Novel Clues?

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”
Sebastian Faulks, Louis de Bernieres	Foreign parts	“Birdsong”; “Birds without Wings”
Hilary Mantel	history	“Wolf hall”
Alan Hollinghurst	LGTB	“The Line of Beauty”
Zadie Smith	versatile	“NW”
Julian Barnes	More an essayist	A history of the world in 10 ½ chapters
Hanif Kureishi	Conflictual relations	“My Beautiful Launderette”
David Mitchell	Surrealistic worlds	“The Bone Clocks”
John Lanchester	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

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/25/reading-between-the-lines-books-to-help-us-understand-brexit

Post-war English novelists
https://www.britannica.com/art/English-literature/The-20th-century

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281413847_Playing_with_Collective_Memories_Julian_Barnes's_England_England_and_New_Labour's_Rebranding_of_Britain

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.academia.edu/9682169/Barnes_England_England-_Novel_as_an_Identity_Analysis

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

Exchange of letters between Houllebecq and BH Levy

https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/02/28/michel-houellebecq-serotonine-review/

https://www.artforum.com/print/201504/michel-houellebecq-s-new-novel-50729

https://www.dw.com/en/prophet-of-depressing-times-michel-houellebecq-releases-yellow-vest-novel/a-46986149

https://jakeseliger.com/tag/novel/

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.522.5833&rep=rep1&type=pdf