All too much ... Man carries a pile of books at the Hay festival 2007. Photograph: Martin Godwin
John Freeman's blog on writers who take their time between books raises the question of how we feel about those authors who barely pause for breath. If making the audience wait raises expectations that every word will have been carefully distilled over many years, then putting out a book every few months can encourage readers not to take the work seriously.
To be prolific shouldn't be a curse, and yet it has about it the miasma that hovers around all tendency to excess. If there is so much of it, can it all be quality product?
There must be a reasonable limit, but where does it lie? Beyond a certain level of productive output, the ghost of Dame Barbara Cartland materialises, recumbent on a chaise longue, dictating screeds of barely serviceable pap. In an era, however, before the domestic electronic distractions mentioned by Freeman set our daily contexts, writing could often constitute almost the entire mental armature and consuming business of a life. There is so much of Dickens that we wonder how he managed to do anything other than write, and yet only a cultural studies undergraduate would call him the Barbara Cartland of his day.
Fay Weldon has published 27 novels in 40 years - about one every 18 months, which is about as intensive as it gets. Iris Murdoch was almost as productive. Vladimir Nabokov began at a furious rate in his (and the century's) twenties, made the transition from Russian to English, and continued writing longer and shorter fiction more or less up until his death in 1977.
These achievements are the more impressive in that they all wrote (and in Weldon's case, are still writing) work informed by narrative intricacy. Painstakingly constructed plotting isn't only the preserve of the detective writer, for all that the hugely prolific Agatha Christie is said to have worked over her own plots as assiduously as the genre demanded.
Turning to forms of non-fiction, we may be struck by an even greater sense of unease. How can a historian write incessantly? Simon Schama's body of work has crossed over from the academy into the mass media, but it hasn't suffered noticeable intellectual dilution. Books to accompany TV series that take a popularising Greatest Hits approach - the three-volume History of Britain, The Power of Art - appear concurrently with meticulous documents of historical research such as. Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution.
And how about philosophical enquiry? Slavoj Zizek, for many the world's most important living thinker, releases a book about as often as guitar bands release singles - two or three a year. Shouldn't conceptual thought take a little longer in the gestation than that?
Where writers are guilty of overproduction to the eventual detriment of their work, we may regret their lack of the self-editing faculty. But the plain fact is that some are capable of prodigious output over the years, and only continue to grow in stature.
