Musicians do it. Playwrights do it. Scientists do it. As for novelists, they’re fussier about collaborations, working together only under special circumstances. A recent example is Fourteen Days, a book edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston. It features a diverse set of other writers such as Emma Donoghue, Dave Eggers, John Grisham, Mira Jacob, and Erica Jong.
Fourteen Days has been compared with Boccaccio’s Decameron, and is set in a down-at-heel New York City building during the height of the Covid pandemic. Residents gather on the roof and tell each other stories of themselves and those they have known, forming a mosaic of love, loss and lived lives. To discover who has written which tale, you have to turn to the end – but it’s more fun to guess before checking the final list.
There have been earlier literary tag-teams. In a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Margaret Drabble recalls taking part in “a communal novel” to publicise a cultural festival in the '70s. The 20 writers involved – including Olivia Manning, Piers Paul Read, and Melvyn Bragg - knew only the chapter immediately before and after their own. Drabble and B.S. Johnson invented the characters and the framework, and wrote the opening and closing sections. To whet appetites, a cash prize was offered to the reader who could correctly allocate the chapters to their respective authors.
As it turned out, recalls Drabble, no one won the prize. Looking back, she admits that even she doesn’t remember who wrote which section, and “couldn’t even identify my own paragraphs”. The book is more or less unreadable, “but it does, if you plough on with it, give you a sense of the zeitgeist”.
Such volumes can be likened to book-length versions of the game of Exquisite Corpse, in which multiple players create a story, poem, or drawing one piece at a time, without seeing the previous contributions. Players take turns adding to a folded piece of paper, and the results, sometimes absurd and sometimes hilarious, are revealed only at the end. (As an aside, the name is believed to have originated from the first phrase generated when a group of Surrealists started playing the game.)
It’s understandable that a collaboration in its true sense is considered a novelty when the novel is viewed as the product of a unique vision and voice. We’re all in thrall to the Romantic-era notion of the artist being a solitary genius visited by the Muse. Yet, there have been some works born of a meeting of minds from the start.
Collaborative efforts among Victorian authors were not the norm, but not uncommon. Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins worked on short stories together; the satirical The Diary of a Nobody was written by the brothers George and Weedon Grossmith; and Rudyard Kipling and Wolcott Balestier created The Naulakha, which, as it turned out, was received with less than fervent enthusiasm.
Genres like horror and fantasy, with their established conventions, make it easier for authorial partnerships to bear fruit. Friendship and a healthy respect for each other’s work lubricate the process. Notable examples are Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens, and Stephen King and Peter Straub’s The Talisman and its sequel, Black House.
Marital relationships can help. Nicci French is the pseudonym for the husband-and-wife team of Nicci Gerrard and Sean French, who have written a series of bestselling psychological thrillers. Complementary expertise also comes in handy: Ambrose Parry, the credited author of the Raven and Fisher mystery series set in Victorian Edinburgh, is a partnership between Chris Brookmyre and Marisa Haetzman, the former an author in his own right and the latter a consultant anaesthetist. Closer home, surgeons Ishrat Syed and Kalpana Swaminathan write together as Kalpish Ratna, exploring the interplay between science and the humanities.
With the rise of large language models, collaborative novels may well enter a new phase, that of a partnership between novelist and machine. A recent example is Ross Goodwin’s 1 the Road, which emulated Kerouac’s On the Road. The book was written with inputs from an AI model connected to sensors attached to a car that Goodwin drove from New York to New Orleans. The results were idiosyncratic, even erratic. Not a very exquisite corpse, after all.
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