The last major British novelist?

[stlukesguild]

Tolkein is the 'front-runner"? Does anyone seriously imagine that Tolkein can stand along side of Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Cormack McCarthy, or John Barth? That was the original question: what post-War British novelist do we imagine standing on such a level and surviving. If we're going the Tolkein route I'd suggest Mervyn Peake might be a far better alternative.

[PabloQ]

As I read through this thread, Anthony Burgess' name kept echoing in my head. Finally, FifthElement comes to the rescue and embeds his name in a substantial list of folks most of whom I've never read. The point that A Clockwork Orange may be the only work of Burgess to survive the test of time may be valid, but it's unfair. I can't go into a book store today and find his works on the shelves. That, in and of itself, may make Self's point. I read the Enderby novels many, many years ago and ended up enjoying them more than Orange. Burgess is worthy of some enduring recognition beyond that single novel.

[kilted exile]

Throwing in a good word for LeCarre. He suffers because he is popular & written best-sellers so is not taken to be a serious writer, but he was very talented & definitely not be cast out with the likes of Brown, Rowling & Grisham. Definitely an equal of Cormack McCarthy anyway.

[PabloQ]

Tolkein is the 'front-runner"? Does anyone seriously imagine that Tolkein can stand along side of Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Cormack McCarthy, or John Barth? That was the original question: what post-War British novelist do we imagine standing on such a level and surviving. If we're going the Tolkein route I'd suggest Mervyn Peake might be a far better alternative.

But SLG, none of the folks on your are British, which is the original question. Much of what JBI is saying about the state of the novel in general apply to Tolkien. His most famous work will endure through time more through its popularity than as a novel. Tolkien's editor virtually ruined the novel by hacking it up into pieces. It's organization is irritating. Peter Jackson did the world a favor by telling the story with a chronology that made sense. The novel feels like someone lost a game of 52 pickup. Tolkien's work will endure, but not because he was anything special as novelist.

[meh!]

Along with Alasdair Gray I would suggest another Scottish author: James Kelman. Deeply moving, profound and doing great things with language.

[prendrelemick]

Tolkein is the 'front-runner"? Does anyone seriously imagine that Tolkein can stand along side of Saul Bellow, Phillip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Cormack McCarthy, or John Barth? That was the original question: what post-War British novelist do we imagine standing on such a level and surviving. If we're going the Tolkein route I'd suggest Mervyn Peake might be a far better alternative.

Mervin Peake!
The question hinges on the term "Major Author" I would suggest that Tolkien fits the bill. He's widley read, his works have inspired many artists and musicians and writers, they have spawned thousands of imitations, people are inspired by them. I won't say he invented a genre, but he picked it up, reshaped it and sent it on its way. Unlike Roth, Bellow, McCarthy et al, he was unpretentious enough to keep himself out of the story.

The problem is his subject. Major Authors don't do Fantasy. His craft is well up to scratch.

[Lokasenna]

The problem is his subject. Major Authors don't do Fantasy. His craft is well up to scratch.

Couldn't agree with you more.

That says more about our perception of literature more than the literature itself. I'm sure that an Anglo-Saxon/Old Norse audience would have regarded Tolkien as a powerful and visionary artist, while probably being horribly confused by Mrs Dalloway, though I suspect they would have appreciated the musicality of her prose. Alas, the modern world has become somewhat snobby about certain literary genres; some people seem to assume that if a text isn't based on reality, then it somehow loses validity and pertinence.

[Jozanny]

Loka,

I am somewhat in the middle ground here. I think Tolkien is above par as commercially viable entertainment, and I do not disparage LOTR for what it is not, and I also think the themes within the series are worth respect. I would put Golding, with LOTF, in the same category, along with Hammett, for an American, but I have a certain extra fondness for Hammett, as I studied him under an aging 60's activist who "has an FBI file" to paraphrase his own words, and then under a retired Jewish professor who provided me with additional insights through a less famous novel--

but that said, to me, for novels to be the absolute best, they have to transcend something. For an atheist, transcendence is still oddly important to me, and sixsmith inadvertently started me thinking that few British novels hit this watermark for me. Austen, ahem ahaw, is yes a great writer, but she basically says the same thing in five books, and in Emma, seems to deliberately undercut what she takes more seriously in P&P.

Dickens is a great melodramist, but he isn't quite Austen and he's no realist, at least not in the Jamesian fashion.

Now, the Brits and the Americans still spar over Henry James. Both claim him, but to me he is an American expatriate, so I don't cede him to England, but if I did, that would solve this problem--which is, that I cannot think of a British movement novelist that is close to Joyce, Proust, and other modernists, both European and American, whose work is in some sense, transcendent. I know of no Anglo Broch, or Musil, Faulkner, even a Hemingway--with two possible exceptions, as I mentioned before, who will grow in stature with time, and those are Byatt and Lessing--though with Byatt I have to read more.

Given your enthusiasm for Tolkien, you'd like Byatt's "Little Black Book of Stories". She does things with fableism that surpass Tolkien.

[TheFifthElement]

That was the original question: what post-War British novelist do we imagine standing on such a level and surviving.

Actually it wasn't. The original question was:

which contemporary (post war) english language novelists will be read 100 years hence

I think Tolkien will still be read 100 years from now whether or not he's considered 'high literature'. I believe LoTR holds the record as the second highest selling book (in Britain anyway). Second to the Bible, that is.

If Tolkien is in the frame then C.S. Lewis is likely to survive also. I'd dismissed Lewis as too early, but he was writing around the same time as Tolkien. They were pals, apparently.

Mervyn Peake is pretty cool too

I suppose the difficulty for British writers, when you're talking about innovation and the like, is the pressure of all that history of great writers which have kind of set the standard against which all following writers fail. And the further difficulty, of course, of not knowing if those original great writers were truly great or just lucky that printing was fairly new or not that widespread.

Interesting, all this talk of DeLillo. I found DeLillo oppressively boring and have no intention of reading any more of him now, let alone in 100 years Never heard of Bellow either, or Barth. Just going off to look them up...

[sixsmith]

Originally Posted by stlukesguild
That was the original question: what post-War British novelist do we imagine standing on such a level and surviving.
Actually it wasn't. The original question was:

Quote:
Originally Posted by sixsmith
which contemporary (post war) english language novelists will be read 100 years hence


Interesting, all this talk of DeLillo. I found DeLillo oppressively boring and have no intention of reading any more of him now, let alone in 100 years Never heard of Bellow either, or Barth. Just going off to look them up...

I think my original intent was more commensurate with what stluke has said but the question was admittedly vague. In any case on a practical level you are quite right. Whether we currently consider Tolkien sufficiently literary will not dictate his posterity. I have not read him so i cannot speak to either possibility.

De Lillo can be infuriating. Which book (s) have you read? The paranoia/conspiracy/plot motif can get a bit much and isn't particularly nuanced. I found Libra to be a very powerful and moving novel and White Noise to be a very clever and disturbingly funny one. The others are tough going. I assume you're joking re Bellow.

Interested to hear your views on Byatt Jozanny. In Wood's essay (an essay on Iris Murdoch), he suggests that Byatt (along with Spark and Drabble) restricts the freedom of her charcters with 'bossy authorial intrusion'.
Not read her so i may have to find out for myself.

[Jozanny]

Interesting, all this talk of DeLillo. I found DeLillo oppressively boring and have no intention of reading any more of him now, let alone in 100 years Never heard of Bellow either, or Barth. Just going off to look them up...

Fifth: I cannot fully defend DeLillo as a paramount post-modernist. Underworld is a very large novel, and I only got into the opening fifty pages before I was beset by library fines (I might buy the book), but he isn't boring. The opening of Underworld was riveting, the best of any contemporary writing I can think of.

He may be otherwise uneven, but boring really doesn't do his efforts justice, the meticulous attention to detail, the ability to glide the reader through movement sequences effortlessly. He can put you in the head of a black kid from Harlem besting the white man's world through his wit and survival instinct, and mesh this with the mindset of Hoover during the cold war, and then connect this to the perfection of modern mechanics in a fast driven Lexus.

I may be an obscure author, but I haven't spent 20 years of blood and treasure not learning something about the achievement of excellence, and DeLillo really knows how to pitch episodes in sharp and distinct bites of clarity.

How he adds up, at the end of the day, I can't say, but I know a narrative voice in the major leagues when I see it.

[JCamilo]

But SLG, none of the folks on your are British, which is the original question. Much of what JBI is saying about the state of the novel in general apply to Tolkien. His most famous work will endure through time more through its popularity than as a novel. Tolkien's editor virtually ruined the novel by hacking it up into pieces. It's organization is irritating. Peter Jackson did the world a favor by telling the story with a chronology that made sense. The novel feels like someone lost a game of 52 pickup. Tolkien's work will endure, but not because he was anything special as novelist.

Eh? Peter Jackson butchered Tolkien in a mindless show off of predicatable steriotypes. He destroyed Tolkien geography and chronology to satisfy people who can only read Dan Brown or watch James Cameron movies. When Tolkien was alive some dude sent him a script to approval and Tolkien listed the reasons why it was crap. It works for Peter Jackson (an awful director. The LoTR movie triology is just a thrailler for the DVD. 10 hours of movies to sell DVDs.) as well. And the editor and Tolkien worked alongside with the division of chapters of LoTR, Tolkien who separated the work with chapters, nto the editor (and I have no idea what is wrong with the chronology of such books).

And sorry, however is pointing that the problem of Tolkien is because he wrote fantasy, this is silly. Major literary figures wrote fantasy, Kafka and Borges, mostly in the XX century. And that is one of the reason why Tolkien occupies this bordeline position - he was just worst than them. Yet, I think he will be read yet in the future because of his merits, and he is not the one who will save the english post-war novel. No more than Agatha Christie will. Or Bram Stoker, or Dumas, or Conan Doyle were.

[kelby_lake]

Kafka didn't write fantasy, he was a surrealist. Fantasy is a genre relying on mythical worlds and creatures and magic.

[PabloQ]

Eh? Peter Jackson butchered Tolkien in a mindless show off of predicatable steriotypes. He destroyed Tolkien geography and chronology to satisfy people who can only read Dan Brown or watch James Cameron movies. When Tolkien was alive some dude sent him a script to approval and Tolkien listed the reasons why it was crap. It works for Peter Jackson (an awful director. The LoTR movie triology is just a thrailler for the DVD. 10 hours of movies to sell DVDs.) as well. And the editor and Tolkien worked alongside with the division of chapters of LoTR, Tolkien who separated the work with chapters, nto the editor (and I have no idea what is wrong with the chronology of such books).

Like the movies, don't like the movies, that's not my point. My point is that the work, The Hobbit and LOTR, will transcend time. But not because the writing is anything special or extraordinary or that the novel are well constructed. I've read LOTR three times. It really is poorly constructed as a novel (and it really is only one). The main characters disappear for an entire half of the second part so that the author can back track and tell the story of the other members of the broken fellowship. There is a tremendous amount of fluff there. And then there's the second part of the third book that has so much unnecessary anti-climactic material, you really have to be a fan to wade through it to the end. But it's a popular story and that is what will make it endure, not Tolkien's writing ability.

Which is a lot of what I take from JBI's entries. There is a million tons of popular fiction novels available, most of which are targeted to make a buck. If a truly artistic novel, welll-written, innovative, and revolutionary were to be produced by any modern day author it is questionable whether it would be published and, if published, whether it would get enough critical acclaim to be read. JBI has declared the novel dead. He may be right; I want him to be wrong.

We'll never all agree on any one point in these threads. StLukesGuild might look at a Jackson Pollack and see art; I might see a drop cloth for sale. But that's okay, it's what makes these forums fun. I'll admit that I am completely ignorant of the state of the post-war British novel. As I read through the thread, I couldn't get Burgess out of my head and he's dead. He may be remembered, in the long run, for just one novel, just like Tolkien.

I purposely kept American authors out my thinking as I readi the thread, despite the reference to English-writing authors and the number of American writers brought up in the course of the discussion. But if I were to pick a post-war American novelist whose works might endure 100 years, I'd pick Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., especially Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle. Some of the other American writers mentioned might endure and for others it might be too soon to tell. Vonnegut might have the best chance of any of them.

Finally, J, you made me laugh, intentionally or otherwise. I'm not advocating the movies one way or another but exactly how did Jackson stereotype a hobbit? I don't remember the Hobbit Anti-Defamation League marching outside theaters. Same for the Equal Rights for Elves Union. You lost me there.

[TheFifthElement]

De Lillo can be infuriating. Which book (s) have you read?

The Body Artist.

Fifth: I cannot fully defend DeLillo as a paramount post-modernist. Underworld is a very large novel, and I only got into the opening fifty pages before I was beset by library fines (I might buy the book), but he isn't boring. The opening of Underworld was riveting, the best of any contemporary writing I can think of.

He may be otherwise uneven, but boring really doesn't do his efforts justice,

Hey Jozy, you may be right but I think when it comes to boring/not boring it comes down to personal opinion/preference. He may be the most excellent writer in the world right now but all I can say is the book I read, I was glad when it was over. As a reader, he left me cold. It might just be that his style isn't my style, I completely acknowledge that, but the one thing I am sure of is that I'm not likely to pick up another of his books any time soon. He's behind a very long list of other writers that I do want to read: Saramago, Laxness, Tanizaki, Bulgakov, Dostoevsky, Sartre, de Beaviour, Eco, Calvino, Brautigan, Zola, Durrell, Ondaatje, Ballard, Murdoch, le Clezio, Marquez, Flann O' Brien, and a whole load more who may not be as technically proficient but I enjoyed more.

I assume you're joking re Bellow.

Nope, wasn't joking. Looked him up and there's something vaguely stirring in the back of my mind that I may have heard of Hertzog, or maybe it was one of those titles that stood out as I was browsing the shelves at my local Waterstones. But no, until he was mentioned here today I'd never heard of him.

Maybe he's just not 'big' in UK? Or maybe I move in the wrong circles. I don't work in literature and neither have I studied literature beyond A level. If it makes you feel better, I hadn't heard of Wallace Stevens before Lit-net either, but again unless you're studying literature to a high level in UK you're not likely to either. Literature studies up to the age of 18 tend to focus on British or Irish writers, generally.