The Great Philosophical Novel

I finished 'The Golden Notebook' today, which was a sobering experience in some ways; it had taken me over two months to read and in that time it had become a sort of fragile, depressed friend who articulates their problems so well and in such a fatalistic manner that you feel compelled to spend all your time with them in the futile hope that you might be able to make things better.  So it goes to follow that it wasn't the cheeriest of reads, nor the easiest, but it was an intensely absorbing one.  Sometimes I need a read that goes a bit beyond a concrete, scripted beginning, middle and end; sometimes I just want unstructured thought-insights that help me forget my own life whilst also helping me to understand it in better ways.

In fact the three books I read in succession since I moved here have all had that theme; no coherent storyline, just fragmented life stories I was able to get myself lost in.  They were by no means cheery; the first one, Halldor Laxness' 'Independent People' was beautifully compelling even though it really shouldn't have been; I guess I am the only person I know of who would be attracted to an extremely long book about a sheep farmer in rural Iceland asserting his independence, but I really was.  There was something about the darkness and the frugality of the setting and the characters' inherent resilience that I found appealing; it seemed to 'go' with the stripping back of my life and reading it was an almost meditative experience.  I will always associate that book with the beginnings of this time...this year.  It was a seminal read also for the fact that I finished it on the train, crying my eyes out over the ending and feeling there was something strange; something different about it, then realising that it was the first time in months that I had been crying over something other than my own self-indulgent life.  It felt like an epiphany of sorts.

'Crime and Punishment' and 'The Golden Notebook' followed; novels with no particular structure, and  of course I've realised that those are the type of books I like the best.  It doesn't help that my own writing follows the same unstructured pattern - the only difference being that I don't have the talent of a Lessing, a Dostoevsky or a Laxness to back it up with!  But Doris Lessing lamented in an interview printed in the back of 'The Golden Notebook' that there is no place for the 'great philosophical novel' in this day and age.  I hope she's wrong about that.  Not because I think I could write one, but because I want to continue reading them for as long as is humanly possible.