Tags
A.S. Byatt, Alasdair Gray, Ali Smith, Angela Carter, Barry Unsworth, C.J. Sansom, Charles Dickens, David Mitchell, Dorothy L. Sayers, Graham Swift, H.G. Wells, Hilary Mantel, Iain Banks, J.L. Carr, Jeanette Winterson, Jim Crace, John Banville, Josephine Tey, Kate Atkinson, Lindsey Davis, Margaret Drabble, Martin Amis, Muriel Spark, P.D. James, Pat Barker, Peter Carey, Peter Kemp, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ronald Wright, Salman Rushdie, Sarah Moss, Sarah Perry, Steven Saylor, Toni Morrison, Walter Scott, William Boyd, William Golding
I’m sure it will come as no surprise to anyone reading this blog that I like books about literature, about literary history, and about literary criticism. So I was always going to be the target audience for Peter Kemp’s Retroland: A Reader’s Guide to the Dazzling Diversity of Modern Fiction. And I am glad I picked it up. I do have probably as much in the way of gripes and criticisms as I have praise for the book, but that is almost inevitable in a work like this. But in the main I found it an exhilarating romp through primarily English fiction since about 1970. That starting date is arbitrary, and not really explained, but it does give us a half-century of literature to consider, and I suppose it means Kemp gets in ahead of what is likely to be a rush of books in the next couple of years that will be looking back at the first quarter of this century, or perhaps starting in 1975 to compare the last quarter of last century with the first quarter of this, or even more expansively perhaps considering the century from 1925. I don’t know about you, but I’m already getting a vague sense that the 1920s are starting to crop up in books more frequently than I remember, though that could just be the direction my own interests take me.
The first thing to be said about Retroland is that the sub-head is irrelevant. There are a lot of novels covered in this volume, so it is diverse in that sense, but the book is not about diversity, it is not about the dazzle. Kemp has a theme, and the book focuses narrowly on how the fiction of the last half-century has stuck to that theme, explored it and played games with it. Which in a very real sense is the opposite of diversity.
Kemp’s theme is history, and his thesis is that the novelists (at least the British novelists) of the period have overwhelmingly turned to the past for their subject, their inspiration, or their model. Kemp’s focus on this is so narrow that any writer (by which I mean mainstream novelist, I will come later to discuss Kemp’s engagement, or lack of it, with genre fiction) who deals exclusively with the present (Ali Smith, Iain (no-M) Banks) does not appear in the book, which can rather skew the perspective. But okay, I will concede the point, since so many of the contemporary novelists that I return to again and again (Kate Atkinson, William Boyd, Sarah Perry, Graham Swift) do turn frequently, sometimes exclusively, to the past.
There is, of course, an issue here that I don’t think is adequately addressed in the book; two issues, in fact. The first is: what does it mean that so many contemporary writers have turned to the past in this way? Are they saying that today can only be thoroughly understood by examining yesterday? Are they saying that the ills of today have their source in the wrongs of yesterday? Or, by contrast, are they saying that the well-formed past holds up a mirror to the ill-fared present? I don’t know, but Kemp has so much ground to cover that he must perforce spend more time on the ways the past is addressed and not on why it is so addressed. But then there’s another issue that only occurred to me as I was writing this: is the past really a phenomenon peculiar to post-1970 fiction? Let’s face it, British writers (and something like 90% of the writers covered here are British) have been writing about the past since at least Walter Scott. Dickens was an historical novelist, so was Stevenson, so were heaven knows how many others. How many of the interwar crime novelists (Dorothy L. Sayers) infused their work with references to the Great War; or turned even further back (Josephine Tey)? So, are we talking about a mode that fell out of fashion only to become prominent again after 1970, or something that had always been there? The answer to that question would change our perspective on the works considered here, but I’m not sure the question is even asked.
Yet, although I was aware of these niggles, they didn’t bother me as I was reading the book, I was too caught up in the narrative. Now a book of this nature inevitably comes down to lists, and there are a lot of them spread through the book. When you are reading such lists your mind inevitably snags on the names that are missing, and these clearly indicate gaps in the author’s knowledge. In one list there is an allusion to Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, but neither she nor the book are named anywhere in this volume; so he knows of the book but is not familiar enough with it, or anything else by Atkinson, to recognise how she fits within his thesis. In a chapter devoted to updatings of the story of Frankenstein there is no mention of Poor Things by Alasdair Gray, indeed Gray appears nowhere in the book which seems to me like a fatal shortcoming. But no one can read everything, be aware of everything, and Kemp covers a lot of ground, writers I like and writers I have never previously heard of. So yes, there are writers I would have thought central to the thesis that are absent, but that hardly undermines what the book does achieve.
And the lists, let’s face it, are not the be-all-and-end-all of the book. Far more interesting and valuable are the longer, more considered, more detailed accounts of particular authors or works. I can hardly fault him here, for he takes us into the work of writers I rate highly (David Mitchell, Pat Barker, Peter Carey, Hilary Mantel, William Golding, Angela Carter, and a writer he returns to several times and who is, I feel, one of the very best novelists of the last half-century, Barry Unsworth) or whose work I’ve only dipped in to and feel I need to study more (J.L. Carr, Toni Morrison, Jim Crace, Sarah Moss). It’s a book that makes you excited about books, there’s a feast of stuff here I want to grab immediately and read all at once.
Not that Kemp is uncritical; far from it. You can tell his favourites (Unsworth, A.S. Byatt), but he is not afraid to turn a sharp critical attention upon writers usually considered critical darlings. Salman Rushdie: “For an author who attaches such significance to storytelling, Rushdie is curiously inept at telling stories.” Jeanette Winterson: “Amid a jumble of researched scientific data that characters reel out, the basic lineaments of Mary Shelley’s Gothic fable — science over-reaching itself, hubris hideously punished, malformed loneliness tragically wreaking havoc — get peculiarly garbled.” Margaret Drabble: “This dismissal of psychological fiction and Freudian thinking comes strangely in a trilogy whose most pervasive character is a psychiatrist.” There are skewering one-liners all through the book which contribute immensely to its liveliness, the sense that some great novelists and some not-so-great novelists are producing work that we really should be paying attention to, and conversely that there are supposedly great novelists who should be paying more attention to their work.
Peter Kemp is a reviewer for the Sunday Times and the author of books on Muriel Spark and H.G. Wells, a background which, you might think, might open him to writing that doesn’t follow a straightforwardly realist model. And it does, but not in the way you might think. The second of the five parts that make up this book concentrates on the fictions that show how an individual’s past shapes their present. One of the examples of this motif is the way childhood trauma, and particularly child abuse, are repeatedly shown to lie behind the darkness in a character. He presents several fictional examples of this, but as I was reading it I kept thinking how frequently I have seen this pattern in crime fiction, it is, for instance, a regular feature in John Banville’s Benjamin Black novels, and yet neither Black nor crime fiction more generally feature among his examples. Crime fiction does appear in the book, but usually in other forms, the historical crime fiction of C.J. Sansom, Steven Saylor, or Lindsey Davis, for example.
Unexpectedly, science fiction fares better. But that is partly because so many otherwise mainstream novelists have ventured into the form. And where science fiction does appear it is usually from writers not normally identified as science fiction authors: Martin Amis, P.D. James, Kazuo Ishiguro, Angela Carter. He is never dismissive of sf, and it clearly forms part of his overall vision of literature, but you get a sense of unease when he ventures into the territory. He spends some time discussing Ronald Wright’s updating of The Time Machine, A Scientific Romance (and he is clearly besotted with Wells’s original), but his reading of the book felt slightly off to me. He is outside his comfort zone, but at least he is willing to give it a go.
There is, I am sure, no such thing as a perfect book about literature. Any such book depends upon the taste and interest of the author, and a reading list that can at best only be partial. Though I suspect that it is such partiality (in both senses of the word) that is what makes these books interesting to me. And this is a pretty good example of the form.