Has there ever been an autumn season so rich in fat books? George RR Martin's latest fantasy whopper, A Dance with Dragons (1,040 pages), was swiftly followed by Neal Stephenson's sci-fi epic Reamde (912); and their efforts will be joined on Tuesday by Stephen King's 11.22.63, depicting a time-travelling teacher seeking to prevent John F Kennedy's assassination, which, while failing to match the 1,074 pages of King's previous novel, Under the Dome, still asserts that he can keep up with the upstarts in reality-altering fiction by coming in at 740 pages.
Literary authors have contributed to this bumper harvest too, with Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, itself not lacking in sci-fi elements, doing most to destroy forests with a three-volume combined pagination just short of the virility-verifying 1,000-page marker. Also in autumnal lit fic, Adam Levin's The Instructions and Peter Nadas's Parallel Stories both managed to produce 1,000-plus pagers. And that's what's changed about the size issue today – it cuts across publishing's class system.
A lot of commercial fiction has always been weighty, from Victorian three-decker novels via Gone with the Wind to Harold Robbins and Jilly Cooper. Reacting against this in the 20th century, classier writers regularly differentiated themselves (from both market-pandering scribblers and their wordy Victorian predecessors) by producing slimmer books – if they wanted to make a bigger statement, as with Marcel Proust, John Dos Passos and Anthony Powell, they wrote sequences of novels that were normal size. The era's sci-fi, fantasy and crime classics were also easily portable. Ulysses and The Lord of the Rings were one-off monsters.
The grip of modernism's anti-bulk bias lasted, with some exceptions, until the 60s; and so did the idea that you should be able to stick pulp fiction in your pocket, not your backpack. Then, in 1965, Frank Herbert produced 600 pages of Dune, which with its sequels has arguably influenced Martin's Fire and Ice sequence; and the next 15 years saw a run of saga-size literary novels that included Gravity's Rainbow, Midnight's Children and The Name of the Rose, with postmodernism (feast on past literature!) and magic realism (feast on your country!) both encouraging authorial indulgence.
This initiated today's class-neutral obesity epidemic, with award-winning authors making their mark through hefty tomes (Robert Bolano's 2666, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall), while best-selling genre fiction (JK Rowling's later Harry Potter books, Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy) is often beefier than ever, and now features series entirely made up of extra-large novels – Martin's five-book series (one in two parts) so far totals 5,000 pages, and King's long-running The Dark Tower project, with an eighth title due out soon, is even longer.
The process has peaked, intriguingly, in transitional times when paperbacks will soon all become ebooks, if book trade prophets are right. What this means for long-winded authors is hard to judge – will they benefit (and perhaps write even fatter whoppers) because the disincentive of having to lug heavy novels around and rest them on your tummy disappears? Or suffer because readers become more aware of the eye-fatigue associated with ebooks the longer a book continues? Maybe the former is likelier: HarperCollins has just identified A Dance with Dragons as one of its biggest digital sellers of the past year.
