An extraordinary author dead at 79

Jamie says:

12:11pm | 23/11/12

April Fools Day is still the only book that has ever broken me down. Such a heartbreaking, but beautiful read.
Thank you Bryce

Audra Blue says:

12:51pm | 23/11/12

How sad that such a beloved author is now more.

I could never get into Bryce’s books.  I didn’t find them terribly interesting.

St. Michael says:

01:41pm | 23/11/12

Personally speaking I could never really get into Courtenay’s books - for whatever reason his writing style or something about it didn’t click with me.

On the other hand, he had three other important attributes which made me like him:

(1) He believed this country held itself in mediocrity, but he also believed in its potential and always wanted more for it.  I remember an old interview - we’re talking 15 years ago now - in which he basically said “If we’re going to pull our beloved country out of the shit, we will not do it by living safe, pro forma lives.”

(2) Even if I didn’t like his stories as such, I respect and admire his craft by virtue of him having sold a lot of books.  He talked the talk and had the sales to prove it worked.  That makes his advice on writing worth thinking about.  Popularity, like it or not, is one hallmark of a well-told story, even if the prose (Twilight, for example) makes you want to claw your eyes out, because it connects with a wide, wide array of readers.

Consider advertising writers, of which Courtenay was one for decades before he started in fiction (although given he was in advertising you might say he always was writing fiction).  They have to grab your attention, make an emotional impact, get what may be a complex concept across as simply as possible, as quick as possible, and as memorably as possible - in a manner of seconds.  Courtenay treated his novel writing like his ad writing, and I’d wager that’s a big part of its popularity and its success.

(3) He hated the artifice and the cultural cringe of career literati, and he wasn’t backward about calling Peter Carey (who was himself a former ad man) in particular an uppity arsehole: http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/06/09/peter-careys-a-snob-bryce-courtenay-in-defence-of-popular-storytelling/#respond

Let me clarify: this doesn’t mean I hate F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books or John Steinbeck’s books.  I hate pretentious literati, not great books.  Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck, they all wrote beautiful, brilliant pieces of work if you’re prepared to sit down and really savour them word by word.  No doubt about it; some of the authors who stay with us were brilliant.  Enduring popularity is the mark of a great book—something that speaks across the ages—but contemporary popularity is, like it or not, a pretty good indicator of something going right with a book.

For example, people can and should mash Dan Brown and The Da Vinci Code.  Brown’s stories are a lot more comfortable in the fantasy section of the bookshop next to JRR Tolkien than sitting next to, say, James Michener.  But Brown knows pacing and how to trail the bread crumbs of a mystery; how to keep a reader’s heart rate up, keep them turning the pages.

Or look at James Michener: dozens of location-based books (Poland, Centennial, South Pacific, Space)—generatioal sagas one and all.  Not so much “pace” as “crawling”.  But he sold in the millions, too—because he becomes the reader’s avatar.  He goes to the places he writes about, and when he writes, he puts you there.  And he knows his locations.

Courtneay was an unashamed popular writer, and good on him for being so.  Maybe part of it is that he started writing so late—at 55, he was a mature man, had much of his life and had nothing to prove to anyone.  What a wonderfully refreshing attitude to have compared to the excuses for authors we fund on government grants for much of their careers.