All Hail The New Puritans, or how not to start a literary movement

The idea:

The year 2000; mid-ranking British authors Nicholas Blincoe (35 years old, author of four novels, including Manchester Slingbacks, winner of the CWA Silver Dagger in 1998) and Matt Thorne (just 26, with two novels behind him already) survey the literary scene around them, and are not impressed by what they see. Gripped by a millennial fever, the two men set about devising a manifesto to inspire a new generation of writers, to ‘blow the dinosaurs out of the water’, as they put it. They hone their philosophy until it can be summarised in ten points and, taking their inspiration from a song by The Fall, declare themselves to be The New Puritans. Recruiting thirteen other authors to their cause, they sign up with Fourth Estate to deliver the first anthology of writing inspired by the manifesto; with the likes of Toby Litt, Geoff Dyer and Alex Garland on board, the New Puritans look set to be the first major literary event of the millennium. 

The manifesto:

In setting out their manifesto, Blincoe and Thorne were deliberately challenging the literary elite of the time. Disdaining the magical realism and authorial trickery of authors such as Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie and Jeanette Winterson, the Puritan manifesto sought to ‘strip fiction down to the basics’. The rules forbid the use of flashbacks and foreshadowing (‘a cheap trick’), as well as rhetoric and authorial asides (‘too many writers get caught up in the cult of personality’). Speculation about the future was anathema (‘shameful… patronising’), and their fervour even extended to the banning of ‘elaborate punctuation’ (it ‘encourages querulousness’). 

The manifesto is especially damning with regard to poetry, which Blincoe declared ‘has nothing to offer or to teach the prose writer'. In the introduction to the anthology, there is an interesting suggestion that novels set in modified worlds, or the past, make the present seem unimportant, alienating the reader. By way of contrast, New Puritan texts are all dated and set in the present, and ‘all products, places, artists and objects are real’. This fixation on the tangible underlines the fact that the New Puritans were far from being revolutionaries, at least in terms of form. Blincoe was explicit about this, making a virtue of readability: ‘While I admire the formal experiments of writers like BS Johnson, Italo Calvino or Georges Perec... the most subtle and innovative form available to the prose-writer is always going to be a plot-line'.

With this long list of proscriptions in mind, the fifteen New Puritans were expected to ‘always move towards new openings, rupturing existing genre expectations’. 

The cast

So, who were the New Puritans? Blincoe and Thorne were relatively well-established authors. Blincoe was the more commercially successful of the two, but Thorne had received extremely favourable reviews for his work to date. They also managed to attract some big names to the cause. Best known at the time was Alex Garland, still riding high from the massive success of The Beach which had been released as a film that year. Lending some intellectual credibility to the enterprise was Geoff Dyer, whose ground-breaking study of DH Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, had been published three years earlier. Daren King was seen as a writer with great potential - his debut novel Boxy an Star had allegedly been longlisted for the Booker Prize (although since the Booker didn’t announce a longlist back then, we’ve only got his word for it), whilst Rebecca Ray’s debut novel A Certain Age had been massively popular with perverts due to its graphic descriptions of underage sex. Toby Litt was another up-and-coming star, his collection Adventures in Capitalism capturing something of the pre-millennial zeitgeist with its references to Jeremy Beadle, Eurotrash and the Lottery. 

Even the less well-known authors had form. Scarlett Thomas was not the star she is today, but had already published four novels. The New Puritans was an opportunity for her to signal a move away from commercial fiction towards something more ambitious. Ben Richards had also published four novels, Tony White and Matthew Branton three each. Bo Fowler declared that he was going to write 100 novels before retiring – he had managed two so far, as had Candida Clark and Anna Davis. Making up the group was Simon Lewis, whose debut novel Go had been released in 1999. 

Looking at the group as a whole, there is a clear slant towards the white, metropolitan and male, but the roster contains a relatively impressive mixture of established authors and rising stars. Coupled with a deliberately controversial and media-friendly manifesto, it’s no surprise the arts supplements were interested. So, in practice, what does New Puritan fiction look like?

The Anthology

Reading All Hail The New Puritans now is like digging up a time-capsule. The manifesto’s dedication to contemporary references means the text dated extremely quickly – the opening sentence, for example, references the Sega Dreamcast, obsolete since 2001. That’s not the biggest problem though. It soon becomes apparent that the strictures on punctuation and flashbacks severely hamper the stories contained within. In particular, the need to create rounded characters within a purely linear narrative means the authors stuff their dialogue with exposition, and the reliance on the perfect tense seems to sap the stories of energy. Candida Clark’s Mr Miller is a particular victim of this. The story of a meeting in a bar, culminating in a suicide, may have been vaguely interesting had it appeared elsewhere; here, it appears absolutely lifeless.

The anthology isn’t without merit. Scarlett Thomas’s opener, Mind Control, takes the rules on elaborate punctuation to heart, and is heavy on short, sharp sentences, but there’s plenty of humour and invention in her story. Arguably, the success of her contribution is down to her willingness to stretch the rules to breaking point (a pond full of fish disappearing into thin air seems rather speculative to me), and it is noticeable that her big commercial and artistic breakthrough, The End of Mr Y, dispensed with the rules about speculation and flashback entirely. The themes of Alex Garland’s Monaco (fast cars, sex, voyeurism) are all pretty familiar, but the story is effective enough in the context of this anthology. While others flounder trying to introduce background details, Garland is able to use the focus on the present to his advantage, giving the narrative a real sense of urgency lacking elsewhere in the book. 

Nicholas Blincoe’s A Short Guide to Game Theory is another highlight; the story of rivals trying to make it in the board game industry is written with wit and a playful surrealism that isn’t a million miles away from some of Will Self’s early short stories, although without the dark heart. By contrast, his co-editor Matt Thorne’s contribution, Not As Bad As This, is utterly unrealistic, despite the ‘moral universe’ diktat, and would certainly have benefitted from some use of flashback. As it is, the story is all very unemotional and flat, making his title an unfortunate hostage to fortune. 

Many of the stories lack any sort of conclusion, possibly influenced by rule nine, ‘all texts feature a recognisable ethical reality’.  Unwilling to play God and dish out reward or punishment to their creations, the authors simply refuse to tie up loose ends, leaving their characters hanging. Anna Davis is particularly guilty of this, her story containing little more than a vague sense of threat which never materialises. Bo Fowler serves up two inconsequential sketches, followed by a more interesting short piece about a girl with pen nibs for nipples which could have found a home in a flash fiction anthology (although I’m not sure what distinguishes this from magical realism). Daren King’s Better Than Well is a brief sketch about depression, which was reminiscent of Matt Haig, in a bad way. 

Elsewhere, I was amused to see both Toby Litt and Matthew Branton getting to grips with the dark side of the internet, as it appeared in the year 2000. Branton’s Monkey See Monkey Do, about a policeman tasked with investigating online porn who begins visiting swingers’ clubs to try and patch up his failing marriage is all told effectively enough, without ever really sparking into life. Litt’s The Puritans sets itself up as a ‘grim up North London’ cliché of a couple who move from the capital to the coast ('What she once did with Dreamweaver 2.0 she now did with real, physical, objects... she had learned to bake bread'), but the reality of their new occupation (copying imported hardcore porn films on an industrial scale) is nicely subversive. 

Perhaps, though, the anthology’s problems are best summed up by Geoff Dyer’s Skunk. Dyer is clearly a cut above most of the rest of the contributors, but seems hamstrung by the manifesto. There’s humour in the scenario of an Englishman in Paris sharing a joint with an attractive acquaintance and then having to look after her when she pulls a whitey, and Dyer’s prose is as excellent as ever, but the ban on flashback means that the narrator has to describe the past rather than living it, draining the account of energy. The ending is also abrupt, leaving Skunk feeling like little more than an offcut from Paris Trance. 

The Aftermath

If Blincoe and Thorne were hoping that The New Puritans would be the making of their careers, they were sadly mistaken - after the initial publicity came a rush of hostile responses. Reviewing the anthology for the Guardian, James Wood saw the Puritan manifesto as less a moral crusade and more a desperate craving for success, arguing that by stripping literature of literary affectations like authorial asides and dual timelines, they were effectively looking to emulate Hollywood. ‘It is,’ he concluded, ‘really a commercial or pragmatic argument posing as an aesthetic and puritanical argument’. Going further, a prominent literary editor took the almost unprecedented step of reviewing the anthology on Amazon, under his real name (since removed). This is worth quoting in full: 

It's difficult to conceive of a sorrier crowd of no-hopers than we see collected together here. With the possible exception of Dyer (who should be ashamed of himself for stooping to this level), the so-called 'new puritans' offer stories which are on the level of Little Red Riding Hood when it comes to depth and complexity. The thrust of the 'manifesto' - that literature needs to find some pure values in terms of storytelling and precision in use of language is not without value, though it is incredibly short-sighted and pretty banal in the way it's outlined. It's just a real shame that such a shower of second rate authors is the best the editors could come up with to illustrate it. The fact that they include their own work says a lot.

Meanwhile, an event at the Globe Theatre featuring Blincoe, Thorne, Rebbecca Ray and Daren King only managed to draw an audience of around twenty.

Although no other books have ever been written according to the New Puritan model, its preference for short sentences, present-tense narrative and up-to-date cultural references are echoed in alt.lit. On the other hand, the fact that the big literary successes of the year 2000 were White Teeth and Harry Potter suggest that the Puritans’ desire for stripped-down and realistic novels rather failed to capture the public imagination, or deliver the Hollywood ending James Wood believed they were hoping for. It turns out, in fact, that participation in the anthology could also be rather harmful to your career.

The successes first. Geoff Dyer was pretty much bullet-proof by this point, and his participation is a minor footnote in his career, alongside such curiosities as Nicholas Royle’s football themed collection A Book of Two Halves. Four of the writers, Scarlett Thomas, Toby Litt, Daren King and Matt Thorne, were included in an Independent of Sunday 'Best Young Writers' feature in 2001, and it's tempting to think that their association with the New Puritans had helped. Ms Thomas went on to enjoy great success, by jettisoning the rules entirely for The End of Mr Y. She has since composed a guide to novel-writing, which doesn’t lean *too* heavily on Blincoe and Thorne for inspiration. King has also enjoyed some commercial success, although Jim Giraffe and Tom Boler are a bit of a comedown for someone whose debut may or may not have been in contention for the Booker. It’s notable, however, that the lustre soon wore off, and the Granta Best of Young British Writers list in 2003 included only one Puritan, in Toby Litt.

As for the rest… Matthew Branton burned his bridges with publishers Bloomsbury, deciding to post his novel The Tie and The Crest online for free in protest at the money they were spending on celebrity authors like Sophie Dahl. He hasn’t published a novel since, but he has released a series of ‘how to write’ guides. Anna Davis went on to write a number of chick-lit books, including one about shoes, and also works as an agent. Bo Fowler is still some way off his ambition of publishing 100 novels – he now has 96 to go. Ben Richards’s most recent novel came out in 2007 – but he has made a second career as a successful TV writer whose credits include Spooks. Rebbecca Ray’s second novel, published in 2006, was the victim of an unbelievably vicious Tanya Gold review in The Guardian. Her third book came out in June this year. 

And the editors? Blincoe hasn’t published a novel in a decade, but has done some TV writing, and made a name for himself in journalism. He has also worked as an adviser to Nick Clegg, suggesting an ongoing passion for hopeless causes. Matt Thorne’s early critical momentum deserted him when he went lad-lit with his third novel Dreaming of Strangers, but he picked up a Booker nomination for Cherry in 2004 (his friend Tibor Fischer was a judge, so some eyebrows were raised over the nomination), and he has a pretty consistent publication history, including a series of young adult books which never really took off and a biography of Prince. He has enjoyed more success as a reviewer, journalist and judge for Fiction Uncovered. 

The New Puritans briefly satisfied a need in the literary world, their manifesto providing a controversial discussion point for arts shows and Sunday supplements desperate for a narrative. Unfortunately, the title proved to be more of a flag of convenience than a real meeting of like-minds. Even Thorne and Blincoe expressed no interest in sustaining the project beyond the anthology, lending more weight to the accusations of gimmickry. In the end, no literary dinosaurs were blown out of the water – indeed, they showed rather more staying power than most of the upstarts trying to dislodge them. Now, the anthology represents a moment of literary history preserved in aspic, floating in references to forgotten games consoles and obsolete software, a far cry from the bold claims which preceded its arrival.