The novel is alive and kicking

The Bangkok Post January 14 1990

It used to be said that the novel was dying. Then it was reported to be dead. A wake was held, drink taken, and a big funeral wound its way through the libraries and the groves of academe. It made a beautiful corpse. The Commonwealth countries sent a wreath. The developing world breathed a sigh of relief – now they could concentrate on their TOEFL and forget about those ideas upsetting the applecart. There were speeches by old fogeys. We were to go back and watch the viddyscreens and forget about this business of reading. It destroyed the eyes. It gave young people bad thoughts. The novels were stacked up on the high shelves out of harm’s way. Screens and buttons and earphones would do instead. Phrasal verbs and plenty of linguistics but none of this questioning reality. Oh no! The novel was a thing of the past. We’d get by on soap operas and the mental popcorn of condominium advertisements.

But suddenly it was up and kicking again. It couldn’t be held down. Dead? Who talked about dead? Novels never die, they only take long sabbaticals and come back with stories to tell about what’s going on out there. What was going on?

Well, the Commonwealth for a start. What used to be the red parts on the map were now talking back. There was silence in the gallery. Stories as long as your arm, tall stories, war stories. The voices in the wilderness had come back to the fold.

V.S. Naipaul, recently invested Knight bachelor on the UK Queen’s New Year Honours’ list, is one voice. Born in 1932 in Trinidad, under British colonial rule, Naipaul takes a close look at the uneasy relationship between the developed and the under-developed worlds. He is the greatest novelist to come out of the Caribbean.

Younger Commonwealth voices are also represented in this comprehensive exhibition. The Anglo-Chinese novelist Timothy Mo, born in 1953, describes the Chinese community in London with great warmth and humour. His most recent novel An Insular Possession is a wry account of the Opium Wars and the founding of Hong Kong.

Kazuo Ishiguro, the current winner of the Booker Prize for his novel The Remains of the Day, is of the same generation as Mo. Nagasaki is his birth-place, London he makes his home. The decline of the gentry is one of the themes of his award-winning novel. Among Asian literary voices in London, both Mo and Ishiguro represent an interesting new direction for British fiction.

The title of Grand Old Man of English Letters could safely be conferred upon three widely different novelists represented in this exhibition. William Golding, winner of the 1983 Nobel Prize for Literature, is famous for his best-selling Lord of the Flies, which anyone who has studied or taught O-levels knows quite enough about. Graham Greene, a more popular novelist, has eluded the Nobel Prize for a number of years. We are told “menace and moral ambivalence have often led him to decaying tropical settings.” Food for thought down on Siam Square!

Rumbustious, prolific Anthony Burgess, Greene’s neighbour on the Côte d’Azur, also gets a touch of “decaying tropical settings” in his Malayan Trilogy. Burgess was in the Colonial Service but his career as a novelist runs in many different, experimental directions. A Clockwork Orange is his best-known novel but nothing beats Earthly Powers for one of the most arresting openings to any book.

Women novelists are well represented in this selection by the British Council, comprising about 40% of the total. This is a healthy indication of increasing interest in women’s fiction in Britain. The inclusion of Alan Hollinghurst, on the strength of only one novel and as an openly homosexual voice, is also a sign of changing times and greater tolerance of diversity in writing.

The term ‘novel’ covers a broad range of genres. Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard represent science fiction. The more popular mass-market writers included are Frederick Forsyth, John le Carré and P. D. James. The exhibition is truly a panorama of the many imaginative ways of representing reality in novelistic form.

A notable absence from the line-up is the Anglo-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, illustrating the uneasy alliance between flagship culture and literary ethics. [Rushdie was under Iranian cleric Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa at the time.]

This informative exhibition covering 65 of the Best of British Novelists should interest anyone who would like to know more about what’s happening in the field of fiction in English. A portrait, introductory piece, photographs and bibliography are displayed for each author. The exhibition is in the form of panels, is easily assembled and is available for loan by schools and universities. It is a stimulating digest which should lead many bookworms to the library next door to search out new talent.

As William Golding, in his Nobel lecture in 1983, said: “The novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.”

The exhibition Contemporary British Novelists in the British Council on Siam Square runs until 10 February. The show is well worth an hour of your time and demonstrates that the novel is indeed alive and kicking.