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

the poetry of tartan noir

I keep wanting to like poetry – but generally failing. Bert Brecht, Norman MacCaig and Marin Sorescu are the main poets who have ever really got through to me - the first for his political anger; the other two for their wry humour. TS Eliot and Adrian Mitchell also appeal. But I do enjoy and appreciate the poetic style which you can find in good novels and essays.

William McIlvanney has always been an admired writer in Scotland though his renown hasn't spread beyond the borders in quite the way some of us think it should have. 

McIlvanney isn't a crime writer per se; he's also written literary novels, short stories, essays and poetry since the 60s. But he did happen to write three crime novels, starting with Laidlaw  in 1977, that acted as a hard-bitten blueprint for all Scottish crime fiction to come, inspiring a generation of writers to take on the genre in his wake.
Laidlaw's eponymous detective is an existentially troubled individual with a strong moral compass and a stronger sense of socialist justice.

The Glasgow he stalks is a brutal place, rife with deprivation and poverty, yet depicted with dark humour and perceptive, poetic prose. The plot reads like a cliche today, but that's because McIlvanney was first to do it. The murderer of a teenager has to be found and, well, that's it. But McIlvanney subverts expectations, and gives away whodunit early on, focusing instead on the psyches of characters that represent different facets of Glasgow, and by extension Scotland. In a time when English crime writers were still copying Agatha Christie, McIlvanney took the hardboiled ethos of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and applied it to the working classes of the city around him. It was a revelation.

I was spellbound by which I've just read after its recent republication – the toughness of its taut text. Detective Inspector Jack Laidlaw left university after one year. He had not failed -"University failed me ... I took acres of fertile ignorance up to that place. And they started to pour preconceptions all over it. Like forty tons of cement. No thanks. I got out before it hardened".

"Panda (one of the characters) was like a banana republic threatened by two contending major powers who don’t want direct conflict". (ch.11 p.75)

Laidlaw takes as much pleasure in the ordinary street life of Glasgow and of the dignity of its people. This indomitable spirit is captured in the last action of the book where Laidlaw after an evening’s drinking, dances outside Central Station with an old woman who had been standing in a queue. ‘Son,’ she said, ‘This is the best queue I’ve ever been in in my life.’ (p.298)

McIlvanney’s shorter pieces are marvellous examples of expressive writing and can be accessed on his website. 

Reviews of his work are available on a Glasgow University site about Scottish literature here and here

In researching for this post, I came across a very interesting website about lifesaving poems  one of whose posts was about Marin Sorescu  Perhaps the site can help me with my blind spot for most poetry. I know I need to focus more!

To end - not with a poem but with a symphony of wood! The spoons which head this post are the creation of this artist MANU whose studio in Tirgovishte we visited recently and two of whose beautifully-crafted dressers now have pride of place in our mountain kitchen.  

picking up Voltaire's Coconuts

A second-hand English bookshop here in Sofia which boasts 10,000 titles – this is the Elephant Bookstore - now relocated in the centre.
The collection is in a tiny space – with the books piled to a high ceiling. I emerged with 5 or 8, depending on how you count them since one was a bumper collection of four West of Scotland novels written variously between the 1930s to 1980s entitled Growing up in the West and containing no less than 4 different books - Edwin Muir (Poor Tom) by one of Scotland’s most respected writers of the 20th century and three less well-known writers - JF Hendry (Fernie Brae), Gordon M Williams (From Scenes like these) and Tom Gallacher (The Apprentice). Although the last was published in 1983 and is based on life and shipyard work in the 1950s in my home town (Greenock), I was not aware of the book or the writer. Many people say there was a renaissance of Scottish writing in the 1980s – but I would suggest that this is to underestimate what was being produced fairly consistently in the 20th century in this small country of 5 million people. I’ll say something more shortly about this.
Another book was also an unknown Voltaire’s Coconuts – or anglomania in Europe by Ian Buruma an under-rated writer who was born a Dutchman, writes now in English and has lived in Japan, UK and America. The book brings many European historical figures to life eg Voltaire, Goethe, Garabaldi, Mazzini, Marx - all from the perspective of their attitude to the structure of English life and government. It starts with Voltaire's famous query - "Why can't the laws that guarantee British liberties be adapted elsewhere?"
Having been imprisoned in the Bastille for publishing a satirical poem on religious persecution in France, Voltaire travelled to England to find his model of tolerance and liberty. As a universalist and a rationalist, the French philosopher assumed that these virtues could be transplanted elsewhere, and most especially to the France of the ancien Regime. Anticipating objections on the lines of "you might as well ask why coconuts, which bear fruit in India, do not ripen in Rome” he stated that it took time for those (legal) coconuts to ripen in England too. There is no reason, he said, why they shouldn't do well everywhere, even in Bosnia and Serbia. So let's start planting them now."
What Voltaire essentially admired in England was the theory of equality before the law and the separation of legislative and executive powers. England in the 18th and 19th centuries was seen by prominent French and German figures in many regards in the way we now view the United States of America – full of dynamism, workshop of money but with rather uncouth, disrespectful citizens and media.

A 1998 edition of JK Galbraith’s 1958 The Affluent Society was the next book – this one with a foreward in which the author assessed what time had done to his analysis. One of the reviews I unearthed was by writer and left-wing Labour MP John Strachey in the long-defunct Encounter magazine. Here is a highly viewable video of Galbraith reminiscing,
Books by Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March) and Louis de Bernieres (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin) rounded off my purchases – all for the total price of 17 euros! Such is the joy of serendipity in foreign bookshops – and this one in particular!
The cafe also has a great atmosphere and buzz – being Sunday, parents and kids were present, with lost of activities for the latter. My one complaint is that a lot of the books were disfigured - apparently deliberately - with the back page of the cover having been torn off. This is pure sacrilege - I have never come across this apparent policy........

I have, on this blog, already posted links to surveys of the literature from small countries in central europe particularly Hungary which I offered in a discussion about the subject on another blog
The Irish are well-known as good story- tellers and writers– whether it is George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, WB Yeats, Louis McNeice or, more recently, William Trevor, John Banville, John McGahern or Sebastian Barry. As a Scot, I have an obvious bias in suggesting that the quality and quantity of the Scottish literary output of the past 80 years is on a par with the European best (Latin American and China are something else!!). For an introduction see this assessment and this listing of the best 100 Scottish books