The Death Of The Novel

The Death Of The Novel

Next time you hop on a train in china you may find yourself sitting next to someone who seems far to engrossed in their last text message. If you thought no text or tweet could so completely devour someone’s attention from one end of the red line to the other. You’d be right .The latest craze to hit the shores of those , constantly one step ahead of the game ,techno savvy Chinese is the “mobile phone novel”.

Most of us have already embraced concepts such as getting our daily fix of the news online. Broadsheets were always such nuisance anyway and the idea of corresponding via letter seems positively Stone Age these days. But I had always rather hoped that some things would stay sacred and were safe from a technology makeover .The birthday card ,good quality paper the hand written in loving scrawl is a no contest with the likes of Facebook wall posts no matter how many you get. They pale in comparison with the thrill of 53cent stamp and a sealed envelope full of possibility ,maybe twenty euro from your favourite uncle .I would hold the novel in the same reserve, lovingly printed in paper or hard copy with that new book smell, which I can’t describe but we all know .

However many Chinese, don’t share my sacrosanct view of literature and are ditching their books in their millions for mobile phone novels. Mobile phone novels are creating their very own genre, like chick lit(light hearted yet steamy romances penned for poolside reading)before them mobile phone novels define themselves. The novels are pacy and paunchy ...

“ The literature needs an intense outline, a shallow writing style and a lively atmosphere. I think the length is not the real trouble,” says Shen Haobo, president of Beijing Motie.

“ it should not make people feel tired to read, each episode should not surpass four lines, and each episode has to contain a funny sentence or joke to inspire the readers not to give up, not to stop reading. This means love stories, historical stories and horror stories, as well as novelty books are the main categories of mobile phone books now,” said Xia.

Professor Zhang Yiwu, a literature professor at Peking University and one of China’s most respected commentators. Has said, that he thinks that this new breed of novel may be the death of the midsized novel as we know it. Although many would argue that Twilight saga had already sucked the life out of quality literature some time ago.

Written Chinese is a character-based language, so each word is a concise pictogram, rather than a lengthy English word made up of several letters which takes up a lot more space. For this reason the Chinese language lends it’s self very well to mobile phone novels in. It enables witters to covey a great deal in a very small amount of space.

The mobile phone novel is originally of Japanese descent, but it is Chinese authors and readers have truly embraced the concept. Like St. Patrick ’s Day in New York. It’s able to avoids the censorship that interferes with content in traditional formats. Tens of thousands of novelist have their “books “downloaded onto their readers Smartphone’s for free every day.

 One of the leading providers of mobile phone books, Shanda, gets hundreds of millions of hits on its websites every day. Readers can and have been doing, in their thousands, texting messages to the authors to complain about plot development or characters. One can only imagine the texts JK .Rowling would have had to respond to after Dumbledore’s untimely death.

The rights to film one popular mobile phone novel, Ghost Blows Out the Light, has been sold for millions. Recent research indicates that almost half of Chinese adults read books, in different forms, and about 25 per cent of readers – some 220 million people – read electronic media. Of these, almost 120 million people use their mobile phone to read, and almost 25 million only use their smart phones to read books.

Well I can’t say I’m entirly against the mobile novel .I having spent many an hour wandering around my house looking for my mid chapter, misplaced copy of Ulysses/The goblet of Fire and accusing every member of my family of grand theft during the search process,so it will be nice to know I can just call my phone to find it.