Unmannered crime
Unmannered crime
Whereas "impressionist" was once intended as an insult but later became a label for a recognisable style of art, the word "mannerist" was once intended as a label for a recognisable style of art but later became a form of insult.
I live in a city, Rome, where mannerist and baroque art and architecture prevail, far more than in Florence, which is where you want to go if prefer the earlier period, the High Renaissance. Rome has much beauty, but is also a heavy and exhausting place that seems tired of its own history compared with the airy elegance of many Tuscan-Renaissance towns.
When "mannerist" is intended as a term of abuse, it is used to suggest a lack of authenticity in a work of art. A mannerist work might be accused of preferring style to substance, of showing off, of being a bit jaded, a bit "clever" and rather overdone.
The term comes from the innocent Italian word maniera, meaning style. If an artist had a "maniera", he had a recognizable style, and he was therefore a "mannerist". I believe the reason that "mannerist" became a slightly derogatory term has to do with a human instinct both to admire and to distrust excessive accomplishment. An artist who has enormous skills, who has a notable style and has mastered the techniques painstakingly acquired by his or her predecessors, an artist who does not have to worry about themes, or work out the rules of perspective like Brunelleschi had to – in other words, a supremely qualified artist who can draw on a rich heritage, will have the luxury of being able to add an extra dash of style and manner, but will also have to bear the burden of accusation of unoriginality and glibness. He or she may well be seen as no longer trying hard enough, no longer making mistakes, no longer producing very bad as well as very good works. Even an artist such as Michelangelo who drove the Renaissance forward can be said to have become a mannerist in his later days, once he had settled down and found the mode of representation that suited him most.
I feel that English-language literary fiction has been stuck for a long time in a mannerist phase. I do not think the same is true for genre fiction, or at least for crime. Our genre is massively overpopulated, overpublished, overdone, oversold and omnipresent. There is way too much of it everywhere, and so much of it is, frankly, awful. This badness, however, can be a sign of rude health, especially when it comes from interesting practitioners who are still trying and failing rather than always succeeding.
In recent years, crime has begun to gobble up other genres such as historical fiction, romance, science fiction, comic fiction. It has even overstepped the boundaries of fiction itself and taken on the non-fiction canon, with police procedurals that read like study notes for aspiring cops, murder mysteries that turn into scientific or legal textbooks. Some (Camilleri) include cookbooks inside their pages, many are like tourist guides to cities around the world, others contain treatise on subjects ranging from sociology (a lot of that) computing and genetics to church-building and electricity distribution (Grasshopper by Barbara Vine).
Crime may be a big bubble due to burst like an Irish property market, and it certainly could do with some puncturing, but it is also a genre on the move, hungry and still searching. It has overreached itself because it is still in flux and won't settle down. It is therefore no coincidence that the branch of crime fiction that is most "mannerist", the branch that has stopped thrashing wildly about in search of themes and seems happy to play elegant variations on its past glories, is the "Whodunit". I suspect it is simply a question of maturity, since the whodunit (or, the "cosy" as those who dislike the form often call it) is also the oldest kind of crime writing, the one that began with ETA Hoffmann, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe and Willkie Collins at the end of the 19th century. Whether the apex of this form is Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Dorothy Sayers, Earle Stanley Gardner, PD James or any other of the eligible candidates past and present is open to debate, but it is definitely of a "quieter" and more mannered disposition. Buyers of, say, Donna Leon, are like visitors to a certain type of gallery. They read the books with complicity and understanding, much as connoisseurs in the 16th century will have read and understood the symbols, allusions, style and themes of a painting.
There are plenty of other intra-crime niches where the writing is similarly "mannered", skilled and appreciated, but the genre as a whole remains a big, messy, occasionally violent and clumsy adolescent that is still growing towards maturity. As the genre continues to evolve, it also draws in - or generates - certain writers whose output is undoubtedly "literary" and even intellectual in intent and effect.
Meanwhile, all literary fiction seems stuck in the mannerist era, making the occasional half-hearted foray into experimental prose. Perhaps the problem with certain very fine contemporary writers such as, in no particular order, James Lasdun, Alan Hollinghurst, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis (yes, absolutely), Ian McEwan, Justin Cartwright, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Kazuo Ishiguro, J.M. Coetzee et al. is that individually, they are simply too good, which often raises envious hackles, and collectively they are diminished by the long and glorious tradition that has preceded them. One of the characteristics of a classical or renaissance period is that bad writing was allowed to flourish even among the Greats, especially among them. Nowadays, practitioners who have the legacy available to them are expected to do better, and they do, but I am not sure this necessarily works either to their or to our benefit. Good contemporary writers are condemned to always being good, always writing better sentences than most of those that Dickens or Thackeray cobbled together, yet never approaching either of those writers for scope and importance. It might do Coetzee good to write a few lousy paragraphs.
For all that crime has had some greats, it has nothing to compare with the giants of the literary novel, for which we who attempt to write the stuff should be grateful.
Whereas "impressionist" was once intended as an insult but later became a label for a recognisable style of art, the word "mannerist" was once intended as a label for a recognisable style of art but later became a form of insult.
I live in a city, Rome, where mannerist and baroque art and architecture prevail, far more than in Florence, which is where you want to go if prefer the earlier period, the High Renaissance. Rome has much beauty, but is also a heavy and exhausting place that seems tired of its own history compared with the airy elegance of many Tuscan-Renaissance towns.
When "mannerist" is intended as a term of abuse, it is used to suggest a lack of authenticity in a work of art. A mannerist work might be accused of preferring style to substance, of showing off, of being a bit jaded, a bit "clever" and rather overdone.
The term comes from the innocent Italian word maniera, meaning style. If an artist had a "maniera", he had a recognizable style, and he was therefore a "mannerist". I believe the reason that "mannerist" became a slightly derogatory term has to do with a human instinct both to admire and to distrust excessive accomplishment. An artist who has enormous skills, who has a notable style and has mastered the techniques painstakingly acquired by his or her predecessors, an artist who does not have to worry about themes, or work out the rules of perspective like Brunelleschi had to – in other words, a supremely qualified artist who can draw on a rich heritage, will have the luxury of being able to add an extra dash of style and manner, but will also have to bear the burden of accusation of unoriginality and glibness. He or she may well be seen as no longer trying hard enough, no longer making mistakes, no longer producing very bad as well as very good works. Even an artist such as Michelangelo who drove the Renaissance forward can be said to have become a mannerist in his later days, once he had settled down and found the mode of representation that suited him most.
I feel that English-language literary fiction has been stuck for a long time in a mannerist phase. I do not think the same is true for genre fiction, or at least for crime. Our genre is massively overpopulated, overpublished, overdone, oversold and omnipresent. There is way too much of it everywhere, and so much of it is, frankly, awful. This badness, however, can be a sign of rude health, especially when it comes from interesting practitioners who are still trying and failing rather than always succeeding.
In recent years, crime has begun to gobble up other genres such as historical fiction, romance, science fiction, comic fiction. It has even overstepped the boundaries of fiction itself and taken on the non-fiction canon, with police procedurals that read like study notes for aspiring cops, murder mysteries that turn into scientific or legal textbooks. Some (Camilleri) include cookbooks inside their pages, many are like tourist guides to cities around the world, others contain treatise on subjects ranging from sociology (a lot of that) computing and genetics to church-building and electricity distribution (Grasshopper by Barbara Vine).
Crime may be a big bubble due to burst like an Irish property market, and it certainly could do with some puncturing, but it is also a genre on the move, hungry and still searching. It has overreached itself because it is still in flux and won't settle down. It is therefore no coincidence that the branch of crime fiction that is most "mannerist", the branch that has stopped thrashing wildly about in search of themes and seems happy to play elegant variations on its past glories, is the "Whodunit". I suspect it is simply a question of maturity, since the whodunit (or, the "cosy" as those who dislike the form often call it) is also the oldest kind of crime writing, the one that began with ETA Hoffmann, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allen Poe and Willkie Collins at the end of the 19th century. Whether the apex of this form is Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Dorothy Sayers, Earle Stanley Gardner, PD James or any other of the eligible candidates past and present is open to debate, but it is definitely of a "quieter" and more mannered disposition. Buyers of, say, Donna Leon, are like visitors to a certain type of gallery. They read the books with complicity and understanding, much as connoisseurs in the 16th century will have read and understood the symbols, allusions, style and themes of a painting.
There are plenty of other intra-crime niches where the writing is similarly "mannered", skilled and appreciated, but the genre as a whole remains a big, messy, occasionally violent and clumsy adolescent that is still growing towards maturity. As the genre continues to evolve, it also draws in - or generates - certain writers whose output is undoubtedly "literary" and even intellectual in intent and effect.
Meanwhile, all literary fiction seems stuck in the mannerist era, making the occasional half-hearted foray into experimental prose. Perhaps the problem with certain very fine contemporary writers such as, in no particular order, James Lasdun, Alan Hollinghurst, Julian Barnes, Martin Amis (yes, absolutely), Ian McEwan, Justin Cartwright, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Kazuo Ishiguro, J.M. Coetzee et al. is that individually, they are simply too good, which often raises envious hackles, and collectively they are diminished by the long and glorious tradition that has preceded them. One of the characteristics of a classical or renaissance period is that bad writing was allowed to flourish even among the Greats, especially among them. Nowadays, practitioners who have the legacy available to them are expected to do better, and they do, but I am not sure this necessarily works either to their or to our benefit. Good contemporary writers are condemned to always being good, always writing better sentences than most of those that Dickens or Thackeray cobbled together, yet never approaching either of those writers for scope and importance. It might do Coetzee good to write a few lousy paragraphs.
For all that crime has had some greats, it has nothing to compare with the giants of the literary novel, for which we who attempt to write the stuff should be grateful.
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