The last major British novelist?

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Originally Posted by TheFifthElement

Come on guys, don't you read? There's plenty of good writers coming out of all countries, and this speculation of what people will be reading in 100 years time is just that, speculation. Maybe no one thought Shakespeare would be read 100 years later at the time. Sure, there's a lot of stuff out there which is holiday reading, so what? Time to start thinking about what's good, instead of falling into the cliche of nit-picking and quibbling and claiming that everything even remotely contemporary must be cr*p. Or so it seems to me, anyway.

So, how about thinking about these guys:

Angela Carter
Jeanette Winterson
David Mitchell
Anthony Burgess
J G Farrell
Graham Swift
Iris Murdoch
John Fowles
Lawrence Durrell
J.G. Ballard
Kazuo Ishiguro
A S Byatt
Martin Amis

newer writers:
Steven Hall
John McGregor
? who knows

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Some good ones there Fifth. I considered Burgess but the strength of his career as a novelists seems to be one novel, A Clockwork Orange. Truely a great work. Sort of like Orwell and 1984. I considered Ishiguro, but is he British? I guess so. Fowles is an interesting pick. I had overlooked him. I mentioned some you list, and the others I have idea on.

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Come on Virgil, that'd be Kingsley Amis! He was Martin Amis's dad.

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:blush: You're right. I always, always get the two confused.

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Originally Posted by Virgil

I always, always get the two confused.

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There's an easy way to tell: one is dead, one isn't. Just use your alphabet ;)

I love this forum... I really do.

When I ocasionally have the urge for some literary amusement, I check back and can always count on threads like this, along with "What is the most boring...", "Who else hates..."

Pretty much all the opinions posted so far I find hilarious. Only stlukesguild took exception to dismissing all Modernist Fiction out of hand...

Considering Post War American novelists (when the thread of course got sidetracked a ways back) as a weak group is also pretty comedic.

Find another country's Post War fiction practitioners that would stand the test of time against:

Bellow, Bowles, Roth, Gaddis, Pynchon, Barth, Gass, Hawkes, Coover, Elkins, Carver, Barthelme, Morrison, Ozick and McCarthy (who's Blood Meridian and Suttree will stand tall for a LONG long time).. You have Crowley on the horizon...

My guess would be that you have of heard of maybe half of all the above, am I right? Which fact does not mean it disproves my argument, it proves some of you need to get 'out' more...


I do acknowledge that the conclusion seems to be a rather weak representation of British Novelists Post War, but if any are going to stand it will be in fifth's list, he pretty much nails it



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Virgil... check into Burgess' Nothing Like the Sun, A Dead Man at Deptford, the Enderby Novels, etc... Probably the greatest follower of Joyce after Beckett.

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

And where will the next wave of brilliant literature come from? No... let me guess... Canada? (Or perhaps China):D. Seriously, this reminds me of the same sort of theoretical dribble that was thrown around some 25 years ago concerning the imminent "death of painting"... and yet the old boy still seems to be going strong. Perhaps he will never hold the position he once had before the days of photography and film, but he still hasn't quite given up the ghost. If anything seems to be petering out it is the sort of dry conceptualism that was imagined would replace painting.

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Okay, but he is not exactly wrong about the concept of Novel/Romance to be exausted. After Joyce, Woolf (Someone suggested there is no great english romancist with her?), etc and after Pierre Menard and Magic Realism it do seems like a harder task to add anything new to the formula.
Sure, since in art all deaths are relative, we are going to find one or another great work. There is Lolita, there is The Devil to pay in the badlands, Gravity Rainbow but mostly, the formula is so struck that Dan Browns of life can write since they can make readers "follow one chapter after another" and this is a banalization... not something to be pround.
I think the americans and the great american novel dream is getting dust. Maybe the english are just free of that and thus they could be doing something else with literature (because it is not only about writing novels anyways), not sure if they are doing. But the americans still produce something good like Cormac MacCarthy. You can not even follow dialogues after dialogues, everything is movement, in this he do seems more latin american (Or Italo Calvino) than north american. Even The Road, it is like watching a good George Romero zombie movie. If the guy did a good movie...
There is a funny thing, I remember E.M.Foster arguing that english literature (and here he is talking about irish, american,etc) did not produced a single work worth of Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. It was in the end of 20's (so, we see, he was missing Joyce and Woolf under his noise, and obviously ignored Melville, Conrad, Kipling, Dickens) but I suppose this dramatic future of english novel is not something new. :D

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Originally Posted by TheFifthElement

So, how about thinking about these guys:

Angela Carter
Jeanette Winterson
David Mitchell
Anthony Burgess
J G Farrell
Graham Swift
Iris Murdoch
John Fowles
Lawrence Durrell
J.G. Ballard
Kazuo Ishiguro
A S Byatt
Martin Amis

newer writers:
Steven Hall
John McGregor
? who knows

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I don't like to nitpick lists, but as for Carter, for instance, she is far better as a story writer than novelist - her novels are OK, but she really works better in shorter forms. Byatt to me seems rather dull and boring, Amis the same. Burgess is long dead, and I'm with Virgil on only valuing A Clockwork Orange, though perhaps only for the Kubrick film. Can we consider Ishiguro an English novelist? I don't particularly think he writes in the vein of English novel (as a genre), though perhaps we can, in the sense that we can call Rushdie an English novelist. But really, that list seems strained; from the ones I read on that list, most seem to be rooted in 80s modes of fiction, and seem to lack any real vision of the future.

The market of these books has become a joke. We now have "Literary Novels" as a section in a bookstore, which are essentially normal novels, with perhaps circuitous narration in places, and language above a 6th grade level. When I read these sorts of lists, I can't help but feel that all these names are such conventional, almost householdish names. Take the late Updike's work. Had he started writing now, we would have completely ignored him. He was a revolutionary for his time, but now, all his modes are conventions. That's how I feel about these novelists - they write in a form that has become convention, and don't do much in terms of innovation. They are all such 1980s novelists, that it's almost painful to read; when will literature move on? Clearly it is in the process of moving on, in the sense that there are more interesting works being written now that I know of (perhaps not in Brit Fiction, because underground and New voices rarely make it over here). But still, I can't help but feel there is this tugging to a sort of watered down post-modern novel (watered down meaning essentially a simplification and a decent back into older, usually 19th century conventions, as apposed to radicalized forms).

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Originally Posted by stlukesguild

Virgil... check into Burgess' Nothing Like the Sun, A Dead Man at Deptford, the Enderby Novels, etc... Probably the greatest follower of Joyce after Beckett.

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Thanks I will. I've read The Wanting Seed, which I felt was a good novel, but not great. I do recommend it.

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Originally Posted by promtbr

Considering Post War American novelists (when the thread of course got sidetracked a ways back) as a weak group is also pretty comedic.

Find another country's Post War fiction practitioners that would stand the test of time against:

Bellow, Bowles, Roth, Gaddis, Pynchon, Barth, Gass, Hawkes, Coover, Elkins, Carver, Barthelme, Morrison, Ozick and McCarthy (who's Blood Meridian and Suttree will stand tall for a LONG long time).. You have Crowley on the horizon...

My guess would be that you have of heard of maybe half of all the above, am I right? Which fact does not mean it disproves my argument, it proves some of you need to get 'out' more...

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But the authors you listed are American, aren't they? Whereas the thread is about the British novel in decline.

Have heard of a few of the above but they aren't definitively great, that's just your opinion.

He has probably been mentioned already, but: the late, great JG Ballard. He provided some fascinating insights into the modern world and the modern mind. Dostoevsky and Turgenev did that in the 19th Century and will still read them for that. So . . . yes, JG Ballard.

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Originally Posted by curlyqlink

I'm glad you find Tolkien "brilliant". I found him to be long-winded, childish in his tastes, and remarkably unoriginal.

I have no idea where the "new material" enters into Lord of the Rings. It's based on a Wagner opera that is based on an Icelandic Saga, the Volsungs Saga. Wagner was understandably wowed by the story when he discovered it; in the original, it is extremely powerful stuff. Wagner uprooted it, romanticized it, "Germanicized" it; but for all his bombast Wagner was still a genius.

At its third remove, in Tolkien's labored and tamed version, the Saga has lost all of its native force. He made it into something polite, he took a savage tale and set it amongst the fairies and sprites of an imagined English garden.

In tone, it is a boy's fantasy, a fantasy of high adventure in suburbia, much like Harry Potter or Superman. Boys will always dream about swordfights and magical powers. Lord of the Rings may well live on, but then so may Star Wars; they have much of their appeal in common and they were both ripped off from a classical source.

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Wagner actually based his Ring Cycle on the Nibelunglied, which is an old Germanic poem. Völsunga saga is indeed an Icelandic text, and both are derived from a much earlier source material, which is now lost (if indeed it was ever codified). Thought there are many similarities, the two versions have plenty of differences, the obvious one being that Sigurðr is entirely absent from the Germanic version, while he is the main character in the Old Norse source.

While I'm sure that Tolkein was familiar with Wagner, the fact that he is considered one of the greatest medieval critics that we have had, who lectured and wrote extensively on Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature, would suggest his great familiarity with the source material. One case in point would be the latest thing they've published (Sigurd and Gudrún) from his files - the man was writing his own Eddaic poetry, extrapolated from the source materials in terms of content and style, to fit into the gaps of the poetic canon surrounding the prose Völsunga saga. As far as I am aware, no one else has tried that, and if they have, they certainly haven't advertised the fact.

That said, he borrowed some motifs from Völsunga saga, but they're hardly uncommon. Aspects like the reforging of a broken sword, or the idea of a magic ring, are extremely common tropes in the Fornaldarsögur. Other bits of his material are startlingly original in their reinvention and reapplication.

As for your personal opinion on the quality of his writing, then I respectfully disagree, and I freely acknowledge that he won't be for everyone's tastes. But I honestly think that a comparison to Star Wars is to do it a disservice - to think of it as a mere escapist fantasy is to ignore the subtlety with which Tolkien uses his source material and his own imagination. His works are as much an academic exercise as they are a literary one.

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Originally Posted by Lokasenna

Wagner actually based his Ring Cycle on the Nibelunglied, which is an old Germanic poem. Völsunga saga is indeed an Icelandic text, and both are derived from a much earlier source material, which is now lost (if indeed it was ever codified). Thought there are many similarities, the two versions have plenty of differences, the obvious one being that Sigurðr is entirely absent from the Germanic version, while he is the main character in the Old Norse source.

While I'm sure that Tolkein was familiar with Wagner, the fact that he is considered one of the greatest medieval critics that we have had, who lectured and wrote extensively on Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon literature, would suggest his great familiarity with the source material. One case in point would be the latest thing they've published (Sigurd and Gudrún) from his files - the man was writing his own Eddaic poetry, extrapolated from the source materials in terms of content and style, to fit into the gaps of the poetic canon surrounding the prose Völsunga saga. As far as I am aware, no one else has tried that, and if they have, they certainly haven't advertised the fact.

That said, he borrowed some motifs from Völsunga saga, but they're hardly uncommon. Aspects like the reforging of a broken sword, or the idea of a magic ring, are extremely common tropes in the Fornaldarsögur. Other bits of his material are startlingly original in their reinvention and reapplication.

As for your personal opinion on the quality of his writing, then I respectfully disagree, and I freely acknowledge that he won't be for everyone's tastes. But I honestly think that a comparison to Star Wars is to do it a disservice - to think of it as a mere escapist fantasy is to ignore the subtlety with which Tolkien uses his source material and his own imagination. His works are as much an academic exercise as they are a literary one.

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Hmm, I've not read that he was "one of the greatest" medievalists. I know he put out two books, one on fairy stories, another on Beowulf, and did a translation of Sir Gawain, but I wasn't aware that he was anything special, in terms of criticism. I think, actually the comparison to Star Wars is perhaps accurate - it certainly features the same themes, structure, and characters as the Star Wars trilogy, which, was, essentially constructed out of a reading of Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. OF course, the cast in Tolkien is longer, but the ideas are pretty much the same.

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Originally Posted by JBI

I think, actually the comparison to Star Wars is perhaps accurate - it certainly features the same themes, structure, and characters as the Star Wars trilogy, which, was, essentially constructed out of a reading of Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces. OF course, the cast in Tolkien is longer, but the ideas are pretty much the same.

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But what is wrong with this if we look @ LOTR as quality didactic entertainment? It was a decent saga. I cared about the way of life of the Hobbits, and Gandolph, and wanted them to succeed. Star Wars is a different medium, but relatively enjoyable, at least the first three. I really don't mind good trash JBI, and maybe that is a difference here.

Am I going to dash off and develop a thesis on Darth Vader's limited complexity as a flawed hero? Maybe not, but I don't mind a romp in a decent day camp, and I am not sure why Tolkien deserves castigation; his middle earth has an authentic legendary quality to me.

I do not think it is wrong comparing to Star Wars, specially because in the end, Star Wars have a decent use of narratives, but Tolkien didnt needed Campbell (not to mention, he had more a linguistic than a psychologist approach), anyways, I doubt many would deny Tolkien quality as scholar, but this does not exclude the flaws of LoTR (by the way, I think Silmarillion is much more interesting and original). The idea that he may be placed alongside Dumas seems to be correct and to me is more than a compliment (Dumas had qualities after all), to be some short of bordeline classic.
The notion that he created anything new is exagerated as it is the notion that he should be dismissed for using old sources. And the idea that he is just something popular should be considered: he is not a typical best-seller, his narrative is not exactly fluid, awkward poems and songs in the middle of the story, long and very detailed description of the geography, accurate timeline, linguistic experiments, some elements that could appear unecessary for the narrative (Tom Bombadill or the final chapters) which would be eliminated by any editor to reduce the size of the books. He is not a Dan Brown kind of guy, but people like him. I suppose it is fair to say something he learnt from his studies and applied well. But really, one could argue Agatha Christie is the greatest post-war english novelist because she did everything right, immortalized his characters, in her "area" she is also some short of "specialist"...

Simply ask yourself: What modern British novels do you possess?
A quick look on my bookshelf reveals:

David Nobbs
Angus Wilson
Fay Weldon
Jeanette Winterson

Now for someone who hardly ever reads a novel, this has to be saying something. What they all have in common is that one or more of their novels have been adapted into a TV series. Hence my reading them.

Jeanette Winterson, could be a contender, but does the quality of the work count ?

Tolkien is the front runner, and deservedly so. OK he wrote fantasy and he's popular but so what?