Is the trend for epic movies and hefty novels getting too much? Our critics redress the balance with a classic compilation of shorter works – plus 10 long ones that are worth your time
A growing trend for longer films and heftier novels has recently been attracting indignant comment. Martin Scorsese’s latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, has been in the news not for its content but because it is three hours 20 minutes long (and he has form on this – The Irishman was three hours 29 minutes). This year’s Oscar contenders have also been taking their – and our – time: All Quiet on the Western Front, Elvis and Tár are two-and-a-half hours long each. And Avatar: The Way of Water, the third highest-grossing film of all time, spills on for three hours 12 minutes. Is the idea that sitting in a cinema interminably makes it more of an event, earns you epic stripes as a cinema-goer – makes you a co-hero along with Batman (whose most recent outing was three hours long)? Or are you more likely to be furtively checking the time in the dark?
Length seems to be becoming dangerously confused with artistic prestige – as though short equals superficial or critically lightweight. According to publisher Flipsnack, novels have been getting longer for a couple of decades. The average length of those on the Booker prize shortlist, in 2019, was 530 pages. Fantasy fiction is especially incontinent: the last Game of Thrones book, A Dance With Dragons, was 413,202 words, trumping the dimensions of the Victorian novel and in defiance of our distractible modern attention spans. Are we, in the age of the soundbite, tweet and TikTok, becoming rebelliously nostalgic for an era when there seemed to be more time?
