Another year, another Booker shortlist. But just how good is British fiction? A decade ago, D J Taylor ruffled literary feathers with his polemic A Vain Conceit. Has time proved him right or wrong?
Back in the early 1980s, as an aspiring literary hack, I can remember petitioning Peter Ackroyd - some kind of acquaintance having been scraped at a party - for a copy of his little-known and barely procurable work, Notes for a New Culture. The book, a spirited and defiantly highbrow "essay on modernism", rolled in a few days later, together with a civil note from the author which wondered diffidently whether he didn't now disagree with practically all of it. At the time I can recall being slightly shocked by what seemed a fundamental dereliction of self-belief. A decade and a half later - drenched in the unyielding light of the re-evaluations one gets to perform on one's own works - I think I rather admire Ackroyd's guts.
A Vain Conceit, the conspectus promised by its subtitle (British fiction in the 1980s) rather belied by the wafer-thin dimensions, was published ten years ago this month. According to the jacket copy (not written by myself) it offered "a provocative antidote to Booker prize ballyhoo". My own favoured synopsis was the couple of sentences in the opening chapter that went: "It is no good going around pretending that contemporary writing in this country is frightfully good. It is in fact frightfully bad." Appearing in the same week as the Booker shortlist (Ishiguro, Barnes, Kelman, Tremain), the book was widely and for the most part abusively reviewed. Allan Massie, Blake Morrison, Karl Miller - now, inevitably, the kind of people one nods to at literary gatherings - all these gentlemen could be found gnashing their teeth in the pages of the books supplements. Auberon Waugh was so enraged that he noticed it twice, the second foray opening with the words "A newly fashionable book reviewer has said . . ." and, ingeniously, managing to avoid mention either of my name or that of the work under review.
Why write a book that infuriates the senior members of a club to which one is eagerly trying to gain admission and - worse, perhaps - presume to lay down the law on a subject for which one has one's own aspirations? (For years afterwards two or three bright sparks would haul it off the shelf whenever I published a novel and gleefully demonstrate how calamitously the latest darling work fell short of first principles.) At bottom, A Vain Conceit grew out of simple irritation. I started reviewing novels in the mid-1980s. What struck me about them, especially the ones produced by "name" writers of the kind who made prize shortlists, was how feeble they were, how slackly written and devoid of any attachment to the landscapes they purported to reflect. Nadir was reached with a novel by Margaret Drabble called The Radiant Way - fearful condition-of-England tosh, I diagnosed, which seemed to have been put together out of back numbers of the Guardian, and yet - this was the really puzzling thing - had six or seven perfectly respectable critics lined up on the jacket to commend its delicacy, panoramic scope and so on. And then there was dear old Kingsley, the out-of-touchness of whose social apercus and the barbarity of whose syntax seemed scarcely credible in the light of what got said about him in the Sunday Telegraph.
For the most part, though, this bright-eyed young person's distaste for literary log-rolling - something which, I fear, will always be with us, and from which, predictably enough, I've now begun to benefit myself - was merely accidental. As an avid reader of English novels, and of that proliferating genre, books about the English novel, I was uneasily aware that the dutifully realistic study of manners, morals and "character" one had grown up with, and whose distant ancestors one had exclaimed over at school, was becoming steadily less defensible. Or if not less defensible, then more difficult to write. Having grown up on a diet of widescreen Victorian novels that seemed unobtrusively to command the social environments through which they moved, I naturally expected their contemporary equivalents to do the same. At the same time, it was hard to see how you could write a modern Vanity Fair given the shifting of the moral, spiritual and even technological goalposts that had taken place in the intervening 140 years. The English social realist novel, Eva Figes once suggested, could not contain the horrors of her lifetime: little as one liked the formal experimentalism doled out in response (one of Malcolm Bradbury's early novels contains a comic avant-garder who wonders whether there is actually an "about" for novelists to write about any more) it was hard not to concede the point. This conviction - that novelists were finding it increasingly difficult to engage with notions of society and social change - was reinforced by an examination of the various modern novels that attempted to bring off this feat, and I have never forgotten the trouble I got into with David Lodge - a disagreement kept up through several newspaper articles and tart footnotes - after suggesting that Nice Work, a novel consciously in thrall to the grand Victorian vision, was - how can I decently put this? - good in parts.
Mostly comprising extant bits of literary journalism and assembled in the course of a fortnight's leave from the current day job, A Vain Conceit divided into six chapters. The first lamented a general situation of limited aims and scaly underachievement. The second chided every English novelist currently writing for lack of political awareness. The third ("Some Contemporary Novelists") picked off Kingsley Amis, Margaret Drabble, Ian McEwan and John Fowles with the assurance of a howitzer trained on a file of ants. Only A S Byatt ("a pallid lack of substance" precariously redeemed by "maturity of response") was given the benefit of the doubt. Chapter four, boldly headed "The Literary Establishment and the Middlebrow Conspiracy" and my own favourite, presumed to dish the dirt on the cosy world of backstairs intrigues and mutual admiration by which literary life got conducted, and among other things convicted the then literary editor of The Times of copying out the blurb of a Stephen Spender novel and trying to pass it off as his own work. Chapter five drew injurious comparisons between homegrown and American talent over the matter of "finding a voice", and commended US demotic over English "gentility". The final chapter, while predicting that the future lay with postmodern tale-spinners of the Rushdie/Swift school (Midnight's Children and Waterland were the exemplars), ended with an apocalyptic call to arms: "It is time to step outside. Not perhaps to picket-lines, demonstrations, or any of those events at which the presence of a few middle-aged novelists and literary gentlewomen [a reference to Lady Antonia Fraser] is such an embarrassment, but outside - on to the bare, level plains of warring armies and mighty clangour from which art retreated so long ago."
Ah well, it was a long time ago and I was very young. All the same, if I wouldn't care now to express it in quite that way, the sentiment of that last passage still seems to me to be unexceptionable. Back in the 1980s you had to look a long way to find much evidence of political commitment or even interest among contemporary novelists, and when you found them they tended to come courtesy of people such as Kingsley Amis, whom I notice that I marked down as "a right-wing joke figure". Ten years on, there would seem to be two questions worth asking about this outburst of juvenile spleen: a) What do I think about it in the meditative light of late-thirtysomething retrospect? b) What happened in the intervening decade?
Starting with a), I think I exaggerated the poverty of what was currently on offer in the interests of an eye-catching thesis. Amis senior, in particular, now looks a much sturdier figure than I ever gave him credit for, and only a few years later produced one of his sharpest novels, You Can't Do Both (1994), which finds a thinly disguised young Amis confronting and failing to deal with the selfishness that was the elder Amis's main literary dynamic. I still think I was right about Margaret Drabble, though.
Simultaneously, if one or two gratuitous brickbats were hurled at the older guard of homegrown practitioners, I think I overvalued the merits of the contemporary Americans (I used them to belittle A N Wilson and co for not having a clue about the social experiences the Americans were writing about). Looking at the dazzling reputations that Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx and Peter Matthiessen - splendid writers all of them - maintain on this side of the Atlantic, it is possible to speculate that much of their appeal stems from what are essentially un- or super-literary reasons. In his introduction to the Granta Book of the American Short Story (1992), Richard Ford takes Stephen Spender to task for some rather elderly remarks to the effect that "Intense loneliness gives all great American literature something in common, the sense of a lonely animal howling in the dark, like a wolf in a story of Jack London". But surely, take away the old-world unctuousness and this is exactly the appeal of a book such as Proulx's Close Range to an inhabitant of Hampstead Garden Suburb? One of the reasons that Proulx fascinates English readers is the simple fact that she hails from Wyoming, where stories tumble from the trees and people have names such as Horm Tinsley, and no doubt an American critic would locate a similar exoticism in the novels of the Cumbrian writer John Murray.
As regards the cosy world of book reviewing and the "middlebrow conspiracy" that supposedly lay at its core, curiously enough these remarks - accurate, I think, when they were made - were overtaken almost as soon as they were written. The late 1980s saw a street gang of young, tough-minded, male critics - James Wood, Jonathan Coe, Anthony Quinn, Nicholas Lezard - elbow its way on to the books pages. Some of them even got to review A Vain Conceit. By the end of 1989 an anonymous Private Eye column-ist (myself, as it happens) could note - again, I think, accurately - that book reviewing had become a bloodsport again. Time hasn't dulled quite all of this asperity, and there are still occasions on which, by means of a kind of osmosis, critical opinion uniformly decides to stop giving some old lag the benefit of the doubt (see, for example, Jeanette Winterson), but by and large book reviewing in this country is mostly a matter of forelock-tugging to the eminent - see, for example, the reception afforded to Julian Barnes's England, England, his weakest novel to date, Booker-shortlisted and hailed in the Sunday Times as a work of genius.
And what about the English novel? What happened to that? For the most part the novelists on whom A Vain Conceit pinned its hopes fell into the fashionable category of "postmodernist", by which I meant not much more than writers who were prepared to delve into a ragbag of fictional styles and emerge with whatever materials they thought appropriate for the garment in question. Midnight's Children, to take the most obvious example, betrayed the influence both of Dickens and the wily South Americans. Waterland combined a magical realist's fixation with myth and tale-telling with a tethered provincial solidity. Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, on the other hand, was an historical pastiche-cum-thoroughly modern detective novel, while Martin Amis's Money - still, for my, well, money, one of the most significant English novels of the past 20 years - offered the whole prestidigitator's bag of tricks, including the appearance of the author at large in his own text.
Look at the books that this gilded crew produced in the 1990s and, with a few exceptions, all that exists is a hole in the air. To compare Graham Swift's Last Orders (which, inevitably, won the 1996 Booker prize) with Waterland is to set a plodding exercise in can't-do-the-voices against a genuine reinvention of the English provincial novel. Worse, perhaps, than the traditional creative slide that affects postwar English writers (a kind of dreadful inversion of the usual career track in which, mysteriously, the potboilers you write 15 years after your promising debut win you the prizes) is the feeling that the chosen styles are inadequate to the task in hand. Rushdie, for example, on the strength of The Ground Beneath Her Feet, seems somehow bogged down, the "stories" he craves hidden behind explosions of stylistic fireworks, the plot literally lost. Amis, too, seems simply to have turned in on himself, turned out novels whose distinctiveness lies in their hypertrophied sense of authorial self, the acknowledgement that no one else could have written them balanced by the suspicion that this is not always a point in a writer's favour.
As for that political commitment one searched for ten years ago, well, we had plenty of that - most of it retrospective and the majority of it more or less unthinking. "Politics" in the England of 1979-97 means Margaret Thatcher, and there had been warning signs all through the 1980s of the injurious effect that this lady was going to have on contemporary fiction (Ian McEwan's The Child in Time, for instance, which combined McEwan's characteristically A-grade human heart stuff with some absolutely creaking projections of the Thatcherite future.) From Rushdie's "Mrs Torture" to the sight of Julian Barnes declaring in some interview or other that this was the person he most despised, scarcely a single contemporary novelist bothered him or herself to try and comprehend the nature of Thatcher's appeal. Back in 1995, in somebody's drawing room, I once listened to a considerable harangue delivered by a Booker-winning novelist, whose gravamen was that "Thatcher was evil". Not even the mildest remark about parliamentary democracies and the will of the people could stem this tide: Thatcher was evil, and that was all there was to it. It is difficult to convey quite how depressed I was by this exercise in moral reductiveness and its implicit dismissal of about a third of the country's adult population (I write, by the way, as a member of the Labour Party), but it existed in nearly every "political" utterance made by an English novelist, and in many of the novels that reflected these utterances, during the 1990s. As for meaningful critiques of 1980s Toryism, it says something for the woman's importance that the tone of much of the tide of "anti-Thatcher" novels - a distinctive literary genre that began in the late 1980s - was hugely uneasy: all too often what started off as satirical disparagement ended up as celebration by default.
Good novelists continue to do their stuff (Byatt, Mantel, Cartwright), abetted by deserving newcomers (Coe, Birch); but no, in the main the 1990s has not been a good decade for the English novel. Significantly, about the solitary survivor of that galaxy of early 1980s talent still capable of bringing off surprises is Timothy Mo, a writer who, ominously enough, seems to have turned his back on the whole UK publishing scene. If there is one promising sign, amid the apparent becalming of so many middle-aged crowd-pleasers, and the rise of the personality novelist - writers of the Amis/Self/Winterson stamp, who go around proclaiming that critics review their lives rather than their work, while doing all they can to render life and work inseparable - it is that the formerly dominant strain of metropolitan fiction (the Amis/Barnes kind) looks to have reached the end of its natural life.
One of the striking features of this year's batch of "promising" first and second novels - one might mention books by Christopher Hart, Alan Mahar and Phil Whitaker - is a tendency to be set outside the constricting embrace of the M25. At the same time, such novels have an odd habit of looking backwards - in many cases deep into the lost hinterlands of the 1940s and 1950s. Unhappily, books of this kind are delivered into a critical climate that, for the most part, is deeply unhelpful to the novelist and whatever it is that he or she is trying to achieve. In the routine squeezing of the books pages that characterises our cash-strapped "serious newspapers", fiction invariably loses out. Ten years ago, it might be said, a first novelist worried about bad reviews; these days he worries about not getting reviewed at all - this is at a time when the newspapers are full of critics busily informing us that the 19th Anita Brookner novel is exactly the same as the 18th.
Worse even than this, perhaps, is the time-honoured critical snootiness that looks down on the novel as a slightly suspect or even frivolous art form and, as such, rather beyond the notice of serious people. Sitting in a hospitality tent at the Edinburgh Book Festival last month, I overheard a former Whitbread judge lamenting the nugatory fee on offer for the dozens of books he had had to trawl through. "And these were serious books," he complained, without any noticeable irony. "Not novels or anything." Well, I happen to believe - one, though not all, of the beliefs I share with the person who wrote A Vain Conceit - that novels are the most serious books of all, and that of all the cultural heroes on hand to analyse the dense and unpromising chaos of the 1990s, the novelist is the one who matters. Somehow this point seems even more worth making now than it did ten years since.
D J Taylor's "Thackeray", a biography of the novelist, is published by Chatto & Windus at £25
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by using the 'report this comment' facility or by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
