Granta magazine has taken to the road in support of its current Best of Young British Writers edition; last night saw editor Ted Hodgkinson hosting an event at Manchester’s International Anthony Burgess Foundation featuring authors Adam Foulds, Xialou Guo and Steven Hall. Although the line-up has varied each night, this event presented an interesting cross-section of the 20 selected writers. Foulds’s more traditional narrative frameworks are a contrast with Hall’s structural experimentation, while Guo occupies a place between the two, combining a modern authorial voice with a relatively traditional structure.
Of the three, Foulds has the most traditional writers’ background; a graduate of both Oxford and the UEA, he would be the most comfortable fit with the authors who made up the 1983 list. Much has been made of his time spent working as a forklift truck driver before the publication of his first novel, but he plays this experience down in his article for the Granta online edition, pointing out that there had been other options open to him. The theme of his reading is also familiar, though very well-expressed: a young man in 1942, fresh from Oxford and waiting to play his part in the war. Foulds skilfully contrasts the violent impulses of daily life with the widespread horror of war, following in the footsteps of novels like The English Patient. He also talks engagingly of the inspiration for his upcoming novel, which began with a story he heard about Sicilian Mafioso being spirited away from the island in coffins to escape from the invading Germans in 1943.
By contrast, Steven Hall is the most experimental of the authors on Granta’s list, The Raw Shark Texts showing a willingness to stretch the possibilities of what a novel can do, playing with structure and form. It’s been a long wait for fans since the publication of his debut novel; since 2007 he has produced only one short story, two Dr Who episodes and one computer game, Crysis 3. The extract he read here contained some familiar motifs (including parcels of mail containing cryptic messages from beyond the grave), and Hall spoke of a continued desire to make the reading of his novels an engaged process, describing his technique as ‘pinning down butterflies, and leaving the reader to make the connections between them’. He also discussed his experiences of working as a writer in the games industry, attempting to persuade developers to embrace the concept of unreliable narration.
Xialou Guo was the only one of the authors not to read from her Granta 123 story, choosing instead to read from her first novel, written in Chinese when she was 17. Her extract described the cyclical nature of life in a rural village, the knowledge that each day would be the same as the last, and the desire to break free from the constraints of history. This raised an interesting discussion point; Guo, probably the most engaging talker of the three, points to a difference between Eastern and Western mentalities when it comes to writing historical fiction. For her, and for many Chinese authors, it is difficult to isolate an individual voice when writing the past; there is more of a sense of collective experience. She sees her own writing as a struggle to identify an individual self, a rebellion against collectivisation. By contrast, Foulds has written extensively (and not uncritically) about Britain’s recent colonial past, and Hall has also revisited the imperial mind-set through the figure of Mycroft Ward in The Raw Shark Texts, and a strand of his forthcoming novel, which is set in the mid-nineteenth century.
One of the more telling comments of the evening was made in the Q&A at the end of the event. When asked whether there were any differences in the lifestyle of a writer of literary fiction between now and the publication of the original list in 1983, Hall remarked that authors had a tendency to be more entrepreneurial these days. In the current financial (and cultural) climate, the market for highbrow fiction has diminished, and writers are forced to be more pro-active in promoting themselves as a brand. Publishers also clearly face this issue, and the evolution of the first Best of Young British Writers edition from a Book Marketing Council promotion reflected the developing need to stage events which would push literary fiction into the public eye. In recent years, Granta has attempted to reposition itself as an international brand, in part as an attempt to address a declining UK market, and this wider outlook is reflected in the broad range of backgrounds represented in this decade’s selection.
When an audience member asked Hodgkinson how he could be expected to find time to read all 20 of the selected authors, the editor replied that this wasn’t what Granta were expecting. Instead, they were trying to give a snapshot of the current literary scene, and predict which writers we would still be reading in a decade’s time. How successful they were, and whether this is even possible, is open to debate - in 1994, the year after his inclusion in the second Granta list, Will Self published ‘A Short History of the English Novel’, in which one character asks ‘surely we won’t be able to judge the literature of this decade for another thirty or forty years?’. This list has certainly generated the desired levels of debate, and publicity; leaving that aside, last night’s event showcased three very different, and successful, approaches to modern British writing.
No comments:
Post a Comment