by Colm Toibin
Bapsi Sidhwa was born in Karachi, grew up in Lahore and lives in Pakistan and the USA where she teaches. Other novels are The Crow Eaters (1978) and The Bride (1983).
Age in year of publication: fifty.
Alan Sillitoe 1928–2010
1958 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
If this novel were written in French, it is possible that its protagonist, Arthur Seaton, would be an existentialist hero and the book an essential modern text; instead, it was written in English and it is known as a story about the antics and highjinks of the northern English working class.
In the first chapter our Arthur gets drunk, falls down the stairs, vomits all over a man and then takes a woman not his wife back to her house to bed while her husband is away. All of this is good fun, clearly written and well paced. But the novel then becomes darker and stranger.
Arthur lives at a considerable distance from his own experience. He prefers other men’s wives, and feels only slightly uneasy when he meets the husband. He barely exists during his time in the factory. He has no religion, and the idea of England for him and his family, especially his cousins, is a sour joke. Even the idea of family and community has broken down. Arthur is unusual in modern fiction: he does not use his intelligence, it is not important for him, and yet he is never stupid – his instincts and his appetites dictate his behaviour, and this gives the novel great integrity and originality.
Alan Sillitoe was born in Nottingham and lived in both London and France. He wrote many novels including The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959). His Collected Stories were published in 1995.
Age in year of publication: thirty.
Iain Sinclair 1943–
1991 Downriver (or the Vessels of Wrath):
A Narrative in Twelve Tales
This novel reads like an Old Testament for the east side of London. The tone is sombre and sinister, at times bitter and satirical, at times unsparing in its venom and hatred for England under Margaret Thatcher, who appears here as The Widow, and for ad-men, TV people and property speculators, not to speak of wine bars. The stories are loosely connected: there is a long interview; there are letters; characters appear, disappear, reappear, but Sinclair is at his most content when they disappear mysteriously, leaving strange traces. Downriver is a big Ulysses of a book which can contain anything and everything including echoes of and references to Conrad, Eliot (there is a newspaper-seller called Tiresias), William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Hawksmoor and many others living and dead, including the ‘author’ himself. There is an extraordinary rhythmic energy in Sinclair’s prose; he loves big, long snaky sentences; huge lists; apocalyptic moments; quotations; arcane references; titles of obscure books; newcharacters; pubs; the Irish in London; place names. For him, capitalism is a form of terrorism, with money moving across London like napalm. Sinclair is interested in layers of narrative and layers of time and experience: he allows the past to haunt the book, allows whole sections to become quests for something half-lost, half-forgotten and misunderstood. His London is a dark ghostly placewhose spirit is available only to the few; his book is one of the several enduring, playful – dare one say Modernist? – monuments to Thatcher produced by British novelists.
Iain Sinclair was born in Cardiff. He has lived in London for many years. His books include poetry, novels and the non-fiction Lights Out for the Territory (1995), a celebration of London, London Orbital (2002), Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare’s Journey Out of Essex (2005) and Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report (2009).
Age in year of publication: forty-eight.
Khushwant Singh 1915–
1956 Train to Pakistan
‘The summer of 1947 was not like other summers. Even the weather had a different feel in India that year.’ So begins Singh’s famous novel about the Partition of Pakistan from India, set in the small Punjabi frontier village of Mano Majra, where Hindu, Muslim and Sikh have lived together for thousands of years. This place of about seventy families is best known for its railway station; as the book opens a Sikh boy and a Muslim girl are making love in the fields.
But in 1947 nothing is really the same; there is quiet unease, then, dreadfully, the first train from Pakistan arrives. At first glance the train seems normal, then its ghostly silence reveals a thousand corpses, emitting the incredible stench of putrefying flesh. Soon, in the rains, comes a second train, with an even more horrific cargo. The effect is devastating; religious warfare breaks out, the Muslims of the village are evicted and put on a train for Pakistan. The massacres of Partition are just beginning.
The strength of this political novel lies in the vivacity and life Singh gives to the people of the Punjabi community. You can feel the presence of Mano Majra and hear the rhythm and laughter of its days. The loss of this, in this fine novel, is a striking testament to the devastating human cost of religious prejudice.
Khushwant Singh was born in Hadali, now in Pakistan, and lives in Delhi. Critic, journalist, historian, short story writer and distinguished editor, this was his first novel.
Age in year of publication: forty-one.
Jane Smiley 1951–
1991 A Thousand Acres
Zebulon County, Iowa, is the centre of the universe. Larry Cook owns one thousand acres of land there and farms it well. When the old monster suddenly decides it’s time to pass the inheritance on to his daughters, he is infuriated when the youngest, Caroline, refuses the gift, whilst the older two, Rose and Ginny, accept it with reservations. Here we have the plot of King Lear transferred to the American Midwest, where it flourishes embedded in a recreation of every particular of farming and family life – the crops, the technology, the strawberry rhubarb pies, the mucking-out of farrowing pens, pizza with pepperoni and extra cheese – a multitude of tiny details evoking a world in which the land and its people seem indivisible.
Listening to the conversational voice of Ginny, we learn to see beyond the horizon. Jane Smiley’s skill here is to use the great play but to look at King Lear through a different microscope. This transforms it into an epic study of a tyrant and of a family slowly disintegrating as old sins see the light of day. There is an airy clarity about this novel, echoing the rolling landscape of the American Midwest. Jane Smiley’s graceful prose gives a similar beauty to the novel’s moral twists, its passion for life and its emotional vitality.
Jane Smiley was born in Los Angeles and lives in California. A Thousand Acres won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the US National Book Critics Circle Award.
Age in year of publication: forty.
Wole Soyinka 1934–
1965 The Interpreters
This is, to some extent, a dark and intricate comedy of manners set in Nigeria in the years after independence. It centres around the lives of a number of young intellectuals who are ambitious and uneasy in the new society, who meet regularly, drink a lot and talk all of the time. Much of the novel is made up of their dialogue. In scene after scene – the setting and tone change in each chapter – they confront their own idealism and sophistication, their own concern (or lack of concern) with manners and morals versus the concern (and lack of concern) of the society all around them. Religion, voodoo, art, government, journalism, sex, negritude, whiteness, etiquette (the wearing of gloves by women at certain parties, for example), Americans and Germans all come in for discussion and examination. (The American and the German in the book are treated with a good deal of contempt.) Soyinka makes none of his characters heroic in any way: they all have their weaknesses, but they also have a sort of innocence which makes them vulnerable. His ability to make dialogue sparkle – especially in the party scenes, where our intellectuals are at their most cynical and observant – is astonishing. At times, the novel demands close attention as Soyinka refuses to deal in easy realism; he makes no judgements or psychological assessments; he wrings a lot of emotion out of surface detail and moments of pure, careful observation, and manages – and this is one aspect of the genius of the book �
� to suggest that the people he has written about are doomed and will not have the strength to withstand the pressures of the society all around them.
Wole Soyinka was born in Nigeria. He was imprisoned for two years without trial in Nigeria in 1967–69. He has written many plays and has also published volumes of poems, memoirs and diaries. In 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Age in year of publication: thirty-one.
Muriel Spark 1918–2006
1961 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark is a novelist whose every line contains at least three insinuations. The oft-used phrase of Miss Jean Brodie, teacher extraordinaire, proclaiming that she is ‘in her prime’, are words now used by millions of women as they leave youth behind them.
It is Edinburgh in the 1930s. Miss Brodie is a mighty woman, forcefully politically incorrect, an individualist. She has her ‘set’ at Marcia Blanc School, five girls she raises to follow her principles, providing them with high culture, homing in particularly on Love. She involves them in her affairs with Teddy Lloyd the art master and Gordon Lowther the music master, and in her unfortunate penchant for Mussolini and his attractive fascisti. Her colleagues long to see the back of her. Miss Brodie confounds all their attempts until betrayed by one of her girls, raised to bite the hand that fed her.
This is a novel about nonconformity and spiritual pride and the nastiness of mankind, in particular in the shape of growing girls with peg legs and skinny souls. In spare, quirky dialogue, Miss Brodie and her disciples tempt fate with self-composure, accepting retribution with an imperturbable sense of guilt. This is a perfect novel, a classic, not a word out of place, laced with mother’s wit and wisdom.
Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh and lived in Rome. This novel has been adapted for the stage, the screen and for television. Her other novels included Memento Mori (1959), The Girls of Slender Means (1963) and The Mandelbaum Gate (1965).
Age in year of publication: forty-three.
Christina Stead 1902–1983
1966 Cotters’ England
(US: Dark Places of the Heart)
The rushing force of Christina Stead’s novels explodes with words and myriad personalities and images: reading her is like standing under a gigantic waterfall, shouting your head off with glee. Nellie Cook, née Cotter, is a spellbinder and a possessive manipulator, one of those Socialists to the left of everything, living in a tatty house in Islington, working as a journalist on a London newspaper in those harsh years which followed the end of the Second World War. Nellie never draws breath. She lies, she fantasizes, she drinks, she smokes, wandering round the house all night blowing smoke into sleeping faces, talking to the moon. She is a seductress, an emotional gangster. Her brother Tom, to whom she remains locked in adolescent intimacy, uses women’s hearts to wreak his havoc, oozing into them then out again, leaving a trail of slime behind. Cotters’ England made them what they are: the poor Northern town of Bridgehead where poverty – incest? – has stunted and perverted them, like trees growing underground. Christina Stead writes at full pelt about politics, domestic life and sexual politics. She fizzes with ideas, making no judgements, revealing everything through the monologues and encounters of the people of Cotters’ England. This is a great novel, savagely comic, demanding angry understanding for people and a country whose lives are blighted by the past.
Christina Stead was born in Sydney and lived in Europe and the USA from 1928 to 1974; on her return to Australia she was the first winner of the Patrick White Award. The best known of her eleven novels are The Man Who Loved Children (1940) and For Love Alone (1944).
Age in year of publication: sixty-four.
John Steinbeck 1902–1968
1952 East of Eden
Has there ever been a male American novelist who did not want to write a vast, defining history of the American soul? East of Eden, John Steinbeck’s version, is set in rural California in the years around the turn of the century. It is the story of two families of settlers, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, but it is also the story of settlement itself, of the formation of the modern United States. ‘The Church and the whorehouse arrived in the Far West simultaneously … the singing, the devotion, the poetry of the churches took a man out of his bleakness for a time, and so did the brothels.’
East of Eden is a rambling, garrulous family saga, with some deeply memorable characters (such as the Irishman Samuel Hamilton, the narrator’s grandfather, and the dark, almost innocent Adam Trask), and some wonderful set scenes (such as the birth of the twins Aron and Caleb, whose lives dominate the second half of the book). In the novel there is a constant struggle, epic, almost biblical (sometimes knowingly echoing the Bible), between light and darkness, money and penury, bad land and good land, water and drought, men and women, fathers and sons and, perhaps most starkly and dramatically, brother and brother. Steinbeck has a natural skill as a storyteller, and manages to make this long and powerful saga hugely credible, readable and vivid.
John Steinbeck was born in rural California and spent most of his working life there and in New York. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. His other novels include Tortilla Flat (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939). East of Eden was made into a film in 1955 starring James Dean.
Age in year of publication: fifty.
Robert Stone 1931–
1981 A Flag for Sunrise
This novel is set in a fictional Central American country, its tone and sense of darkness and impending doom a cross between Conrad and Greene. Stone is at his best when he deals with loners and drifters, with drugs, uncertainty, paranoia, hallucinations, violence. There is a very accurate sense of the mixture of strange innocence and pervasive malevolence of the American intelligence services, and the novel is haunted by Vietnam, where Holliwell, one of the protagonists, has served.
A number of characters are moving and being moved towards catastrophe. One of them is a nun who has been told to be prepared to treat the injured in an insurrection, another a gunrunner, another a drug-crazed refugee from the United States, another a CIA man, another our friend Holliwell, an anthropologist, another a local cop. All of them are oddly powerless, only half-motivated; the writing is dense, concentrated and often powerful. Right in the middle of the book, there is a sensational description of Holliwell diving and the world under water: ‘On the edge of vision, he saw a school of redfish whirl left, then right, sound, then reverse, a red and white catherine wheel against the deep blue.’ At the novel’s heart is the drama of covert action versus botched revolution, how easily things are misunderstood and half understood, and how strong the lure of violence.
Robert Stone was born in Brooklyn and now lives in Connecticut. His other novels include A Hall of Mirrors (1967), Dog Soldiers (1974), Damascus Gate (1998) and Bay of Souls (2003). A Flag for Sunrise won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1981.
Age in year of publication: fifty.
David Storey 1933–
1976 Saville
For the English, the class system has been as fruitful a subject and as devastating to contemplate as serfdom was for the great Russian writers. Saville is an epic account of English life in the mid-twentieth century, told through the story of young Colin Saville, son of a miner, living in a worn-out mining community in south Yorkshire. Colin is an observer, strong in his silence, watching the weary lives of his father and mother – subsistence allowed them, but little else – as gradually the education he earns by winning a scholarship removes him from them and from his community. The school sequences are worthy of Dickens, all the more astonishing because they tell of such recent times.
Saville examines the consequences of poverty, class and environment, but there is patience and a sturdy intensity about this novel that makes the absence of so much a rich seam, for Storey elaborates many other themes – the conflict between the spiritual and the physical, the force of sexuality, the exact price paid by the English working class as they left the old ways behind. This
is a realistic novel of power and beauty, full of sardonic humour and feeling and desire, using those passions of the soul which D. H. Lawrence and the Brontës drew upon to provide Storey’s people with a stoic testament.
David Storey was born in Wakefield and lives in London. A playwright and a novelist, his famous first novel was This Sporting Life (1960). Saville won the 1976 Booker Prize. His other novels include Radcliffe (1963), Pasmore (1972) and Thin-Ice Skater (2004).
Age in year of publication: forty-three.
Francis Stuart 1902–2000