Retroland: A Reader’s Guide to the Dazzling Diversity of Modern Fiction – A critical machete wielded mercilessly

November 2017. In a room in the City Courthouse in Ostend, the Belgian performance artist Mikes Poppe chains himself to a four-tonne cube of Carrara marble. The marble, says Poppe, is “symbolic of history, the history of art, which I am trying to free myself from”. His method is to chip away at the four-tonne cube with a chisel. But he stays stuck. After 19 days, he is finally cut free by a workman operating an angle grinder.

Mikes Poppe, c’est nous – especially if we are anglophone novelists. Or so says Peter Kemp, who should know – he has been for several decades chief fiction reviewer for the Sunday Times. For Kemp, “the salient feature of fiction in English during the last half-century or so” is “a widespread and diverse enthralment with the past.” As Kemp sees it, “fictional engagement with the past in various forms expanded massively from around 1970.” Since then, writers and readers have been living in Retroland, where all is “Aftermath, repercussions and consequences.”

Well, it’s a thesis. And like all theses, it’s in need of supporting argument. What happened, or started to happen, around 1970, to chain three or four successive generations of working novelists to the four-tonne marble block of the past? Kemp is hazy on specifics (dates, data) but his chief contention is that circa 1970 marked the unignorable end of the British empire and that, since then, lots of anglophone novelists have been telling stories about what it meant. “As the British Empire drew to a close,” Kemp writes, there came “an engrossment with the political past.”

This is one of those observations that is both definitely true and basically moot. Did the one cause the other? Does fiction make its own discoveries, or is it merely an obedient pupil in the school of history? The answer is a little from column A, a little from column B, as Grampa Simpson might put it. In any event, if you feel that the anglophone novel’s post-1970 turn towards the (British? imperial?) past requires some theorising, you will come away from Retroland unsatisfied. It isn’t that kind of book.

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What kind of book is it? Clearing a trail through the rainforest of contemporary fiction with his critic’s machete (only hacks use hatchets), Kemp has charted his progress, and preserved his scattered treasures. Retroland, he says, “aims to be both a map and a display case”. It is not, therefore, so much a book of ideas as it is a book of informed opinions. Under the vague auspices of its Big Notion, it plays a twofold game: on the one hand taking punts on the reputational stock exchange, on the other drawing attention to books that lovers of literary fiction might have missed.

Altogether, a stimulating and useful enterprise, though that doesn’t mean we’re not entitled to ask for a bit more in the way of cognition and bit less in the way of praise and dispraise. For instance: Kemp notes that there has, since 1970, been a “growing engagement with the personal past: novels uncovered buried trauma, childhood damage, traumatic war experiences and suppressed lives”. As indeed they did, and do. The American critic Parul Sehgal noted as much in the New Yorker last year; to her, it was clear that “the trauma plot” impoverished both fiction and reality, and should be resisted. From Kemp, no such cultural critiques; and no theories about why, precisely, novels went all in for trauma after 1970.

And again: Kemp observes that “Where the typifying concern of the Victorian novel was to demonstrate connections between one sector of society and another, the typifying concern of late twentieth- and early twenty-first century fiction is to demonstrate connections between the present and the past.”

True? True with qualifications? Why did the Victorians tell social stories, while we tell past-haunted personal ones? No theory is advanced. (Here’s one: beginning around 1970, successive western governments promoted individualism, alongside deregulation and the dismantling of the social safety net, as part of the project known as neoliberalism; hence, a general dwindling of the communitarian impulse, in the novel as elsewhere.)

Isn’t it the case that, in a secular age, we lack a clear sense of evil, except at extremes? Stories need the sense of evil to function

And once again: “Counterpointing personal and vaster historical perspectives is a technique much favoured by modern novelists” – a sentence from which the word “modern” might profitably be deleted, though doing so would still leave us with a phenomenon in need of explanation.

What about the subject that contemporary anglophone fiction seems obsessed with above all others – the abuse of children? Kemp notes that “Modern fiction has widely and often harrowingly concerned itself with this subject”, and lists myriad examples, but he doesn’t make any claims about why. Isn’t it the case that, in a secular age, we lack a clear sense of evil, except at extremes? Stories need the sense of evil to function. Child abuse, like fascism (also a popular subject for contemporary fiction), is inarguably evil; both child abuse and fascism stand, for us, as moral boundary-markers, defining the limits of the acceptable, when so much else is muddle. They mark the ends of story in a godless world.

But enough about what Kemp doesn’t do. What about what he does do? He sorts chaff from wheat; sometimes he throws out the wheat, too. His tour of modern fiction (by which he means the modern novel: short stories get short shrift) begins with the postcolonials: specifically with JG Farrell, whose novels about former British colonies (Ireland in Troubles [1970], India in The Siege of Krishnapur [1973], and Singapore in The Singapore Grip [1978]) are, I’m ashamed to say, unknown to me; Kemp has persuaded me to buy all three, proof that his critical enthusiasm is as persuasive as his critical ire is amusing.

Roddy Doyle, in his Last Roundup trilogy, ‘almost parodically conforms to the fictional mode Rushdie pioneered’, and deploys ‘stock fitments of the magic realist postcolonial novel’

He then spends quite a lot of time pointing out how many younger writers have ripped off Salman Rushdie (making a case, actually, for Rushdie as one of the central novelists of our age), and then proceeds unforgivingly to swing that critical machete: “For an author who attaches such significance to storytelling, Rushdie is curiously inept at telling stories”; Rushdie’s novels operate a “closed-door policy against psychological subtlety”; there is “little sense of his being a novelist who has ever really listened to other people”. Oh, dear.

What about Irish writers? Roddy Doyle, in his Last Roundup trilogy, “almost parodically conforms to the fictional mode Rushdie pioneered,” and deploys “stock fitments of the magic realist postcolonial novel”. John Banville is praised for his “impressive” emulation of Henry James in Mrs Osmond (2017) but dispraised for “the affectation that had stilted even his 2005 Man Booker-winning novel, The Sea.” Well, one critic’s affectation is another critic’s mastery of English prose, but tant pis. Joseph O’Connor and Edna O’Brien are briefly mentioned; Sally Rooney’s name appears, once. And that’s it for us, the poor Hibernian cousins. No Anne Enright, no Colm Tóibín, no Sebastian Barry (twice winner, as it happens, of the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction).

At points, a listicle quality supervenes: less literary criticism, more Here Are Some Books I Have Read. Some glib cracks: Jean Auel’s Cro-Magnon epics are “more plasticine than Pleistocene”. Some deep incisions: “The result of long immersion in research, [Hilary Mantel’s] A Place of Greater Safety is, like many long-immersed things, bloated.” Zadie Smith’s characters are reduced to “Zany quirks.” (See what he did there?)

Upon whom, or what, will Kemp pounce next? Thoughts are provoked. For instance: Kemp admires William Golding for noting how things smelled in the past. “The sweetish odour of laudanum hangs over” the ship’s sickbay in Rites of Passage (1980). Why are historical novelists always being praised for describing how things smelled in the past? Contemporary writers are never praised for describing how things smell in the present. More thoughts: whither Iain Banks? David Peace? Rachel Cusk? Any Northern Irish novelist? What about all the novels published since 1970 that aren’t about the past? What about autofiction?

Even the most capacious survey has to stop somewhere, and taste is taste: Kemp may skimp on science fiction/fantasy, but he’s commendably well-read in crime and espionage fiction

Well, you can’t do everything. A brief epilogue treats literary science fiction of the Margaret Atwood, it’s-not-really-science-fiction-because-I’m-too-respectable-to-write-science-fiction variety, but not popular science fiction or fantasy – a big omission. Then again, even the most capacious survey has to stop somewhere, and taste is taste: Kemp may skimp on SFF, but he’s commendably well-read in crime and espionage fiction (the novelist he praises most often in Retroland is the workmanlike storyteller Robert Harris, author of Fatherland [1992] and The Ghost [2003] – make of that what you will).

Is contemporary fiction chained to the past? If so, why? Can it chisel itself free? Mikes Poppe, he of the four-tonne marble cube, said his artwork proved that to free yourself from history was “not possible. It is burden which I must always carry.” You could just as easily point out that the lesson of Poppe’s artwork (he called it, ridiculously, “De Profundis”) is that you can indeed free yourself from the burden of history. You just need a workman with an angle grinder. Marx would approve.

Kemp’s loose thesis – the past is a present country – gets him where he wants to go, and it leads us to some good writing (his own included). Beyond that, the worst you could say about Retroland is that it shows us where we might want, or need, to go ourselves. What else are maps for?

Kevin Power is assistant professor of literary practice in the School of English, TCD. His latest novel is White City

Further reading

Letters of Intent: Selected Essays (Atlantic Books, 2017) by Cynthia Ozick. For some reason Ozick has not been canonised for her literary-critical essays, which are easily the equal of anything by Susan Sontag or Elizabeth Hardwick. Letters of Intent collects the best from six volumes of beautifully wrought engagements with writers from Henry James to Kafka to Saul Bellow.

The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (OUP, 2017) by Frank Kermode. A bit academically dense at points, but nevertheless one of the richest books of literary criticism ever published: an argument about why and how we shape experience into time, and time into stories, and why doing so might mean we can’t see what’s really there.

The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews (Penguin, 2001) by Martin Amis. Five hundred pages of strong opinions, constituting a sustained argument in favour of style over, well, everything – the liberal aesthete’s manifesto. One of the most influential volumes of literary criticism published in the last half-century.