Men no longer write long fiction. The days of the million-word book are gone. At 850,000 words, Xavier Herbert’s Poor Fellow My Country remains the longest work of fiction written by an Australian. I like the idea of Xavier Herbert. I like the legend. I like his pursuit of awards and trophies. Xavier Herbert the idea is all about what motivated him to set out to write. Xavier Herbert the legend is all about what motivated him to undertake various walks and other excursions, particularly his walk from Sydney to outback Queensland. Xavier Herbert in pursuit of recognition is all about his aspirations to obtain the ‘red silk’ – an honorary doctorate for his contribution to Australian writing.

All those things; the idea, the legend, the pursuit have now been displaced. Xavier Herbert, and other great men of fiction, have been cast aside. As G K Chesterton may have remarked, when men stop believing in God they don’t simply believe in nothing, they will believe in anything. Such is the case of the casting aside of the great writers.

In their place, however, there is not nothing. There is a literary fiction genre that Herbert himself may have found attractive or, indeed, he may have found abhorrent. I suspect it may have been the former as it has the potential to provide its writers with a much-coveted legendary status along with the pursuit of awards and trophies.

The genre is fan fiction and it claims to have published the longest fiction work in the history of the world. Now, this is a big claim. The claim is made by a work entitled The Loud House: Revamped, which kicked off in 2017 and concluded in February 2024. By 2022 16 million words have been published. This increased to more than 30 million at its conclusion. Comparatively, the King James Bible is 783,137 words.

What is fanfiction and why would Xavier Herbert approve? Fanfic, as it is also known, is created by people (fans) who like a particular work and go about writing and publishing online their alternative ideas for its characters and events. The Loud House: Revamped is a work by multiple authors who, rather than interacting with video games and other gamers, interact with other writers and words. They have effectively created a fictional work of more than 30 million words around the narrative of the animated television show The Loud House.

The show that led to the fan fiction Revamped began in America in 2016. It was created by Chris Savino and focused on a character named Lincoln Loud, one of eleven children (the only boy), who lived in the fictional town of Royal Woods, Michigan.

Let’s circle back to Xavier Herbert. In 1975, a month or so after its publication, I bought (and still own) a copy of Poor Fellow My Country. I struggled to read its 1,463 pages, although I did well to complete a reading some years later. As the longest single-volume novel ever written in the English language, it is a towering work that has as much relevance in an Australia that is needing to find its sense of place in the world as it did in the novel’s fictional settings between 1936 and 1942.

Herbert’s Poor Fellow, like his earlier Capricornia, is centred on Australia’s Northern Territory, a place which captured his imagination and allowed the unbounded development of his characters. Within five years Poor Fellow had sold 100,000 copies – a successful outcome for a novel published almost 50 years ago.

Since then, much has altered in the global publishing business. Herbert would be unable to find a publisher today, let alone to do the legendary things he set out to achieve. He would, however, be pretty keen on the idea of fanfics. I suspect the character himself, Xavier (whose real name was Alfred Jackson), was pretty chuffed that his novel won a Miles Franklin award and sold 100,000 copies. I also have no doubt that his sharp grasp of the commercial reality of publishing would have had him leaping valiantly onto the fanfic wagon in order to attract a wider audience and increase sales.

Fanfiction works through the transference of what has been inspiring in a work of fiction to one’s own writing. So watching The Loud House created the Loud House: Revamped. Reading a book creates the same inspiration and the same desire to write fanfic about it. I am not suggesting Poor Fellow My Country would inspire a fandom community to begin writing a fanfic. But it could.

What I am suggesting is that Herbert may have sniffed the wind and found great value (if not virtue) in the idea of a multitude of others creating characters and events of their own based on his work.

I would like to see Poor Fellow become the subject of fanfic. It beat Frank Hardy and Tom Keneally to the 1976 Miles Franklin which in itself ought to be the stuff of legend. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry once remarked that he had John Ford in mind when he wrote The Last Kind Words Saloon. ‘Ford had once said, when you had to choose between history and legend print the legend.’ (The actual line was from the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance which was, ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’)

Nobel laureate Patrick White is rumoured to have said of Poor Fellow My Country that its dialogue and characters were cartoonish, though it described some beautiful landscapes. He allegedly added that he would not read the complete work.

Cartoonish characters and dialogue? Indeed, it would make a legendary fanfic.