Belonging and not belonging
Caroline Moore
ON MODERN BRITISH FICTION edited by Zachary Leader OUP, £14.99, pp. 318, ISBN 0199249326 The front cover of On Modem British Fiction has a roll-call of contributors. Anyone at all interested in fiction (or indeed in what it is to be 'modern' or 'British') will find at least three or four of these essays worth the price of the book, though which three or four will depend upon individual tastes. As an omnivore, I felt at the outset like Mole faced with Water Rat's picnic.
'What's inside it? Well, there's martinamis inside it, and katherinebucknellvalentinectinninghamlindsayduguiddanfranklinpnfurbankchristopherhitchenseliza bethjanehowardwendylesserianmcewanI iammcilvanneyh il arymantelpa trickpa rrindermartinprie stmanelaineshowal terjamesw oodmichaelw000d ....
On the whole, the critics supplied the hard-boiled, academic eggs and over-ripe tomatoes, the expected staples of a literary hamper. The novelists generally provided the freshest vittles.
The difficulty for a reviewer faced with such plenitude, however, is that one feels compelled to ask if there is any discernible underlying pattern. I am tempted in response to celebrate sheer diversity — and praise a collection that anatomises ladlif, conveys the excitement of `comissioning and editing modern fiction', discusses not only the science fiction of John Wyndham and his heirs but also the possible relation between Comedy and Conservatism (with particular reference to Waugh and Wode
house), and in general captures the rambling, freshly aired, bring-your-own-views, picnic format of a good conference.
Nonetheless, I cannot resist taking a stab at some critical overview. One theme, then, that runs through several of these essays is that of exile, literal and metaphorical. Many of the novelists and critics have taken as their starting-point the word 'British' in the title, and made it a matter for properly sceptical but deeply involved enquiry. The best here write quite brilliantly about that sense of both belonging and not belonging which sharpens and informs the consciousness of all great writers.
For some, the exile is literal, geographical: Michael Wood writes suggestively of 'Enigmas and Homelands' in the works of V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. But there are many other forms of exile.
The most compelling reading in this volume is Ian McEwan's edgily unsentimental account of his attempt to master 'correct' English — not as a foreigner, but as one whose 'mother-tongue' was inherited from the class-ridden uncertainties of his mother, who regarded language 'as something that might go off in her face, like a letterbomb'. It is a brilliant piece of self-revelation from a brilliant novelist. I wish I had read it before reviewing Atonement, for it illuminates the novel; not just the edginess of the working-class victim, but, more deeply, the edginess of McEwan's narrative tricks: the 'hands-up-if-you-spotted-thedeliberate-mistake' subtly-socially-out-ofkilter narrative. Whether she describes brussels sprouts in midsummer or a revoltingly naff chocolate cocktail, you are not supposed to take McEwan's narrator at her word. At the end of the novel we discover that she is suffering from something like dementia — the appalling fate that, as McEwan's memoir so movingly reveals, eventually claimed the mind of his mother.
I first discovered the writings of another favourite novelist, Hilary Mantel, through The Spectator, when she submitted a short
story for the Shiva Naipaul prize in 1987 (founded in memory of V. S. Naipaul's younger brother, another displaced and memorably brilliant writer). Her story was an extraordinarily lucid evocation of cultural exile. Mantel was describing her time in Saudi Arabia, within the claustrophobic bubble of expatriate life; but, as it turns out from the essay in this book, she has never felt quite at home. She was a female Catholic northerner of Irish descent, excluded in her mind from English culture, which appeared to her to be 'white, male, southern, Protestant and middle-class'.
I cannot, however, believe in her vision of the expanding horizons that will come with the realisation that our writers must become 'European' novelists. A desire to belong may run deep, but is never attainable through aspirations or agenda. What the writers in this collection suggest is the extent to which a sense of belonging — whether to Britain, the modern world, or even the enterprise of fiction — is for novelists subtly and deeply ambivalent. A writer may long for or long to escape from (very often both) a particular country, culture, class, period of history, or, most commonly, his or her own childhood; and a great writer both shapes and is shaped by that yearning or resentment. Writers in literal or metaphorical exile, of course, create their own images of those longed-for or fought-against worlds. V. S. Naipaul suggests how potent nostalgia may be for an England or Trinidad that perhaps never existed.
Yet the utopias and dystopias that power the most lasting fictions are never purely aspirational or merely fictional. I can think of plenty of good, intelligen, up-market novels that have not lasted the course, by such once well-thought-of authors as Charles Morgan or L. H. Myers, which faded because they were not ultimately rooted. In the context of this book, one might argue that they were not British enough. (Morgan still has a following in France.) Sometimes, of course, the home-tethering of the imaginative balloon is exhilaratingly slender, a mere spider's thread. When Wendy Lesser praises Penelope Fitzgerald for 'her uncanny ability to write from within an alien culture', she is entirely right; and yet of course the worlds portrayed are recognisably Fitzgerald's. And the combination of wit and melancholy in her fiction often suggests the voice of the dispossesed, the semi-exile. (Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history' is the quotation she chose as epigraph for The Blue Flower.) I have always felt that her sensibility was somehow Irish, but this, I realise retrospectively, must partly be because she once taught me Yeats — cramming for Cambridge Entrance in a ramshackle tutorial establishment which smelt of damp and mice and a revoltingly elderly lapdog. Light-hearted juveniles among the mice that skittered over the furniture at night
used to fall off into the wastepaper-baskets and have to be emptied out in the morning. Yeats, she said, was her favourite poet. And I remember my chill surge of panic when we realised that, with only weeks to go. I had written essays upon nothing else.
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