John Mullan over at Guardian Books has an interesting article on what he considers to be the top 10 ‘circadian novels’. Are you familiar with the term? I wasn’t until it was explained that novels coming under the tag of circadian, are ones where the story takes place entirely in the course of a single 24-hour period. Interesting!
John provides a brief synopsis of each circadian title in the article together with an explanation for its selection, so I recommend you pop along to there, but for those just wishing the briefest of summaries, the ten selected titles are:
- Saturday by Ian McEwan
- Twice Round the Clock by George Augustus Sala
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- Mr Phillips by John Lanchester
- The Light of Day by Graham Swift
- Intimacy by Hanif Kureishi
- Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk
Most interesting to me in the list (although I’m not sure if it could be classed a novel), is the title which according to Mullan, started the circadian genre – George Augustus Sala’s Twice Round the Clock. Published in 1859, Twice Round the Clock gives a journalistic 24-hour snapshot into daily Victorian life in Central London. Because it sounded so intriguing, I went a-hunting and I was delighted to find Mr. Sala’s seminal work reproduced electronically, over at VictorianLondon.org.
I was racking my brains to come up with some circadian novels myself but the only one I could think of was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but as that’s already in the list I guess it doesn’t count. I’m interested to know of more novels that comes under the label of circadian so I thought I’d turn it over to you guys – What ‘circadian novels’ do you know?
About Rob