To attend the Booker prize dinner in October was to understand why a sad twilight has settled on contemporary literary culture. This was a year of levelling mediocrity for the British novel. You might have thought otherwise, listening to publishers at Guildhall lament the exclusion of their own "great" novels from the shortlist and boast of the enduring vitality of British fiction. We should not be surprised by such nonsense; we live in a time of cultural inflation-as the frisson of notoriety surrounding the Royal Academy's Sensation exhibition dismally reminds us.
Publishers, supported by a new generation of benign newspaper literary editors, are more culpable than most. Overpraising slender talent is a prerequisite of their role and their judgements are inseparable from the grime of commerce; they must sell their ceaseless flow of new books. And how they love to issue books-more than 100,000 in Britain last year. This profligacy leads to a kind of hysteria of exaggeration, damaging to both writer and reader, but especially to the writer whose work enters the world freighted with unreasonable expectation.
In 1812 Byron wrote: "I awoke one morning and found myself famous," after the first two cantos of his poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage were received with rapture. In 1997 publishers work so assiduously at creating an aura of pre-publication expectation that writers can achieve a kind of fame long before publishing anything at all; and critics can talk of a "new golden age" of British fiction.
Yet-in a year when the death of VS Pritchett deprived English letters of its last truly great writer-I found it dispiriting to discover, as a Booker prize judge, that if this award is indeed a mirror in which British literary culture glimpses a reflection of its own worth, then we ought to look elsewhere-to the US or India. The best novels I read this year-Underworld by Don DeLillo, Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy-were not by British writers.
What is exciting about these authors is their attempt to engage with the contemporary, and to find new ways of writing about the modern world. Roy-half Syrian Christian, half Indian-twists, distorts and mangles narrative in seeking to give a once foreign language an indigenous Indian idiom. Lee, a young Korean living in America, writes of the protean self and the immigrant's endless quest to discover an authentic American voice, in radiantly exact prose. The wily DeLillo examines, with a linguistic swagger, the postwar history of the US and its enduring obsession with self-invention.
These works have a verbal exuberance, an immediate intimacy and colloquial urgency strikingly absent from much British writing-with the exception, perhaps, of Alan Warner, the young Scottish vernacular stylist, and Martin Amis, whose attempt in Night Train to write in a springy, rhythmic American idiom, flowing thickly with street slang, was characteristically bold. Amis has announced his intention to move to the US, to try to live, as an immigrant does, in a condition of perpetual watchfulness and renewal. This is what one would expect of a writer who, almost alone among his generation of English novelists, wants to be here, now.
Watching and learning, renewing language and subverting it: this was the modernist mission. We still live under its long shadow, dance to its tyrannical beat (the so-called post-modern novel-ironically knowing and self-referential-never enjoyed much of an afterlife outside the academy). The artists of the Saatchi school understand this; regrettably, they are engaged in little more than a mimickry of modernism. After Marcel Duchamp there is nothing shocking about Damien Hirst.
Similarly, after the great narrative upheavals of Joyce and Proust, the contemporary novelist in search of an elusive originality must feel as if he is at the end of something, that he is living over-historically, part of a tradition which has cannily foreseen the important work as yet unwritten. We exist in what Malcolm Bradbury calls the aftermath-pressed on as much by what has been as what is to come. The dominant mood is either ironic or retrospective, not experimental; nostalgic rather than speculative. So we look back, returning again and again-according to Bradbury-to the "prime sites of contemporary fictional archaeology: the Victorian disintegration, the Edwardian anxieties that prefigured the great war, the world of the trenches, the crisis in Ireland, the second world war and the Holocaust, the nuclear dawn, the end of empire, the coming of the post-colonial world."
Among the Booker entries this year there was certainly a narrowness of vision, a cultural fatigue, a suspicion of the present and a corresponding flight into the past. Few writers seek to invent their own idiom or to submerge themselves utterly in the world around them. Repeatedly, themes such as the Holocaust, slavery, world war and child abuse are imposed on a text in an attempt to force a spurious moral validation which does not emerge organically. The metaphor of archaeology, of returning to a buried past to unearth something significantly repressed about oneself or one's society-employed skilfully by Graham Swift in Waterland and by Peter Ackroyd in Hawksmoor-has become so overused as to render it a tiresome gimmick.
This inability to picture ourselves in the present and near future, and dwelling on what Roger Scruton calls "that lingering backward glance to what can never be recovered," is echoed in the preponderance of historical novels published this autumn by the better fiction houses. Jonathan Cape has An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears, an excitably plotted work of pastiche, set in a riven 17th century England. Faber and Faber has Peter Carey's Jack Maggs, another work of pastiche, offering an intertextual commentary on Great Expectations. Chatto & Windus is promoting Feeding the Ghosts, Fred D'Aguiar's story of mutiny and massacre aboard an 18th century slave ship. These novels, together with another Faber title, The Nature of Blood by the black Briton Caryl Phillips, diligently recycle many of the same themes and preoccupations: the instability of the past, the centrality of memory, the unreliability of historical narrative, the reclamation of lost lives. The present is not a vacuum; it will always carry the imprint of the past. Yet reading these texts, with their assured, over-beatified literary prose and detailed costume drama, one wonders what lies behind this turning away from the defining particulars of our time. What is it about contemporary reality that so many writers are unwilling to document in fiction?
The Nature of Blood stays in the memory-but for the wrong reasons. Phillips is a brave and confident writer, a writer who dares to follow Jews into Nazi death camps. But his mistake is to approach Auschwitz through a mist of clich?, to see it conventionally. People are "ushered into the gas chambers"; the Nazis' attempt to disguise the gas chambers as shower rooms is revealed as "ludicrous"; and children are "waylaid by uniformed brutes." Ushered? Waylaid? The stilted deathliness of this prose could surely have been avoided if Phillips had written about his own immediate life and experience. He might even have produced a book like Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker, something vital and alive.
Another regret is how few writers attempt to animate the natural world. This is characteristic of a wider dilemma: in much recent fiction a sense of place is neglected for dialogue, plot and character analysis-or, in the work of Julian Barnes, Margaret Drabble and John Lanchester, a pre-emptive knowingness of tone. As a result, many novels have no physical bedrock underpinning the narrative. Yet place can give power, strength and depth to a piece of writing which is almost impossible to achieve in any other way; it sets up resonances within a story, between characters and in action. Of the younger novelists only Alan Warner, in Morvern Callar, his novel about the rave scene, and Tim Pears, whose In the Place of Fallen Leaves is a sensitive study of the Devonshire countryside, attempt to describe the appearance and feel of landscape. So the act of description becomes a consecration of nature, as it was for Ruskin and Lawrence.
All this is not to say that there is nothing interesting about contemporary British fiction; this would be to slip crudely into our fondness for cultural self-denigration. It is rather that talent has become generalised and spread out. AS Byatt is fond of saying that she could name 40 contemporary British writers of distinction. She is broadly right, although it depends on what one means by "distinction." There is certainly, as Vikram Seth has also observed, no dominant figure, no single commanding presence around whom younger writers can gather and learn; no one who remotely approaches the stature of, say, Don DeLillo or Thomas Pynchon.
In the early 1980s something fresh and different was happening, part of the flowering of a generation of subversive talents prepared to take risks with form and genre: there was the urban extremism and grotesque comedy of Amis; the dark world of Ian McEwan; the mould-breaking exhibitionism of Salman Rushdie; the quiet precision of Kazuo Ishiguro; the vernacular energy of the relentless James Kelman; the serious moral intelligence of Byatt; the expansive, Aids-haunted work of Alan Hollinghurst; and the comic vigour of Jeanette Winterson.
Many of these writers, not all of whom have fulfilled their potential, were radicalised by Thatcherism and by their disgust at the complacent parochialism of so much postwar British fiction. They drew inspiration not from the social realism of the mainstream British tradition, but from the US; from the "magic realism" of Gabriel Garc?-a M?rquez and Milan Kundera; from the exotic essay-like stories and parables of Jorge Luis Borges. As Ian McEwan puts it: "When I started writing I knew I wanted to be vivid and urgent. Most contemporary writing left me completely cold. Writers like Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson wrote about a familiar, documented social world that I found oppressive... I wanted to stake out some other territory, believing that newness was one of the requirements of writing."
First Love, Last Rites, his first collection of stories, certainly had a gruesome originality: experimental work about murder, molestation and incest, stories about lonely sadists, paedophiles and sexual humiliation. In many ways, it remains his best book. Rereading it, you are shocked not so much by the content as by the authenticity of the narrative voice. Even at the age of 26 McEwan had his own style. He knew exactly what he wanted to say and how to say it. Of which young British writers can we say the same, especially as many of the more gifted stylists-James Wood, Geoff Dyer, Adam Mars-Jones-expend so much creative energy working in forms other than the novel: the essay, film criticism, non-fiction, literary journalism?
Anyone interested in our literary culture ought to read first novels with particular interest; they are the most interesting barometer of what is going on in fiction. In 1995 I had another stint as a literary judge-of the Whitbread first novel award. Most of the entries were disappointing, but there were exceptions. I was impressed by Stephen Blanchard's Gagarin and I. It is hard to think of a more subtle, original recent first novel. Leonard, the teenage narrator, lives with his mother and spinster aunt in a tall, narrow boarding house in an unnamed town in the north of England. The boy, who suffers from a rare painless wasting disease, is fascinated with the space race (it is the 1960s) and dreams of jettisoning his frail body, of floating as weightlessly as his hero Yuri Gagarin. His mother and aunt, whose conversation Leonard monitors with hilarious exactitude, are convinced that he will get better. But Leonard knows he will die, having glimpsed, in a dream or vision, his home town as it might look in the future. The experience disorients him: "I had a feeling of looking at things after my own life had gone by. My mouth held the powdery taste of non-existence."
Blanchard is a disciplined stylist; meaning is compressed like sediment in dense layers of description. He chisels a gnarled poetry from the wood of the ordinary, from the apparently mundane. But as the great VS Pritchett understood, the ordinary is never what it seems: there is always mystery and strangeness in the struggle of our daily lives.
To call Pritchett great is not to exaggerate-a critic of range and acuity, he was also a fine short story writer. His deep conviction (a conviction almost lost now) was that the thoughts of so-called ordinary people have their mystical and poetical edges, and that it is the highest duty of a writer to brush up against those edges. Blanchard, who works as a postman in south London, understands this, and his fiction is the richer for it.
But too many novelists have lost confidence in the ordinary and the local; they have stopped listening to the rough imprecision and strange comedy of ordinary speech. This partly explains the continuing appeal of magic realism, a genre in which anything is permissible. This can be liberating-people can fly, death is never final-but it can also be a burden because extravagance is encouraged and a preposterousness of subject and tone is indulged. By failing to animate genuine people in a real society, characters become cartoons: they are flattened out and compressed into two or three clich? gestures, which relieves the writer of the endlessly difficult task of representing how people actually talk, think and interact with one another.
The second work I admired as a Whitbread judge was Morvern Callar, in which Warner-scorning the mannered, ordered language of so many English writers-spoke naturally in the voice of a druggy, morally dislocated girl from Oban. This has a political subtext. In common with many younger Scots, Warner is an advocate of what Jean Aitchison calls the "hypothesis of linguistic equality"-the notion that all languages and dialects are equally valid; that there are no fixed rules and no pre-eminent centre of reference. As James Kelman complains: "As soon as you enter school you are informed that your culture and your language are inferior. My culture and my language have the right to exist and no one has the authority to dismiss it."
The attempt to forge a distinctive Scots literature, founded on the rejection of London as a cultural and linguistic centre, is one of the more interesting experiments of our literary scene. Many Scottish writers are galvanised by lingering feelings of disenfranchisement, of being (at least until last September's referendum on devolution) yoked to a homogenous centralised political system they utterly reject-an experience the poet-publisher Robin Robertson likens to being "tied to a dying animal."
George Steiner, arguing that political and cultural decline are inseparable, perceives a "deep tiredness" in our culture and in our fiction. For Steiner, just as fatigued muscles secrete acids into the blood, so the same applies to the body politic. "This English fascination with kitsch and nostalgia, with long farewells and recessionals, with plaques of the great dead-this is all part of our post-imperial tiredness. As Val?ry said in 1919: 'We now know that cultures are mortal.'" The only novelists Steiner considers worthy of discussion are genre novelists: John le Carr? and PD James. "These two writers tell me things about English society and its operations I could never otherwise know."
The disaffected Marxist Richard Gott is even more extreme, asserting that for the past 50 years England has effectively ceased to exist: "The country should more appropriately be labelled Anglo-America." While the Scots and Irish confidently build thriving indigenous cultures, the English look to the US for their icons and entertainment, for their political vocabulary, computer software, business argot and assorted cultural ephemera.
In this context, Martin Amis says that the "history of the 20th century novel is the history of the American novel." But, even taking into account Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Nabokov, this surely cannot be true. How can it be, in the century of Joyce, Beckett, DH Lawrence, Kafka, Bernard, Musil, Mann, Pasternak, Conrad and C?line? Just as the English novel is suspended between two traditions-the continental and the American-Britain itself is disorientatingly suspended between a putative European superstate, where its best interests lie, and a mid-Atlantic culture which it longs to emulate-a situation surely rich in comic potential.
For JG Ballard, one of the most consistently innovative of the older generation, the problem is less to do with politics than with the triumph of the bourgeois novel. He laments the emergence of what he calls "career novelists," writers who travel the world on British Council jamborees and pontificate like game show hosts at literary festivals. Ballard says: "Many writers I meet approach the career of writing in the same way as solicitors or accountants. They work towards establishing themselves as a successful literary professional; they accept the rules of the game and judge themselves by yardsticks laid down by their peers, fitting neatly into the professional world of publishing, reviewing, of literary conferences and festivals, of signings and of sitting on committees."
As Ballard points out, the best work tends to be produced by mavericks, independent spirits answerable to no one. Most of the 20th century writers he considers great are mavericks: Joyce, Beckett, Burroughs, Virginia Woolf, C?line, Genet. "These were people," he says, "you wouldn't want to share a lifeboat with, but who saw themselves in an antagonistic position in society."
Erica Wagner, literary editor of The Times and a New Yorker living in London, finds that the new writers who excite her most are from outside Britain. But she dislikes glib explanations of decline: "I certainly don't believe that the novel here has 'died'; but at the moment I haven't seen much that excites me. It's simplistic to try and explain the phenomenon away by claiming that Britain has an exhausted culture; is uncertain of itself. Surely there is more inherent interest in uncertainty than in boundless confidence. I can only say what I perceive, which is that, just now, British fiction leaves me feeling a little enervated. But I don't think it always will."
The novel is nothing if it is not a medium of discovery. As the century draws to an end, we do not require another messianic narrative of interpretation to supplant an exhausted post-modernism; or a return to what Scruton, slipping into familiar twilight mode, calls a "rediscovery of the sense of the holy in art." Rather we need a resurrection of the word, of the constantly absorbing process of refining and renewing English, to defamiliarise and thus revitalise our sense of the world. This, of course, can be achieved at any time and in any place. Viktor Shklovsky, the Russian critic, wrote: "Habitualism devours objects, clothes, furniture, one's wife and the fear of war... art exists to help us recover the sensation of life, it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony." Grasp this-the rest will follow.
