Contemporary Novelists

Contemporary Review, April, 2005

Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction since 1970. Peter Childs. Palgrave-Macmillan. [pounds sterling]14.99 p.b. v 287 pages. ISBN 1-4039-1120-7. In this survey Prof. Childs concentrates on twelve novelists born after 1940 to illustrate his argument that modern fiction is marked by a 'startling diversity of subject matter and experience'.

The twelve are: Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Angela Carter, Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Graham Swift, Irvine Welsh and Jeanette Winterson. Just as he begins his survey with an introduction he ends it with a short conclusion on 'The Novel Today and Tomorrow' in which he argues that the novel 'has perhaps always flourished most at the margin'--a thesis which may work in the twentieth century but which has, surely, little relevance to the nineteenth. How were Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot or Thackeray 'marginalised'? The difficulty as always is which novels are read by the thousands and which are read by teachers of English literature. (A.C.)