wimp-novels: “I had this really boring job as a clerk in a small provincial town,” they would begin, “when I met this really wonderful gay cripple and entered a whole new world.” (I am lampooning, but only a little.) There was a whole group of son-of-Kelman Scottish novels in which people said “fuck” and “cunt” and recited the names of minor punk bands. There was, too, the Incredibly Badly Sub-Edited Novel. I remember one set in the sixties in which a Communist character couldn’t spell “Baader” or “Meinhof” (“Bader,” “Meinhoff”). Many of the entries read as if no editor had ever looked at them.
More seriously—and this is probably why there has been a lot of garbage talked about a lost generation—it was easy to see, all over the landscape of contemporary fiction, the devastating effect of the Thatcher years. So many of these writers wrote without hope. They had lost all ambition, all desire to wrestle with the world. Their books dealt with tiny patches of the world, tiny pieces of human experience—a council estate, a mother, a father, a lost job. Very few writers had the courage or even the energy to bite off a big chunk of the universe and chew it over. Very few showed any linguistic or formal innovation. Many were dulled, and therefore dull. (And then, even worse, there were the Hooray Henries and Sloanes who evidently thought that the day of the yuppie-novel, the Bellini-drinking, okay-yah fiction, had dawned. Dukedoms and country-house bulimics abounded.) It was plain that too many books were being published; that too many writers had found their way into print without any justification for it at all; that too many publishers had adopted a kind of random, scattergun policy of publishing for turnover and just hoping that something would strike a chord.
When the general picture is so disheartening, it is easy to miss the good stuff. I agreed to be a judge for “Best of Young British Novelists II” because I wanted to find out for myself if the good stuff really was there. In my view, it is. The four of us have worked extremely hard, reading, re-reading, evaluating, debating. It was a marvelously un-bitchy experience, and I hope that we will be seen to have performed some service, not only to the chosen writers but also to readers. I hope just a little of the excitement that surrounded fiction a dozen or so years ago might be regenerated by this list.
One of my old schoolmasters was fond of devising English versions of the epigrams of Martial. I remember only one, his version of Martial’s message to a particularly backward-looking critic:
You only praise the good old days
We young ’uns get no mention.
I don’t see why I have to die
To gain your kind attention.
January 1993
Angela Carter
[
First published as an introduction to
The Collected Stories of Angela Carter]
The last time I visited Angela Carter, a few weeks before she died, she had insisted on dressing for tea, in spite of being in considerable pain. She sat bright-eyed and erect, head cocked like a parrot’s, lips satirically pursed, and got down to the serious teatime business of giving and receiving the latest dirt: sharp, foulmouthed, passionate. That’s what she was like: spikily outspoken—once, after I’d come to the end of a relationship of which she had not approved, she telephoned me to say, “
Well.
You’re going to be seeing a
lot
more of
me
from now on”—and at the same time courteous enough to defy mortal suffering for the gentility of a formal afternoon tea.
Death genuinely pissed Angela off, but she had one consolation. She had taken out an “immense” life insurance policy shortly before the cancer struck. The prospect of the insurers being obliged, after receiving so few payments, to hand out a fortune to “her boys” (her husband, Mark, and her son, Alexander) delighted her greatly, and inspired a great gloating black-comedy aria at which it was impossible not to laugh.
She
More seriously—and this is probably why there has been a lot of garbage talked about a lost generation—it was easy to see, all over the landscape of contemporary fiction, the devastating effect of the Thatcher years. So many of these writers wrote without hope. They had lost all ambition, all desire to wrestle with the world. Their books dealt with tiny patches of the world, tiny pieces of human experience—a council estate, a mother, a father, a lost job. Very few writers had the courage or even the energy to bite off a big chunk of the universe and chew it over. Very few showed any linguistic or formal innovation. Many were dulled, and therefore dull. (And then, even worse, there were the Hooray Henries and Sloanes who evidently thought that the day of the yuppie-novel, the Bellini-drinking, okay-yah fiction, had dawned. Dukedoms and country-house bulimics abounded.) It was plain that too many books were being published; that too many writers had found their way into print without any justification for it at all; that too many publishers had adopted a kind of random, scattergun policy of publishing for turnover and just hoping that something would strike a chord.
When the general picture is so disheartening, it is easy to miss the good stuff. I agreed to be a judge for “Best of Young British Novelists II” because I wanted to find out for myself if the good stuff really was there. In my view, it is. The four of us have worked extremely hard, reading, re-reading, evaluating, debating. It was a marvelously un-bitchy experience, and I hope that we will be seen to have performed some service, not only to the chosen writers but also to readers. I hope just a little of the excitement that surrounded fiction a dozen or so years ago might be regenerated by this list.
One of my old schoolmasters was fond of devising English versions of the epigrams of Martial. I remember only one, his version of Martial’s message to a particularly backward-looking critic:
You only praise the good old days
We young ’uns get no mention.
I don’t see why I have to die
To gain your kind attention.
January 1993
Angela Carter
[
First published as an introduction to
The Collected Stories of Angela Carter]
The last time I visited Angela Carter, a few weeks before she died, she had insisted on dressing for tea, in spite of being in considerable pain. She sat bright-eyed and erect, head cocked like a parrot’s, lips satirically pursed, and got down to the serious teatime business of giving and receiving the latest dirt: sharp, foulmouthed, passionate. That’s what she was like: spikily outspoken—once, after I’d come to the end of a relationship of which she had not approved, she telephoned me to say, “
Well.
You’re going to be seeing a
lot
more of
me
from now on”—and at the same time courteous enough to defy mortal suffering for the gentility of a formal afternoon tea.
Death genuinely pissed Angela off, but she had one consolation. She had taken out an “immense” life insurance policy shortly before the cancer struck. The prospect of the insurers being obliged, after receiving so few payments, to hand out a fortune to “her boys” (her husband, Mark, and her son, Alexander) delighted her greatly, and inspired a great gloating black-comedy aria at which it was impossible not to laugh.
She
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