Inheritors

And what they copy

The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, compiled by Richard Lancelyn Green

I won’t, because it would spoil the point of the exercise, tell you what happens in these stories. If you want to read them, you want to read them without either forewarning or my comments. And so I will talk instead, if you’ll permit me, about pastiche.

This is not and ought not to be considered, a truly ancient art. Although there would have been no Senecan plays without the Greeks, no Shakespeare without Plutarch and Holinshed, and so on, this is not what we are concerned with. Nor, really, are we thinking about parody. Our greatest parodists are not trying to continue the story. They are not working with much of a sprit of affection. It is a different game they’re in.

Some have said that with the internet and the rise of fan-fiction, pastiche has become subsumed and has been rendered out of date. People are big fans of things. They want to speculate about them endlessly, to talk among themselves. There’s the one format for doing so: criticism. That’s the True Romance ‘get a piece of pie and talk about the film you just saw’ style. (It’s all Twitter is for, really.) And there is the other, which is the metaphorical child with a stick, pretending it’s a sword. People want to continue the adventure in narrative, not in criticism. They want to add, to add despite the fact they are not the authors.

Fan-fiction is, for all its legal ups and downs, largely the literary equivalent of children playing with toys. Unless you get a legal letter, no one is going to tell you as a small child that Optimus Prime of Transformers fame and Batman were not friends or foes. No one is going to care. Fan-fiction is the formalisation of that. You like Holmes and Watson, you like this or that character, and so you spin it out in you own mind. Think of new settings for them, new situations. Once this kind of thing might have been kept in notebooks. Now it’s read by millions.

Here’s a distinction I’m prepared to defend between fan-fiction and pastiche. Much fan-fiction is really fan-service. It’s taking characters from properties that are known and giving them new things to do. In many ways, it is impersonating the character. ‘OK, OK,’ someone says, ‘I’m Jotaro Kujo, and me and my friends ...’

‘I’m with Achilles at the siege of Troy, and I’d tell him ...’

Whereas pastiche, by contrast, is really about impersonating the author. It’s about getting closer to the hearts of the matter. It’s about the treatment of stories and ideas. On the level of language, parody can be so easy as to be an insult to everyone: writer, reader, the person being impersonated or sent-up. How many people truly believe they can impersonate, for example, D. H. Lawrence or Shirley Jackson or Hemingway? How any of them have actually, really succeeded in doing that? None I know of. For most parodists, it’s an easy day’s work; it’s donning fancy dress. It’s a cheap laugh.

Pastiche is, at least in theory, something else. Most pastiches fail. They lack texture and subtlety. They mistake the importing of certain features from a story for channelling its essence. (Most TV and film adaptations, either of novels or non-fiction, fail for similar reasons. They have no spirit of the original, just a series of incidents or tics, stolen.)

The world is full of continuation novels. It is the era of big estates doing big deals to license ‘official’ or ‘canonical’ sequels to big sellers. There’s something mechanical in it. But as it breaks confinement to the thriller genre and trades off the names of long-dead authors whose estates were sold to asset managers, things happen. There are long-dead writers for whom big multimedia expanded universes are imagined.

But there are better pastiches. More noble efforts. Some of them are so vivid they exist in a different way. They are not only Dr Watson or Holmes, or any other character. (Write a novel about Woolf’s Orlando. Say whatever you want. Someone would publish it, these days.)

The best pastiches do more. It’s seeing further, imbibing the original. It’s thinking truly as the author would. It’s looking into a story and doing one’s best to make it exist again, to have new life.