Novels of Manners

I’ve recently been reading Ellen Kushner’s novels. They are novels of manners set in a fantasy world. This can be tricky, as one of the attributes of a novel of manners is that all the characters attempt to adhere to a set of social conventions which is never stated or even discussed. Doing this in a fantasy setting requires some careful work to set the framework without having the characters actually describe it.

Jack Vance is a master of the science fiction novel of manners, although he normally resorts to something of a cheat: he has an outsider enter the society, which gives him a plausible hook for explaining the rules. For example, in “Marune: Alastor 993” his protagonist is a native who has suffered amnesia, and in the short story “The Moon Moth” it is an ambassador from another planet. I think his stories without an outsider, such as “The Last Castle” (which is not so much a novel of manners anyhow) are somewhat less successful.

Kushner has no outsiders, but her novels work because she picks a more familiar milieu, and does a nice job of showing us what is different through plausible actions of the characters rather than through pure exposition. Since I like both novels of manners and fantasy novels, it’s nice to see the combination well done.

It also makes me wonder whether it is possible to write a contemporary novel of manners. After all, although Jane Austen’s novels are historical today, when she wrote them they were contemporary. It seems that that sort of novel today results in much broader comedy–something like “Bridget Jones’ Diary,” in which the realism is lost in favor of laughs. Not altogether a bad thing, of course, but also not quite the same thing.