In May, the Guardian published a list of the 100 best novels "as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide." They just gave ranks, but I was interested in total scores--how much difference is there between first and 10th place, or 10th and 100th? I also wondered if there were novelists whose votes were scattered among a number of different works, so they would do better in a ranking by authors. This article by Jarrett Kobek has a link to a spreadsheet with the choices of individual voters. I calculated scores as 10 points for a first choice, 9 for second, .... 1 for 10th.*
There were 172 voters, who selected 670 different novels. The distribution was highly skewed--the leader was Middlemarch, with 446 points, and at the other end there were 67 novels that got a single point (ie, one voter placed them tenth). To make the top 100 required only 18 points--twelve novels had exactly that total. Turning to authors, 474 received votes. The top 25:
N points Guardian
George Eliot 60 469 83.45
Virginia Woolf 64 407 84.35
Jane Austen 63 390 82.50
Leo Tolstoy 47 379 65.95
Toni Morrison 57 361 75.05
James Joyce 39 295 53
Charles Dickens 44 269 57.45
Marcel Proust 27 201 37.05
Gustave Flaubert 22 159 29.95
Vladimir Nabokov 27 157 34.85
Henry James 29 151 36.55
Gabriel García Márquez 23 126 29.30
Charlotte Brontë 21 121 27.05
F Scott Fitzgerald 21 120 27.00
Herman Melville 18 116 23.80
Emily Brontë 15 114 20.70
Fyodor Dostoevsky 17 110 22.50
Laurence Sterne 18 109 23.45
Franz Kafka 18 107 23.35
George Orwell 20 104 25.20
Kazuo Ishiguro 19 97 23.85
Chinua Achebe 15 94 19.70
Salman Rushdie 15 86 19.30
Miguel de Cervantes 11 84 15.20
Muriel Spark 16 83 20.15
On the other side, here are some well-known novelists who didn't get much support:
points
Balzac 7
Stephen Crane 9
Richard Wright 10
Zola 13
In 1998, the Modern Library offered a list of the top 100 novels published in English in the 20th century. Novels from that list that got no support in the Guardian survey include Brave New World (#5), Darkness at Noon (8), An American Tragedy (16), Native Son (20--Wright's points in the Guardian poll were for Black Boy), Henderson the Rain King (21), Sister Carrie (33), All the King's Men (36), The Heart of the Matter (40), and Lord of the Flies (41).
One pattern that seems clear is that realist novels of the 19th and early 20th century don't get much support from the Guardian voters. Why not? The basic realist plot is that an outsider tries to get somewhere but is defeated, partly by social injustice but partly by his/her flaws and bad decisions. I think that accounts for their poor showing in the Guardian survey: educated middle class people are increasingly uncomfortable with anything that seems to express a critical view of disadvantaged people. Another pattern is that novels by Americans and Europeans which are set in the rest of the world don't do well in the Guardian survey. In addition to the examples of Henderson the Rain King and The Heart of the Matter, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano ranked 11th in the Modern Library list and got only 9 points from the Guardian, which puts it about 250th. There's one big exception: Heart of Darkness gets 42 points, for a rank of 40. I think there's a reason for that: it's about the damage done by colonialism. Conrad gets only 9 points for all of his other novels (Modern Library had The Secret Agent ranked 46th, Nostromo 47th, and Heart of Darkness at 67th). Finally, two novels with political themes do well in the Guardian ranking: 1984 at 16th and The Handmaid's Tale at 36th. But that's about it--several of the Modern Library picks that got no support in the Guardian survey seem at least equally relevant to contemporary politics. Overall, the Guardian list seems to reflect the view that writers should "stay in their lanes."
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