Top 10 parallel narratives

What makes a novel a novel? The word comes from the Latin novus, meaning new, via the Italian novella storia, “new story”, so it can seem a contradiction in terms when someone protests that a book “is not a novel”. The very definition suggests something original, unfamiliar – and yet one knows what the disappointed reader means. The parts don’t add up to a satisfying whole; the new story feels too disjointed or unfinished; the two or eight or 28 chapters don’t sufficiently cohere.

For many novelists, however, it’s precisely a traditional sense of continuity and completion that one simultaneously resists and pursues via novel means. One way writers have gone about this is by juxtaposing narratives whose plots have no apparent (or immediately apparent) intersecting points.

Philip Hensher wrote about such parallel narratives here in 2014, and while some of my own choices fit neatly into this category I have also selected examples of “parallelism” by other means, including within a single storyline. Of course, to be parallel in the purest sense, narratives mustn’t intersect or converge at all, whereas “parallel narratives” as we’ve come to understand them do — if not plotwise then thematically, and obviously their author is always an element in common. But maybe only with the impure parallels of our art can we evoke the true parallels of our world, including the impassable gaps between art and nature, memory and reality, one human consciousness and the next. (“And maybe east and west really are eternally irreconcilable,” wonders a character in my own parallel-narrative novel of sorts, Asymmetry, “like a curve and its asymptote, geometrically fated never to intersect.”)

Through parallelism, a novelist might achieve a more realistic impression of the world’s multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple angles, multiple mirrors – whose reflections are sometimes all we have to bridge the divide. These are our antidote to what Louise Glück has called “a metaphysical claustrophobia: the bleak fate of being always one person”.

Source: theguardian