What,
I asked last week, does Brexit tell us about British – or perhaps more precisely,
English - society? And the post duly looked at some titles from the social
scientists, think-tankers and the better journalists to see what insights they
might offer on such a question. But
perhaps I’ve been looking in the wrong place – or rather format?
Perhaps it’s the novel which
has the capacity and range to help us “penetrate the soul” of a country? – an issue which
these posts have tried to deal with from time to time…..After all we talk of the Thatcher novel.
The
French indeed would consider the point so obvious – Michel Houllebecq for 20
years has been the poster-boy
of cultural pessimism. I;ve actually read a couple of them – and actually
like them! He has somewhere said quite explicitly that the diagnostic skills
you expect of non-fiction seems to have transferred to novelists…And if the “gritty
realism” of his early novels shocked those used to the more formal tones of le nouveau roman of Duras
and Queneau, it was actually thoroughly in the traditions of Emile Zola.
I
may not be a great fan of novels but I do my best to keep up with the names and
reputations - and have read enough to be able to make the distinction between
contemporary Scottish and English novelists – whose countries, of course, voted
differently in the referendum…
I’ve
started to read the latest collected essays (“The Rub
of Time”) of one of
England’s most famous novelists Martin Amis – who has some similarities with
Houllebecq – and noticed that he characterizes contemporary English fiction as….
“hopelessly inert and inbred (apart from the crucial infusion of the colonials)” – and French fiction as …“straying into philosophical and essayistic peripheries”
I’m
not an Amis fan (I prefer Faulks, Ballard and even Weldon) – he is so arrogant
indeed that I would not put it past him to have included the Scots in his use
of the term “colonial”! It can't have escaped him that the prose of Alasdair Gray, William
McIlvanney, James Robertson, James Meek, Andrew O’Hagen, Andrew Greig, AL
Kennedy - let alone the SF of Iain M Banks - has a raw force only Ballard could match amongst English novelists. Interestingly, 2 of that list (Meek and O’Hagen)
have also established a reputation in the wider field eg Private
Island.
So
the table I have developed below to explore the Brexit issue deals only with the
English writers. And I do understand that it is a bit provocative to refer to a
writer’s “typical” concerns…..but we all have to simplify!
English novels 1985-2019
Author
|
“Typical” context
|
Example
|
Fay
Weldon, Margaret
Drabble
|
Middle
class women
|
“She
Devil”; “The Millstone”
|
Martin
Amis
|
brats
|
“London
Field”
|
David
Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury, Howard Jacobson
|
University
academics
|
“Good
Work”; “History Man”; “Zoo Time”
|
Ian
McEwan
|
Middle
class men
|
“Chesil
Beach”
|
JG
Ballard
|
Dystopian
cities
|
“High
Rise”
|
Foreign
parts
|
“Birdsong”;
“Birds without Wings”
|
|
history
|
“Wolf
hall”
|
|
LGTB
|
“The
Line of Beauty”
|
|
versatile
|
“NW”
|
|
More
an essayist
|
||
Conflictual
relations
|
“My
Beautiful Launderette”
|
|
Surrealistic
worlds
|
“The
Bone Clocks”
|
|
Social
concerns
|
“Capital”
|
|
Clive
James
|
Poet
and essayist
|
“Cultural
Amnesia”
|
There
is a very good short overview of the 1945-1990
writing scene in the UK here
I
will now have to give some thought to the sort of picture (if any) which
emerges about the “state of England” in the 1985-2016 period and how this might
differ from, for example, the French “cultural pessimism” which has been
referred to...
Further Reading
Post-war
English novelists
https://www.britannica.com/art/English-literature/The-20th-century
https://athanata.typepad.com/files/literature-for-the-21st-century.pdf
21 st century British lit
https://thegreatestbooks.org/the-greatest-fiction-since/2000
Thatcher novels
Postwar English literature 1945-1990#Profile of John Lanchester
https://www.britannica.com/art/English-literature/The-20th-century
https://athanata.typepad.com/files/literature-for-the-21st-century.pdf
21 st century British lit
https://thegreatestbooks.org/the-greatest-fiction-since/2000
Thatcher novels
Postwar English literature 1945-1990#Profile of John Lanchester
good on post-war novels - http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/7300/5/05_chapter%201.pdf
On
Houllebecq
Michel Houllebecq and the
politics of despair; Carole Sweeney (2019)
Western Civilisation in
the novels of Michel Houllebecq; Timothy Gouldthorp
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