Heroes, lovers, snobs and villains

LITERARY CRITICISM: Faulks on Fiction: Great British Characters and the Secret Life of the Novel, By Sebastian Faulks, BBCBooks, 376pp. £20

SEBASTIAN FAULKS has an excellent ear for literary prose. His slim 2007 collection of parodies, Pistache, told us as much: in that book of short pieces, originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s The Write Stuff, he brilliantly lampooned the work of novelists from Jane Austen to Martin Amis, demonstrating in the process a mercilessly exact eye for revelatory quirks of tone and phrasing.

In his new book, written to accompany a BBC television series starting tonight, his brief is avowedly more ambitious. Faulks on Fictionseeks to examine "the secret history of the novel" in 28 essays, each devoted to a character from British fiction. This sounds like a grand scheme – the jacket copy has some highfalutin stuff about how novels helped "invent the British", but, luckily, Faulks on Fictionturns out to be chiefly an excuse for Faulks to enthuse about the characters that appear in his favourite novels. And his enthusiasm is infectious.

Faulks on Fictionis divided into four sections: Heroes, Lovers, Snobs and Villains. This might seem rather schematic, but Faulks, in his amiable way, makes a convincing case that these are the four types most often represented in classic British novels. His Heroes are can-do individualists such as Robinson Crusoe, "cleaving to the standards of the world he has left" on his deserted island; social-climbing operators such as Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair, "magnificently indifferent to men"; superminds such as Sherlock Holmes; and, more interestingly, Winston Smith from George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Fourand John Self from Martin Amis's Money, two characters not usually classified as heroes, but elevated to something like heroic status in Faulks's indulgent, empathetic readings.

In the Lovers section we get the usual suspects – Heathcliff, Tess Durbeyfield, Constance Chatterley – as well as Nick Guest, the hero of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker-winning The Line of Beauty (2004). The Snobsinclude PG Wodehouse's Jeeves, of course, but also Muriel Spark's Miss Jean Brodie, "a cultural snob" whose elitism leads her to sympathise with Franco.

The Villains section, which deals with rogues such as Fagin from Oliver Twist and Jack from Lord of the Flies,is, strange to say, the least engaging, perhaps because the novel in English, with its humanistic philosophy and sympathetic psychological leanings, has always shied away from depicting figures of irreducible evil. (There are very few villains in canonical English novels to compare with, say, Aaron in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.)

"In this book," Faulks writes, "I talk about fictional characters as though they were real people; the focus is deliberately narrow and psychological . . . I have tried to rehabilitate the simple idea of creating character from nothing – a sort of magic, and the gift that the novelist is selling to the public." In other words Faulks on Fictionis good old-fashioned liberal-humanist literary criticism, the sort of thing that academics stopped writing 50 years ago, and which it has fallen to novelists to preserve.

Faulks's epigraph (and motto) comes from Flaubert: "L'homme n'est rien, l'oeuvre tout"(The man is nothing, the work everything). And although there are occasional brief excursions into byways of social and literary history, Faulks more or less succeeds in avoiding what used to be called the biographical fallacy: the notion that an author's work cannot be understood without reference to his or her life. Detached from their creators, the characters Faulks has chosen can be examined in a gossipy, speculative spirit – just as we examine real people.

The kind of criticism that Faulks practises in this book is digressive, unsystematic, imaginative, personal (several of the essays begin with Faulks recalling the circumstances in which he first read the novel he’s discussing) and blessedly free of abstract theorising. Which is not to say that Faulks is short of ideas. The Lovers section includes a psychological portrait of Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy unlike anything I’ve ever read, in which Elizabeth Bennet’s prospective husband appears as the gloomy victim of an undiagnosed mental disorder: “Mr Darcy may not be the first depressive to feature in an English novel, but he is almost certainly the first to be a romantic lead”.

Faulks also offers a neat reading of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories in which the detective’s adventures are understood as expressions of anxiety about the fading of the British empire: the Holmes mysteries, as Faulks puts it, reflect “the drama that lay about [Conan Doyle] in the return of empire to the suburbs and the Home Counties”.

Faulks is as perceptive a reader of contemporary fiction as he is of the classics. Describing the early novels of Martin Amis, he notes that "behind the street slang and the hipster lilt, quite a pedant was at work". (Faulks also offers a quick, brilliant deconstruction of a couple of sentences from Amis's Money, in which he identifies no less than seven registers juxtaposed – a wonderful illustration of Amis's distinctive style.)

It's natural that a book written to accompany a TV series should attempt to offer a few broad platitudes about the works under discussion, and this occasionally leads to some bet-hedging banalities along the lines of: " Lady Chatterley's Loveris a flawed book with many moments of absurdity, but it is, I think, a brave one that makes its central point with conviction." But the incidental pleasures of the essays more than compensate.

Aside from its other qualities, this book serves as an excellent introduction to classic British fiction. It is breezily informative and highly entertaining, with no trace of highbrow obscurantism. It makes you want to read the novels it scrutinises – either again, if you’ve read them already, or for the first time if you haven’t. And for any work of literary criticism, there is no higher praise than that.

Kevin Power is the author of Bad Day in Blackrock(Pocket Books). He teaches creative writing at University College Dublin. Faulks on Fictionstarts tonight on BBC2 at 9pm