The Novel: alive and well (apparently)

A rather interesting article, courtesy of the Guardian, on the state of the novel today, by former judge of the Booker Prize, Jason Cowley.
Now, I usually find myself having to watch my step when it comes to the Guardian. It is, after all, a left-of-centre publication, and although it has probably one of the best arts and literature sections of any newspaper, the insidious ghoul of Political Correctness rears its ugly head all too often. If you're willing to look past the incessant America-,Israel-,Blair-bashing of the politics and world affairs columns, you'll probably find something of substance elsewhere in the paper, like this piece, fr'instance.

Cowley, among other things, refutes the suggestion that the tragic events of September 11, 2001 have altered irrevocably the literary artist's ability to come to terms with a world suddenly made new:

Yet the evidence from the new novels I have read so far this year is quite the contrary - our writers have not allowed the extremity of 11 September and the wars that have followed to silence or defeat them; their imaginations seem far from meagre. The 'culture' is not overwhelming them. Quite the opposite, in fact, because this is, I think, perhaps the richest year for contemporary British and Commonwealth fiction since the launch of the Booker Prize in 1969, with most of our best novelists - Ian McEwan (Saturday), Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go), Zadie Smith (On Beauty), JM Coetzee (Slow Man), Julian Barnes (Arthur & George), Salman Rushdie (Shalimar the Clown), Hilary Mantel (Beyond Black) - publishing exceptional new works.

Having read most of these novels, as well as outstanding books from emerging writers such as Louise Dean (This Human Season, which is set in a Belfast riven by sectarian conflict) and James Meek (The People's Act of Love, which is set in Siberia during the years following the Russian Revolution), I would argue that the novel, so often declared dead or moribund by VS Naipaul and other cultural pessimists, is as vital now in this time of profound political crisis as it has ever been - and continues, through the popularity of reading groups and the huge influence of television programmes... as well as the astonishing popularity of global bestsellers such as the Harry Potter books and Dan Brown's conspiracy thrillers, to be the principal artistic form of our times.

This is heartening news. Even the most devastating of occurrences should not dampen the artist's creative fire, and today's post-9/11 world proves a veritible gold-mine of subject matter for talented writers:

The devastating events of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the second wave of mass asylum-driven immigration into Britain and the emergence of our new wired-up, interconnected world, have changed everything in this country. As has the emergence of writers such as Monica Ali, Zadie Smith and Andrea Levy, who write with such verve and insight of the shifting realities of the lives of the new Britons, the black, Asian and mixed-race people, and their descendants, who arrived here in the post-war years and whom you seldom, if ever, encountered in novels, except in mocking or pejorative representation.

Mitzi Angel, a senior editor at Fourth Estate, and one of the most talented of the younger generation of publishing editors, says: 'It's always difficult to look for patterns in fiction, but perhaps some do stand out. There are this year, for example, the dystopian elements to Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go; Rupert Thomson's Divided Kingdom, and Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days. All three novelists have imagined alternate worlds in which the interactions of man, machine, technology and political experiments result in terror. I couldn't read these without remembering David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, published last year, which also deals with a post-apocalyptic future and the breakdown of civilisation.'

Novelists have, of course, been conjuring up these sorts of visions for centuries; but, as Angel continues, 'Perhaps the uncertainties of a post-11 September world have lent this kind of questioning more urgency. This year, some novels have tackled the attacks on the World Trade Centre head-on - such as Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close or, very recently, Chris Cleave's Incendiary (which was published on the day of the London bombings) or Frederic Beigbeder's Windows on the World, published last year, in which he replays the last moments in the building.

McEwan's Saturday, by contrast, seems to be about the shift in consciousness that has occurred since the attacks; the heightened sense of danger that seeps into ordinary life ... the emphasis here is on the fragility of the domestic world.' Of this year's leading Booker contenders, Saturday certainly offers the most complete fictional response so far to the murderous attacks on New York and Washington and how they have altered the way we think, act and remember. (The visionary French novelist Michel Houellebecq's Platform, about the clash between western secularism and Islamic puritanism, was published just before 11 September.)

Cowley also offers this brief yet honourable defense of the novel as a genre:

[N]o other art form privileges consciousness and interiority in quite the same way. One can tell fabulous stories through moving images, but how to show thought in film without resorting to the clumsy device of the voice over? How to show in film what Virginia Woolf called the 'quick of the mind'? Only the novel can truly show, from the inside, how it feels to move through space and time, from one day to the next, with contradictory thoughts constantly clashing, over the narrative of a lifetime.

Bravo.

I'm looking very forward to dipping into some of these titles. I have Ishiguro's book sitting in my to-read pile, and Rushdie, McEwan and Coetzee (especially) are sure to make their way in that direction before the year is out.

Incidentally, this year's Booker longlist is out on 10 August.