Julian Fellowes’ new app-based novel recalls Victorian tradition
Julian Fellowes, best known as the brain behind the ultra-popular British television show Downton Abbey, has taken a hint from Dickens. After dipping into screenplays, children’s books, stage drama, and Broadway musicals, he has created Belgravia, a novel that will leak out in ten weekly installments. Starting in April, readers can access Belgravia from Fellowes’ website or download each chapter from eBook giants Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Though Grand Central Publishing will release the novel in its entirety in July, Fellowes’ experiment deeply jars the pace of modern reading. Media consumers today get their culture in big gulps. We swallow novels on Kindles in single sittings, binge-watch Netflix in fanatic bursts, and indulge in intense — albeit short-lived — obsessions. The digital world has expedited our experience of art, collapsing the time that art used to demand. Winning the long-term attention of the impatient millennial reader is a challenge that authors, agents, and publishing houses must thoughtfully embrace.
When does this voracity disrupt our interaction with our favorite books? How does impatience alter our digestion of artistic content? A healthy literary appetite is surely a cause for celebration, but a publishing culture that demands speed and bulk over time and quality may deprive readers of certain pleasures. Time, after all, builds suspense. Time begs readers to think — to mull over characters’ subtle quirks. Time requires immersion, attention.
Belgravia breaks with this trend while remaining relevant. For $1.99 each week, readers opt to submerge themselves in 1840s London and engage with many of the class issues that Dickens satirized in his opus. They enjoy ample time to privately connect with Fellowes’ characters and to chew over narrative possibilities with friends. Fans of Downton Abbey can dive into a similar world as they confront the close of the final season this winter.
For $13.99, readers can commit to the full series, an experience that comes with perks: audio, video, music, and maps, among others. The book meets the digital world, abandoning paper pages but gaining dimensionality. Each feature asks the reader to more thoroughly indulge and engross themselves in the foreign space of fiction — to spend their valuable time reading and thinking.
Belgravia is not the first book to adopt the time-released structure of the app-based novel. Iain Pears’ Arcadia, Eli Horowitz’s The Pickle Index, and Wally Lamb’s I’ll Take You There all include apps as their essential feature, appealing to modern readers whose phones are on a short leash at all times.
At the end of the day, the app-based novel may have more in common with the modern podcast or television series than a Dickens tale. Whether or not today’s serialized books — consumed in the context of a visual culture — will enjoy the success of Dickens’ newspaper installments remains to be seen.
Still, I can feel Bleak House resonate quietly in Belgravia, a nod toward the time and patience that we choose to devote to the books we love. Digital culture may be compatible with time-intensive pleasures after all. Perhaps app-based books will soon attract a new wave of millennial readers.
Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/04/business/media/new-julian-fellowes-project-belgravia-treads-new-digital-ground.html?ref=books
