I was a Booker prize judge in 1997, and I have never really recovered from the experience of reading so many novels in such a short time. When the jamboree was over and we had awarded the prize to Arundhati Roy, I recall writing an essay for this magazine in which I spoke of my frustration with the modern English novel. I was especially concerned at the failure of so many novelists to engage energetically with the present, preferring instead to write costume dramas and historical fiction. What was it, I wondered, about contemporary reality that so many writers were unwilling to document in fiction? What made these writers turn away from the defining particulars of their time?
The essay resonated with many readers. The Independent commissioned that professor of cultural inflation at Oxford University, Valentine Cunningham, to write a long response in which I was disparaged for my ignorance of history, and indeed of the history of the novel. I received other letters, some from "career" novelists, warning me that I would, as one put it, "get it in the neck" if ever I were to publish fiction of my own. (The unpleasant subtext of such warnings was that all critical judgements ought to be informed in some way by a vulgar careerism: if you write nice things about other people they will be nice about you in return.)
And yet others agreed with me. I had many letters of encouragement, to the extent that, for the next year or so, I became obsessed with the idea that the English novel was in decline precisely because of this very failure to produce contemporary, relevant, and energetic work. Here, I thought, was another manifestation of a people struggling to redefine themselves after generations of post-imperial ennui.
The more fiction I read, the more I was convinced of the terminal decline of the English novel itself, certainly compared with the vibrancy of its north American cousin. Fiction in England had ceased to be an act of moral inquiry, a mechanism by which to discover honest truths about individual lives and societies; it had become little more than a branch of the entertainment industry. The English novel had nothing new to offer and nowhere else to go. The future, as VS Naipaul suggested, lay in hybrid forms, in interweaving reportage, autobiography, invention and narrative. Or so it seemed to me.
Well, having just written my own first novel, Unknown Pleasures, in which I specifically attempted to write about the English present as seen through the eyes of a young man returning to London from Canada after the disappearance of his father a decade earlier, I regret the na?vet? of my pronouncements. For a start, I no longer believe that there is something called the English Novel; merely that there are English novels, both good and bad. I am sceptical, too, of smoothing the world into generalisation, for no sooner have you bound up one batch of novels in the ribbons of generalisation than another batch comes along, evading any glib attempts to constrain it. Nevertheless, I'm still struck by the failure of so many English novels-mine included-to bring news, to animate the contemporary condition in fresh and unexpected ways, as JM Coetzee did so startlingly in his parable of post-apartheid South Africa, Disgrace. Or rather, I have a better understanding of the difficulty of achieving such a feat.
Rival Australian players admire the English cricketer Alec Stewart because, they say, with his swagger and pluck he has a touch of "the mongrel" in him-which is praise indeed in Australia. To write a good novel, I think, you need not so much a touch of mongrel as of madman in you: a willingness to put the work before everything else, to submit yourself entirely to the writing life, not as a career, but as an existential commitment, as a matter of life or death. But it is hard to be Nietzsche, Dostoevsky or C?line at the start of the 21st century; it is hard to be existentially committed in an age of unrivalled peace and prosperity, in which Britain has become just another one of the unremarkable consumerist societies of the west.
And this, I suspect, brings us to the heart of the matter, and to why so many novelists return to the great historical moments of the past-the two world wars, the imperial adventure, the Shoah-for inspiration. They return to these events because they are unable to find anything inherently dramatic in the English present, certainly nothing to compare with the charged atmosphere of, say, Coetzee's South Africa, Zimbabwe, former Yugoslavia, or Russia. George Steiner, surveying what he has long considered to be a postwar English cultural landscape of decline, has repeatedly remarked that no ash from an Auschwitz chimney was carried on an English breeze-which is an oblique way of saying much the same thing: that affluence and a benign political culture have curtailed invention.
It was only through writing my own novel that I began to understand all this; to understand how attractive the dramas of the past are to the writer of fiction living in the age of mass man. Yet I still long to read a novel which brings news of our contemporary condition. There are few writers in this country, if any, who are capable of doing that. How impoverished, culturally, we are as a result. n
