Embarrassed by fiction?

Previously published in the Bangladesh Daily Star

An American novelist writes to tell me he’s read one of my books. There are things in it he admires, such as ‘the evocation of atmosphere’ and ‘the urgency of suspicions of adultery’. But the plot bothers him – the fact that there is one. ‘Plot always bugs me,’ he says, ‘and I couldn’t help thinking – if you’ll forgive me – that almost all novels would benefit if they (we) could break loose of the imperative of A leading to B leading to C, etc.’

A friend, writing from Japan, is less apologetic. He has already told me, to his own great amusement, having read only the publisher’s blurbs, that my books are ‘silly’. A social historian who has lived on four continents, he just can’t see the point of made-up stories when there’s so much real life to learn about. He writes, ‘I’m reading about Karl Ove Knausgaard and he says the same kinds of things about fiction as me. I’m not as mad as I’d thought!’

Knausgaard’s unflinching memoir has won him notoriety far beyond his native Norway and has given new impetus to an old critical trope: the death of the novel. ‘Just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous,’ he writes in the second of six fat volumes of the bizarrely titled Min Kampf. The British novelist Rachel Cusk is also reported to have given up on fiction, finding it, according to a profile in a recent New Yorker, ‘fake and embarrassing’, and the creation of plot and character ‘utterly ridiculous’.

As I wrestle with the familiar challenge of bringing fictional characters to life and giving shape to their experiences, I begin to feel disheartened. Perhaps I should just write about my life. But I have no appetite for self-revelation. On an impulse I download Cusk’s latest book, Outline.

Some books I buy in the expectation of pleasure, others for work. This one I encounter as an enemy. If Cusk considers ridiculous what I put so much energy into, it follows that I will either hate what she’s doing or be defeated by it, recognising that my craft has indeed been superseded.

But the headlines have misled me. Outline is no memoir. The first person narrator, of whose life we gather only fragments, is mainly a recipient of other people’s stories, which are delivered with arresting eloquence. I’m reminded of the strange fictions of Borges, or of a Chekhovian play in which characters take it in turns to reveal something of themselves. Many of these narratives lead to moments of illumination. The effect is elaborately fictive.

It occurs to me that I have mistaken Cusk’s self-reflective musings for literary analysis. Her embarrassment is, of course, purely personal. Pushing herself to solve problems thrown up by her earlier works, she is acutely aware of what she perceives, justly or not, to be their shortcomings. This is a feeling I understand. I finish Outline exhilarated and ready to get back to my novel. 

Silk purse or sow's ear?

Previously published in the Bangladesh Daily Star

“The writing is overstuffed and leaks sawdust.” So writes Michael Hofmann of Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North in the London Review of Books. The novel’s many admirers, like the tourists recently observed by Hofman throwing themselves out of the path of a monumental granite ball that turned out to be fake, have been “hoaxed by polystyrene”.

Hofman is not the only dissenter. In the TLS, Craig Raine described the novel as “saturated, not always judiciously, in poetry,” poetry, for Flanagan, meaning “exaggerated imagery, an uncertain, elevated tone, and generous rights on repetition”.

This is the same book that was praised by Catherine Taylor in the Telegraph for its “grace and unfathomability” and whose war scenes were described by Leyla Sanai in the Guardian as “devastating”.

The Man Booker judges sided with the novel’s admirers and gave Flanagan the prize. They took a different view of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. With the competition open for the first time to American authors, expectations were high for Tartt’s third novel, which had already won her a Pulitzer, and when the judges announced their longlist in July, its absence was, for some reporters, the big story.  

Early reviews had been mainly positive, some verging on the ecstatic. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called it a “glorious Dickensian novel… that pulls all [Tartt’s] remarkable storytelling talents into a rapturous, symphonic whole”. Kamila Shamsie wrote in the Guardian that to say too much about the events “would be to deprive a reader of the great joy of being swept up by the plot.” The Telegraph’s Catherine Taylor found the grief of the young hero for his mother “so tangible the pages appear tear-sodden”. 

But there was a growing band of sceptics. In the Guardian, Julie Myerson described it as a “mystifying mess”, wondering why a writer of Tartt’s talent was wasting her time on this over-long and slackly written “Harry Potter homage”. In the New Yorker, James Wood agreed that “its tone, language, and story belong in children’s literature”.  

What are we to make of these starkly diverging opinions? Is there something about these books in particular that scrambles reader’s critical faculties, inciting them to hyperbolic gushing or sneering put-downs? Or are they just the extreme cases, reminding us that all literary opinions are utterly subjective and any attempt to judge artistic merit is futile? Should we perhaps question the motives of the writers, suspecting the favourable reviewers of sycophancy, the detractors of envy?

I resist all these conclusions. As a novelist I find I’m attached to the notion that there are worse ways of writing and better ways, even if only in some Platonic sense. Why else is it so hard to get it right? And it’s good that people care enough to argue fiercely about what those ways are. I find their arguments, and my responses to them, sharpen my own sense of what fiction is for and inform the choices I make in my work. 

Diversity on the page, on the screen, in the studio

I've been neglecting my blog recently, mainly because I've been pushing forward with my novel-in-progress. It certainly isn't for lack of blogworthy material. What about the government's plan to make creative writing courses redundant by requiring all 11-year-olds to be able to write "a coherent short story"? I should take that class! Meanwhile I've been keeping up my monthly supply of pieces to the Bangladesh Daily Star, but failing to republish them here. This is November's piece, so there are a couple more to follow.

A headline in the London Evening Standard caught my eye recently: “BBC in race row.” The Corporation has been getting a lot of bad press and I feared another damaging scandal. But as I read on, this one began to look like a storm in a teacup. The BBC was under attack “for casting a white actor in a role originally written as black for a new thriller.” It seems the author of the new 5-part series London Spy, best-selling novelist Tom Rob Smith, was still writing the script and the identity of the lead character was fluid when casting began. The black actors who auditioned all lost out.

I can’t help feeling sympathy for Smith, whose mind was probably on art rather than demographics, but I sympathise with the rejected actors too. In the novel I’m currently struggling with, a character I had thought was West Indian turns out to be Kurdish. Another I had conceived as a native Londoner has become a Hungarian immigrant. The cultural impact of these changes, outside my own head, is precisely zero. But perhaps the writer of a high-profile TV drama has a wider responsibility. There are two distinct issues here: how will the diversity of modern Britain be reflected on our TV screens? and what work opportunities will be offered to black, Asian and ethnic minority actors?

There’s no doubt that white actors are over-represented in British TV drama. If you’re inclined to blame the writers, you should probably start with Jane Austen and then move on to Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Trollope. You might also blame a viewing public that seems to have a bottomless appetite for classic adaptations, lapping up weak substitutes such as Downton Abbey when the real thing isn’t available. This includes viewers in America, where this kind of programme finds a lucrative market. The focus on the picturesque past keeps the British acting establishment busy dressing up in corsets and frockcoats but leaves thin pickings for minority actors.

Commissioning editors must also take responsibility. The success of Luther, a crime drama that ran for three seasons between 2010 and 2013, and for which the star Idris Elba won a Golden Globe, demonstrated that viewers are ready for compelling stories about non-white characters. But we can only choose from what’s offered. Speaking in June at the launch of Act for Change, a project designed to address the lack of diversity on British television, actor and writer Meera Syal made an eloquent plea for a fresh approach to a problem that people have been talking about, she said, for 30 years. So Tom Rob Smith’s artistic choices take place in a broader context.

In some ways it’s a relief to know that the changes I make to my own story won’t affect anyone else’s career. Meanwhile diversity is working for me. The south Asian character I’ve just introduced looks set to have a significant impact, unless the plot takes an unexpected turn – or I decide to make her Norwegian.