The last major British novelist?

[mortalterror]

Viable Literary Trends
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4.Books JBI likes

Although he is right about Atonement.

[sixsmith]

to the above

[stlukesguild]

I'm not an expert on post-ww2 literature, but the only two writers which I'm sure are the equals of the modernists are Marquez and Bellow. One thing I do know, Self and Amis aren't in that league.

While we may disagree on McCarthy (among other things) I won't dispute you here.



Hahahahahaha!

Yes indeed. More than a few times it seems as if JBI has his head stuck too deeply into his academic theorists (or elsewhere) so that he completely forgets the reality that artists and authors largely couldn't give a rat's a$$ about what some PhD. theorist thinks about what is or is not viable in art today and in the future.

Right now, it feels like England has exhausted itself. Larkin and Auden picked up on this exhaustion decades ago, and England has never recovered. America has exhausted itself too...

And where will the next wave of brilliant literature come from? No... let me guess... Canada? (Or perhaps China). 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.

[Jozanny]

mortal writes:

Originally Posted by JBI
Viable Literary Trends
1.Novels
2.Epics
3.Books people like
4.Books JBI likes

Bravo mortal I thought if I ran in this direction Sche would have scolded me, so I blithely went my merry way, but we all got a collective chuckle. However, I think that it leads to the problem of our over-education. When I was a kid I could enjoy something like a John Jakes narrative. Now I read for hermeneutics, for learning how to steal, for judging x against y. I never read just to enjoy a damn book, and I'm not really sure I could, which is exactly my problem with a novel like The Road; it plays against too many traditions.

[kilted exile]

However, I think that it leads to the problem of our over-education. When I was a kid I could enjoy something like a John Jakes narrative. Now I read for hermeneutics, for learning how to steal, for judging x against y. I never read just to enjoy a damn book, and I'm not really sure I could, which is exactly my problem with a novel like The Road; it plays against too many traditions.

I am in the very lucky position in this regard that I have never studied lit at all. I read constantly but do so only for the sake of reading


erm that doesnt read right: lucky is not the word I mean.

[JBI]

Although he is right about Atonement.

I'm yet to see someone name a particularly memorable "English Novelist" (note, if you count Rushdie in here, and Naipaul, perhaps that makes sense, though I hardly see them as English Novelists, in the sense that their best work has nothing to do with England, and stylistically is very unenglish).

As for books I like, well, yeah, perhaps. I don't think the novel is out, I think the English novel, and its concept of narrative are out, in the sense that the Nouveau Roman completely recreated the French novel. There was no such coherent movement in English prose, things sort of just started to melt (without the general readership knowing or caring).

The concept of the Occidental Novel has been exhausted. Lets Face It, it has. Besides which, it is impossible to judge anything on what is liked, as books tend to sell quickly, and disappear quickly. I don't see you championing the next bodice ripper, which, by the way, outsell virtually everything.

In that sense, Dan Brown has essentially faded from literary history, JK Rowling is disappearing quickly, Twilight will soon go, Romances change weekly, Grisham seems to have quieted a bit, though Stephen King seems to be going strong.

The novel, moreso than any form, is the least prosperous, yet the most read - novels matter little, yet sell many. The general reason for this, is that essentially it has suffered becoming the dominant commercial mode of writing outside of journalism. You can't get rich writing short stories, poems, drama, or non-fiction (unless you write some bigoted rubbish, or some stupidity without footnotes or any purpose), but you can get rich writing novels if you are very, very, very lucky, and you can make a decent living even if you aren't lucky (romance writers make decent salaries - not fantastic ones, but enough to get buy). As a poet, even if you are T. S. Eliot, you can't make a living. As a playwright, you pretty much can't make a living either. As a scholar, your job relies on institution for support, rather than sales. As a novelist though, there is always that opportunity, and therefore, there is always that yielding to the potential of sales over the potential of freedom. A novel reader won't take an author the same way as a poetry reader, and because of it, novels have, and will suffer, always.

Eco is perhaps the person who realized this the best. He even writes with two separate audiences in mind, giving a sample flavor on one hand to the average reader, with content aimed at them, yet on another level, he has a completely ironic set of jokes that only a specialist in the field would completely get, and perhaps the well read person would pick up on some of them. That's why his novel Baudolino didn't do as well as The Name of the Rose; Eco took the academic audience over the popular one, and set the book in a time when the common reader wouldn't be able to get any of the jokes, which are numerous, very ironic, yet reliant on so much manuscript history as to make getting all of them impossible (I found that I stumbled upon many of them by chance - for instance, I got the references to the Arch Poet by the chance of having read through the lyrics booklet of my CD of Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, and others in similar, unlikely ways). The point is though, that Eco realized this, and perhaps bent over slightly to the popular. On the other hand, he is a skilled novelist, so he made up for it.


That is just really one problem though. There is also the problem of the form as being just a form. Poetry is not just a form, therefore it has adapted well over time, whereas the novel is a form, and hasn't really morphed into its next shape completely yet. The novel is similar in a sense, to epic poetry, in that it is merely one facet of literature. It certainly is not the be all and end all that it is made out to be by most readers (academic and common). I see no reason why it can't be suggested that it should either move forward or die. In most cases, I see no justification why the text should be read, and not just a movie made with the plot. In such cases, I ask myself why even bother read the text.

The novel needs freshness, and, unless some genius comes from somewhere, I hardly doubt it will come from England. Like I said, it is hard to find a novelist from England worth real mention right now, despite my trying. In that sense, we can only just wait and see. Generally though, if something great is to come, it won't be in the past traditions, that is for sure, it will completely redefine the "English novel" in the sense that Wordsworth redefined poetry, and Whitman redefined poetry after him.

Right now, it feels like England has exhausted itself. Larkin and Auden picked up on this exhaustion decades ago, and England has never recovered. America has exhausted itself too...

And where will the next wave of brilliant literature come from? No... let me guess... Canada? (Or perhaps China). 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.

Perhaps in the US, there are many immigrants writing great stuff there right now. I doubt novels from Canada, as the novel, as a form, isn't as important as the Short Story. India certainly - China won't get many translations for a while, so probably not there, besides which, they have their own stuff to work out first, so I am told - perhaps some more from Africa - I bet we get a lot more Middle Eastern Prose soon. The West Indies are still stronger per capita than generally any area in the world, - generally, I'd say the so called "West", most of Canada included, has exhausted itself. The best works in all these countries seem to be coming from minority voices. Certainly in Canada, the best writing comes from minorities (though most Canadian specialists would scold me at this point). In the US too, I feel strong things from newly arrived immigrants, though their reaction to their new country is very, very different than Canada, and has produced some strange hybrids in terms of novels and stories, and scholarships for that matter (American culture politics mixed with immigration problems create sometimes interesting, sometimes quite annoying literature), but on the whole, guessing is hard to say.

I'm pretty much at the point where I think the novel is exhausted. So it won't matter exactly from where, but more in what form.

[Lokasenna]

I suspect that history will consider J. R. R. Tolkein as THE author of the last century...

Ha ha ha... Nothing like a good laugh after a day at work. (That was a joke... wasn't it?)

...and he's certainly going to survive.

He will survive for the foreseeable future in a manner not unlike Alexander Dumas (The Three Musketeers, The Count of Monte Cristo, etc...) as the writer of adventure tales that appeal especially to young readers and the unversed... but are barely recognized as "classics" by subsequent writers, critics, and the well-read.

I must, in a light-hearted and amiable way, leap to the defence of my beloved hero, Prof. Tolkein . For starters:

[URL="http://www.amazon.co.uk/J-R-R-Tolkien-Author-Century-T-Shippey/dp/0261104012/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244278580&sr=8-3"/URL]

And Prof. Shippey (whom I've had the pleasure of meeting, and have listened to several of his lectures) is not just some random crank with a Tolkein obsession - he is one of the most respected Medieval scholars in the world.

Tolkein didn't just write adventure stories - rather, he was the culmination of a medieval revival that began in the mid-Victorian era. But while they merely began translating and rereading the old Icelandic and Germanic sources, he was the first to really start composing new material, and it really is brilliant, both from an entertainment and an academic point of view.

That said, I really do appreciate that it is a matter of taste. My dislike of Woolf and Lawrence is subjective, although I will admit that Woolf had some talent with wordplay. Similarly, I do know plenty of people who can't stand Tolkein. All I'm saying is that we should not write off either his considerable talent, or his major impact on the literary and academic scene.

[curlyqlink]

I think Scottish writer A. Kennedy has what it takes to be considered a "great" writer. As does Iris Murdoch.

Tolkein didn't just write adventure stories - rather, he was the culmination of a medieval revival that began in the mid-Victorian era. But while they merely began translating and rereading the old Icelandic and Germanic sources, he was the first to really start composing new material, and it really is brilliant, both from an entertainment and an academic point of view.

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.

[Scheherazade]

Nobody is going to mention Ms. Rowling?

[Jozanny]

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.

I am no expert on Tolkien's source material, far from it, but I read all five novels of the saga, with the last being the weakest. The Silmarillion was rather unnecessary as a summation novel--but I am going to hedge--and say that, in comparison to contemporary fantasy, LOTR is a great niche work. It does not mean that I rank Tolkien up there with great British novelists, but as fantasy entertainment LOTR hasn't been surpassed. It offers lessons about the seduction of evil, the waste of vainglory, the humility of simple decency, the exacting toll of the desire for absolute authoritarianism. In that sense, it works as a parable, and follows the English traditions such as can be found in Beowulf and the Arthurian legends. Byatt does this herself, but in a much more sophisticated fashion--but perhaps six does point to a particular problem.

The Spanish have Cervantes, and everything pretty much comes from him, in terms of great novels.

The French have Flaubert and Proust.

The Americans have Melville and Faulkner.

I cannot think of a British equivalent to any great European or American novelists, and I don't think the comedy of manners--such that Austen represents, is equal to other great works of realism or modernism; maybe I am just tired.

I mean, there is Dickens, but one can only laugh in comparing Dickens to another movement novelist.

I give up.

[Virgil]

I cannot think of a British equivalent to any great European or American novelists, and I don't think the comedy of manners--such that Austen represents, is equal to other great works of realism or modernism; maybe I am just tired.

I mean, there is Dickens, but one can only laugh in comparing Dickens to another movement novelist.

I give up.

There is Dickens, yes. Don't forget the 18th century novelists of Richardson, Fielding, Austen and Scott, though the last two straddled into the 19th. But I think Shakespeare (yes, I know a playwrite) set a standard by which no one has ever equaled. He remains at the pinnicle of English literature.

[meh!]

I think Scottish writer A. Kennedy has what it takes to be considered a "great" writer. As does Iris Murdoch.

I do think A.L. Kennedy is an excellent writer (and a good comedian, btw, I saw here recently in Glasgow). I've always liked her shot stories a lot.

[Mr Endon]

I'd say Henry Green. I've only read Living, but I remember really liking it, it's exactly what a novel's supposed to be.

[kelby_lake]

Lets be honest, is Atonement really a superb work? It's a rather silly story, written in a terribly boring omniscient voice, loaded with all the typical clichés, yet still is held as perhaps the greatest work in the vein of "British novel" in the last little while.

Traditional narrative practices hold no real weight anymore, and are only flings to be read once and discarded - the form is exhausted, and built on a set of clichés.

I don't think Atonement is a superb work, but I did find it moving. Cliches are cliches because they work- we repeat them over and over so they sound a bit silly, but they still work. With good books, the cliches are hidden, but they're still there.

On Chesil Beach was critically acclaimed but it's the dullest thing ever. At least Moby Dick had whales. At the end of Chesil, you sort of see all the clever devices but don't really care.

Can't think of any recent British novellist that was any good- I like the Americans We've had some decent theatre in between 1950 and now, I think.

[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

I think The Road may sour me on Blood Meridian, when I start it, which is perhaps unfortunate.

Hi Jozy I really enjoyed The Road but I found Blood Meridian boring and a bit of a disappointment. I thought McCarthy had something but then I read a couple more of his books and they seemed, samey. And I began to wonder if he could write without the words 'slant', 'wise' and 'stricken'. So I don't know. Bit torn on that one.

Martin Aimis's Lucky Jim is hilarious.

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