Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Why do writers ignore the world of work?

I have just finished reading PD James' latest book, and without spoiling the plot for potential readers, it involves writers and their writing and the plot was threaded through this to some extent. I remember too reading another crime thriller by Elizabeth George where the murderer was an artist, who murdered her victim as revenge for having a piece of her art destroyed.

This made me reflect on a couple of interesting thoughts.

Firstly would a piece of work you created- novel, painting, sculpture, etc - be so personally meaningful to you that you would commit murder for it? Perhaps that is a test of how good you are? Would you murder someone if they threatened your work? Perhaps literary critics should take more care.

But the second thought was, how often do we really describe a working life in a novel? I know of course that crime writers describe police work, but apart from that - how many novels really take the world of work seriously and make it an integral part of the novel? Surely we should, as for most people, that is where they spend the vast majority of their waking hours - yet sometimes we can read a novel and not believe that the world of work exists.

Oh yes the characters go to work and come back from work and so on, but how often is the workplace actually an integral part of the landscape?

I would be interested to hear of any such novels, apart from, as I said, the crime genre.

1 comment:

Leigh Russell said...

Have you read Saturday by Ian McEwan? The entire novel takes place in 24 hours.