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The Introduction to the New Puritan Generation 1 Healthy and Modern Form Had at Last Become Three Years Later, in the Same Publication (New Consolidated 1.- The birth of a new sensibility Reading the assessments on British fiction that were regularly published in the 1990s a certain sense of complacency can be gleaned, as if the novel published The Introduction to in Britain at the time had reached its prime, having left behind previous accusations of provincialism, The New Puritan Generation introspection and lack of adventure. There were reasons to be satisfied. The writers by who had emerged in the late 1960s and in the 1970s José Francisco Fernández flourished in the following decade, producing some of their finest pieces by placing themselves outside outdated modes of narration (Fay Weldon, Beryl Bainbridge, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Angela Carter, Rose Tremain…). The new writers of the 1980s had added vigour and freshness to this scenario, contributing with unusually rich forms of invention (Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, Ben Okri, Alan Hollinghurst, Kazuo Ishiguro…). It seemed, then, that a The Introduction to The New Puritan Generation 1 healthy and modern form had at last become Three years later, in the same publication (New consolidated. The British novel had somehow come full Writing 4, 1995), A. S. Byatt shared Bradbury’s views circle starting with the brilliance of Modernism in the on the good quality of British fiction in the early 1990s first decades of the 20th century and ending in the and the excellent prospects for the novel in the years to 1990s with a fresh surge of creativity. In the words of follow: ‘I do think the British novel at the moment is Malcolm Bradbury, writing in the first issue (1992) of full of truly inventive writing – new forms are being New Writing: ‘Aesthetically, it [British fiction] is equally discovered, old forms are being subtly altered, there is plural, ranging freely from one genre to another, from a sense that anything is possible and, moreover, the detective story to science fiction, the historical anything has a chance of being taken seriously’ (1995: novel to the post-modern pastiche, reviving forms of 439). Critics and scholars were basking in the glow of writing from the past while experimenting with the the roaring fire fed by a variety of fiction: writers from often media-based forms of the future’ (1992: 9). the Celtic fringe of Britain were producing outstanding Things had been done properly, a dignified status had works, women’s writing had never been such a finally been achieved and the reward was justly earned, prominent part of the mainstream as it was then, ‘new and consequently Bradbury spoke about new writing voices’ from countries which had once belonged to the characterized by ‘its variety and pluralism, its Empire had undoubtedly enriched and energized multiplicity of expression, its breadth of voices’ (1992: British fiction. Even repulsion and abjection in sexual 8). matters, including descriptions of physical violence by The Introduction to The New Puritan Generation 2 the boldest of novelists was perfectly admitted, and of after the collapse of Communism, but British authors course playing with history was a readers’ favourite. were continuing with old forms, unaware of the fact However, one cannot help noticing that there was that the approaching end of the millennium demanded a residual sense of belletrism in the critics’ assessment a new literary conscience: ‘The world has changed far of fiction published at that time in the British Isles. A. S. more than writing has and we haven’t yet generated Byatt celebrated the ‘excitingly mongrel nature’ (1995: the new writing’ (cited in Fernández, 1998: 225). What 441 – emphasis in original) in the finalists for the he was looking for, he said, was someone who could ‘Twenty Best of Young British Novelists’ (1993) for describe the world that follows this [the fall of which she was a member of the panel. It was good to be the Berlin Wall], and describe it not just in terms hybrid as long as it was framed in a good novel. of its habits, and not some commonplace facts, Malcolm Bradbury himself could not help feeling but a story that was really about that great sense the ennui that sometimes accompanies the feeling of of difference, and who could actually articulate having been well nurtured and satiated. I had the this as the writers of the Romantic Movement did opportunity to interview him in the mid-1990s and he after the French Revolution. (cited in Fernández, told me that the established writers of the day were 1998: 225) very much living on the surge of energy of the previous Bradbury did not complain about the absence of good decade, when powerful ideas had triggered the writers’ writers. There were plenty of gifted artists: that was imagination. For him, the world had changed radically not the point. What he found missing was the The Introduction to The New Puritan Generation 3 ‘magician’ of the moment, someone to grasp the spirit because ‘Everything had gone all slippery, like spilt of the confusing, heady times they were living at the mercury; and when the tweezers of criticism tried to end of the century. pick up a trend or a product or an event it seemed to It is fanciful to imagine a new Milan Kundera or split up into cunning little sub-sections of itself, an updated version of Václav Havel disregarded by scattering hither and thither with a wanton disregard critics and unknown by the general public, but let’s for any singularity of purpose – any one meaning’ imagine that the new writer had not just been released (Bracewell, 2002: 2). from prison in Eastern Europe, or that he/she had not Times had changed indeed and they did not have secretly been writing their big novel in some miserable the shape anyone would have predicted for a grand bedsit while working part-time in an obscure finale as befitted the end of the millennium. There was administrative job. Perhaps the new writing, the a sense of provisionality in all spheres of life, and the literature that encapsulated the hollow excitement of new urbanscape was not downtown Manhattan nor a the times had not one but multiple faces and could be semi-detached house of the professional middle-classes found just round the corner, in the shopping centres, in Chelsea, Hampstead or St John’s Wood, but places the disco-clubs and in the streets of suburban like the Old Pier in Weston-Super-Mare, the epitome of neighbourhoods. Perhaps in the 1990s no coherent English tackiness, where the protagonist of Matt concept of culture could be encapsulated anymore by Thorne’s novel, Tourist (1998), dresses up as a cabaret just one single style or an encompassing worldview artist in an attempt to revive the fortunes of a seedy The Introduction to The New Puritan Generation 4 music hall venue. Sarah Patton, the protagonist of narrative of the new millennium. The literary novel, Thorne’s first incursion into long narratives, was more understood as an artistically ambitious work of fiction, a representative of the cultural atmosphere of the more than 30,000 words long, not commercial and not 1990s than any frustrated over-intellectualized fictive genre (Jack, 2003: 11) was seen as an outmoded form writer going through a self-destructive middle age by a new generation of writers who thrived on sub- crisis. ‘I’m twenty-seven years old and I don’t know standard literature and who lived in a consumerist who I am’ (Thorne, 2001: 231), says Sarah reflecting world. Tony White put it succinctly when, thinking on upon her own life. She earns her living in a low-paid the motivation for putting together his anthology of job, searches for meaning in a number of personal alternative writing britpulp! (1999), he said: ‘Just relationships finding sex instead, goes out to pubs or developing the idea about the writers who were clubs ending up in other people’s houses and is as emerging in the mid-nineties, who seemed to be devoid of cultural referents as the rest of her friends, ignoring any orthodox “literary” canon, and taking with video-games and bowling alleys as the main some kind of cue from popular fiction of the sixties and highlights in her daily drudgery. seventies. The ones who were any good, that is. It felt My point is that a new kind of fiction which never like an important moment that no one was picking up reached the bestseller lists was lurking in the shadows on’ (cited in Marshall, 2002). of mainstream publishing in the last decade of the 20th Most of the new writers who did not fit into the century and that it contained the seeds for the prevailing pattern of high literary standards did not go The Introduction to The New Puritan Generation 5 to the lengths of Tony White in his first novel, Road tends to be the subject matter of most English fiction; it Rage! (1997) when he imposed himself the rules of not is profoundly retrospective’ (cited in Self, 2006: 28), he spending more than two weeks on its composition, not said. Similarly, Ian Jack complained of the stress on doing any research and not forgetting to include at self-examination so characteristic of English novels of least one scene of sex or violence in every chapter the mid-1990s. They were not necessarily historic (cited in Marshall, 2002), but it is nevertheless true fictions, but they all dealt ‘with the country and people that they wrote against the canon, or rather, they did that seemed to be there a minute ago, before we not care about following the tradition of their elders, blinked and turned away’ (Jack, 1996: 8).
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