OK, picking on John Irving and now Sebastian Faulks might get me accused of shooting fish in the proverbial. But I couldn’t let this go. There’s a profile of the popular novelist in the last Observer— the strapline caught my attention:”He’s the Balzac of Holland Park, a ‘must-read’ novelist who seems happiest writing about turn-of-the-century France, women and soldiers. Now, with his latest book, he’s turned his attention to madness and psychiatry. Kate Kellaway reveals why there’s nothing ‘straightforward’ about Sebastian Faulks.”Now I know that journalism relies on dodgy comparisons to position possibly unfamiliar figures in the readers’ minds. But does Faulks deserve the comparison to Balzac just because a) he writes supposedly “19th-century novels” (i.e. novels driven by a strong plot) and b) some of his books are set in France? I recently finished a novel by Balzac, in fact the first I’ve read, called The Wild Ass’s Skin (The dodgy title is based on a pun that makes sense in the original French). Yet even in translation, the prose seemed fluid, even cinematic–more vivid certainly than Faulks’s serviceable prose. And there’s nothing stolid or cosy about the plot of Balzac’s novel–rather it’s a fever dream in which the pretty repellent protagonist sells his soul in exchange for having his ever whim fulfilled for an ever-shrinking scrap of donkey hide.