Postscript on the Current

delusion abolished by Marxism, and the secret of History is to co-operate with it by manipulating others.

Lodge’s most serious novel is How Far Can You Go?, a case study of a group of Catholics living through the changing morality of the decades before and after the Second Vatican Council. Changing Places is a well-crafted job-exchange between Philip Swallow of Rummidge (Birmingham), who prides himself on his setting of

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exam questions, and Maurice Zapp of Euphoria State, who plans to be the best-paid English professor in the world. Professor Lodge has also explained continental literary theory, while reserving his own position; he likes binary structures. Nice Work is an internal Rummidge exchange, between Dr Robyn Penrose, feminist materialist semiotician, and Vic Wilcox, managing director of an engineering firm. An older educationalist, Anthony Burgess (1917-93), turned from linguistics to novel-writing with a Malayan trilogy (1956-9), an Enderby trilogy (1963-74) and the long Earthly Powers (1980). The violence of A Clockwork Orange (1962) made Burgess famous, but verbal energy is not enough.

There has been perhaps a levelling-out of the realistic novel, which has skilled practitioners whose names are not listed below. Anita Brookner, Penelope Lively, Penelope Fitzgerald and Susan Hill, for example, write sensitive novels of a familiar realistic kind, dealing with middle-class private lives. They maintain good writing, as do the broader comic treatments of current marital or social predicaments by Fay Weldon and Beryl Bainbridge. These topical novels shade into genre fiction, such as the spy novels of John le Carré and literary biography.

There have been fine literary biographies of Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, and good lives of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Virginia Woolf, although the best of these, such as the scholarly James Joyce (1959, 1982) by Richard Ellmann or the stylish Ford Madox Ford (1990) by Alan Judd, are not Boswell’s Johnson. Literary biography seems to promise a full understanding of another human being, combining the fact of scholarship with the depth of psychology. Fact and fiction seem to have become closer. Talented writers such as Richard Holmes and Peter Ackroyd have written novelistic biographies and biographical novels, Holmes of the Romantics, Ackroyd on Nicholas Hawksmoor and Thomas Chatterton. Ackroyd has also written straight biographies of T. S. Eliot and Sir Thomas More, but his Charles Dickens has inter-chapters which imagine Dickens’s thoughts, and he has tried to imagine John Milton in America. Susan Hill has recreated the world of Owen and Sassoon, a vein which has been further reworked by others. This adoption of documentary and historical material, a source of fiction since the time of Defoe, recurs in recent historical novels about slavery, and, more literally, in a series of maritime novels by Patrick O’Brian (1972-99). Literary biography offers some of the pleasures of the realist novel.

Notable recent novels

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Novelists in the late-20th-century limelight were Angela Carter (1940-92) and Salman Rushdie (1947-), who wrote with panache about dangerous issues, and Kasuo Ishiguro (1954-), who stalks large subjects with subtlety. Rushdie’s extravagant prose has a cosmopolitan glitter. Midnight’s Children is a novel or romance of a new type sometimes called historical fabulism, presenting history via ‘autobiographical’ fantasy. It begins with the narrator’s birth at midnight on 15 August 1947, when Pakistan and India were born as separate independent states: parturition as partition. Entangled lives of that generation are made vivid, unfamiliar things perceived with cultural difference.

Rushdie (born in Bombay in 1947, but educated at Rugby School) has adopted magic realism, now an international mode, in which realist narrative includes episodes of symbolic fantasy. The Satanic Verses, for example, opens with two entwined characters singing rival songs as they fall from an airliner to land on a snowy British beach unharmed. Similar things are found in Latin American writing and earlier in the Central European novel, as in Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum (1959). ‘Magic realism’ was a term invented for German expressionism of the late 1920s, traumatic times in which ordinary realism would not do.

A British upbringing has alienated Rushdie from the religious culture of Islam; the sending of the blasphemous Satanic Verses to the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran invoked a sentence of death. Former colonies continue to educate Britain in fiction as in politics. Lively Anglo writing comes from writers such as the Nigerian political exile Wole Soyinka, or from secondgeneration immigrants such as Hanif Kureishi. The multicultural nature of current writing in English is increasingly reflected, on social as well as artistic grounds, in the syllabus at schools and colleges.

An expressionism similar to that of Grass is found in the late poetry of the American Sylvia Plath, and in the sexual polemics of Angela Carter. Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984) is so zestfully written that its narrative surprises keep its pornographic affinities under control. The heroine, Fevvers, a gorgeous artiste of the flying trapeze, spent her childhood in a

Whitechapel brothel. After international erotic adventures, it is confirmed that the plumage which enables her to fly is genuine, for she is a bird as well as a woman. The gender-bending, species-blurring comedy is, like that of

Kazuo Ishiguro (b. 1954).

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Woolf’s Orlando, not all good fun: the frustration Fevvers causes the men she attracts is part of the point. Carter’s influence is seen in Sexing the Cherry (1989) by Jeannette Winterson, in which the narration erases male/female differences. Her earlier ‘autobiography’ Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), less deliberate, is more original.

Waterland (1983) by Graham Swift is a formidable achievement. A carefully-mounted narrative, it combines fictional autobiography, family saga and a history of the Fens. Likened to Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and to Hardy for its slow naturalistic build-up and determined pattern, its doomed rural lives and multiple narration also recall William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. Its highly conscious narrative method is modern rather than Victorian. Swift’s Last Orders is highly praised.

The Remains of the Day (1989) by Kasuo Ishiguro (born in Japan in 1954) is narrated by a retired butler, a man rather similar to the old Japanese painter who narrates An Artist of the Floating World (1986). In both, an old man remembers a life in which he has made dubious accommodations with authority in order to retain an honoured role. For both, the radical revision of perspectives after 1945 is too painful to admit. If the Japanese setting is slightly opaque to outsiders, the English country house is convincing. The butler’s quaintly dignified language does not hide from us what he has trained himself not to see: that his admired master was host to pre-war Anglo-German appeasement talks. This finely managed serious comedy shows clearly how sticking to social roles and rules can lead to self-deception and self-betrayal. Ishiguro draws no attention to this, nor to his skill. Japanese reticence could be recommended to a Britain where the postmodernist often rings twice.

Contemporary poetry

Contemporary poetry is a small area full of prospectors for gold. Since the humane Elegies for his first wife by Douglas Dunn (published in 1985), no British collection has imposed itself in the same way.

And I am going home on Saturday

To my house, to sit at my desk of rhymes Among familiar things of love, that love me.

Down there, over the green and the railway yards, Across the broad, rain-misted, subtle Tay,

The road home trickles to a house, a door. She spoke of what I might do ‘afterwards’. ‘Go, somewhere else.’ I went north to Dundee. Tomorrow I won’t live here any more,

Nor leave alone. My love, say you’ll come with me. from ‘Leaving Dundee’

Dunn's reticence packs a punch.

The Northern Irishman Paul Muldoon (1951-) and the English James Fenton (1949-) are major figures, and Carol-Ann Duffy (1955-) seems a major talent now and for the future. Muldoon is a poet of magical imagination and verbal adroitness,