Beyond Good & Evil at the London Book Fair

THE LONDON BOOK FAIR kicked off this morning at Earl's Court. After passing through the floor, I stopped by one of the seminars sponsored by New York Review of Books entitled "All About Evil: Noir Fiction," featuring John Banville, John Gray and Christopher Priest, which overlapped somewhat with the panel on genre fiction hosted by the National Book Critics Circle in March.

Anyone who sat at the New School in March and bristled against any blanket generalizations that genre fiction is somehow unserious would have been cheered. One of the overarching themes of the discussion was how crime fiction -- noir fiction in particular -- has pioneered story-telling in what some panelists took to calling "the post-religious age." Moderator Edwin Frank mentioned Wilkie Collins and Simeon, but other names which came up were Patricia Highsmith, James M. Cain and Richard Stark.

Almost all of the panelists took issue with the word evil. "There is no photon of evil," Banville argued. Priest argued evil was what we didn't understand. Gray said it was simply a banal concept that allowed us to not discuss "the real issues." At the end of the discussion when someone from the audience asked for a few recent fictional personifications of evil, Priest shot back: "I thought we just spent the past hour saying evil has no place in art."

This isn't to say that characters don't do very bad things -- it's just there isn't a good vocabulary for it, the panelists argued. Banville read a section of "The Book of Evidence" to illustrate "the poverty of language when it comes to describing badness." He then went on to point out that much of our fiction portrays us in a much kinder light than we deserve. "It would be a much better world if the priests and the politicians and the novelists just dropped this facade," he said. "Even the best of us are monsters, horribly selfish people. Noir simply admits this." Which, he continued, explains the sense of relief, of glee almost, we have in reading it. Gray agreed: "noir fiction release us of the baggage of morality," he said.

Not to say that the panelists cheered on amorality or the violence depicted in noir fiction. But they seemed to suggest it was a formal way to capture what we all secretly know -- that the world is a very bad place. "If we were to be aware of the sum of misery in this world at this second," Banville said, "it would kill us." One of the interesting questions the panel didn't have time to fully address was to what extent noir fiction was primarily an American genre. With no evidence to assert so, I would have to say no -- and a flyer for a Vintage Classics UK promotional program captured why. They've themed their backlist so there's Vintage Fantasy, Vintage Sin, and, of course, Vintage Crime, which spans "Crime and Punishment" and Highsmith's "Ripley's Game." Not bad bookends for what could be a really fascinating reading list. To which one can add Banville's latest Benjamin Black crime novel, which I see from the Picador fall list is slated for publication in November.

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