The Booker Longlist for 1910 - Second Instalment

Just a note firming out this process - the main aim is no less than to improve our cultural values by historical novel reading!

Reading that line above over makes me laugh, and yet, it's completely true. Strange thing, the modern journalistic scoff immediately comes to mind, appears so tenable, and yet isn't.

I don't think there's any question that what you read cultures your mind. It's the problem I have with the librarian-squeak when challenged about the low stuff they're seen as purveying: "At least they're reading!" At least they're reading........what, exactly?

I would challenge that on two levels. Nothing could teach me more clearly for one thing that fiction that is called shamefully popular in one era can be appreciated at its true worth in a succeeding one. The epitome of the 20s, Michael Arlen was pounded in his time - the reader of These Charming People these days is struck by the power of his charm and erudition and, in this collection particularly, the originality of his voice. Similarly, the late Victorians Mary E Braddon and Rhoda Broughton were pilloried - reading their works is a revelation today.

To say nothing of that favourite of all whipping-posts, Mary Webb, a truly fascinating successor to Hardy and Emily Bronte. She became the butt of a thousand jokes after her early death in 1927, energised mainly by two things. One was popularity - Stanley Baldwin had praised her to the skies and virtually single-handedly guaranteed her phenomenal sales through the 30s. The other was of course Cold Comfort Farm, whose parallel success guaranteed the satire's author, Stella Gibbons, her moment in the limelight. Cold Comfort Farm no doubt deserves its continuing fame. But I could have wished for more readers now for The Golden Arrow, Gone to Earth and The House in Dormer Forest, the three I've read by Mary Webb, to say nothing of some of the most delicate nature essays ever written in her seminal The Spring of Joy. To be satirised in this way should be a weird kind of compliment, and I hope Stella Gibbons thought of it at least a little that way. It's time now, 80 years on, for us to understand that and read both Gibbons and her targets in full measure. The other major targets were, I think, TF Powys and Sheila Kaye-Smith, though I'm sure there are other examples. Powys' work is a tower of achievement in the field of goat-eyed Christian-Pagan fable - just read Brynmill Press' Mock's Curse to taste a talent that is utterly original and largely ignored - exactly what this exercise is about. Most modern writing barely exists on the same plane. I'd love to see what a creative writing course might make of him! The reactions would be priceless. Not that Powys was ever popular, to get back to the original point.

So I would say that a lot of the fiction that public libraries are purveying may well be of a great deal more worth than is credited. The other level on which to challenge that statement is the mind-enculturation one. Given the severely contestable statement that at least a goodly part of library borrowings are of trash, shouldn't that matter? Let's get down to it, I say. What is trash, in a literary context? A little contrarily, I would say that there's a lot of self-indulgence out there in so-called literary authors. Seeing crud for crud, I would call that, to its measure, trash. The straightforwardness of an unabashed storyteller like Joyce Carol Oates (who has a load of other faults, don't get me wrong) in something like We Were the Mulvaneys far excels the fatuous dullness of a novel like The Way of the Women by Marlene Van Niekirk (which has its good elements, I feel bound to point out). Niekirk's largely grim self-involvement and needless obfuscation is bad quality, barely put. But these are literary authors, aren't they? The trash that public library-detractors talk about is formula-fiction, I think, when brass tacks are finally got down to. I can't say that I have a problem with how a novel is made, as long as it's made well. I think one needs to look a little deeper than that. Can't help feeling that whether a writer is fascinating or not will depend on their natural talent, if that's not too Luddite a phrase. If a Mills and Boon novelist has the goods, they'll go the distance. What I'm after is a clearer recognition of the nature of the goods.

I think it is worthwhile to think about this using an analogy. Think of the world as an open landscape. It's cooling, and as night-time comes bonfires are lit all over. The authors we have available to us are placed in the prized 'storyteller's place', one next to each fire. We all wander, and as we find something which captures us, stay to listen and keep warm. Which authors have the capacity to pull the audience? (To return again to the original point: from whom is our mind culture being constructed?) I think Marlene Van Niekirk's fire would be virtually deserted, and I think Joyce Carol Oates' audience would be legion, at her best. I recognise that this will be seen as over-reductionist, that this doesn't take account of the reality of the novel as more, quite literally, than a campfire yarn. But I'm saying that I think some 'reduction', actually discernment, is necessary. That returning to the nuts and bolts is not a conservative flatulence, it's a grounding measure. We need to rediscover the essence; if you like, we need to regain our appreciation of the forever in culture. At the moment, we are floundering around in superstructural philosophizing.

So, to sum up, I think a new era should be announced - that the time has come for a rediscovery of the essential in fiction. I think that our appreciation should be fed with a steady stream of material from the past, to help us realise exactly what human beings are capable of in literary terms - these authors remind us that our multifarious genre-addicted over-marketed modern literature is quite a limited place, oddly. All that 'noise' - nothing could be more suspicious.......