The English novel is the story of the heroes' lives from the beginning to the end. A life in which the main intrigue lies in the turning point of the heroes' worldview. How they arrive at this turning point and how they confront it. How, in what ways, they struggle with society and with reality trying to grind them.
English romance has a special charm. Something, a certain commonality, according to which, well, if suddenly you find a novel without a cover with an indication of the author, you can immediately say: oh, so this is an English novel! What is this commonality, what is the secret of the popularity of exactly English novels: are they love or historical? Not at all in the special atmosphere of the trademark and subtle English snobbery, as one might think, although not without it, what a sin to conceal. And not in sentimentality - not even in love stories. Certainly, what English novels do not suffer from is sentimentality. But even then, really, they are not German. But is there something that unites absolutely all English novels, regardless of the century of writing?
Never before has a classic been harmed to anyone
Jane Austen. "Pride and Prejudice".
In an impoverished noble family, though with a somewhat tarnished family tree, five sisters grew up. Only after the birth of the fifth girl did the parents despair and stopped trying to give birth to an heir. Now their main headache is to get all five of them married. And the town is small, and the sisters are so unimaginably different: a beauty with a kind soul, an intellectual clever girl, a sheer punishment, an eccentric laughter and her weather-naive fool, amenable to bad influence, the fifth turned out to be a boring cleric. In essence, this is the story of how the sisters got married. About what kind of young people on this difficult path they met and about the mores of the society around them. Jane Austen is one of the first female novelists, very generous, right and left, scatters this society with impartial assessments. Simple story? Yes. But it is also extremely poetic - a story about the search for happiness, about desire and love, and about the difficult twists and turns of female characters. Mrs. Austin, weaving and unraveling the storyline, skillfully writes out the images of young young people and their parents, the motivation for actions, and, even connecting lovers, almost to the last keeps the reader on the hook of dangerous irony, putting it in the mouth of the main character.
Overcoming English Times
David Mitchell. "Cloud Atlas"
Nothing disappears. And time travel is possible. In any case, to the past for sure. It's simple: travel is rebirth. Signs are given to people to remember what was, who you were before. Perhaps, if humanity learned to read them, then a lot could be changed, a lot avoided. Unfortunately, they are lost among many similar, but meaningless and distracting. Like a mole mark, for example, it can be lost among other moles. In one of the most significant English novels of recent years, such a sign is a birthmark carrying the energy of one common soul, among people who are completely unrelated to each other genetically, living in different centuries on different continents, but united by one common fate, one story: with one beginning and one ending. A sea traveler and an adventurer lover, a journalist and a London publisher, a clone girl and one of the earthlings who survived the Apocalypse - they are all people from the Cloud, once created and forgotten by someone. But nothing disappears. The clouds now created by computer users on the world wide web are direct evidence of this.
The novel consists of six chapters, performed in various genres - from historical drama to detective story and humorous and fantastic narratives. And, despite the fact that it was written in a torn style, the action rushes by with cosmic speed. The ambiguous ending set by David Mitchell leaves hope. The hope that when humanity will be able to see a person's past fate from a piece of skin from a body, from a gene contained in this piece, to predict the future will become commonplace, it is no matter how to find out about pregnancy from two strips of test. And then, having taken out the missing link from the Cloud, the universal history can be changed.
Stephen Fry. "Tennis balls from heaven"
Like almost all novels, not research books by Stephen Fry, this book may cause disappointment in someone with its "haste" and "sketchiness". But why expect literality and boring corrosiveness from Fry? After all, this is not why millions of admirers love him. And for the fact that he knows how to open his eyes non-trivially to completely obvious things. This is exactly what Balls … is good for - a novel in which Fry took the well-known plot about Count Monte Cristo and sketched on its basis a swift and tough story about a man who was once forcibly torn out of life and just as suddenly returned to it. The politico-Internet part of the story in the novel is tightly tied to an action-packed detective story. The world of modern technologies and sophisticated opportunities, human rights and the origins of the political environment for Fry are no less important here than the motive "I am retribution, and I will retaliate", with an attempt to look into the depths of the soul of a person with a life forcibly torn in half. And yet, the main questions of the novel are, perhaps, as follows: how outside the box is a truly extraordinary person able to dispose of his suddenly returned life, is it possible, carrying out Old Testament revenge, to calculate absolutely everything and program a modern happy ending?
List of seven
A small list of English novels, selected from thousands of titles and created especially for those who want to understand at least a little the mysterious English soul: John Galsworthy. "The Forsyte Saga"; William Thackeray. "Vanity Fair"; Oscar Wilde. "The Picture of Dorian Grey"; William Golding. "Lord of the Flies"; Sue Townsend. "The Queen and I"; Martin Amis. "Money. Suicide Notes "; Joanne Rowling. A series of novels about "Harry Potter"; Hilary Mantel. "Bring in the bodies."
