clearly the work of a professional writer. Sheridan writes of himself that:
I mostly write comedy and have a particular love of farce: tall stories with outrageous plots told in a realist style. My books are snappy and irreverent featuring everyday characters doing distinctly non-everyday things.
This paragraph describes well the "Secret Chiefs" novel. It is indeed snappy and irreverent. It moves fast in a realistic -- although wildly exaggerated modern world. The characters are clearly described, the dialog is fast-paced, and the story is full of quirks and showdowns. Professional, by all means, obviously influenced by modern screenplay writing. You can almost see in front of your eyes the movie that the novel could become.
Then, as most modern fiction, Sheridan's novel has the defect of being somewhat shallow. A novel has this enormous advantage over a visual technique such as movies, that it can tell the story from different angles and in a depth that a movie can never reach. But this novel is mostly a movie or a comedy script, almost ready to be set on stage.
The result is that characters behave as you would expect them to behave, but you never get more than a glimpse of what makes them move the way they do. The protagonist, the focal point of the story and the narrative "eye" is Adam Sampson, someone clearly looking for something, but he doesn't know what. And the readers don't either. The same is for the female counterpart of the protagonist, the Russian girl called Natashya. Sort of a femme fatale, surely sexy, but we never understand what she really wants or what she is trying to accomplish.
By far the most lovely and endearing character is the smart and quick-witted Mrs. Mitchell, who enjoys playing the role of the Russian babushka, supposed to be Natashya's grandmother, without being Russian and without speaking a single word of Russian except "Nyet." Mrs. Mitchell is the only character that evolves, at least a little, as the story goes on. The other characters remain static. At the end, they are exactly what they were at the beginning.
So, you arrive to the end of the novel with the feeling to have gone for a ride on the roller coaster of an amusement park. It was fun, sure, but what was the point? With the remarkable insight that Sheridan has, he probably understands that his novel mirrors our world: lots of noise and movement but, in the end, nothing changes. And so it goes.
