Part One Introduction

Over the following chapters, this book looks in detail at a variety of texts across different genres, all of which have been published since 1990. Unlike comparable studies, which more typically focus exclusively on the novel, New Directions:Writing Post 1990 examines drama, poetry, autobiography and other forms of writing alongside discussions of contemporary fiction. This more inclusive approach aims to provide a broader understanding of different types of recent literary production. It also enables the reader to trace recurring themes and concerns across diverse writers and literary modes. The intention is always to encourage the reader to explore contemporary writing in all its innovation and diversity and from a variety of perspectives and preoccupations. The chapters are divided into two main sections. In Part Three: ‘Texts, Writers and Contexts’, each chapter is organised around a particular generic convention, such as the neo-Victorian novel, for example, and focuses on three main authors working in that area. This author- specific structure is supplemented by consideration of other relevant writers where this provides useful context and comparison. Each chapter concludes with an extended commentary on a single text in order to exemplify the preceding discussion through close textual analysis. Part Four: ‘Critical Theories and Debates’ provides a more broadly conceived thematic approach. Considering different types of writers and texts, the chapters examine four main themes: representing the

1 New Directions: Writing Post 1990 past; millennial anxieties; constructing contemporary childhood; and readers and writers today. These discussions aim to demonstrate the manner in which current literary preoccupations and anxieties cross genre boundaries and are explored and re-imagined by different writers in different ways. These main sections of the book are framed by Part Two: ‘A Cultural Overview’, which provides some brief historical context to the period and discusses the cultural preoccupations that have come to define the post-1990s, and Part Five: ‘References and Resources’. This concluding section contains a timeline of key historical and literary events from the period, together with an annotated list of further reading.

Post-1990 Writing and ‘the Contemporary’

In 1967 the novelist Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, wrote in the introduction to his critical study, The Novel Now: A Student’s Guide to Contemporary Fiction: ‘The term “contemporary” ought not, in any discussion of literature, to be taken too literally.’ For Burgess, what makes a text ‘contemporary’ – by which he means modern, relevant and fresh – is not necessarily bound by a book’s date of publication. Where some texts date and tire quickly, he argues, others instead continue to speak to ‘the facts of history, the thoughts, feelings, hopes and apprehensions that make one era different from another’.1 Burgess, like many other critics dealing with surveys of contemporary literature, finds himself questioning precisely what is meant when we speak of ‘the contemporary’ in relation to writing. The primary aim in selecting the texts included for discussion in this volume is to provide an overview of significant writing from the past two decades. What makes a text ‘significant’ is of course contentious; while some of the following writers and works have been awarded prestigious literary prizes, others – such as some of the ‘chick lit’ novels and misery memoirs, for example – arguably contain limited literary merit. Even at its most lowbrow, however, the literature of the 1990s and 2000s provides a telling insight into the textual consumption and cultural preoccupations

2 Introduction of the last decade of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Texts are frequently indicative of the moment in which they come to popularity, and they always contribute to an amorphous but meaningful body of published work that constructs its own narrative about contemporary Britain. Contemplation of ‘the contemporary’ also raises questions about where one should draw the chronological limits of the term. Although this volume restricts its focus to the post-1990 period, this window of literary production belies the actual reach of the writers under discussion. The following chapters encompass, for example, Angela Carter and J. G. Ballard, both of whom began writing in the 1960s. Other writers under discussion commenced their careers in the 1970s and 1980s. This inevitably impacts on the analysis of post-1990 literature. To understand the post-1990 works of a novelist such as Martin Amis or a poet such as Grace Nichols, for example, it helps to have some contextual knowledge of their earlier writing. This understanding occasionally draws the discussion back in time, to before its declared starting point. Furthermore, alongside the most established writers under consideration, this book also examines authors such as Zadie Smith and Monica Ali, whose first publications only appeared in the twenty-first century, and who will both hopefully continue to write for many years to come. Thus it is apparent that any seemingly self-contained period of literature will inevitably draw its reader back in time, while simultaneously looking forwards in contemplation of the future. Indeed, one unavoidable pitfall of writing about contemporary literature is the fact that the terms of engagement are always in flux. The ‘contemporary’ text, unlike the Victorian or the seventeenth-century text, occupies no stable chronological boundaries. While the nature of the Victorian period and its literature is subject to frequent re-evaluation, its time frame at least remains relatively fixed. In contrast, the limits of ‘the contemporary’ are always under revision and its canon is constantly subject to reconsiderations and reformulations. With time, authors who were once fresh faces on the literary scene develop and mature, becoming stalwarts of British writing. And so, for example, Ian McEwan’s early short-story collections, First Love, Last

3 New Directions: Writing Post 1990

Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978), which earned the author a reputation for shock and the nickname ‘Ian Macabre’, have given way to weighty novels such as Atonement (2001) and Saturday (2005) – respectfully reviewed works of one of the leading figures of contemporary British writing. With time, authors remake themselves and their reputations. A poet and playwright such as Jackie Kay can become a novelist and short- story writer. Pat Barker, who was first known in the 1980s as a writer of regional, working-class women’s writing, becomes, with the 1990s Regeneration trilogy, a writer of First World War historical fiction and an astute observer of male sexual psychology. Reading contemporary fiction brings one into contact with living authors who repeatedly, determinedly, defy critics’ attempts to apply definitive labels to their works. Furthermore, just as established authors develop and change, so new writers are constantly attaining recognition, altering the field of contemporary writing and reshaping its preoccupations and concerns. The corpus of contemporary writing is therefore perpetually evolving and perennially exciting. It resists attempts to be anticipated, and it refuses to stand still. ‘The contemporary’ demands that we keep returning to it, reassessing its characteristics and reconsidering its limits. As a reader of contemporary literature, one can never rest; every time we presume to ‘know’ the field, its parameters have shifted once again.

A Rather Peculiar Contemporary

For some time now it has been a commonplace to date contemporary writing from around 1970 to the present day. Immediately before this assumption became standard, ‘contemporary writing’ broadly referred to postwar literature. As the 1950s and 1960s – and with time, the 1970s and 1980s – are slowly but inevitably historicised, however, they begin to retreat into the realms of the past, losing their claim on the contemporary. Consequently, there is currently a discernable shift towards redefining ‘the contemporary’ as relating to post-1990 texts. No doubt, with time, this formulation will in turn become dated, and the limits of the contemporary will reside entirely within the twenty-

4 Introduction

first century. For the moment, however, we occupy a rather peculiar construction of the contemporary – one that stretches across two centuries and indeed across two millennia. The field of contemporary writing as it currently exists is notably Janus-faced, looking both forwards and back. The texts discussed in this book exist, often self-consciously, on the cusp of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries, defining a period that hinges on the turn of the millennium. This portentous moment manifests itself in the competing preoccupations of contemporary writing with both the past and the future. As we reformulate the literary field once again, we do so in the shadow of the bloody twentieth century with its two World Wars and their concomitant, unthinkable horrors. Consequently many of the texts discussed in this book, such as Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (2000), as well of course as autobiographies such as Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996) and Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood (2000), are characterised by a sense of time passing, and dominated by themes of memorial and memory. Alternatively, the approaching millennium also prompted a preponderance of futuristic narratives, preoccupied with imagining the possibilities of the future. Millennial dystopian narratives, of which there are many, are typically concerned with the two great anxieties of our future imaginings: climate change and genetic engineering. Novels such as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse (2007) resonate uncomfortably closely with recent non-fictional analyses of global warming such as Al Gore’s 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth. Memorial and anxiety characterise post-1990 literature as much as anything else. And when these concerns were punctuated by the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001, old trauma met new fears, with consequences that continue to echo through recent writings. Set against these multiple traumas of the past and present, however, is also an exuberant expression of diversity and difference within contemporary writing. As novelist Graham Swift notes:

5 New Directions: Writing Post 1990

One thing that’s occurred during my writing career that’s enriched writing in this country is the emergence of so many writers with backgrounds outside this country. The diversity of influences now at work in British fiction, compared with even the 1970s, is striking.2

Much of this volume is concerned with such writers: with poets, novelists and playwrights such as Benjamin Zephaniah, Hanif Kureishi and Roy Williams, who explore new understandings of what it means to be British in the twenty-first century.

Reading Contemporary Literature

Finally, it is worth acknowledging that a number of attendant anxieties accompany the critical analysis of contemporary writing. The very newness of the texts creates peculiar difficulties for readers. For recent works such as Fred D’Aguiar’s Continental Shelf or Atwood’s The Year of the Flood – both published in 2009 – websites can provide the best (and often only) source of early analysis, in the form of book reviews and author interviews. (Accordingly, the bibliography of this volume is notably swollen by a wealth of website addresses.) While online resources are convenient and valuable, they raise significant issues of quality and reliability that must be negotiated carefully. Beyond such practical concerns, limited critical resources have broader implications for the reader of contemporary writing. Without an established body of criticism to turn to, the reader is pleasantly unburdened by the weight of earlier readings that typically accompany older works. At the same time, he or she can be worryingly unanchored by this absence. How, for example, can we know if the texts we are studying are the right texts? Unlike works from earlier periods, contemporary writing has not yet ‘stood the test of time’. Lacking the reassurance of this old formulation, the reader of the contemporary text can feel prey to insecurities. How can we know if our critical judgement is blinded by fashion or reputation? Will the texts of today still be read tomorrow?

6 Introduction

Ultimately, we must live with these uncertainties. Although we have ways of assessing and fêting texts through various prizes and accolades (discussed in Part Four: ‘Readers and Writers Today’), such initial judgements can be no assurance of a text’s longevity. Even as we watch a contemporary author rise to eminence or fade to obscurity, we cannot be certain how posterity will judge his or her work. The best we can do is to read carefully and to enter into critical dialogue with each other. In this way, we become collaborative participants in constructing the canon of our own period. At the same time, we remain aware that our analyses are preliminary and exploratory and are always subject to revision. Fiona Tolan

Notes

1 Anthony Burgess, The Novel Now: A Student’s Guide to Contemporary Fiction (London: Faber, 1971), p. 22. 2 Fiona Tolan, ‘Graham Swift’, interview in Philip Tew, Fiona Tolan and Leigh Wilson (eds), Writers Talk: Conversations with Contemporary British Novelists (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 125–41, p. 135.

7