Today I am on The Guardian books blog talking about the ingredients of a blockbuster.
Here’s the piece.
The ingredients for a blockbuster novel
Big, brash and frequently brutal, it is a genre unto itself.
“What I really want to read is a proper, old-fashioned blockbuster like they used to do. You know?” a friend said to me a couple of years ago. And I did know. I knew exactly the sort of book she was talking about. That conversation planted the seed of the idea which became my first novel, Luxury, which is just that – an old-fashioned blockbuster, brought bang up to date.
When I started writing Luxury, I did a lot of thinking about what makes a novel a blockbuster, as opposed to a saga, or chick lit. While the traditional definition of a blockbuster is simply a mega-seller, like their cinematic counterparts, to call a book a blockbuster implies something more than simply selling in droves – although of course one always hopes they will do that as well.
I did a lot of reading around the subject, devouring reams of exotic locations and deliciously deviant behaviour. I read Shirley Conran, Irvin Shaw, Tom Wolfe, Jackie Collins, Sally Beauman. I started making lots of lists, of the “essential ingredients” of a blockbuster.
Blockbusters are, invariably, long. There is no such thing as a slim blockbuster. They make their presence felt on the bookshelf with their heft and, frequently, the raised metallic lettering on their spines. Luxury is, if anything, at the svelter end of the scale, at around 550 pages; they can easily run into four figures.
These are big books not just physically, but in every way. The lives of the characters in a blockbuster happen on a grand scale. Poverty is extreme, the frequently chronicled rise to stratospheric wealth even more so. There is little in the way of middle ground. Addiction devastates, ambition turbo-charges, passion fuels an inferno. Whether it is the sexily scandalous Hollywood excesses of Jackie Collins, or the catastrophic meltdown of Atlantan titan of business Charlie Croker in A Man in Full, these are lives lived in technicolour.
Blockbusters often span both decades and continents, skipping through years and countries with ease. There is usually a major city involved, often counterpointed by a country escape, or a remote and exotic location. In Luxury this role is played by an elite and ultra-exclusive private island hotel which caters to the every whim of its pampered and famous guests; in Conran’s Savages, one of the greatest blockbusters ever, almost all of the action takes place on the desert island where the characters are marooned, their city lifestyles a distant memory.
People very often aren’t nice in blockbusters. These are not the sympathetic characters of chick lit, the sweet girls searching for love. Instead, here are characters who can walk into a room and ask, “Which one of you bitches is my mother?” (in Shirley Conran’s Lace) or who, like my own Nicolo Flores, are so consumed by envy and the addictive desire for revenge that they spend most of their lives trying to bring down the friend who betrayed them.
Blockbusters teem with detail: great chorus lines of supporting characters, colourful backdrops, jewels and glamour and sex. They are page-turners, where story comes first – though this doesn’t mean they can’t be literary as well – Irvin Shaw’s Rich Man, Poor Man, is a perfect example, and there’s plenty of Dickens that would, if it were written today, fall neatly into the blockbuster category.
They are the literary version of the cinematic epic, of a huge sandwich loaded up with all of your favourite things, of a box set of Dynasty. A shameless guilty pleasure.
