2 PROSPECT

Foreword by Sameer Rahim

oetry makes noth- with profoundly is the rediscovery of her people and her country and finding ing happen.” That insitutionalised racism in the US that feels no comfort. line in WH Auden’s more relevant than ever.” What about those targeted by poem dedicated to the For US writers, the elephant in the populists—such as migrants? I argue that memory of WB Yeats room (or bull in the china shop) is Presi- the UK has seen an upswing in great writ- “Pis often taken to endorse the idea of an dent Donald Trump. But how should they ing about its ethnic minority communities. apolitical approach to literature. Auden, approach such an outlandish personal- This is only likely to increase as demo- once a committed Marxist, had by 1940 ity? Miranda France argues they could graphics change. “Mixed-race” is now the given up trying to change the world. (Who do worse than turn to their Latin Ameri- fastest-growing ethnic category in the UK, can blame him?) But that didn’t mean he can counterparts, who have had to deal which means more of the older generation thought the world was now off-limits; just with “preening strongmen” for decades. than ever have grandchildren with a differ- that we should expect something different The Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa and the ent racial background. from that form of communication. The Dominican-American Junot Díaz tackled Linked to these changes we have seen line continues, poetry “survives in the val- the dictator Rafael Trujillo with contrast- more accusations of “cultural appropri- ley of its making.” Auden’s lines, read this ing styles: one realist, one fantastical; but ation”—authors writing about cultures way, are defiant, not meek. both used satire to expose his lies. they supposedly don’t have the right to. In All the modern writers discussed in Bad leaders often reflect the flaws in her punchy essay, novelist Lionel Shriver these pages engage with the biggest issues their societies. In her essay on Harper argues that accepting such limits on a writ- of our day. 2015’s Man Booker winner, Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, an early draft of er’s imagination goes contrary to the free Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, was a wicked To Kill a Mockingbird, published shortly spirit of fiction—and that giving “offence” is satire on US race relations. As Emran before Lee’s death in 2016, Diane Rob- a vital part of the novelist’s armoury. Mian argues, “what the book connects erts says that we see Lee struggling with Sameer Rahim is Prospect’s Managing Editor

Contents

03 Can fiction lead the 05 When fiction trumps 08 The year of the migrants 09 What does it mean to fight back? El Supremo sameer rahim be a man? emran mian miranda france anthony cummins

11 Brief encounter 12 The war’s not over yet 16 Writers blocked michael rosen diane roberts lionel shriver

Listen to Prospect Follow Prospect Hear all about the biggest issues in this edition by @prospect_uk facebook.com/prospect.mag downloading Prospect’s free podcast from iTunes or soundcloud.com/prospect-magazine prospect_magazine PROSPECT 3 Can fiction lead the fight back? American novelists are doing a brilliant job engaging with politics. Their British counterparts need to catch up fast, argues Emran Mian

t has been a year of extraordinary over into writers’ contempt and condescen- naive idealism and the messy real world. In political events. In June, the United sion for political leaders (rarely the stuff addition, literary fiction rarely provides a Kingdom decided to leave the of good fiction); or the challenge of hack- happy ending. This doesn’t mean that it has European Union and in November ing through clichés learned from politi- to dismiss politics, but it will focus on its fail- the United States elected Donald cal thrillers, or newspapers, of how power ures and follies. ITrump as its first reality-television presi- is exercised in Washington or Westmin- One way to disguise that feature of the dent. Our instant storytellers—columnists, ster. Notice how Beatty sets his political genre is to retreat into the past. Garth Risk news anchors, other politicians—are still novel a long way from the seat of govern- Hallberg’s novel City on Fire (Vintage), pub- reeling from the shock. But what can real ment, closer to what the philosopher Iris lished at the end of 2015, ends in 1977. The writers do to respond to politics—if any- Marion Young has catalogued as the social city in question is New York and the fire thing? Fiction, by its nature, cannot move movements outside formal politics. Young includes homophobia, racism, status anxi- at the speed of current events. But those suggests that such movements have three ety and inequality. The political movement novelists who are willing to engage with the main purposes: to challenge decision-mak- in the novel initially expresses itself through world can bring a unique set of insights into ing structures directly; to organise autono- music and situationist stunts and gradually the state of a nation. mous services; and evolve cultural identity. pivots towards the use of terror. But the folly Fittingly, in the year of Trump’s racially- Benjamin Markovits’s novel You Don’t we observe isn’t merely in the choice of tac- charged triumph, both the UK’s Man Booker Have to Live Like This (Faber), which won the tics; it’s in how the egoism of Nicky Chaos, Prize and the US’s National Book Critics’ James Tait Black Memorial Prize in August, the leader of the movement, supplants the Circle Award were scooped by Paul Beat- also acutely observes the intersection of all solidarity the movement supposedly believes ty’s The Sellout (Oneworld). Beatty is an Afri- three of these. Markovits, a US writer liv- in. Chaos comes to a sticky end—as does his can-American writer born in Los Angeles ing in England, has his narrator, Marney, mirror image Amory, the scion of a massively in 1962, and The Sellout imagines a world in along with others help to take over a left- wealthy family. What we’re observing is the which America unwinds 40 years of political behind neighbourhood in Detroit. Marney is lose-lose politics of domination and resent- progress. The high-jinks, low-concept idea white and the city he is now living in mainly ment, the master-slave dialectic with a punk- at the heart of the book is the re-segregation black, and the novel tackles issues of gentri- rock beat. Forty years later, Hallberg might of a Los Angeles suburb called Dickens— fication, racial politics, poverty and the way be asking, can we avoid the same mistakes? the catch being that it is the black narrator in which outsiders can help—or not help— Can we? The progressive view in politics who wants to divide the races once again. struggling communities. This is the stuff of usually claims that we can. But one striking “Me,” as he is known, develops his stunt into politics, but politicians play little part in it. characteristic of politics in 2016 is that “the a political programme with the aim of creat- President Barack Obama makes a fleeting shipwrecked mind,” as the historian of ideas ing public spaces in which black people can appearance in the book—playing basketball Mark Lilla calls it in the title of his new book feel more confident by living only with their rather than making speeches or negotiating on reactionary politics, has fixed its eye on own kind. “I’m not advocating segregation,” amendments. Even the money to redevelop us. Whether there’s a shock of orange hair Beatty has explained, “I’m having fun pon- Detroit does not come from government but above that eye and a roaming mouth below dering it.” instead from tech entrepreneurs and hedge it, or it takes some other form, the impera- On Beatty’s telling, the plan works: fund managers. The mission is inevitably tives of “bring back…” and “things were bet- the restriction is a form of liberation that economic as well as social—though for Mar- ter when…” are now incredibly powerful. improves, for example, the school results of ney it is as much about proving himself as The trouble for writers of fiction is that faced black children. (The book starts with “Me” it is about helping others. In a melodiously with such an outlandish phenomenon as on trial at the Supreme Court, the elite tak- frustrated tone, signalled by the book’s title, Trump, they generally respond with super- ing its revenge.) What the book connects he remarks: “There should be a better test of ficial satire. with profoundly is the rediscovery of institu- who I am than middle-class American life.” On Trump himself, the US-based Nige- tionalised racism in the US that feels more This is politics, not as the Trumpian art rian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie relevant than ever. of the deal, but as the dilemma of how to live has had a go, in a short story published this Beatty’s success in writing about pol- a good life with others. That said the politi- summer in the New York Times Book Review. itics is unusual in modern novelists. We cal schemes in both Beatty’s and Markovits’s Written from the perspective of the pre- might hope that writers of fiction would books are riddled with problems. The diffi- sumptive First Lady Melania Trump, in the catch something that pollsters, commen- culty of re-segregation as a basis for politi- second paragraph, we are told that “taste, tators and political incumbents have been cal utopia is obvious enough. The soft-hippy for him, was something to be determined by unable to. But many are not. Some of the community envisaged by Markovits is more somebody else, and then flaunted.” It’s an reasons for this are long-standing: profes- appealing. But the philanthropists behind observation that any creative writing teacher sional rivalry between novelists and politi- it aren’t the ragged-trousered type. We can would strike out: is Trump likely to defer to cians, who usually studied together in Ivy tell that something is awry and indeed much experts? Later, there is a laboured passage League schools or Oxbridge, which brims of the novel’s interest is the conflict between about how Trump’s tweets are indistinct 4 PROSPECT

from his text messages to his wife. Adichie writers reject both that instinct for perfect- ris, Andrew Marr, Richard T Kelly—these hasn’t done any of the work required to imag- ing human affairs and that claim to author- authors use the theatre of politics. They often ine the couple’s private life. So we’re bereft of ity. In Ian McEwan’s 2005 novel Saturday, the do serious work at the same time. Harris’s a reaction to what she tells us. It might or pretensions of the protagonist—as a surgeon Cicero trilogy, completed in 2015 with the might not be sad (sad!) that his text messages and father—are dissected in slow motion. publication of Dictator, is superb on the per- are impersonal. Trump’s tweets might be the All the while, anti-war protestors gather to ils of politics: how the monopoly of violence best of him. exhort Tony Blair that he must not intervene that the state assumes becomes a threat This is not to say that writers can only in Iraq. “I can only go one way,” Blair said to liberty, how a successful polity becomes write about reactionary politics by seeing the later, “I’ve not got a reverse gear.” That’s the wealthy and then that wealth corrupts it. But best in them—empathising with pro-Brexit or problem from the writer’s perspective: poli- Harris knows all too well what we end up call- Trump voters, as liberals have been repeat- tics is all about remaking the world and uni- ing this kind of work. As he puts it, “because edly instructed to do in this revolutionary lateral presumption. Or, as the title of one any work of fiction that seeks to describe the year. But what 52 per cent of UK voters have of Rosen’s latest letters has it, “Dear Justine public sphere—its miscarriages of justice, opted for, and tens of millions of Americans, Greening, It’s time to stop hounding teachers coups, conspiracies, elections, assassina- is not beneath observation in literary fiction. and harness their wisdom.” tions, spies and swindles—is automatically Young describes the social movements of the Not all writers will feel the same. Many labelled a thriller, a thriller-writer is what I left as “focusing on broad issues of decision- might follow Norman Mailer instead, who have become.” Perhaps some writers steer making power and political participation. ran to be the Democratic nominee for New clear of politics because they don’t want to be Often they seek less to expand the scope of York City mayor in 1969. He said: “The dif- labelled in the same way. the state’s welfare services than to respond ference between me and the other candidates Another challenge for English novelists to the invasion of nearly every area of social is that I’m no good and I can prove it.” In the writing about politics is our focus on the con- life by both public and private bureaucra- US, the divide is perhaps less pronounced. ventional sites of power. The movements that cies.” We can recognise the purposes of the But in England it is glaring. Saturday is one joined under the banner of “Leave” had to Occupy movement in that statement, or those of the few books written in England in recent appeal to parliament for a referendum first. of Momentum. The World Transformed, years to come close to politics. Though even Momentum has broader purposes but those as Momentum called its alternative to the it spends no time itself on the march against are viewed with suspicion. Certainly the Labour Party conference in September, may the war. Politics is background, the real scope for local politics is narrower in England as well be a literary slogan. But turning back action is personal and domestic. The Tidal than in the US. The kind of community-mak- the hordes of bureaucrats and taking back Zone by Sarah Moss, published earlier this ing that Beatty and Markovits write about is control is a familiar theme on the right too. year, gives politics the same status. The char- harder to pull off in our centralised politi- “Here I am, Ishmael,” Daniel Hannan, one acters overhear political news, they comment cal system. Perhaps the new wave of may- of the founders of the Brexit movement, told on the effects of austerity, but the drama is oral elections and the enhanced powers that the Guardian recently. “Every man’s hand is about how adults respond to a sick child. (some) mayors will have might prompt new against me.” Invoking politics in a novel in this way does municipal fiction. In the meantime, though, British writers are especially bad at cap- the same work as mentioning the brands writing about politics seems to drive writers turing the stuff of politics. There are some the characters use or the music playing on a to Westminster, and to be rude about your low reasons for this. “His intellectual CV radio. It’s part of a broader overture to real- university friends who became politicians or gives an impression of slow-minded rigid- ism—in other words, it’s not aesthetically towards genre fiction. ity; and he seems essentially incurious about unimportant, though there’s no conviction Even the new novel by Ali Smith, Autumn, anything beyond his immediate sphere.” So that politics might be informing the choices billed as an instant reaction to the Brexit writes Martin Amis of the “undereducated” people make, either driving them to despair vote has more to say about the 1960s—one Jeremy Corbyn. Writers commonly believe or inspiring them. of the characters collects art from that dec- that politicians are not as clever as they are, There is another effect that fiction com- ade—than 2016. The state of the nation mer- and not as broad either: rigid ideologues, monly extrudes from politics: the House of its no more than a few paragraphs of the kind rather than dashing flâneurs. Cards-style thrill of skulduggery. Robert Har- of prose that kicks off the longer opinion This might be true. (Though Trump does pieces in a Sunday newspaper supplement. speak in a prose style that it would take any The sadness is that politics is teeming with writer a decade or two to master.) Or it might life right now, mainly low life perhaps, but merely be intra-elite rivalry. While Corbyn writers shouldn’t decline to observe the very only got two Es at A Level, other leading pol- worst in us. Alternatively, perhaps some citi- iticians made it through Oxford or Harvard. zens have already set off on the road to polit- On the face of it, they’re in the same intellec- ical progress, or they are trying out ways to tual league as Amis and Co. So they have to be more just to the weak and vulnerable far be put in their place. The poet Michael Rosen away from the corridors of power. Couldn’t for example (who holds a degree in English writers watch them and observe for us the from Oxford) has written open letters to perils and possibilities? It is what Beatty and scold successive Education Secretaries. Markovits have done, though they are rare But, smarts aside, the deeper tension among American writers, and the scene is between the two tribes is due to their differ- sparser still among the English. ent frames of mind. Politicians presume to Emran Mian is Director of the Social Market

© ATYPEEK/GETTY IMAGES © ATYPEEK/GETTY make decisions to improve lives. Whereas Foundation PROSPECT 5

Over to you Ivanka: Donald Trump’s nepotism echoes the South American leaders of the past © MARK WILSON/GETTY IMAGES IMAGES © MARK WILSON/GETTY When fiction trumps El Supremo Novelists searching for clues on tackling Donald Trump would do well to revisit the preening strongmen of Latin American literature, argues Miranda France

It is still a point of pride among some clever is not enough: it can’t jump into the future On this side of the Atlantic, Howard people never to read novels, as if they were or go behind the scenes. In fiction every Jacobson has already opted for the first an indulgence for soft minds. But if we ever perspective can be considered, and every approach. His novella, Pussy, was written needed proof that fiction has a place in consequence explored. in two months after the November elec- public discourse, it’s in the current rush to So what will fiction be like in the Trump tion, in a “fury of disbelief,” and has just read novels about authoritarianism. In the era? The new regime demands interpre- been published. “I wanted to get over week after Kellyanne Conway, a counsel- tation. Never in living memory has a US Trump’s moral bankruptcy but also the lor to President Donald Trump, coined the president lied so brazenly or declared war sheer bankruptcy of a culture that could phrase “alternative facts,” George Orwell’s on the media so openly. Never has one produce him,” Jacobson told the Guard- Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s boasted of assaulting women or bragged ian. Salman Rushdie’s novel The Golden Brave New World were back in the best- about the size of his penis. Not for a long House, due in September and set during seller lists. Philip Roth’s The Plot Against time has one felt no need to disguise his the Obama administration, charts the rise America (2004) and Margaret Atwood’s racism. Satirists complain that Trump of the ultra-Conservative Tea Party and The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), both of which is not an easy target: you can’t lampoon “the insurgence of a ruthlessly ambitious, imagine a fascist America, are also selling a guy who already seems to be making a narcissistic, media-savvy villain sporting briskly. The window of Waterstone’s flag- joke of himself. So how will novelists tackle makeup and coloured hair.” ship store in Piccadilly has been given over him? Huxley and Lewis were writing in the This is just the start: more novels are to a display of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Hap- 1930s and Orwell in 1948. Roth has prom- in the works. Will they be Orwellian? pen Here (1935), which follows a right-wing ised us he won’t write any more novels. We Rothian? Atwoodian? Anglo-American populist taking charge of the US in the need something current—but novels take a dystopias, especially when informed by 1930s. In a world where images threaten to long time to write and events are moving so Soviet communism, somehow don’t cap- eclipse print as the dominant medium, the fast that keeping up means either writing ture the colourful excesses of a man whose thirst for novels is heartening. News alone very quickly or taking a longer view. power comes married to a fragile ego, a 6 PROSPECT love of beauty queens and a clutch of pecu- tion over Barbarism, said Sarmiento, who tatorship that corrupts every generation. liar phobias. We might do better to look became president himself in 1868. When Buendía’s grandson becomes ruler for influences south of Trump’s proposed Facundo is both a manifesto and an of Macondo we see him transformed from border wall, to Latin America and the investigation into the conditions that allow an intelligent schoolteacher into a tyranni- touchy despots created by Miguel Ángel caudillos to thrive. Sarmiento discerned a cal despot, at the head of an army of teen- Asturias, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario dangerous divide between populists and age thugs. Vargas Llosa and other writers, in a genre intellectuals. That same mistrust, now vis- García Márquez had been planning his so established that it has its own name: dic- ible in the United States, has long been a novel for 20 years but couldn’t find a way tator fiction. feature of Latin American political life. into it until the solution came to him in a Trump isn’t a dictator, of course, but In his essay “Against the Heroes,” Carlos flash, on a family outing: the trick was to he certainly calls to mind the caudillo, or Franz describes Latin Americans’ longing use his native Colombian styles of speech. strongman, who features so regularly in for a strong leader as a sentimental trap: The author’s model was his grandmother, Latin American fiction that for a time “Distrust of democracy and of individual whose conversation moved between mun- it felt as though every writer had to have responsibility produces an irrational desire dane, extraordinary and even impossi- a go at one, much as British actors try for a leader, a hero who can make all the ble events and treated them all the same. their hand at Hamlet. From Juan and Eva difficult decisions.” (In more sinister fashion, dictators were Perón in Argentina to Porfirio Díaz in Mex- When the populists gain—or grab— also adept at mingling fiction and real- ico, there have been plenty of despots to power, intellectuals are expected to oppose ity.) “When I finally discovered the tone I choose from. them, entering into a game of wits that had to use, I sat down for 18 months and Your typical Latin American caudillo worked every day,” García Márquez said. tends to be vain, paying a lot of attention “When populists grab Language was key to this new litera- to his hair and looks. (Argentina’s Car- power, intellectuals ture, quickly dubbed “magical realism.” los Menem was said to get up at 4am for enter a game of wits Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa read beauty treatments and hair weaves). Cau- One Hundred Years at his home in Crick- dillos like naming things after themselves, that they often win on lewood, North London (yes, really) and and putting up statues. (Eva Perón was paper, but at a price” declared it a work of “literary genius.” The going to be honoured with a memorial novel opened the door to him and a gen- taller than the Statue of Liberty, before her they often win, but only on paper, and at a eration of Latin American writers whose husband Juan got deposed). They divert price. For much of the 20th century, Latin explosion on to the world scene earned attention from their flagging potency America’s best writers lived in exile, many them the moniker, “Boom Generation.” by surrounding themselves with beauty in neighbouring countries; others were It was apparently on a pub crawl queens—dating or marrying them when- murdered, imprisoned or humiliated like through 1960s London that Carlos Fuentes ever possible (in the Dominican Repub- Jorge Luis Borges, who was demoted by proposed to Mario Vargas Llosa that they lic, Rafael Trujillo even crowned his own Perón from municipal librarian to poul- collaborate on a book of dictators. They daughter a beauty queen). Even when try inspector. It can be dangerous to be too and fellow “Boomers” would take a chap- democratically elected, they show a reluc- clever, or too critical. Writers have to stay ter each to write about their favourite des- tance to relinquish power—then become on their toes, inventing new ways to take pots. Julio Cortázar, for example, would paranoid about their opponents, calling on the tyrants. profile Evita. them “enemies.” After Alberto Fujimori The novel that would reinvent modern That book never materialised, but more was elected president of Peru in 1990— South American literature was published novels did. The year 1974 saw “dictator nov- beating Mario Vargas Llosa—he shut down half a century ago. In May 1967, 8,000 cop- els” from Alejandro Carpentier, Augusto the Congress and sacked judges. He’s in ies of One Hundred Years of Solitude came Roa Bastos and García Márquez himself. prison now, serving 25 years for corruption off the presses in Buenos Aires. Its Colom- Later offerings came from Luisa Valen- and crimes against humanity. Caudillos bian author, Gabriel García Márquez, had zuela and Tomás Eloy Martínez. often have strange fears and phobias: Fran- written four novels, none of which had I, The Supreme (1974), by Roa Bastos, çois Duvalier (“Papa Doc”), suspecting sold more than a few hundred copies. The was inspired by José Gaspar Rodríguez de that his opponent had been transformed family’s fridge had to be pawned before he Francia, dictator of Paraguay (1814-1840) into a black dog by voodoo, had every black could afford postage for this hefty man- and self-styled “Supremo,” though the dog in Haiti put down. uscript. But the publisher was optimis- suspicion that it was also about General Such macabre eccentricities have been tic. He thought the run could sell in six Alfredo Stroessner, ruler for 35 years until grist to the novelist’s mill. The “father of the months. In fact all 8,000 copies sold in one 1989, was enough to send the author into dictator novel” was the Argentine Domingo week in Buenos Aires. More than 30m have exile. El Supremo is obsessed with commu- Sarmiento. In 1845 he wrote Facundo, not been sold since then. nication as a tool of power and paranoid a novel in fact, but a novelistic portrait A literary star was born, with an accom- about having it used against him. He would of a local strongman, and an excoriating panying clamour that has been compared surely have been a fan of early morning indictment of the brutal regime of Presi- to Beatlemania. One Hundred Years of Sol- tweeting. “I don’t write history,” he says. “I dent Juan Manuel de Rosas during which itude charted the experience, through one make it. I can remake it as I please, adjust- thousands died. Facundo had an urgent family, of a region dogged by bad politics. ing, stressing, enriching its meaning and purpose: to argue for a more enlightened, Soon after its foundation by José Arcadio truth.” It isn’t hard to imagine Conway or (preferably European) style of govern- Buendía, the peaceful town of Macondo White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer ment. Argentines must choose Civilisa- is drawn into a cycle of violence and dic- talking about “enriched truth.” PROSPECT 7 © BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES © BETTMANN/GETTY Dictators are victims as well: Rafael Trujillo was fictionalised by Mario Vargas Llosa

The general in García Márquez’s The the leader walking alone through his pal- surreal style of communication, perhaps Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) also takes ace, perhaps recalling Trump alone at the we can expect similar language innova- a relaxed approach to facts: “It doesn’t White House while his wife and son stay tions in the Trump-era novel. By now matter if something’s not true now, in New York. In Mario Vargas Llosa’s The all of us are familiar with his Twitterese: because at some point in the future it will Feast of the Goat (2000) the dictator, a fic- the indignant statement followed by a be true.” Based on no particular histori- tionalised version of Rafael Trujillo, is one-word exclamation, usually “Sad!” or cal figure, this archetypal tyrant has held also holed up in his palace, paranoid and “Unfair!” onto power so long that he is rumoured to raging after discovering that the US has A whole narrative built on this stac- be more than 200 years old. In one scene dropped its backing because of his human cato style might be indigestible, but he has the Minister of Defence served up rights violations. Trujillo ruled the Domin- Jacobson, for one, takes aim at Twitter. at a banquet, stuffed with pine nuts and ican Republic for 31 years until his assassi- “Social media thrives on the assertive sin- aromatic herbs. nation in 1961. gle point of view,” he says, “which is what Sometimes compared to James Joyce’s Vargas Llosa’s novel was hugely he is able to do. If you have Twitter, you Ulysses for its linguistic difficulty, The acclaimed and that reception, as well as don’t need tanks.” Autumn of the Patriarch includes stream- Trujillo’s tyranny, was the inspiration for Future novels might show Trump of-consciousness sections and sentences Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of from the point of view of a beauty queen, that go on for pages. This syntactical chaos Oscar Wao, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer or the White House staffer charged with reflects the general’s chaotic rule; just as Prize. Díaz, born in Santo Domingo but bringing him fast food. The president’s people have been violated, so language is mostly brought up in the US, makes no attacks on Latinos and Mexicans could violated. secret of his contempt for The Feast of the also make him a literary target south of Yet, for García Márquez, “dictators are Goat, which he sees as legitimising Tru- the border. For Latin American novelists, victims” too, because all are lonely. “The jillo by using realist language to describe railing against tyrannical leaders was not more power you have, the harder it is to his abuses. only a political imperative but the spur to know who is lying to you and who is not. Realism is the wrong mode, Díaz says, invent new literary forms. American jour- When you reach absolute power, there is because the dictator was “so outlandish, nalists are already discovering how galva- no contact with reality, and that’s the worst so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci- nising it can be to spar with a figure who kind of solitude there can be. A very pow- fi writer could have made his ass up.” His is not merely evasive or dishonest, but erful person, a dictator, is surrounded by own approach is to mix Spanglish, street actively wishes you ill. Novelists cannot interests and people whose final aim is to slang, sci-fi and comic book language in a be far behind. isolate him from reality; everything is in concoction so heady that his publishers at Miranda France is a writer and translator whose concert to isolate him.” one time insisted on including a glossary. most recent book is “The Day Before the Fire” It’s a compelling image, the figure of Given the US president’s unique and (Chatto & Windus) 8 PROSPECT The year of the migrants Sameer Rahim

n 2015 Europe’s refugee crisis caster, is surprised when Avtar turns up on acquiesced with a grin. ‘No, I mean really, became impossible to ignore as his doorstep. Avtar had made friends with Zephyr. Where are you from?’” That grin 430,000 people arrived, fleeing Michael while working in a call centre in hides his humiliation. war or poverty. But mainly absent India. Now, looking to escape his gangmas- Similar themes are handled in a humor- from the political debate have been ter in Sheffield, Avtar asks Michael whether ous way in Amit Chaudhuri’s Odysseus Imigrant voices. What does it feel like to be he can rent a room. The old man seems ame- Abroad (Oneworld). Through his six novels an illegal immigrant or to be British-born nable but his suspicious son sends him pack- Chaudhuri, an Indian-born long-time res- but culturally alienated? Four novels pub- ing. This sequence enacts an urgent political ident in Britain, has become the master of lished in the last year describe how newcom- argument. Ageing Europeans need immi- wry observation. Odysseus Abroad is set in ers to Britain negotiate with the host culture grants to look after them while their chil- the early 1980s. It follows 22-year-old Ben- a dozen times a day. The picture they collec- dren work longer hours; but that requires an gali Ananda and his uncle Radesh, an eccen- tively draw is not of a happy multicultural accommodating trust from the hosts, some- tric who has lived in a Hampstead bedsit for nation; they all echo worries about the diffi- thing Michael’s son is not prepared to give. 30 years. Chaudhuri describes the catch all culty of building a diverse and cohesive soci- For those who do make it the past can description “Asian” as “an equivocal cate- ety. They also explore how those migrants still cast a long shadow. Zia Haider Rahman gory, neither British nor Indian, for people keen to work and integrate into Britain, was born in rural Bangladesh and brought who had essentially nowhere to go.” Still, experience a country very different from the up in London. A gift for maths took him to equivocal categories have their uses. The one they imagined. There is opportunity, Oxford University and then Wall Street. Sylheti owners of a Bangladeshi restaurant yes, but also isolation, poverty and racism. His intelligent novel In the Light of What welcome Ananda and his uncle. As Hindus Sunjeev Sahota’s Booker-shortlisted The We Know (Picador), which won this year’s from the other side of the border, they might Year of the Runaways (Picador) delves James Tait Black Memorial Prize, follows a well have been rivals back home, but in Lon- into the grimy world of illegal immigration. character with a similar background. Zafar don those old conflicts can be put aside: Sahota, of Punjabi descent, was born in feels that no matter how much money he the chicken jalfrezi is on the house. Though Derby in 1981. He has an eye for newsworthy makes or how English he becomes, his Ananda feels alienated, he also has a calm issues: his first novel,Ours Are the Streets, was adopted country will never accept him. A determination to make the best of things. about a would-be suicide bomber. His new Pakistani-American friend tells him Amer- Echoing the famous opening of VS Naipaul’s work follows three Indian “illegals” working ica is different. When he arrives at John A Bend in the River, he reflects that: “The on a Sheffield building site. F Kennedy Airport the immigration offi- weather was what it was; Empire had hap- The story of one character, an auto rick- cial always says: “Welcome home.” Zafar pened; Ananda was here.” shaw driver from Patna, examines an asy- responds: “If an immigration officer at The legacy of empire is a dominant lum seeker who is also an economic migrant. Heathrow had ever said ‘Welcome home’ to theme in the fiction of black British writer Tochi and his family are attacked by Hindu me, I would have given my life for England, Caryl Phillips. His tenth novel, The Lost extremists for moving beyond their caste; his for my country, there and then. I could kill Child, (Oneworld) skilfully weaves together parents are killed and he is badly burned. for an England like that.” a postcolonial retelling of Emily Bronte’s Disillusioned with India, Tochi pays people Rahman said something very similar in an Wuthering Heights and the story of Monica, smugglers to take him to Britain. Tochi’s dep- interview with the American journalist Claire a white woman in 1960s England who has rivation is inseparable from his caste status, Berlinski in 2006. He also disclosed a con- two children with an Afro-Caribbean man. something he believes he can slough off in his nection with Zadie Smith’s bestselling novel Neither wholly in one place or another, new country through working hard. “Work White Teeth (2000). Smith knew Rahman and children like Monica’s are prone to cul- on day one. This was good. Maybe it was true partly based a character called Majid on him. tural confusion. But they can also act as an what they said about England. That this is Majid grew up in Bangladesh but is a fastidi- emotional bridge. “Mixed-race” is now the where you could make something.” ous “pukka” Englishman with a BBC accent fastest-growing ethnic category in the UK, This summer some people offered to wel- he has learnt from the radio. Her portrayal which means more of the older generation come those fleeing persecution into their is gleefully funny but, Rahman said, “con- than ever have grandchildren with a differ- own homes. What might motivate someone spicuously absent from White Teeth is the ent racial background. to make such a generous gesture? Sahota’s anger… Immigration is a very bitter experi- The current debate about teaching Brit- most intriguing character is Narinder, a Brit- ence for many people.” Rahman pours that ish values offers the chance to argue about ish-born Sikh woman, who agrees to a visa anger into his own novel. At a party, a man what these values might be in 2015. And marriage with another migrant. Her reason named Hugh asks Zafar the perennial ques- while all these writers seem to have a pessi- isn’t money, but religious guilt: she wants to tion: “Where are you from, if you don’t mind mistic or fatalistic take on the chances of a help fellow Indians make a better life. me asking?” Zafar replies he lives in Brixton. multicultural society succeeding, their exist- Narinder has a cultural connection Hugh “let out a guffaw, gently nudging me ence shows how English literature at least is with the person she is helping. In contrast, on the shoulder, relishing what his drunken being renewed by their vital new voices. Michael, an elderly white man from Don- imagination took for mutual amusement. I Sameer Rahim is Prospect’s Arts and Books Editor PROSPECT 9 © SALLY ANSCOMBE/GETTY IMAGES ANSCOMBE/GETTY © SALLY

What does it mean to be a man? A crop of recent novels tackle changing attitudes to masculinity, fi nds Anthony Cummins

n 2011 the feminism issue of the especially is aff ecting their morale. The view of the working classes to note that lit- literary magazine Granta fea- statistics are all there in Rebecca Asher’s erary fi ction shies away from uglier expres- tured “Night Thoughts,” a satir- new book Man Up (Harvill Secker). There sions of male disenfranchisement. Irvine ical story by Helen Simpson, in are too many men in boardrooms but Welsh built his career on writing about an which a teacher lies awake fretting there are also too many men in jail. Men underclass embracing hard drugs aft er the Iabout his workload at home as well as at are less likely than women to change the decline of heavy industry. But the coun- school. Reversing the stereotyped roles, sheets or look aft er their kids, but they are tercultural howl of 1993’s Trainspotting his wife—snoring obliviously—leaves mess also less likely to have close friends or go to has now mellowed into a hard-luck story: everywhere and has nothing to do with a GP. They are more likely to commit mur- Welsh’s latest novel, The Blade Artist child care. She is boorish and even violent der but also suicide. (Cape), reveals that the psychopathic Beg- but if her husband objects, she sulks: he How are contemporary fi ction writers— bie resorted to violence as a way to cope has learnt not to threaten her “feminine both male and female—responding? Usu- with dyslexia. The plot turns on his fail- pride” and to see her behaviour as “natu- ally the masculinity represented in fi ction ures as a father—on the rare occasions he ral.” Simpson engineers the story’s every is either middle class or viewed through looked aft er his two sons he did more harm last detail to make the point that in the real middle-class eyes. In the hands of Mar- than good by teaching them to be homo- world men’s behaviour harms women and tin Amis or Ian McEwan the working-class phobic. In one of those karmic rebukes needs to change, but that it won’t because male is someone to mock or fear. In McE- that Welsh oft en dishes out to his charac- it’s in their interests to keep women down. wan’s Saturday (2005) the neurosurgeon ters, one of the sons turns out to be gay. “Night Thoughts” doesn’t mean to be protagonist and his family disarm a vio- Novelists oft en use male homosexu- subtle: it’s not Simpson’s priority to ask if lent thug by diagnosing him with brain dis- ality like this—as a plot point or source patriarchy hurts men too. But questions ease and reciting a poem—art and science of pathos. The candid account of gay of this kind have become more common in combine to defeat an angry young man. life in Garth Greenwell’s acclaimed new the interim between the story’s fi rst pub- Other writers have tended to sanitise novel What Belongs to You (Picador) lication and its reappearance last year in working-class men. The critic Adam Mars- is eclipsed by a backstory that describes Simpson’s collection Cockfosters (Cape). Jones suggested that James Kelman’s How the narrator’s shaming by his intolerant Artist Grayson Perry recently presented a late it was, how late (1994) won the Booker father. In outline the setup is similar to Channel 4 documentary entitled All Man, Prize in part because its portrayal of a Ben Lerner’s 2011 Leaving the Atocha Sta- in which he visited ultra-male worlds Glaswegian ex-convict appealed to lib- tion: a solitary young literary man abroad, refl ecting on how identity is shift ing in the eral sensibilities. Its protagonist—unreal- in Lerner’s case in Spain; in Greenwell’s face of increasing female equality. Jour- istically for Mars-Jones—disdained racism Bulgaria. Lerner’s novel is a buff oonish nalist Owen Jones wrote a much-shared and homophobia, venting his spleen on the portrait of the artist as a young man, who piece in which he examined how economic Tories or big business. lies that his mother has died in order to insecurity among working-class men You don’t have to share Mars-Jones’s seduce a girl. 10 PROSPECT

In literary fiction sex tends to be a big- the V-shaped neckline of her T-shirt... she paid work without you noticing does not ger preoccupation than work and this col- had a nice face.” make you clever.” ours its portrayal of masculinity. From You get a different view of what men For Knausgaard, feeling like a woman Amis to the French provocateur Michel can be from two recent books that show is something to be resisted; for Adam, the Houellebecq, the dominant note is of cyn- them doing what society still thinks of experience gives him a cautious sense of ical, sometimes inept, chasing of women. as women’s work. In his series of autobi- solidarity. Here he is on the awkwardness It’s in this tradition that David Szalay ographical novels, Norwegian phenom- of having to bring his daughters into men’s writes in his new novel-in-stories All That enon Karl Ove Knausgaard experiences changing rooms: “I am fairly sure that the Man Is (Cape). The direction of travel in domesticity as an existential threat. mothers of small boys have an easier time the title is ambiguous: do these nine snap- “Irrespective of the great tenderness in the other room, although I know that is shots of men from 17 to late age, among I felt... my boredom and apathy were partly because the difference in social and them a medieval philologist from Bel- greater,” he writes of life with three political power between adult women and gium, a suicidal Russian oligarch and a young children. In the park, he feels little boys is much smaller than the differ- French double-glazing salesman, repre- “feminised” and doubts he’s the only ence between adult men and little girls. I sent the breadth or the smallness of man? father who feels the same way: “I thought am not suggesting that it is generally, tak- Almost all the men here are lonely: lit- ing any view wider than that of a provincial tle is said about their family relations and “From Martin Amis to leisure centre, better to be a woman.” friendships are insubstantial. But they Michel Houellebecq, the Despite being wryly aware of how unu- swagger on. “I think you should do her,” sual he is, Adam doesn’t view house-hus- an A-level student tells his mate. When a dominant note is of bandry as some kind of demotion. The workaholic tabloid journalist exposes an cynical, sometimes inept, crisis is more subtle, and has to do with MP’s affair with a married celebrity carry- chasing of women” his prickliness regarding his wife’s equal ing his child, he justifies the phone-hack- right to care about her children when ing that led to the scoop by comparing it to I could occasionally discern an uneasy she’s not the one caring for them—a bur- war and bullfighting. It is a rare moment look on some men’s faces in the play area, ied grudge that surfaces when their eld- of kindness when one of the oligarch’s staff and the restlessness in the bodies, which est daughter is admitted to hospital after notices his employer’s distress and invites were prone to snatching a couple of pull- a mysterious near-fatal collapse. Adam him to his living quarters to share a micro- ups on the bars while the children played knows he must keep in check his need waved curry. around them.” Attending a rhyme-time for possession of his children: after all, Desire withers as the stories progress. session, “led by a woman I would have his marriage is built on his “not being an The first three each show us a young liked to bed,” he feels “without dignity, arsehole”—another way to put what is man who at some point masturbates to impotent... I had forfeited everything conventionally expected of men. the thought of the woman with whom that was me.” If Knausgaard’s My Struggle is the they’re currently obsessed. Later we are father of dad-lit, perhaps The Tidal Zone shown two philanderers, one of whom nausgaard shows that mascu- is its grown-up son. In a meeting at the tells his pregnant lover to have an abor- linity is often a relationship to university department where he holds an tion. Then there’s a married father whose time, or a mastery of it. When irregular hourly-paid teaching contract, fatigue stops him sleeping with a colleague he complains he’s not able to Adam wonders why “this mode of passing on a work trip; and a failed businessman Kwrite because he has to “clean floors, wash time is considered more manly or noble arrested after a mix-up on what he thinks clothes, make dinner, wash up, go shop- than cleaning the loo.” Contrast this with is a date. The oligarch’s wife says he isn’t ping, play with the children in the play Knausgaard deploring the closure of his interested in sex; the book ends with a areas, bring them home, undress them, daughter’s nursery: “I have never under- retired civil servant in lifelong denial about bath them, look after them until it is bed- stood the point of holidays, have never felt his attraction to men. time, tuck them in, hang some clothes to the need for them and have always just Szalay is a very fine writer sentence dry, fold others and put them away, tidy up, wanted to do more work.” by sentence but you feel he has put his wipe tables, chairs and cupboards,” many Rebecca Asher reports that in Britain resources in the service of a tired narra- mothers must have thought: welcome to only 6 per cent of men with dependent tive (surely we are beyond figuring male my world. children are employed part-time; moth- decline as repressed homosexuality?) One Housework also features heavily in ers (even high-earning ones) spend more of the best and most affecting episodes Sarah Moss’s The Tidal Zone (Granta), than twice as long as fathers on house- here concerns a Hungarian bodyguard, narrated by a GP’s husband, Adam, an work and care. Moss is careful to estab- Balázs, infatuated with the prostitute he’s architectural historian who has always lish Adam as exceptional—he grew up on been hired to protect during a visit to Lon- been the main carer of their two daugh- a commune where domestic duties were don. The job ends as a fiasco after he pre- ters, now aged eight and 15. Stung by shared and his mother died when he was emptively assaults one of her clients. But blokey quips about being a man of lei- very young. But it isn’t only a matter of the emotion the story patiently builds up sure he thinks: “Mate, it’s a job, the mak- role models or temperament. Economic is all but thrown away by the conclusion as ing of cakes and the washing of sheets, the forces are at play too—his sector’s rise Balázs, wandering the streets in despair, coordination of laundry with PE lessons, in casual labour has made salaried work notices for the first time the girl behind the handling of the Christmas shopping hard to come by. For now Adam might be the till at a chicken shop he’s been visiting. and the girls’ dental appointments, and a statistical anomaly but his story may be “Part of the lace edge of her bra showed in the fact that your wife does it on top of her the one we hear more of in the future. PROSPECT 11 Brief encounter Michael Rosen Children’s writer and poet

First historical event you can recall? The Festival of Britain of 1951, when I was five years old. I can remember going into the Dome of Discovery and standing along- side a beautiful blue diesel-electric railway engine, which towered over me. It all seemed magical and I hoped that I would be alive in 2051 for the next one.

The book you are most embarrassed you never yet read? Bleak House. I can’t explain why not. I haven’t read all of Dick- ens by any means but what I have read I’ve enjoyed massively. BOWLES/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK © MICHAEL About 10 years ago, I would have answered this question with some other books, but that year I made a list and worked through such things as the Odyssey and Jude the Obscure to make up some gaps. I missed out Bleak House, though!

One bit of advice you’d give to your younger self? Read Bleak House. OK—I know that sounds facetious but what I mean is that between, say, the years of 14 and 22, of course it’s great to footle about, not doing much apart from wondering why The best and worst presents you’ve ever received? you’re not doing much, but if you’re halfway interested in doing Worst: a butterfly catching kit. My parents suffered from over- something to do with writing, then the best apprenticeship is read- interest in my brother and me. If I mentioned something I was ing like crazy. half-interested in, they would leap on it as if it meant that it was something I was fascinated by. I once said I liked insects. Fol- What is your favourite saying or quotation? lowing Christmas: the butterfly kit. Never used it. Best: I’m very “I am soft sift/in an hour glass.” This comes from “The Wreck of keen on a mug that my youngest son (12) gave me which says on the Deutschland” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins invented it: “Number 1 Dad.” I don’t care how confected that slogan is, he a new way of writing poetry, which he created out of experiments chose that to give to me. I love drinking out of it. with Milton, Anglo-Saxon poems, nursery rhymes and Welsh poetry. This line expresses to me those moments when you are What have you changed your mind about? both constrained (“in an hour glass”), under compulsion to do Beaches. They’re OK. I used to think that beaches were a night- something (flow like sand in an hour glass) and yet without a mare: for a start, they’re sandy. In Britain they’re usually windy structure. and rainy. But under duress, I’ve come to appreciate that there are other qualities that make them OK: you can’t walk fast on the dry If you were given £1m to spend on other people, what would you bits, it’s great to watch the way the sea flows over the sand. spend it on and why? A Children’s Poetry Centre. I imagine a place that would have What is the biggest problem of all? a performance space, a writing space, a library, great internet Inequality. This, surely, is at the core of nearly all our problems. access, musical instruments, collections of odd objects, photos, We do not distribute the results of our work in an equitable way. paintings, walls where poems and pictures could be pinned, in a Unless we solve this, we will destroy millions of us, if not all of us. place where within a mile there are odd, quirky places to visit... The last piece of music/play/novel/film that brought you to tears? The talent you wish you had? I had moments in Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls. I thought it was Being able to count bars of music without having to count them. a powerful way to show how young people struggle to deal with I’ve worked with musicians over the last five years and I came to tough things in their lives. I guess there were moments that revived realise how bad I am at it. And even when I count myself “in,” I for me the loss of my son, though the film is the reverse: a boy losing get the beat wrong. a parent. 12 PROSPECT WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE/TOPFOTO © WORLD HISTORY The war’s not over yet In Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee has told the truth—America is still wrestling with racism diane roberts

arper Lee has broken our hearts. For more than law. He fails; Tom Robinson is killed. Still we love him for fight- half a century, Atticus Finch has been everyone’s ing the good fight. hero, a white man who puts his reputation, even But the Atticus of Go Set a Watchman, Harper Lee’s mysteri- his life, on the line, defending a black man and fac- ously recovered, newly published, novel, is not the legal Galahad ing down a lynch mob in the Jim Crow south. The of To Kill a Mockingbird, not a crusader for the downtrodden, not HAtticus we’ve always known valiantly tries to prove Tom Robin- Atticus as we picture him: Gregory Peck, stern and beautiful in son never raped Mayella Ewell, angering the good white people that immaculate linen suit as he speaks out against hatred and of Maycomb, Alabama, risking everything to uphold the rule of prejudice. This Atticus is a racist. In Go Set a Watchman, Scout Finch (these days known by her baptismal name Jean Louise) is now 26 years old and liv- ing in New York City. Home for a visit, she begins to realise that

Diane Roberts is a professor of English at Florida State her adored father, a man she sees as an exemplar of all that is University and a commentator on America’s National good and decent, actually believes in white supremacy. He lik- Public Radio ens “Negroes” to children and calls them “backward,” unfit PROSPECT 13

to “share fully in the responsibilities of citizenship.” He joins the local White Citizens’ Council to suppress the burgeoning civil rights movement. He despises the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) for giving black peo- ple ideas above their station: “The NAACP doesn’t care whether a Negro man owns or rents his land, how well he can farm, or whether or not he tries to learn a trade and stand on his own two feet—oh, no, all the NAACP cares about is that man’s vote.” A vote Atticus Finch doesn’t think “Negroes” are entitled to. How can it be that one of the most cherished characters in one of the most cherished novels of all time, a secular saint of Amer- ican justice cited by the likes of Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty and Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, as their reason for becoming lawyers, could say to his horrified daughter, “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theatres? Do you want them in our world?” Readers, nearly as appalled as Jean Louise Finch, may well ask if we really need to know this Atticus. To Kill a Mockingbird is the quintessential southern story, decanting all the big southern themes—the legacy of slavery, the

loss of innocence, cruelty, conformity, unexpected grace—into a © RETUERS few years in the life of Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, the tomboy- Bree Newsome tears down the Confederate flag from outside the ish despair of every high-toned Christian lady in Maycomb, Ala- South Carolina state capitol on 27th June 2015 bama. Mockingbird isn’t the greatest novel by a southerner. That title surely belongs to Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner’s copies to date. In contrast to Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and spectacular demolition of racial difference, Civil War pieties others of the southern literary pantheon, Lee’s narrator is a child, and the whole edifice of white supremacy that ordered south- but not unreliable; linear time in her novel is not in a state of col- lapse; characters don’t shift races or genders. Maycomb’s problem is that everyone is stuck in the station to which he or she was born: “When asked in the early gentry, “white trash,” Negro, acting out a narrative which never 1960s if she planned a allows for deviation. Published six years after the US Supreme Court outlawed segregation, five years after Rosa Parks refused ‘Mockingbird 2’ or some other to give up her bus seat to a white man, and the same year as white- only lunch counter sit-ins began and the Student Non-Violent novel, she said ‘hell, no’” Coordinating Committee was founded, Mockingbird refuses to give into either rage or despair. The south is not fundamentally ern society. Mockingbird lacks the Faustian menace of another and irredeemably evil. Boo Radley is misunderstood, not sinis- great southern novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in ter; Tom Robinson is innocent; Atticus is a hero; and most peo- which Huck chooses to violate his culture’s standards of morality ple are decent. Mark Twain’s radically incorruptible Huck vows and see his friend Jim not as a piece of property but as a human to “light out for the Territory,” disappear into the Edenic wilder- being, declaring he’s ready to “go to hell” for it if necessary. Mock- ness where Nature might be red in tooth and claw, but he’ll be ingbird cannot match the moral complexity of Faulkner’s Go free of depraved social institutions such as class, organised reli- Down, Moses, with its pained confrontation of southern history gion and slavery. In Go Down, Moses, Ike McCaslin thinks the only and the “Peculiar Institution” that allows a father to rape his own way to atone for the sins of his white family against his black fam- daughter because she is also his slave. ily is to abjure the realm, renounce his property and retreat to the healing bosom of the wilderness. But in Harper Lee’s slice arper Lee read her southern writers. You can hear of the south, running away isn’t an option. Everyone, even the Huck Finn’s guileless voice in the Finch children, recluse Boo, belongs to society; everyone is responsible for soci- and detect the influence of Faulkner’s crime solving ety, too. Atticus Finch doesn’t fall into a resigned melancholy, lawyer Gavin Stevens in Atticus. The inhabitants of unlike Faulkner’s Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!, whose HMaycomb owe something to the chatty eccentrics of Eudora Wel- response to the horrors of history is to cry vainly about the south, ty’s Morgana, Mississippi, as well, and Carson McCullers didn’t “I don’t hate it! I don’t!” and drown himself. Atticus turns and miss the similarities between Scout and Frankie in The Member of fights. Hope lives on. the Wedding, sniffing to a cousin after Mockingbird became a hit: Since 1964, when she gave her last interview, Lee has been an “Well, honey, one thing we know is that she’s been poaching on American enigma, a one-novel wonder like Ralph Ellison (Invis- my literary preserves.” ible Man) or Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind). She’s not But Mockingbird was never fenced off from ordinary readers, been a recluse like JD Salinger or a ghost like Thomas Pynchon. put out of reach on the “high art” book shelf, unlike the works of In 1961, she happily collected her Pulitzer Prize and in 1962, Faulkner, the über Modernist, or O’Connor and McCullers, the attended the première of the film based on her novel. Later in connoisseurs of the grotesque. Mockingbird sold like crazy when life she accepted a Medal of Freedom from President George W it appeared in 1960 and has never stopped selling: more than 40m Bush, and a National Medal of the Arts from President Barack 14 PROSPECT

Obama. She said yes to several honorary degrees and until she pect it’s that Hohoff and Lippincott thought perhaps a novel in became frail three or four years ago, she’d appear at the Univer- which every white character, however charming, embodies some sity of Alabama to shake hands with the winner of an annual aspect of racism from paternalism (at best) to an irrational fear high school essay contest in honour of To Kill a Mockingbird. of “mongrelisation” and rails against the Supreme Court’s rul- Nevertheless, as she said to her cousin Dickie Williams, “When ing declaring that separate is never equal, was either an offence you’re at the top, there is only one way to go.” She never wanted to Yankee progressivism or out of date. In the 1930s, Faulkner to talk about her writing. When asked in the early 1960s if she exposed segregation as a vicious crime against humanity; in the planned a “Mockingbird 2” or some other novel, she’d simply say 1940s and 1950s, Richard Wright and James Baldwin gave voice “no.” Sometimes it was “hell, no.” On one occasion she added: “I to the fury and pain of racism in their fiction and essays, while wouldn’t go through the pressure and publicity I went through Ralph Ellison, in Invisible Man, took on America’s myriad race with To Kill a Mockingbird for any amount of money. I have said myths and shot them down one by one, brilliantly, if sardonically, what I wanted to say and I will not say it again.” demanding full humanity for every American of every shade. A Unlike her childhood friend Truman Capote, she had no novel in which the supposedly wise father and the supposedly desire to shine in New York café society—much as she loved New rebellious daughter both seem to feel that states’ rights should York. Capote’s 1948 bestseller Other Voices, Other Rooms, a tale trump the human rights of African-Americans would surely have of southern decadence complete with rotting plantation house, struck many readers, becoming aware of the struggle for civil cross-dressing uncle, mad aunts, guns and dark family secrets, rights in the south, as retrograde. made him a literary star. He encouraged Lee, maintaining a close friendship with her during the 1950s and 1960s. She worked n that last interview 51 years ago, Lee said she wanted to with Capote in late 1959 as his “researcher and bodyguard,” be “the Jane Austen of South Alabama,” chronicler of a helping with his groundbreaking “nonfiction novel” about the way of life in small southern towns she feared was on the murders of a well-off family in Holcomb, Kansas, and the two decline. On the one hand, she loathed publicity and swore ex-convicts eventually executed for the crime. Some, notably Ishe’d never publish anything again; yet she also clearly intended Norman Mailer, wondered if Lee actually wrote parts of In Cold to produce more than Mockingbird. Blood and—perhaps to equalise the unlikeliness—suggested that Writers are no more consistent than anyone else. In the 1970s, Capote was the real author of To Kill a Mockingbird. Everybody Lee seemed to be planning a true-crime novel called “The Rev- loves literary conspiracy theories: Shakespeare didn’t really write erend,” based on a series of sensational homicides in Alexan- Shakespeare, and Branwell Brontë, Emily’s brother, is the “real” der City, Alabama. A self-proclaimed preacher was suspected author of Wuthering Heights. of murdering his first and second wives, his brother, and various other family members. Alice Lee would tell people, “Nelle Lee hich brings us to Go Set a Watchman, controversial is always writing stories”—Nelle being Lee’s actual first name. before it ever hit print. Did Harper Lee’s lawyer The hype for Go Set a Watchman was positively epic. Book- Tonja Carter “find” the typescript in the summer stores from Boston to Los Angeles held celebrations the evening of 2014, as she has said, or was it really unearthed before the novel officially came out on 14th July. Square Books in Win 2011 when an expert from Sotheby’s examined the contents Oxford, Mississippi (home of Faulkner), held a marathon read- of Harper Lee’s safe deposit box? Did Harper Lee truly want ing of To Kill a Mockingbird, while in Monroeville, where Lee still this uneven, often funny, often inartful, first draft of the beloved lives, now in a care home, a local café served “Boo Burgers” and Mockingbird to see the light of day? It’s hard to ignore the stag- “Finch Fries.” Monroeville’s Ole Curiosities and Book Shoppe gering amount of money involved: royalties for To Kill a Mocking- opened at midnight on 13th July to begin selling 10,000 copies bird top $63,000 a week. Conspiracy theories abound: perhaps of Watchman (Monroeville’s population is only 6,300) to people Lee, aged 89, is too infirm to have consented in a meaningful who’d been queueing for hours, some dressed as Atticus or Scout way? Alice Lee, known around Monroeville, Alabama as “Atticus or other characters from the Mockingbird universe. Harper Col- in a skirt,” died in 2014, and could no longer protect her baby sis- lins, the novel’s US publisher, says the novel broke all previous ter from publishers, editors, agents and advisors intent on maxi- records for pre-sales. On publication day, the Guardian’s web- mizing a huge publishing opportunity. A columnist for the New site offered “Live Updates” from New York, the United Kingdom York Times pointed darkly to the “synergy” of the Rupert Mur- and Alabama, as if this were some natural disaster, an election doch-owned Wall Street Journal getting “scoops,” including the or the cup final. first chapter, from the Rupert Murdoch-owned Harper Col- A wily public relations firm could not have designed this lins, which published the book. A reviewer on National Public “publishing event of the year” any better. But now that the noise Radio said she didn’t think Watchman was a first draft of Mock- has settled down, we can think a little harder about the novel. ingbird after all, asserting “this troubling confusion of a novel” And Lee’s legacy. And our shock that Atticus could hold such reads like “a failed sequel.” The New Republic did a three-part racist attitudes. This Atticus, this first characterisation of him, is series called “The Suspicious Story Behind Harper Lee’s Go Set much more of a product of his time than the Atticus of Mocking- a Watchman.” The publisher insists that Lee gave full consent to bird. Consider: he would have been born in the 1880s (he’s 72 in the book’s publication. Watchman), and grew up in an Alabama still traumatised by the Watchman is certainly the first draft of Mockingbird. Records Civil War and Reconstruction. He flirts with the Ku Klux Klan kept by Lee’s agent in the late 1950s corroborate this. It reads as a young man; joins the White Citizens’ Council as an older like a first draft: rough and often angry. Tay Hohoff, Lee’s editor man; and makes a distinction between “good Negroes”—the def- at Lippincott, counselled the young writer to abandon the con- erential domestics, preachers and tenant farmers who call him temporary story set in the 1950s and concentrate on Scout as a “sir”—and “outside agitators,” civil rights activists, the NAACP, child in the south of the 1930s. If there is a “secret” here, I sus- trying to destroy the “Southern Way of Life.” PROSPECT 15

and identity from the rich mix of the two, cautioned black civil rights activists to “go slow, now” and don’t push for integration. He went on to say “if I have to make the same choice as Robert E Lee then I’ll make it,” and added that if the federal government interfered with Mississippi, he’d resist, “even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.” One hundred and fifty years after the surrender at Appomat- tox, it’s still not over. Some white southerners, terrified of immi- grants, terrified of social change and the astonishing fact that a black man lives in the White House, still talk about secession. The whole country still debates the Confederate battle flag—her- itage or hate? After the massacre of nine worshippers at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, the state legislature (finally, and not unanimously) voted to remove it from the cap- itol grounds. Alabama followed suit. But Mississippi continues to cling to the battle flag, incorporating it into their state ban- ner. A new book by David Theo Goldberg, Are We All Postracial Yet? argues that, if anything, race informs American society more than ever. Our attempts at colour-blindness have only made us more aware racialists. Barack Obama did not, after all, usher in the new era when race is finally irrelevant. Race is—as it always has been—life and death. As the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his searing Between the World and Me, says, “race is the child of rac- ism, not the father.” This isn’t about “hue and hair,” it’s about power. America, a nation constantly telling itself the future is what matters, is mired in history. As Faulkner said, “the past is never dead; it’s not even past.”

o should we shun this lesser, this limited, Atticus Finch of Watchman, holding onto his more heroic, later-draft self? On the contrary. Lee’s rough draft brings us closer to the reality of 21st-century America than the hopeful lessons of STo Kill a Mockingbird. Jean Louise’s Uncle Jack, trying to explain how the south got that way, says to her, “Not much more than 5 per cent of the south’s population ever saw a slave, much less owned one.” In 2015, the Texas Board of Education continues to deny that slavery was the main cause of the American Civil War. It was really cotton tariffs. Or states’ rights. Uncle Jack would be proud. In Watchman, Lee coolly dissects the class system Ameri- cans insist doesn’t exist: Hank, Jean Louise’s sometime boyfriend, is white but working class. He can’t afford patrician tolerance for black people, who are, he thinks, primitive and largely ineducable. DDP USA/REX SHUTTERSTOCK

© You can hear the same sentiments, slightly more veiled, in con- To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee in 2011 servative justifications for the killings of Trayvon Martin in San- ford, Michael Brown in Ferguson, and Tamir Rice in Cleveland, “The Southern Way of Life” was white folks’ genteel euphe- unarmed boys who are called “thugs,” boys taunted with “Pants mism for apartheid. Jim Crow. Segregation. The laws that for- up, don’t loot!” mocking the “Hands up, don’t shoot!” of the pro- bade blacks and whites to marry, to use the same entrance to testors. Atticus Finch condemns government intervention in the movie theatres or eat in the same parts of a restaurant, the poll economy and what he sees as the “right” of Alabama to frustrate taxes and “literacy” tests that stopped black people voting, the the dreams of anyone who happens to be a descendant of slaves; laws that made it almost impossible for the children and grand- he castigates the Supreme Court for its “activism” (by which he children of freed slaves to be full citizens of the United States. means its decision to end American apartheid) and wishes that Atticus is similar to historical figures eventually regarded as only certain people—you can guess what kind of people—be civil rights advocates: the Supreme Court justice Hugo Black allowed to vote. He’d be right at home in the Tea Party. of Alabama, and the late Senator Robert Byrd of West Vir- In Go Set a Watchman we see a writer struggling with her peo- ginia. Both joined the Klan as young men; Byrd filibustered the ple and her history and finding no place of comfort. Whether Civil Rights Act of 1964; Black spoke against an anti-lynching 1957 or 2015, slavery haunts us still; the Civil War isn’t quite fin- law in the 1930s. Both later embraced the cause of social jus- ished; and, much as we congratulate ourselves on how far we’ve tice. Faulkner, who in book after book undermined every sacred come, Atticus, speaking from the scared, entitled subconscious tenet of white supremacy and showed how the south, despite 300 of the America that desperately wants to see itself as a “white years of trying to separate black from white, derives its culture man’s country,” shows us how far we have to go. 16 PROSPECT Writers blocked I write to be mischievous, subversive and perverse. There’s no room for any of that in a culture obsessed with offence lionel shriver

n the 1980s, pop psychology promoted the shibboleth tional, unreasonable and disproportionate: spitting fury that that “you can’t argue with what people feel.” Since then, you’re not allowed a chocolate cream, but only a caramel. That that line has brought many a contentious conversation was me, throwing a tantrum aged 10. Pity I wasn’t born 20 years to an impasse. The consequences of anointing emotion later. I might have screamed at my mother when she sent me to as beyond interrogation are vividly illustrated in Mark my room: “But you can’t argue with what people feel!” Lawson’s biting novel The Allegations: when an aggrieved party Worse, in English “I feel” and “I think” are roughly synon- Ifeels bullied it means, ipso facto, that he or she has been bullied, ymous. If we enshrine as a truism that “you can’t argue with and employment tribunals are mere formalities. Sacked by the what people think,” we can throw in the towel on intellectual BBC for the same offence, but never allowed to confront his debate in perpetuity. Which, the way things are going, maybe anonymous accusers whom the Corporation trusted, Lawson we should do. should know. One emotion has grown so sacrosanct that an astonish- But you can argue with what people feel. Emotions range ingly large segment of Europeans now thinks that provoking it from the justifiable—grief that a brother just died—to the irra- should be illegal: umbrage. According to a 2015 Pew Research PROSPECT 17

Centre poll, only the barest majority of Britons—54 per cent— boon for folks whose medium is wordsmithing. Aren’t we writ- and a scant 27 per cent of Germans any longer believe gov- ers menacing? Unfortunately, we authors now contend with a ernment should allow people to make statements offensive to torrent of dos and don’ts that bind our imaginations and make minorities. (Why only minorities? Wouldn’t equality under the the process of writing and publishing fearful. Being a novelist in law argue for banning speech offensive to anyone?) the era of “call outs” for supposedly offensive content is far less Thus in January, in an interview with the Canadian free- fun than it once was. speech advocate Jordan B Peterson that went viral, Channel 4 I’ve written at length before about “cultural appropriation”— News presenter Cathy Newman referred casually to the “right the idea that availing yourself of other cultures without permis- not to be offended,” as if the entitlement were a familiar point sion is a form of theft—so let’s keep it short. Preventing writers of common law. Though Peterson got the better of her in that from conjuring lives different from their own would spell the instance—we don’t often see Newman flustered—defenders of end of fiction. If we have the right to draw on only our own expe- the “right not to be offended” are starting to prevail in Euro- rience, all that’s left is memoir. But when I drafted my famous— pean public opinion. or infamous—speech for a 2016 appearance at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival, I’d barely heard of the term. Fast-forward, and this ostensible taboo has grown firmly established, becom- “If words that cause umbrage ing a far bigger issue in literature than it was a mere 18 months ago. (Social fads can colour not only the present, but the past. are acts of violence, the state It now seems as if we’ve been battling over “cultural appropria- has every right to impound tion” for years and years.) The notion often crops up in creative writing programmes, leaving upcoming writers confused about your dictionary” what material they’re “allowed” to use in their work and how in heaven’s name they’re supposed to seek permission to borrow a It doesn’t take much parsing to conclude that protecting all cup of sugar from “marginalised peoples.” and sundry from the terrible experience of having your feel- Yet these days, straight white fiction writers whose charac- ings hurt is the end of free speech altogether. Since nowadays ters’ ethnicity, race, disability, sexual identity, religion or class “you can’t argue with what people feel,” umbrage is freed from differs from their own can expect their work to be subjected rational justification. Given that the better part of the human to forensic examination—and not only on social media. Pub- race is crazy, stupid, or both, there’s nary a thought in the world lishers of young adult fiction and children’s literature hire whose airing won’t offend somebody. Doesn’t Darwin offend cre- “sensitivity readers” to comb through manuscripts for perceived ationists? Furthermore, in granting so much power to wound- slights to any group with the protected status once reserved for edness, we incentivise hypersensitivity. If we reward umbrage, distinguished architecture. The publishing magazine Kirkus we will get more of it. We do reward umbrage, and we’re buried Reviews assigns “own voices” reviewers with a matching “mar- in it by the truckload. ginalised” pedigree to assess young adult books that contain a Time was that children were taught to turn aside tormen- diverse cast. Last autumn, the magazine yanked both a posi- tors with the cry, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but tive review and its coveted “star” after online activists accused words will never hurt me!” While you can indeed feel injured Laura Moriarty’s dystopian novel American Heart, which imagi- because Bobby called you fat, the law has traditionally main- nes a future in which US Muslims are sent to internment camps, tained a sharp distinction between bodily and emotional harm. of using a “white saviour narrative.” (Yes, whole plot lines are Even libel law requires a demonstration of palpable damage to becoming unacceptable. This year’s film Three Billboards Out- reputation, which might impact your livelihood, rather than side Ebbing, Missouri has attracted heavy flak because its racist mere testimony that a passage in a book made you cry. cop rounds into a half-decent human being. Writers can refur- That words-will-never-hurt me rejoinder is out of fashion. bish murderers into good guys, but must never redeem a racist.) The “safe spaces” cropping up on university campuses aren’t As for adult literature, it’s impossible to gauge the degree of shelters to protect students from hailstorms, or havens for politically correct censorship going on behind the scenes at pub- young women whose boyfriends beat them up, but bubbles in lishing companies and literary agencies. Editors and agents are which to hide from ideas—to hide from words. In a tweet this unlikely to assert directly that a submission’s content is too hot January, the journalist Matt Baume decried Ryan Anderson’s to handle. Having tackled divisive subjects or deployed charac- controversial book on transgenderism, When Harry Became ters who don’t hew to the rules of identity politics—rules that Sally, as “violent.” He didn’t mean it was full of gory shoot-outs. are often opaque, or at least until you break them—authors are Baume meant it was full of opinions that he didn’t like. left with uneasy suspicions about why their manuscripts might Emotion cannot be disputed, especially umbrage. Words be attracting no takers, but with no hard evidence. and sticks-and-stones are on a par. If words that cause umbrage Equally impossible to gauge is the extent of writers’ collec- are acts of violence, the state has every excuse to impound tive self-censorship. The tetchiness and public shaming of “call your dictionary. out” culture has to be influencing which subjects writers feel free to address and which they shy away from, as well as mak- ing many writers reluctant to include a diverse cast. Does the The end of fiction edict to eschew stereotypes mean a black character can never be a drug dealer? (So much for The Wire, then. Or Clockers, both p against the wall in a dark alley, I’d personally say the created by white men.) Rather than tip-toe through this mine- sword is mightier than the pen. But all this power to field, plenty of writers must be playing it safe with characters, U break bones imputed to mere language might seem a topics and plots that won’t get them into trouble. But this 18 PROSPECT

caution is invisible. Literary roads not taken are mapped pri- vately in a writer’s head, behind a screen, with the drapes drawn. We have no record of what a host of individual authors have decided to avoid.

Imaginary friends

riting my first novel in the 1980s, I didn’t hesitate to include black characters—not only Americans, but a whole invented African tribe. I freely included occa- sionalW dialogue in Black English. Despite a continued convic- tion that I have as much right to create black characters as black writers have to create white ones, I’ve grown more self- conscious. Accents and dialects make me nervous. I’m more hes- itant to fold a range of ethnicities, races, gender variants and classes into my work. Unless I push back against my own pru- dence, my fictional worlds will fail to reflect the world I live in. My literary palate will pale. Overcoming my anxiety, in late 2016 I permitted myself to create another black character in a short story. Jaconda is the alluring girlfriend of a young white layabout. Her willingness to cross the racial divide for this waster helps push the reader to puzzle: what on earth does she see in the guy? Counter to cliché, Jocanda’s background is upper middle class, so to the degree that she speaks as if she’s from the ’hood—“He don’t need to become nothing”—it’s an affectation. I constrained the Black English to light touches. Jocanda is lively, smart, savvy and appealing. Yet despite the positive portrayal, the cutting across class ste- reotype, and the restrained rendition of her speech, my agent warned me about the story’s poor prospects at a magazine that had published me in the past. In the touchy climate following my speech in Brisbane that September, she said “we’ll never know” whether it would be rejected because I had the gall to craft a black character. She invited me to revise the story using a white girlfriend. I held my ground. The story was indeed declined. Why? Maybe the editor just thought it was crummy. We’ll never know. I’ve plenty of recent experience of using non-white charac- ters in my novels, only to have them singled out and scrutinised for thought crime. It’s funny how consistently folks looking for affront tend to find it. (I envy a series like Charlie Brook- er’s Black Mirror, whose futuristic settings enable characters to merely happen to be non-white.) I have an obstreperous streak a mile wide. I hate being bullied, especially at the keyboard. If even writers like me are starting to wonder if including other ethnicities and races in our fiction is worth the potential blow- back, then fiction is in serious trouble.

ne crucial but now imperilled fictional device is that of imbuing characters with thoughts and emotions that the author may or may not share. When charac- Oters speak and think, the writer has plausible deniability. The contractual understanding with the reader—that the content of dialogue and internal reflection does not necessarily repre- sent the author’s own perspective—facilitates putting contra- White saviours? Top, Dominic West in The Wire, a show created by dictory feelings and ideas in the same work, providing it with white men with a 70 per cent black cast. Above, Sam Rockwell as a balance and depth. Freedom from a reader’s assumption that racist redeemed in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri every character is necessarily a mouthpiece for the author’s PROSPECT 19

Walled in: Monica Ali faced protests over characters in her novel Brick Lane © JUSTIN WILLIAMS/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK own opinions allows for the exploration of characters who don’t embrace progressive orthodoxies—who are bigots, opponents of skit, “ESL Students Learn New Gender Pronouns.”) Though gay marriage, advocates of more restrictive immigration, or— preferring plural constructions, I resist female pronouns in the horror—Tory supporters. the general instance. Using “she” in reference to both sexes is Yet the “it wasn’t me, it was my imaginary friend” defence merely reverse discrimination, and these intrusions of autho- has been challenged ever since Bangladeshis successfully pro- rial righteousness are distracting. Unless handling the term tested against the filming of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane in their with the protective rubber gloves of quotation marks, I plan to area not because of what her novel said, but because of what go to my grave having never employed the linguistic abortion her characters said. At the 2016 Sewanee Writers’ Conference “cisgender”—which suggests sissy gender—a word not only fla- in Tennessee, fellow authors accused Allen Wier of a “micro- grantly repulsive, but one that in its contortion casts being born aggression” because three old men in a baseball park ogled a a woman and imagining that therefore one is a woman as one young woman in his short story. Is “hate speech” in dialogue more sexual kink. prosecutable? Not long ago, I’d have said of course not. Now I’m not so sure. Minnesota has just withdrawn two great Amer- ican classics, both scathing examinations of southern racism— The perils of privilege Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird—from its school syllabus because n the wake of #MeToo, hasty, due-process-free sackings in the novels’ bigoted dialogue might make students feel “humili- response to sexual misconduct allegations (like Minnesota ated and marginalised.” Readers highly motivated to find fault Public Radio’s dismissal of author Garrison Keillor) and often embrace deliberately unsophisticated interpretations of Ithe consequent popular conflation of art and artist potentially literary texts, for it’s easy to make passages sound atrocious just makes the publishability of authors’ work dependent on how we by taking characters’ assertions and word choice out of context. comport ourselves at parties. Like actors, directors, and paint- Indeed, searching for hidden offences has become social media’s ers, writers, too, could now be silenced—and have their previ- updated version of the Easter egg hunt. ous work withdrawn from sale, if not have the fruits of entire Impositions from the left also extend to language. Any fiction careers effectively erased—by the exposure of some impropri- writer who wants to strain the reader’s patience with gender- ety off the page. neutral pronouns is welcome to them, but I dread the day that Writing about #MeToo can itself trigger the reflex to gag. artificial contrivances like ze and zir become ideologically man- When Harper’s Magazine was about to run an article by Katie datory. (For a hoot, check out We the Internet television’s online Rophie outing the anonymous creator of a widely circulated 20 PROSPECT blacklist of men in the media accused of sexual misconduct, the novel is magnificently elastic. Fiction is under no obligation there was a concerted online campaign to stop the maga- to reflect any particular reality, pursue social justice, or push a zine from publishing, including jamming its switchboard and laudable political agenda. The purpose of any narrative form is instructing other writers slated for the same issue to withdraw up to the author. Yet contemporary university students are com- their work. monly encouraged to view literature exclusively through the Writers are already stifled by expressing the wrong opinions prism of unequal power dynamics—to scrounge for evidence of outside their fiction. In 2014, Black Lawrence Press dropped a racism, colonialism, imperialism, sexism, the list goes on. What novella from an anthology because the author, Elizabeth Ellen, a loss. What a pity. What a grim, joyless spirit in which to read. had published on an unrelated website a controversial essay How did we get so obsessed with virtue? A narrow version with which the BLP editors disagreed. Do publishers now need of virtue at that—one solely preoccupied with social hierar- to endorse everything you’ve ever written in order to print your chy, when morality concerns far more than who’s being shafted work? In today’s polarised political climate, it’s perilous for writ- and who’s on top. If all modern literature comes to toe the same ers to speak out about controversial subjects, lest they alienate goody-goody line, fiction is bound to grow timid, homogeneous, a portion of their readership, and be banished from progressive and dreary. literary mags and presses. Professionally speaking, my voicing I don’t want to read only about nice people, and I don’t turn public support for Brexit was shooting myself in the foot. to novels to be morally improved. I was drawn to writing fic- We now have a whole new category of writer, and person for tion in the first place because on paper I completely control my that matter, who isn’t permitted to say anything about anything. world—where I can be mischievous, subversive and perverse. Sticking up for the rights of straight white males is less fash- Where I follow no one else’s rules but my own. Where I can ionable than sticking up for smokers. More broadly, enjoying make my characters do and say abominations. I have never con- any kind of “privilege”—I can’t be the only one who’s sick up fused sitting down at my desk with attending Sunday school. to the eyeballs with that word—means you sacrifice your right And I frankly do not understand readers who go at novels mak- to free speech. Sorry to go all American on you, but our Con- ing prissy judgments of the characters and author both, and stitution’s First Amendment protecting freedom of expression can’t just sit down to a good story. doesn’t come with an asterisk: “*unless you’ve hitherto had it We live in denunciatory times. Cynical times, too; we assume decency will only descend through legislation or an iron-fisted cultural fiat. Raise the issue of free speech at any gathering, and “Raise the issue of free speech, first thing everyone piles on with all the ways in which this awful and everyone will pile on to freedom must be constrained. Perhaps because the cause of free speech has been—cat- say how this awful freedom astrophically, in my view—allowed to become the preserve of the right, too many left-leaning writers (ie most writers) in the must be constrained” west have been discouragingly tepid in their defence of a liberty on which their art and livelihood depend. When PEN Amer- too good.” I’ve heard from multiple male colleagues that they’d ica gave Charlie Hebdo a freedom of expression award (under like to champion free speech, but sitting at the very bottom of heavily armed guard) after Islamists murdered 12 of the maga- the victimhood totem pole they “can’t say anything.” To quote zine’s staff for its irreverent content, over 200 huffy authors pro- an ex-president whom I quite miss: “yes, you can.” tested. For the dissidents, sticking up for Muslims’ “right not to Not all repression, however, is coming from the left. In the be offended” was more important than free speech. US, libraries and school boards are so ban-happy that the Amer- Following my Brisbane folderol, the Guardian Review ran ican Library Association holds a “Banned Books Week” every a two-page spread in which 11 authors addressed whether September to highlight its annual “Top Ten List of Most Chal- fiction writers should feel free to “appropriate” others’ experi- lenged Books.” With a single exception—Bill Cosby’s Little Bill, ence. The equivocation was astonishing. Even writers who ten- which was singled out for the author’s alleged sexual assaults— tatively defended imaginative “theft” did so only after hedging last year’s most proscribed books were exclusively targeted for the point to death. A commonplace thread ran that it was all content that affronts prudish, Christian conservatives: gay and/ right to write about characters different from yourself, but only or transgender characters, sexually explicit scenes that might after exhaustive homework, and only if you were really good lead to “sexual experimentation,” drugs, atheism, cursing and at it, which they were, of course, but most people weren’t. The profanity. Chuck Palahniuk’s Make Something Up: Stories You writers willing to defend their liberty without a snow- Can’t Unread was censured not only for sexual licentiousness, storm of qualification numbered exactly one. Good on you, but for being “disgusting and all round offensive”—a badge of Philip Hensher. honour that makes me jealous. The presses with their sensitivity readers. Kirkus with its “own voices” reviewers. The academy, now content to assess the canon in the reductive terms of “intersectionality.” The whole Virtue by iron fiat apparatus of delivering literature to its audience is signalling an intention to subject fiction to rigid ideological purity tests, unre- hat is the purpose of literature? To shape young peo- lated to artistry, excellence and even entertainment, that miss ple into God-fearing adults who say no to drugs? To the point of what our books are for. Let’s see a little more cour- accurately mirror reality? To act as a tool for social age, people—in the work and in the world. engineering?W To make the world a better place? Certainly fic- Lionel Shriver is a novelist and critic. Her short story collection tion is capable of influencing social attitudes, or trying to. But “Property” (Borough Press) is out in April PROSPECT 21

5 free speech fl ash points

Horowitz’s War Last year Anthony Horowitz, the author of the Alex Rider spy novels, was warned off writing a black character by his editor, who told him it might be considered “inappropriate.” Horowitz, who had previously run into trouble for saying Idris Elba was too “street” to play James Bond, argued that we were moving into dangerous territory. “Taking it to its logical extreme,” he said, “all my characters will from now on be 62-year-old white Jewish men living in London.”

Margaret Atwood the “bad feminist” In the era of #MeToo, the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale inspired feminists all over the world. But Atwood was called out for being a “bad feminist” by other women when she signed an open letter in defence of Steven Galloway, a writer and academic at the University of British Columbia who had been dismissed after allegations of misconduct. Atwood defended herself in a January article: “understandable and temporary vigilante justice can morph into a culturally solidifi ed lynch- mob habit.”

Je ne suis pas Charlie After 12 Charlie Hebdo staff were killed for publishing anti-Islam cartoons in January 2015, Pen America decided to honour the French satirical magazine with its Freedom of Expression Courage Award. In response, more than 200 writers—including Peter Carey and Michael Ondaatje—signed a letter objecting because Charlie Hebdo’s contents was Islamaphobic. The literary world was split down the middle but in the end the prize was given. Salman Rushdie, who lived under the threat of death for writing The Satanic Verses, responded: “What I would say to both Peter and Michael and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them.”

Jonathan Franzen corrected When Jonathan Franzen admitted in a 2016 interview that he wouldn’t write a novel about race because “I don’t have very many black friends,” and had “never been in love with a black woman,” Twitter exploded with outrage at the crassness of his expression. But perhaps he couldn’t win either way: if he had written a book with black characters, he would probably have been accused of “cultural appropriation.”

Ban Babar! Children’s fi ction has become a battleground. The French classic Babar the Elephant was taken down from an East Sussex library in 2012 for its racist stereotypes. In February this year, a fi lm company had to apologise for a sequence in the new Peter Rabbit fi lm where a character with an allergy is pelted with blackberries. The hashtag #boycottpeterrabbit was used by parents who believed the sequence was offensive and dangerous to people with food allergies. © AF ARCHIVE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, EVERETT COLLECTION INC / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, REX/SHUTTERSTOCK, PRIXNEWS / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, , TUUL AND BRUNO MORANDI / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, WENN LTD / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, COLLECTION CHRISTOPHEL / ALAMYPHOTO STOCK / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, WENN LTD , TUUL AND BRUNO MORANDI / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO, PRIXNEWS / ALAMY REX/SHUTTERSTOCK, STOCK PHOTO, INC / ALAMYCOLLECTION EVERETT STOCK PHOTO, / ALAMY© AF ARCHIVE STOCK PHOTO,