What are you reading now?

[french frank]

I'm not often taken aback but I am just a touch shocked!

At my indifference to those you mentioned? I just meant I had never read those particular authors and so their writing was something I couldn't assess or comment on. I'm not sure I would put them in the Angus Wilson, Somerset Maugham or McEwen, Ishiguro class but I speak from ignorance and from the fact that I would have expected to know more about them from having read something about them. Like others here, I seldom read new fiction now so the newer it is the less likely I'll have read it.

On women writers, I would add Doris Lessing (and probably subtract Susan Hill). And what about Hilary Mantel? Not the Thomas Cromwell trilogy but her oeuvre before that. George Eliot would, I'm sure, have approved.

Agree on Lessing, and probably on Susan Hill. I was intending to group by dates although, as I said, I hadn't checked them. Mantel a 'generation' later though she is certainly widely-known/read; goes along with Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie as contemporaries.

[smittims]

Thanks, Padraig, for your recommendation. I would not otherwise have thought of even opening a book by Donna Tartt. I think I will now.

[Master Jacques]

We might have had a thread about this? Wilson perhaps is the post war generation of writers (Kingsley Amis, Anthony Burgess, Malcolm Bradbury would be others) who join people like (substantially/transitionally) pre-war novelists as JB Priestley, Evelyn Waugh, Somerset Maugham: much read for a generation, then the new generation takes over.

I suppose we could find composers and visual artists for whom this has also been true.

In the case of your nicely selected gaggle of novelists, perhaps their (often satirical) focus on contemporary life diminishes their artistic force with the passing years, as society morphs into different patterns - especially, as with Priestley, where their own contribution has contributed to the changes. There's a sense in which K. Amis, for example, seems nowadays to be taking a peashooter to things which really have not registered for decades.

Though I have to say, that having recently enjoyed a Priestley "binge" - especially enjoying Bright Day, which I'd never read before and found moving, powerful and immediate - it seems to me the neglect of his compellingly-told stories is not so much due to his having become passé, or any preachiness, so much as our contemporary suspicion of rhetoric and love of language.

I'm currently reading Rushdie's new book Victory City, which may be "Rushdie-lite" but has an easy, entertaining readability which slims down his usual verbal exuberance - and I can't square my pleasant experience with reports (on Radio 4's Front Row and elsewhere) that the book was "a difficult read". Really? Perhaps for those who find words of more than two syllables a challenge, worry about long Indian proper nouns, or - perhaps more to the point - worry about others for whom they fear it might all be a bit much.

[smittims]

It's certainly true of composers. Need I mention Astor Piazzola and Florence Price (though I'd rather not)?

One target of Amis' rage is still, sadly, prevalent in today's world: what he called the 'Easier for Them Association'. This is where a commercial or official organisation gets you to do their work for them. It's proliferated with the Internet: 'Manage your account online' (and save us the work of doing it). 'Download our brochure' (and save us the cost of printing and sending it).

Other books come back because of their subject: 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' may have semed outdated after the Married Woman's Property Act; but now coercive control has become a criminal offence, it's topical agian.

[Master Jacques]

It's certainly true of composers. Need I mention Astor Piazzola and Florence Price (though I'd rather not)? [...] Other books come back because of their subject: 'The Tenant of Wildfell Hall' may have seemed outdated after the Married Woman's Property Act; but now coercive control has become a criminal offence, it's topical again.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a very interesting case. For many years, we suffered a version which had been severely mutilated (for doubtful motives) by Anne's surviving sister Charlotte. The echt original was reprinted in 1992 by OUP's Clarendon Press, but anyone reading older publications is getting the cut version.

I think it's fair to say that the book's huge power was immediately apparent in 1992, for its elongated dream sequences as well as the "coercive control" element, and today it does indeed seem stronger than ever. What marvels those three weird sisters achieved.

[smittims]

Indeed; you've raised a further aspect of the matter: revival of bowdlerised novels. 'Far from the Madding Crowd' is an example, Hardy's grittier original being revived in 2000 in Penguin Classics.

[Master Jacques]

Indeed; you've raised a further aspect of the matter: revival of bowdlerised novels. 'Far from the Madding Crowd' is an example, Hardy's grittier original being revived in 2000 in Penguin Classics.

... indeed so. I've also just read a fully-restored text of The Return of the Native, also in Penguin. Not so bowdlerised as Wildfell Hall had been, of course, but I still felt a positive difference - the original is fresher, somehow.

The worst case I know of, is Samuel Butler's mould-breaking The Way of All Flesh, which was not published until after his death, in 1903, and then in a cut and partially rewritten - toned down and more conventional - form by his literary executive, the Handelian scholar R. A. Streatfeild. The original, given Butler's preferred title Ernest Pontifex (which is not so memorable, agreed!) was published by Methuen in 1964, but most reprints still use the bad, adulterated version, probably for copyright reasons.

[french frank]

Though I have to say, that having recently enjoyed a Priestley "binge" - especially enjoying Bright Day, which I'd never read before and found moving, powerful and immediate - it seems to me the neglect of his compellingly-told stories is not so much due to his having become passé, or any preachiness, so much as our contemporary suspicion of rhetoric and love of language.

I found (courtesy of Wikipedia) this critique of Priestley's Angel Pavement by DJ Taylor responding to the savaging of Priestley's novels by his contemporaries (including Orwell).

[Master Jacques]

I found (courtesy of Wikipedia) this critique of Priestley's Angel Pavement by DJ Taylor responding to the savaging of Priestley's novels by his contemporaries (including Orwell).

Thank you very much for this - an excellent defence of a novel which needs none, in reality. Angel Pavement was part of my binge - in this new paperback edition - and I found it terrifyingly memorable, and to the point, in its deconstruction of modern, urban herd mentality and the personal isolation that paradoxically results. Funny, it ain't.

(I'm also, like smittims a big Patrick Hamilton fan: the publication of three of his early novels, about the same time as those Priestley four were republished, taught me that he was a considerable novelist even before the magnificent Twenty Thousand Streets... trilogy.)

Orwell's objections to JBP stem from jealousy: he hadn't had his own bestsellers at that point, and can't have disapproved of Priestley's politics. Woolf, as ever, was simply being an uncomprehending snob. And Priestley is great on music - all the odder therefore that he didn't leave enough space for Bliss's in his libretto for The Olympians!

[french frank]

Thank you very much for this - an excellent defence of a novel which needs none, in reality. Angel Pavement was part of my binge - in this new paperback edition - and I found it terrifyingly memorable, and to the point, in its deconstruction of modern, urban herd mentality and the personal isolation that paradoxically results. Funny, it ain't.

Taylor's article has made me seek out my ancient (1968) Penguin edition of Angel Pavement - ironically right next to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four on the shelf (my apologies to Orwell if I have created decades of discomfort for him). I also have The Good Companions but would need some added stimulus to prompt a rereading of that.

[Master Jacques]

Taylor's article has made me seek out my ancient (1968) Penguin edition of Angel Pavement - ironically right next to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four on the shelf (my apologies to Orwell if I have created decades of discomfort for him). I also have The Good Companions but would need some added stimulus to prompt a rereading of that.

Of the four recently republished, The Good Companions is still a feel-good, entertaining read; but for me both Bright Day and Angel Pavement have aged more richly, while his late Lost Empires revisits Bright Day territory, more discursively but with much pith and plenty of edge. Reading Bright Day, I got the feeling I used to get from his best plays, a "where have you been all my life" sense of familiarity and rightness.

[Historian]

Curiously, my wife and I have just finished Anglo-Saxon Attitudes as our bedtime reading. I was revisiting it after about fifty years, and was charmed anew by Wilson's humour, sourness and perspicacity. It's sad that his considerable body of novels is now more or less forgotten, and I was very glad to read that we're not alone in finding it so vital and enjoyable. (As somebody currently shepherding a large team of academics, for a substantial music history, I had fellow-feeling for Wilson's central character, doing likewise while coping with the egos of his dysfunctional family!)

We've slated his Late Call for future reading, and I'm looking forward to revisiting that one also.

Thank you for the recommendation, will add it to the list. 'Vital and enjoyable' chimes with me too.

[Rjw]

I would recommend The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton

[smittims]

So would I! A most absorbing novel which has not dated despite being very much 'of its time'.

[richardfinegold]

I am on a Vonnegut binge. Currently re reading Breakfast of Champions