This article is taken from the April 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Not long back the Times Literary Supplement decided to notice the Collected Poems of Wendy Cope. The review, by Tristan Fane Saunders, was one of those fortuitous pieces of criticism that have the welcome effect of illuminating vast areas of the cultural landscape beyond its immediate coign of vantage. Mr Saunders began by pointing out that much of his subject’s early work — the poems assembled in Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (1986), for example — was highly allusive, dense and, above all, parodic. Not, he argued, that this was a handicap, for her targets were “popular enough that the average New Statesman or Spectator reader might be expected to get the joke.”
Naturally, there were injurious comparisons to be made with the here and now. Imagine, Mr Saunders went on, the difficulty of trying to find ten collections of British or Irish poetry published in the past couple of decades on which a modern-day Wendy Cope could work her magic and still expect to be understood by all but a tiny fraction of the reading public.
The form on display here was the somewhat exclusive redoubt of poetry, but the same rule applies to fiction. At round about the time that Ms Cope was starting her career, Malcolm Bradbury produced a collection of pastiches entitled Who Do You Think You Are? in which such titans as Iris Murdoch, Alan Sillitoe and Kingsley Amis were (very gently) lampooned.
Could such a book be published nearly half-a-century later? The Secret Author’s guess is no, on the grounds that there would no general agreement as to who ought to be included and no guarantee that a potential readership would be able to see the humour. It is not just that people read less widely and discriminatingly than they used to, but that the fragmentation of mainstream book-world culture has been gathering pace since at least the early 2000s. A good place to see its effects at work is the fiction review slots of our national newspapers, whose literary editors never quite know what to feature in their pages. Eleanor Yaughan’s latest cannibal gore-fest or Mairead McSweeney’s new Hibernian elegy? As there are no real household names any more — a few gnarled old stagers and newly ascendant meteors aside — the selection process is pretty much a lottery.
We live in a landscape of cultural fragmentation, full of tiny, contending constituencies and interest groups
The same goes for those articles — so common twenty years ago, as rare as hen’s teeth now — about “developments” in British fiction. Back in the 1980s, asked to come up with a raft of “our leading novelists”, the average reader could probably have named half-a-dozen (Amis Sr, Murdoch, Golding, Burgess etc), while having a fair idea of the identities of up-and-coming youngsters (McEwan, Amis Jr, Barnes, Swift.) Asked to identify today’s up-and-coming young writers, the Secret Author wouldn’t have a clue, but he is almost certain they aren’t the unfortunate young people eligible for the Sunday Times Young Writer award, most of whom, book-trade economics being what they are at the moment, won’t have a career in ten years’ time.
No, we live in a landscape of cultural fragmentation, full of tiny, contending constituencies and interest groups and an increasing disavowal of the shared standards that used to keep the old-style book-world afloat, a landscape in which literary prize shortlists are populated by a series of relative unknowns who, once the prize has been judged and awarded, go back to being relative unknowns again by dint of their inability to sustain a readership. This is not to say that old-style literary culture didn’t have its drawbacks. It could, for example, be exclusive, cliquey and well-nigh disdainful of anyone beyond its drawbridge. The late Ian Hamilton, editor of the highly influential yet woefully small-circulation New Review, was once asked in the 1970s whether he wouldn’t like to double his 2,000-strong subscription base. Yes indeed, Hamilton replied, but he’d like to know who they were.
It could be argued, of course, that the less homogenous the literary world is the more interesting it will become, what with all the exciting left-field voices that will doubtless be let into it. On the other hand, shared standards are important, for they allow judgments to be made, and judgment — as most readers of newspaper review pages will perhaps agree — is an increasingly elusive quality. We are all relativists now, which may explain the dreadful sense of ennui that floats from the pages of most contemporary novels, and sometimes extends the reviews of these artefacts.
The other thing about shared standards, of course, is that they work retrospectively and fashion the body of knowledge that gives reading a context, allows the abstruse and the unfashionable their due while acknowledging that from whichever way you look at it Kingsley Amis is a more important writer than any number of experimenting Sixties mad-lads. Or as a publisher of the old school — happily there are still a few of them about — put it to the Secret Author recently, “It’s so nice to have lunch with someone who knows who Denton Welch is.”
