Just finished a headlong dash through the 11 novels of C.S. Forester's legendary Horatio Hornblower series, and even as the addled mud of my mind swirls with cannon fire and sea mist and the epic clash of British ships against the brooding tyrant Napoleon Bonaparte (that cruel diminutive first draft of Hitler), I pause to contemplate the pleasures of reading series of books, the parades of linked stories that ultimately compose vast novels of thousands of pages.
Are there not many subtle pleasures in series prose? The realisation, at the end of Book One, that you have stumbled on a gripping tale, beautifully told, and there are many alluring islands ahead to be visited; the happy workmanlike feeling of being in the middle of the series, and having a firm grasp of the cast of characters, and knowing there are books enough waiting for you that the summer will whiz past like a nighthawk; the dichotomous sense of hungrily wanting to know what's going to happen while mourning quietly that there are only a few pages left in the whole saga; the sigh of satisfaction at the very end, not only that you have actually read 12 consecutive novels and savoured every moment of the journey, but that you now have, let's say, Captain Hornblower, or Legolas, or Lyra Belacqua, or V. I. Warshawski, or (God help us all) Sir Harry Flashman as a shadowy friend the rest of your life, as yet another example of the mysterious awkward grace of the human animal, because the best fictional characters are utterly true, isn't that so?
Braces of books like John Steinbeck's undeservedly uncelebrated masterpieces Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, trilogies like Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, quartets like Paul Scott's haunting account of the end of the British Raj in India or J. R. R. Tolkien's masterpiece The Lord of the Rings (in which The Hobbit is really the opening book, yes?), sprints of seven like C.S. Lewis' Narnia novels or the tale of Mr H. Potter of 4 Privet Drive, sprawling piles like the late George MacDonald's 12 hilarious Flashman novels, or incredible mountains like the more than 50 Inspector Maigret novels by Georges Simenon — it's a fascinating subgenre of fiction, the series.
And while many series are carried along by a single (and singular) character, others have immense circles of casts, layers of voices, hints and intimations of endless