Open season for sniping
Autumn, in the English literary calen- dar, is the season of atonement. Put away all those Keatsian fantasies about mists and mellow fruitfulness, and think instead along the lines of those 'Days of Public Humiliation and Intercession' enjoined upon the populace in the 18th century in moments of national emergency. Imagine the tolling of funereal bells, displays of crepe and bombazine, solemn counte- nances, muted accents and a feeling of 'we have done those things we ought not to have done and there is no health in us'.
The reason for this dismal cringe, this metaphorical assumption of sackcloth and ashes by a sinful people, is something only recently identified as a national disgrace, but one on which sanctimonious critics, joumalists and opinion-formers have now got into the habit of lecturing us, as the nights draw in and the sleep of authors starts getting perturbed by visions of a £20,000 cheque handed to them in a packed Guildhall by the chairman of Book- er McConnell. Bad-mouthed for everything from genocide and child-abuse to emotion- al retardation and BSE, the English now have another shame to add to their cata- logue. For they cannot write — maybe they never could, unless Middlemarch is grudg- ingly admitted as a contender — Really Important Novels.
The pundits who proclaim this failing every autumn with a self-lacerating relish worthy of Old Testament prophets are never too precise as to what constitutes a Really Important Novel and why the Ang- los can't hack it. That it has something to do with not being English by blood or birth forms part of the popular wisdom. So too does the presence of a global theme, Aids, say, or the Holocaust or the challenges of religious dogma, assisted by the protago- nists' engagement with the kind of symbolic conflict thrown up by voyages, shipwrecks or political displacement. Since the author's eye is trained so intensely on these serious concerns, the style must not suggest too self-conscious an interest in the lan- guage . as an artistic medium. Such elegance as may distinguish the unfolding of the narrative must always appear elusive or accidental.
A historical context hands writers much of the necessary kit for a Novel of Major Significance ready-packaged. Not so long ago those of us who wrote stories set in an
era beyond the reach of surviving memory got accused of burying our heads in the sand. Historical fiction was the preserve of the notional spinster in Hove, her over- heated imagination fuelled by reading Jean Plaidy, Kate O'Brien and Forever Amber. Nowadays so complete a reversal of the genre's fortunes has taken place that no self-respecting novelist can afford to ignore it, and the various publisher's catalogues arrive embossed and bejewelled with tales of Mughal emperors, Jesuits in Abyssinia, Victorian explorers or Baroque castrati. If the past is, in L.P. Hartley's famous Go- Between incipit, 'a foreign country', then its tourist industry is booming as never before.
Here, as elsewhere, significance, the big picture, is what we are after. Goodness, how hard we try, obsessed with attempting to transmute our base metals into some- thing like that gravity, portentousness and general air of prophetic urgency which, we are assured, the Irish, the Indians, the Aus- tralians, anyone but us, possess in spade- fuls. And gracious, how yah-boo the response of the critics, deriding English novelists as purveyors of what one paper disdainfully calls 'London fluff and anoth- er, refreshing a reviewer's cliche we might have thought dead for 20 years, designates as 'the Hampstead dinner party'.
But hang on, I thought dinner parties were the stuff of which any halfway decent fiction used to be made. Emma consists of almost nothing else, apart from a ball, a lunch and a picnic. There are dinners in Our Mutual Friend and Little Dorrit, but nobody ever taxed Dickens with narrow- ness of vision for sitting his characters round a table with knives and forks. As for London fluff, where would Vanity Fair and The Way We Live Now have been without it?
Yeah, yeah, that was then, this is now, a Lower Empire of epigones and petits- maitres stumbling upwards into fatuity. We have, we smugly tell ourselves, moved on since the days of serialisation in the Com- hill or Bentley's Magazine and the dispatch from Mudie's of boxfuls of the latest three- deckers. Novelists are no longer expected to mirror, arraign or engage with the social actuality nearest to them, and the presence of a Flaubert or a Balzac among us is both unimaginable and as it seems undesirable. A work along the lines of Anna Karenina, based entirely within the world of its
author and his readers, unadorned by any hint of the exotic, its big picture (apart from Levin's ouvriereiste pipedreams of get- ting closer to the Russian soil) no larger than that of the emergent bourgeoisie of 19th-century Moscow and St Petersburg, could scarcely hope these days to find a publisher. We want the modem novel to accomplish a different task entirely, some- thing which will effectively combine escapism with the sort of snobbery which denies the validity of the familiar and the humdrum as stimulus for narrative.
At this point I feel I must declare an interest in the whole question, for I have just completed exactly the kind of novel the Big-Picturists are calculated to despise. It is set in a recognisable 1999, made the more so by a multitude of references to contem- porary brand-names, media images and news items, of the kind whereby authors get accused of triviality or, worse still, of sophistication. Apart from a brief jaunt made by one of the characters to Paris, the action takes place in London and Worces- tershire, among a small group of people all of whom are purely middle-class or aspira- tionally so. They have babies or school-age children, live in decentish flats or houses paid for by the money they earn from salaried jobs, and give dinner parties (though in this case the scene has shifted from Hampstead, doubtless just as repre- hensibly, to Holland Park and Islington). There are no epiphanies, there is not a hint of magic realism and nobody dies. You may understand why, before the ink has dried as it were, I do not consider the work as even remotely Bookerish.
The mere reflex of such a realistic pes- simism makes me feel as if, in penning such a straightforward chronicle of contempo- rary life (essentially an Aga Saga with sub- ordinate clauses) I am an outright modernist rather than the kind of outmod- ed survivor panjandrums and prize juries might label me. Despite their autumnal jeremiads, I can't feel particularly ashamed of the modern English novel, more ener- gised, cosmopolite and polymorphous than it has ever been. I look at writers like Alan Hollinghurst, Candia McWilliam, Philip Hensher and James Buchan, none of whom is exactly a scandal to our tradition, and wonder what on earth the critics can have been reading.
Jonathan Keates
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