Writers unite! The return of the protest novel
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Version 0 of 1. There are many reasons to miss the writer Gordon Burn, who died in 2009 at the age of only 61: his fearlessness in depicting the crimes of the Yorkshire Ripper, the Moors murderers and Fred and Rosemary West, and parsing their distorted, occult refraction of the English psyche; his wonderfully engaged, wry writing on sport, art, politics; his intuitive, loving understanding of the deep pathos and nostalgia of popular culture. But one of the talents that his death deprived us of becomes more noticeable by the minute. In 2008, Burn published Born Yesterday: The News as Novel, which he had written to a punishingly tight schedule during the course of 2007. Born Yesterday had only the slightest plot – a Burn-like character absorbs the world around him, noticing incidentals, making connections, drawing conclusions – because its real business was the news itself, its events and atmosphere gleaned from the newspapers and TV bulletins. Here is an elderly, infirm Margaret Thatcher, walking in the park; there is Tony Blair departing office and leaving Gordon Brown to deal with attempted terrorist attacks in London and Glasgow, a flooded country and an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease; further afield, in a Portuguese resort, are Madeleine McCann’s parents making their stricken appeals for her return. But there are also appearances from those who might linger in the memory less concretely for those not intimately involved: “Super Smeato” – John Smeaton, the baggage handler who threw himself in the way of danger during the Glasgow attack; Michael Barnett, who died from hypothermia after his leg fastened in a storm drain during the Hull floods; Fiona Jones, the Labour MP and “Blair babe” convicted and later cleared of election fraud, whose alcoholism led to her early death. Everywhere is detail, unstoppable, irresistible, kaleidoscopic. “I see what I see very clearly,” writes the novel’s narrator. “But I don’t know what I’m looking at.” During the course of the book, Burn quotes a novelist also known for his striking ability to metamorphose the everyday into the uncanny: “Given the unlimited opportunities which the media landscape now offers to the imagination, wrote JG Ballard, I feel we should immerse ourselves in the most destructive element, ourselves, and swim.” How to swim, though, if your preferred stroke is made with a pen? Or: how to respond to a time of extreme political and social uncertainty, a time when language itself is contested at every turn, and when urgency seems the order of the day? What can fiction writers make of the shifting ground beneath their feet, and how does their participation in – or withdrawal from – public life affect our view of them? Just short of a decade after Born Yesterday came a novel, albeit very different in style, that was also written at furious pace and, at least in part, dictated by external events. Ali Smith’s Autumn presented readers with a novel that had clear kinship to her previous work – the preoccupation with the legacy of a forgotten artist, an imaginatively wayward child, the hidden life of a mysterious adult, all somehow woven together – but which also reflected on the country’s recent, momentous decision, whose impact was summarised in a short, incantatory chapter: Autumn was hailed as the first Brexit novel, and it’s certainly hard to see how anyone could have written one faster All across the country, there was misery and rejoicing. All across the country, what had happened whipped about by itself as if a live electric wire had snapped off a pylon in a storm and was whipping about in the air above the trees, the roofs, the traffic. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. Smith’s gaze fell on those Googling how to apply for an Irish passport, the graffiti of swastikas, the flag-waving, the disappearance of money, and the constant appearance of lines: All across the country, the country was divided, a fence here, a wall there, a line drawn here, a line crossed there,a line you don’t cross here,a line you better not cross there,a line of beauty here,a line dance there,a line you don’t even know exists here,a line you can’t afford there,a whole new line of fire,line of battle,end of the line,here/there. Autumn was hailed as the first Brexit novel, and it’s certainly hard to see how anyone could have written one faster; Smith has spoken of how, having embarked on the project, the dramatic unfolding of events forced her to petition her publishers for another month to deliver her manuscript. At the same time, she was conscious of how the novel reflected her existing concerns, “about divisions and borders and identities”, and the uses, or abuses, of political rhetoric. That doubleness – an ability to produce a novel so recognisably of a piece with her previous work, and at the same time a springboard into something new – is surely a clue to how any artist might be able to make a rapid response to new realities aesthetically viable. That, and determination. Howard Jacobson, whose novella Pussy will be published in April, put aside the novel he had long been working on and rose at dawn for six weeks to articulate his astonishment at the election of Donald Trump. It was also, he recently told me and an audience at Jewish Book Week, the result of having, for the first time in 18 years, no weekly newspaper column to write. All that news happening, and nowhere to respond to it: what else to do than get writing? But, like Smith, Jacobson realised that a straightforward mirror was not the best way to reflect the strangeness of the times: Pussy, despite a fairly unequivocal cover – a flaxen-haired and querulous-looking man, clad in a nappy and clutching a naked Barbie-type doll beneath his chubby arm – does not name the Donald, recasting him instead as a spoilt prince named Fracassus who spends his youth watching reality TV in a gilded palace. Jacobson’s most recent novels – the Booker-shortlisted J, and Shylock Is My Name, a contemporary reworking of The Merchant of Venice – have both taken a turn for the fabular, and both reveal the creative flexibility that incorporating elements of other genres affords: in J’s case, a dystopia that ensues when there has been an act of mass silencing, and a ghost story-cum-social satire in the retelling of Shakespeare. Many novelists have reached for the unreal, the allegorical and the fantastical to depict contemporary concerns; we need look no further than Gulliver’s Travels, Animal Farm or The Handmaid’s Tale, once again racing up the bestseller charts (“Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again” placards have become popular at US protest marches as the encroachment on women’s reproductive rights intensifies). And often such devices are useful precisely because they deter a literal interpretation that limits their reach; Kazuo Ishiguro, in setting his novel The Buried Giant in an imagined ancient Britain, allowed its exploration of the effect of the collective amnesia that follows atrocity to encompass numerous countries and societies. Taking liberties with reality can also underline the enormity and aberrance of what is under discussion. Think, for example, of the talking cat in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and the giant spiders of Jonathan Coe’s Number Eleven, or Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, in which a subterranean sci-fi plot erupts in an account of slavery. What other way to describe horror, Whitehead seems to suggest, than to write a horror story? In her 1993 essay “Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo”, about staging Beckett in the midst of the Bosnian war and the city’s state of siege, Susan Sontag set out her view of the artist’s altered reality. “No longer can a writer consider that the imperative task is to bring the news to the outside world,” she wrote. “The news is out.” Her essay proceeds from that realisation, and the necessary question that it entails: what can and should those whose business lies in the realm of creativity and the imagination do in the face of crisis and suffering? She recalled being asked if her choice of Godot was too pessimistic or depressing for the circumstances, “as if the representation of despair were redundant when people really are in despair; as if what people want to see in such a situation would be, say, The Odd Couple”. One could make the point that they might indeed yearn to see The Odd Couple instead of or as well as an existentialist play; and Sontag herself notes that there were doubtless more Sarajevans who wanted to see a Harrison Ford movie than Godot. But, she adds, “That was true before the war, too. It is, if anything, a little less true now.” Instead, she pointed to the reparative possibilities of art: “Culture, serious culture, is an expression of human dignity – which is what people in Sarajevo feel they have lost, even when they know themselves to be brave, or stoical, or angry.” If we accept the premise that “serious” culture – a loaded term, of course – can have properties that extend beyond the therapeutic or consolatory towards the more fundamentally healing, we are left considering the situations in which it might be deployed. But here comes the rub: the writing of anything, “serious” literature included, never comes from a place of neutrality. Filtered through its creator, it is inflected with place, time, social context, political bias. The idea of aesthetic purism, wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in What Is Literature? in 1947, was a “brilliant manoeuvre of the bourgeoisie”, for whom the writer, at least pre-1850, was a tool to make the status quo seem more palatable: “If he started reflecting on the social order, he annoyed and frightened it.” In time, Sartre argued, the littérateurs began to buck the bourgeoisie and to set literature up “as being, in principle, independent of any sort of ideology”. And there, one might say, was the issue: literature “had not yet understood that it was itself ideology; it wore itself out asserting its autonomy, which no one contested. This amounted to saying that it claimed it had no privileged subject and could treat any matter whatever. There was no doubt about the fact that one might write felicitously about the condition of the working class; but the choice of this subject depended upon circumstances, upon a free decision of the artist.” A great deal has changed since the time about which Sartre was writing, and the time in which he was writing, although writers are still free to talk, one day, “about a provincial bourgeoise, another day, about Carthaginian mercenaries”. It is difficult and undesirable to conceive of it being any other way – but in such deeply divided times this raises a particular issue. In the wake of the Brexit referendum and the US presidential election, those on the losing sides have been told, repeatedly and vociferously, to “get over it”. You lost. Suck it up. Deal with it. Who are you, to deny the voice and will of the electorate? An enemy of the people? One might lament the vulgarity, aggression and triumphalism of such language, but you can hardly deny its effectiveness. And there, at its head, is Donald Trump, the world’s only teetotal drunk tweeter. Of course, his mad messages are brilliant, distracting his detractors with their falsity and disinhibition. Mingling a pretended naivety (“Can that be possible?”) with bizarre quotation marks (“rigged”, “epidemic”), a predilection for capslock (“FAKE NEWS”, “VERY WELL”, “MESS”) and pomposity (“I hereby demand …”), they are manna to his supporters, whose eyes are drawn to those words he deploys so frequently: terrible, bad, sick, sad. For aghast witnesses, only his Pooterishness amuses: after all, as he reports, Rush Limbaugh said his press conference was “one of the greatest”, and if Rush Limbaugh says so … In this arena at the very least, Trump has wrested control of the language away from those who would use it more temperately, more responsibly, more mercifully, more ethically. And the issue for artists is not simply that he is beyond parody (although I would still revivify Ballard and pack him off to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida club, pronto), but that he has undermined the notion of objective truth more successfully than most novelists can dream of doing. But if artists want to effect social change, a greater problem awaits them. We have had change, and we may well be getting more. “The people” may have been seduced by lies, they may have been fooled by the sides of buses and promises of jam tomorrow, but they have indeed spoken. “We” just don’t like it. This is not to suggest that writers, musicians, visual artists should be complicit in normalising what they might see as fascism, racism, totalitarianism. They should not shy away from facing squarely up to what lies ahead of us. But they will have to examine their own mediums’ specific forms of privilege. In a recent review of an exhibition of American art, Simon Schama sounded a note of optimism when he praised its brilliance at “inventive disrespect, and the relentlessly self-congratulatory vanity of Donald Trump presents the fattest target imaginable for its satirical artillery. The challenge, as with all such imaginative counter-attacks, is the capacity to project the message beyond the halls of college and museum and into the street where it counts.” “Should that happen,” Schama continued, “the complacent dismissal of resistance art as the self-indulgent playtime of a defeated ‘elite’ will die on the faces of the powerful. Aux armes, les artistes!” Let us hope so. Meanwhile, novelists must grapple with another key challenge: how to adapt a form that takes a long time to construct and execute to a climate so skittish that any attempt to capture it seems doomed to failure. Many of those who have done so in the past have realised this and taken action; George Eliot’s novel Felix Holt, the Radical, published in 1866 and set at the time of the First Reform Act in 1832, is more easily decoded, as Kathryn Hughes has argued, if one understands how it relates to the schisms in political parties and the generalised social unrest of its time of writing. Narrative innovation and changes to the traditional publishing cycle may well need to happen. Literary magazines and newspapers must rise to the challenge, perhaps reviving the tradition, as outlined by Philip Hensher in his introduction to The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, of commissioning and publishing work that responds to topical events. Shorter forms of writing, appearing in different places, support for essays and poetry: Zadie Smith on Brexit, Atul Gawande on Obamacare, Junot Díaz on radical resistance. Hot takes by cool heads. Short-form satire, such as Hari Kunzru’s brilliant tweet-impressions of Trump: “Tax I mean what is it for us its voluntary more like tipping I mean the IRS is not even top 5 in the list of what stops me getting to sleep”; “Gimme your tired your poor your huddled masses and I will rate them hot or not.” Many writers will find – as with Jodi Picoult’s Small Great Things, or Amanda Craig’s forthcoming The Lie of the Land, which focuses on rural poverty and will be published on the first anniversary of the referendum – that what they have been working on for years has become even more timely. But we also need writers who will play the long game; who will bide their time and present us with a more settled view in the years to come. When Robert McCrum spoke to American novelists in the wake of Trump’s victory, they appeared largely minded to exercise restraint. “We’ll have to see what Trump is going to do,” said Walter Mosley. “If it’s bad enough, I won’t be writing novels, I’ll be talking and writing about it.” Others appeared utterly wrongfooted: “I said Trump was an impossibility. The fact that I was so completely wrong has made me doubt what I understand about my country,” said Richard Ford. Lionel Shriver, known for her ability to zero in on contentious and difficult issues, and whose last novel The Mandibles makes salutary reading (it contains a wall, for a start), has warned that: “It’s dangerous for novelists to point a plot at a moving target.” And Don DeLillo, with characteristic phlegmatism, possibly captured the mood best, months before Trump was elected. “I don’t know what the future holds,” he told a London audience last year, “but I don’t think anybody in the country is looking forward to it very much.” In the meanwhile, we do what we can, and seize on moments of opportunity. A few weeks ago, I was at a 5x15 storytelling event (five speakers with 15 minutes each), at which I heard a Syrian man, Ahmad al-Rashid, recount his journey to this country in exceptionally clear and moving detail. A few days later came Trump’s travel ban. The juxtaposition was unbearable, but galvanising. I decided to organise a night of stories centred on the refugee experience, which will take place on 21 March at Conway Hall in central London; proceeds will go to Refugee Action and a number of other charities. I am under no illusion about the sticking-plaster nature of an event such as this, but I do know that if someone tells you a story, they are no longer a stranger. And that the roots of all stories lie in a shared oral culture, not in a parlour or ballroom designed to keep anyone out. And that being a reader does not prevent you from also being a citizen; it might even help you to be a more empathetic, imaginative, compassionate one. |