Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s 0228006244, 9780228006244

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Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s

Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s J. RUSSELL PERKIN

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston | London | Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021

ISBN 978-0-2280-0623-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-0624-4 (paper) ISBN 978-0-2280-0763-0 (ePDF) ISBN 978-0-2280-0764-7 (ePUB) Legal deposit second quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Politics and the British novel in the 1970s / J. Russell Perkin. Names: Perkin, J. Russell (James Russell), author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210097965 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210098090 | ISBN 9780228006244 (softcover) | ISBN 9780228006237 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780228007630 (PDF) | ISBN 9780228007647 (EPUB) Subjects: LCSH : English fiction—20th century—History and criticism. | LCSH : Political fiction, English—History and criticism. | LCSH : Politics and literature. Classification: LCC PR 888.P 6 P 47 2021 | DDC 823/.914093581—dc23

Set in 10/14 Baskerville 10 Pro with Trade Gothic LT Standard Book design & typesetting by Garet Markvoort, zijn digital

In memoriam J.R.C. Perkin, 1928–2017

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

ix

Chronology xiii Introduction 3 1 The Fiction of Discontent: Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age and John Fowles’s Daniel Martin 30 2 “England Made Me”: John le Carré’s Karla Trilogy 3 The Green World of Richard Adams

79

116

4 The Campus Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge: Politics in a Small World 153 5 Doris Lessing’s Feminist Apocalyptic

199

6 Camels on the Embankment: V.S. Naipaul and the Globalization of the Novel 238 Notes

269

Works Cited Index 313

283

Preface and Acknowledgments This book has its origin in some experiences from my younger days, which I hope it is not self-indulgent to recall. When I was eight, my family moved from England to Canada, and for many years my parents kept in touch with British news and culture by reading various periodicals. I remember as an adolescent in the early 1970s being fascinated by copies of Punch and by the Guardian Weekly, the latter intriguingly printed on tissue-like white airmail paper. Friends and relatives would sometimes send us books, most memorably the annual collections of cartoons by “Giles” from the Daily Express. My interest in British politics was reinforced when I lived in Britain as a student during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the period of the “Winter of Discontent,” Margaret Thatcher’s election victory, the founding of the SDP , urban riots, and the Falklands War. During that time, I read a number of the works I discuss in this book as contemporary literature; it has been fascinating to return to them decades later. Researching and writing this book in Canada during the tumultuous era of Brexit in Britain, I have repeatedly been struck by way that the issues in the novels I discuss recur in the politics of the present day, issues of nationality and citizenship, immigration, property development in London, race, gender, and the environment. Completing the manuscript during the lockdown from the CovID -19

x

Preface and Acknowledgments

pandemic in the spring of 2020, I often felt as though one of Doris Lessing’s dystopian visions was playing itself out in reality. My father, James Perkin, was a scholar of New Testament Greek and church history, and I grew up in a houseful of books. I greatly regret that my father did not live to see the completion of this book, as we often discussed the project during the research stage, and it profited from his lively interest in the subject. The dedication recognizes the example of scholarly life that he provided and his encouragement of my work. It is always a pleasure to acknowledge the Patrick Power Library at Saint Mary’s University. Marie DeYoung, who was the University Librarian when I was researching this book, saved journals that I needed from being sent to offsite storage; Sally Wood, Collections Development Librarian, has assisted my research in numerous ways; Nicole Carter, Reference Librarian, taught me to use RefWorks. In the Circulation department, I would like to thank Susan Cannon, Jim Kennedy, and Bridgit Bell (who can always find material that gets misplaced in the library). I am grateful to a number of friends and colleagues for advice, assistance, and encouragement: Brian Bartlett, Steve Cloutier, Michael DiSanto, Margaret Anne Doody, Adrian Kelly, John MacKinnon, Sara Malton, Goran Stanivukovic, Taisha Teskey, Gillian Thomas, and David Wilson. I would especially like to thank David Heckerl for his advice about the liberal tradition and Henghameh Saroukhani for her help on the topics of citizenship and nationality. I have learned much from teaching the authors discussed in this book in a variety of courses at Saint Mary’s University and in a graduate seminar at Dalhousie University. The anonymous readers for McGill-Queen’s University Press made a number of valuable suggestions that helped me to revise my manuscript. Finally, I should thank Fergus, my West Highland White Terrier, for always letting me know when he thought I was too absorbed in this project and needed to get some fresh air. In the course of working on this book with McGill-Queen’s University Press, I have been lucky enough to have an editor who is both an accomplished writer and someone with a deep knowledge

Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

of my subject. I am profoundly grateful to Mark Abley for his encouragement and assistance at all stages of this project. The manuscript benefited greatly from the comments of my wife Deborah Kennedy, a scholar of eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, and a superlative editor, not to mention someone who shares my enjoyment of British television of the 1970s. The project would not have been possible without her support. Research for this book was supported by several Saint Mary’s University Research Grants. A small portion of Chapter 1 appeared in my article “Margaret Drabble’s Wordsworth,” The Wordsworth Circle 46.3 (2015): 197–201, and is reprinted with the permission of that journal.

Chronology

Governments DaTE oF gENERaL ELECTIoN

PRImE mINISTER

PaRTy

31 March 1966 18 June 1970 28 February 1974 10 October 1974

Harold Wilson Edward Heath Harold Wilson Harold Wilson James Callaghan (succeeded Harold Wilson as Labour leader and prime minister, 5 April 1976) Margaret Thatcher

Labour Conservative Labour Labour

3 May 1979

Novelists George Orwell Evelyn Waugh Graham Greene Anthony Powell William Golding Penelope Fitzgerald Anthony Burgess Muriel Spark Iris Murdoch Doris Lessing

1903–1950 1903–1966 1904–1991 1905–2000 1911–1993 1916–2000 1917–1993 1918–2006 1919–1999 1919–2013

Conservative

xiv

Chronology

Richard Adams Kingsley Amis John Fowles Tom Sharpe A. Alvarez John le Carré Malcolm Bradbury V.S. Naipaul J.G. Farrell David Lodge Margaret Drabble Piers Paul Read

1920–2016 1922–1995 1926–2005 1928–2013 1929–2019 1931–2020 1932–2000 1932–2018 1935–1979 b. 1935 b. 1939 b.1941

Historical and Cultural Events and Significant Literary Works Published and Performed 1970

1971

Edward Heath forms Conservative government Beatles split up Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn awarded Nobel Prize Bernard Bergonzi, The Situation of the Novel Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch Ted Hughes, Crow F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist David Lodge, Out of the Shelter Shiva Naipaul, Fireflies Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat 6 Feb. first British soldier killed in Northern Ireland “troubles” Enoch Powell predicts an “explosion” unless there is a voluntary repatriation scheme for immigrants Margaret Thatcher, Education Minister, gains support for a proposal to end free school milk (leading to the popular phrase, “Mrs Thatcher, Milk Snatcher”) V.S. Naipaul wins Booker Prize for In a Free State A. Alvarez, The Savage God E.M. Forster, Maurice Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal

Chronology

1972

1973

William Golding, The Scorpion God Graham Greene, A Sort of Life Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns Doris Lessing, Briefing for a Descent into Hell David Lodge, The Novelist at the Crossroads Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (UK edition) V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room, vol. 10 of A Dance to the Music of Time Piers Paul Read, The Professor’s Daughter Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont 30 Jan. British army kills thirteen civilians in Northern Ireland in an incident which becomes known as “Bloody Sunday” Idi Amin expels Asians from Uganda, and many settle in Britain Terrorists kill eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum First issue of the feminist magazine Spare Rib Richard Adams, Watership Down Margaret Drabble, The Needle’s Eye Seamus Heaney, Wintering Out Ted Hughes, Selected Poems 1957–1967 P.D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman Doris Lessing, The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories David Storey, Pasmore Britain joins the European Economic Community Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, and subsequent energy crisis Kingsley Amis, The Riverside Villas Murders Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers J.G. Ballard, Crash Malcolm Bradbury, Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel

xv

xvi

1974

1975

Chronology

J.G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur Graham Greene, The Honorary Consul Doris Lessing, The Summer before the Dark Anthony Powell, Temporary Kings, vol. 11 of A Dance to the Music of Time Muriel Spark, The Hothouse by the East River Raymond Williams, The Country and the City “Three-day week” during winter due to industrial action by miners 28 Feb. General election results in a hung parliament, and Harold Wilson becomes Pm for second time, succeeding Edward Heath 10 Oct. Labour wins a slender majority in the second general election of the year Deportation of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Richard Adams, Shardik Beryl Bainbridge, The Bottle Factory Outing Howard Brenton, The Churchill Play John Fowles, The Ebony Tower Philip Larkin, High Windows John le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Doris Lessing, The Memoirs of a Survivor Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine Tom Sharpe, Porterhouse Blue Muriel Spark, The Abbess of Crewe Margaret Thatcher becomes leader of the Conservative Party Referendum on remaining in EEC results in 67 per cent vote for Europe British inflation rate peaks at 26.9 per cent Survivors (Tv series, –1977) The Good Life (Tv series, –1978) Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man Margaret Drabble, The Realms of Gold Seamus Heaney, North David Lodge, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses Brian Moore, The Great Victorian Collection

Chronology

1976

1977

1978

xvii

V.S. Naipaul, Guerrillas Anthony Powell, Hearing Secret Harmonies, vol. 12 of A Dance to the Music of Time Salman Rushdie, Grimus Tom Sharpe, Blott on the Landscape Harold Wilson succeeded as Labour leader and prime minister by James Callaghan Jeremy Thorpe resigns as leader of Liberal party Strike begins at Grunwick photo processing plant Sterling plunges against the dollar, and Callaghan tells Labour conference “The cosy world is gone” Sex Pistols, “Anarchy in the U.K.” Kingsley Amis, The Alteration David Edgar, Destiny Muriel Spark, The Takeover David Storey, Saville David Owen youngest post-war foreign secretary, aged 38 “Lib-Lab pact”: Liberals agree to support Labour minority government First mass picket at Grunwick film processing plant Jeremy Thorpe denies allegations of attempted murder Star Wars Richard Adams, The Plague Dogs Margaret Drabble, The Ice Age John Fowles, Daniel Martin and revised edition of The Magus John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy V.S. Naipaul, India: A Wounded Civilization J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion A.N. Wilson, The Sweets of Pimlico Three-month firefighters’ strike ends in January Inflation drops below 10 per cent for the first time since oil crisis Saatchi and Saatchi’s “Labour Isn’t Working” campaign Death of Pope Paul VI, election and death of Pope John Paul I, election of Pope John Paul II

xviii

1979

Chronology

Callaghan decides against widely expected autumn election Industrial dispute closes the Times from 30 Nov. 1978 to 12 Nov. 1979 “Winter of Discontent” begins in November Kingsley Amis, Jake’s Thing Martin Amis, Success A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop Graham Greene, The Human Factor Geoffrey Hill, Tenebrae Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden John Mortimer, Rumpole of the Bailey Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea Exceptionally cold winter and public sector strikes in Britain: the “Winter of Discontent” Jan. James Callaghan travels in Caribbean for summit and holiday, and on return his response to the crisis is summarized by the Sun as “Crisis? What Crisis?” 30 March murder of Airey Neave, mP , by the INLa Government’s devolution proposals for Scotland and Wales rejected in referendums; SNP stops supporting Labour, and the government loses vote of confidence and calls a May election. 3 May Margaret Thatcher becomes Pm with a majority of 43 Jeremy Thorpe trial ends in acquittal Murder of Lord Mountbatten by the IRa Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, was revealed to be the “fourth man” in the Cambridge spy scandal, and was immediately stripped of his knighthood Iranian revolution Saddam Hussein becomes president of Iraq Soviet invasion of Afghanistan The Clash, London Calling Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tv miniseries)

Chronology

xix

Douglas Adams, A Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine Margaret Drabble, A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore William Golding, Darkness Visible Thom Gunn, Selected Poems 1950–1975 Seamus Heaney, Field Work Ted Hughes, Remains of Elmet John le Carré, Smiley’s People V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River Craig Raine, A Martian Sends a Postcard Home Piers Paul Read, A Married Man: A Novel Muriel Spark, Territorial Rights A number of sources were used to research this chronology. Specific acknowledgment should be given to two books that were used more than all the other sources combined: The Oxford Chronology of English Literature, edited by Michael Cox, and the subsequent Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature, also edited by Michael Cox.

Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s

It was not originally the intention of the writer to adopt the form of fiction as the instrument to scatter his suggestions, but, after reflection, he resolved to avail himself of a method which, in the temper of the times, offered the best chance of influencing opinion. BENJAmIN DISRAELI, PREfACE to 5tH EDItIoN of Coningsby

Introduction the daffodils are beginning to bloom outside my window and the country is on the verge of chaos. BERNARD BERGoNzI, “LEttER fRom ENGLAND,” 1973

The 1970s can be thought of as a golden age of the bestseller, when everyone was aware of books such as Watership Down, Love Story, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, August 1914, Jaws, Ragtime, The Silmarillion, and Roots.1 While many bestsellers were ephemeral soap operas, thrillers, or dubious accounts of consciousness raising, some of them have endured. In his pioneering study Bestsellers: Popular Fiction of the 1970s, John Sutherland suggests that “it would be possible to put together a very decent higher-educational syllabus from American superselling novels of the 1970s” (35), and he points out in his preface that Peter Benchley, the author of Jaws, and V.S. Naipaul were both published in Britain by André Deutsch. In this book, I focus on a selection of British novels from the 1970s that were at the same time very popular and highly regarded by literary critics, and whose reputation has endured, whether in terms of becoming what the book trade calls steady sellers, or in terms of influence on other writers and the general culture, or in terms of academic attention, or some combination of these factors. It is very common to mock the fashion and design of the 1970s, and other aspects of the period as well. Amanda Craig was not being innovative when she referred in her novel The Lie of the Land (2017) to “that shoddy decade

4

Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s

of licentious squalor” (241). The fiction of the 1970s is often held in low regard, in contrast to what is considered the great age of the literary novel in the 1980s.2 Dominic Head has summarized the prevailing view by saying that it is “the decade that is generally held to embody the nadir of British fiction” (Cambridge Introduction, 7). However, as well as being the age of polyester plaid, platform shoes, and brown decor, the 1970s was a period of experimentation in the arts and of influential social and political movements, and the latter are reflected in much of the British fiction of the time. My discussion will argue that the decade was not at all the dire time for the novel that many people have thought and perhaps continue to think. Head concurs, and he enlists Malcolm Bradbury to argue, “in opposition to the Jeremiahs of British fiction,” for the existence of “a vigorous post-war novel, which stands up well to international comparison” (Cambridge Introduction, 7). Head maintains that in writing about the earlier decades of post-war British fiction, one must avoid seeing them through the favoured critical frameworks that have developed since the 1980s. For example, his Cambridge Introduction to post-war British fiction concentrates “on those works that treat of contemporary history and society, even though such an emphasis may seem to be out of kilter with recent literary fashion,” given the turn towards historical fiction since the beginning of the 1990s (2). The 1970s was a turbulent decade in Britain. The period was characterized by political crisis, from the states of emergency and three-day week of Edward Heath’s Conservative government at the beginning of the decade to the public sector strikes that came to be known as the “Winter of Discontent” during the last months of James Callaghan’s Labour government in 1979. As the nation adjusted to the realities of its reduced global status, there was much talk of national crisis, in the press and in everyday conversation. Hanif Kureishi’s novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) provides a carnivalesque account of suburban life and popular culture in the late 1970s. Describing his infrequent meetings with his friend Terry, the narrator Karim says, “When we did talk, it was about the state of the country” (258). It was certainly a time when political questions were widely debated in all spheres of society, and not just by

Introduction

5

the professional media commentators. The news was dominated by stories about inflation, high rates of taxation, the energy crisis, unemployment, domestic terrorism by the IRa , and global terrorism, especially airplane hijackings. British identity was debated in relation to the European Community, particularly during the referendum campaign in 1975. There were rumblings about dangers to democracy, and extreme movements on both the right and the left gained considerable attention. The far right was fuelled by fears about immigration from the so-called “New Commonwealth” countries (i.e., non-white former colonies). Feminism, the environment, education, and minority rights were all important political issues. It is striking how much the political agenda of the 1970s has persisted. Immigration and the European Union, along with terrorism, dominated British politics in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and the challenges addressed by the environmental movement are of increasing urgency. The tone of Geoffrey Fry’s book The Politics of Decline: An Interpretation of British Politics from the 1940s to the 1970s is set early on by a quotation from the memoirs of the Conservative politician Lord Hailsham, who served as Lord Chancellor in the governments of Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher. Writing in the mid-1970s, Hailsham lamented that “it has been a matter of supreme regret to me that my public life has taken place in a period of national humiliation and decline” (qtd in Fry, 2). This idea of the decline of Britain could be found in discussions of education, literature and the arts, social behaviour, and sports. Every generation has its own rhetoric of deterioration; for example, the cultural pessimism of the late Victorian period and early twentieth century was often related to anxieties about the British empire. The specific form of despondency in the 1970s can be related to the need to come to terms with the actual loss of the empire after the Second World War, and the corresponding waning of power on the world stage, of which the Suez Crisis of 1956 is a standard reference point. The economic difficulties of the 1970s, such as rampant inflation and high rates of taxation, were accompanied by what many perceived of as a worsening of the quality of public services. Dominic Sandbrook quotes Peter Jenkins in the Guardian of 26 September 1978, writing in the first of

6

Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s

a series of three articles under the general title “Castles in the Air”: “the notion of Britain in decline has become a commonplace.”3 It is worth noting that at the same time consumer spending was strong; in his third article, Jenkins does acknowledge that “you will find nearly everywhere better shops, more good places to eat and drink, improved amenities and cultural facilities” (28 Sept. 1978). It was a period of very colourful and very gifted politicians such as Harold Wilson, Denis Healey, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Margaret Thatcher, and Shirley Williams. Writing during the Labour Party leadership crisis of the summer of 2016, the Guardian columnist Marina Hyde lamented the lack of talent on offer when compared with the leadership race of 1976. In her view, the figures involved in that earlier contest were “Not so much big beasts, you might say, as galaxy class beasts” (“Eyes Down”). In biblical phraseology, one could say “There were giants in the earth in those days” – though perhaps it was easier to appear heroic before the advent of the twenty-four-hour news cycle. During the late 1960s and 1970s Britain was remade in a liberal image, and in 1975, by the considerable majority of about two-thirds, the country resolved to remain in the European Economic Community, often called the “Common Market.” There were a number of defining moments that still form part of British political discourse: the Grunwick strike, Margaret Thatcher’s “Iron Lady” speech, the “Winter of Discontent,” and the Conservative Party’s “Labour Isn’t Working” campaign in 1979. In terms of political anxiety, the latter part of Edward Heath’s Conservative government, preceding the “Who Governs” election of February 1974, was a particular low point. Several editorials and articles in the right-wing weekly the Spectator sounded the theme of crisis and even of the end of parliamentary democracy. A column in the Christmas 1973 issue opined: “Sunk in the sloth of affluence, Britain and her Western allies have so long persuaded themselves that nothing can greatly disturb the even tenor of their prosperous existence that states of emergency and national crises come as deep shocks” (“Christmas”). In the same issue, the political commentator Patrick Cosgrave published an article on the topic “Could the Army Take Over?” in which he wrote:

Introduction

7

Furthermore, just as happened in Russia before their Revolution, the intelligentsia in this country have for long been both preaching anti-parliamentary forms of political activity and ideas subversive of the broadly accepted moral consensus of the country … But of this I am certain: no coup will take place in this country until it is one that would be welcomed or quietly acquiesced in by a majority or a very large minority of the people. But in my judgement, we have gone measurably down the road to such acceptance in the last decade, and we have travelled very quickly along it in the last year. Only a few weeks before the February 1974 election, the Spectator commented on the labour dispute between the government and the coal miners in an editorial entitled “Irresponsibly to Disaster,” suggesting that “we may begin to feel that Britain is on a Chilean brink” (121). These political and social issues were inevitably reflected in the literature and popular culture of the 1970s. An apocalyptic tone infuses some of the fiction of the period, notably the novels of Doris Lessing. John le Carré represents the British establishment as exhausted by the conflicts of the Cold War, blinkered by class prejudice, and riddled with treachery. The drama of the period is often more overtly politically committed than the fiction, as in the work of Howard Brenton, David Edgar, and Caryl Churchill. In Brenton’s Churchill Play (1974), Britain appears as a totalitarian state where citizens are subject to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment in concentration camps. Edgar’s Destiny (1976) begins with the moment of Indian independence, and then moves forward to the 1970s to explore the rise of the far right in the west midlands. If novels tend not to be as polemical as drama, the same political issues are nevertheless explored in much of the fiction of the decade, and this study is centred on novels in which those issues are especially apparent. The books I have selected were all both critically esteemed and broadly popular with the reading public. The authors to be analyzed in detail include John Fowles, Margaret Drabble, John le Carré, Richard Adams, Malcolm Bradbury,

8

Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s

David Lodge, Doris Lessing, and V.S. Naipaul. Some attention will be given to writers such as Piers Paul Read, Kingsley Amis, Tom Sharpe, and Anthony Powell. Political issues are important in all of these writers; some works, such as Fowles’s Daniel Martin and Bradbury’s The History Man, are explicitly political in the way that Benjamin Disraeli’s Young England trilogy of the 1840s is political, while in others, such as Richard Adams’s Watership Down, politics is present in a more allegorical or displaced manner. The works of Doris Lessing, while addressing social crisis, express a disillusionment with the possibility of effecting meaningful change through the political process.

the “Situation of the Novel” The sense of national decline was pervasive in the cultural sphere as well in other areas of life, and the British novel was frequently seen as timid and conventional in relation to works produced in France or the United States. Surveying “the state of the novel” in 2008, Dominic Head says that “The English novel in particular, prior to the 1980s, has often been characterized as provincial, insular, and dominated by conventional forms of realism, and it is this perception of an essentially uninventive literary scene that, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, gave rise to repeated assertions that the English novel was an exhausted form, in a state of terminal decline” (State of the Novel, 10). An influential touchstone for discussions of the novel was Bernard Bergonzi’s The Situation of the Novel (1970), a book that continues to provide a reference point for literary historians.4 Bergonzi is mainly concerned with the state of the liberal British realist novel, and his anxieties about the “situation” of the genre are clearly related to concerns about the state of the nation. As he writes in his preface, “to write about modern English fiction is also, in some measure, to attempt to define what it means to be English at the present time” (7). In a chapter significantly entitled “The Ideology of Being English,” Bergonzi suggests that “The global unimportance of Britain is not consciously realised in this country, though I suspect that unconsciously it is grasped very well, and is the cause of many current national neuroses and

Introduction

9

traumas” (57). As a result, “English literature in the fifties and sixties has been both backward- and inward-looking” (56). Although he is frustrated with the conservatism of British fiction and the parochialism of its concerns, Bergonzi is also critical of documentary and non-realist tendencies in literature, and of the French nouveau roman, describing the current situation as an “impasse” with no clear way out (79).5 His anxiety about national identity is characteristic of the time, while the manner in which he uses the terms “English” and “Britain” shows that certain aspects of national identity remain unproblematic for him. David Lodge similarly sees the novel, realism, and liberalism as interconnected in a vital trinity in his landmark essay “The Novelist at the Crossroads,” first published in 1969. Doris Lessing, as will be seen in chapter 5, affirmed the tradition of literary realism in her contribution to Tom Maschler’s 1957 anthology Declaration, though by the 1970s she had moved away from the Marxist thinking that inspired her Lukácsian aesthetics in that essay. Her fictional practice in the 1970s embodied the kind of writing that was known at the time as fabulation. Following Robert Scholes, David Lodge defines fabulation in terms of its opposition to realism, and sees it as encompassing “the purely ‘fictional’ modes of allegory and romance” (Novelist, 6). For Lodge, who still wishes to affirm the value of realism, the novelist is at a crossroads, with paths diverging from the realist tradition in the two directions of fabulation and the “nonfiction novel” (Novelist, 18–19) The debate about fiction in Britain in the years around 1970 was as much a debate about the nature of reality as it was about the best form of fiction in which to imitate that reality. Lodge writes at the end of “The Novelist at the Crossroads”: The non-fiction novel and fabulation are radical forms which take their impetus from an extreme reaction to the world we live in – The Armies of the Night and Giles Goat-boy are equally products of the apocalyptic imagination. The assumption behind such experiments is that our “reality” is so extraordinary, horrific or absurd that the methods of conventional realistic imagination are no longer adequate. There is no point in

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Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s

carefully creating fiction that gives an illusion of reality when life itself seems illusory. (33) As Norman Mailer put it in a quotation that Lodge uses as epigraph for his essay, “reality is no longer realistic” (Lodge, 3). But Lodge contends with a liberal reasonableness that most of us most of the time live our lives on the assumption that reality makes some kind of sense. His essay conducts a modest defence of realism against those who argued that fabulation was better suited to address present concerns than was realism. It is both widely assumed and frequently disputed that there was a revival of the realist tradition in the British novel after the Second World War, and the revival is often connected to a retreat from international modernism after the ideological excesses leading up to the war, with the style and ethos of George Orwell an important influence. Suburban and provincial settings and everyday experience are central to the poetry of the Movement and the fiction associated with the Angry Young Men, both of which were promoted energetically. There was a related flourishing of novels and plays that realistically portrayed working-class and lower middle-class life, by authors such as John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow, Keith Waterhouse, and Shelagh Delaney. Commenting on the postwar novel, Malcolm Bradbury both recognizes the partial truth of this view of the revival of realism and resists its mythologization. His common-sense account is very useful in dealing with the vexed question of realism in post-war fiction. He suggests that “The ‘return to realism’ that formed a powerful trend in post-war fiction came in part from the desire to return damaged words to useful meanings, to make new modes of thought possible” (Modern British, 267). This is in line with Orwell’s views as expressed in “Politics and the English Language,” and Bradbury argues further that “The gravitational tug of liberal realism generally remains in the most important novels of the Sixties, even experimental ones” (377). John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), with its loving pastiche of Victorian realism in a text that is in many ways postmodern, is a good illustration of Bradbury’s point about the persistence of the realistic mode of writing.

Introduction

11

In 1977, Bradbury edited The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction, which reprinted essays by well-known novelists and some critics from both sides of the Atlantic. His introduction to this anthology is another valuable document in the debate about the novel and its future. He refuses to take sides in the argument between realism and fabulation, suggesting reasonably enough that the novel as a genre tends towards two opposed poles, a “propensity toward realism, social documentation and interrelation with historical events and movements,” and a “propensity toward form, fictionality, and reflexive self-examination” (Novel Today, 8). Furthermore, Bradbury suggests that the view that English writing of the 1950s was “intrinsically anti-experimental” is “a somewhat unreliable orthodoxy” that was constructed by the Americans who had been the most attentive students of post-war British fiction, in works like Frederick R. Karl’s A Reader’s Guide to the Contemporary English Novel and Rubin Rabinovitz’s The Reaction against Experiment in the English Novel: 1950–1960 (17). Realism is an elusive term that is frequently wielded polemically, whether positively or negatively. In this study, I use it primarily to refer to fiction that self-consciously locates itself in the tradition of British realist and humanist fiction, defined by Bradbury as tending toward social documentation and closely related to the matter of history. Lodge also provides a helpful account of realism in his Modes of Modern Writing: “A working definition of realism in literature might be: the representation of experience in a manner which approximates closely to descriptions of similar experiences in nonliterary texts of the same culture. Realistic fiction, being concerned with the actions of individuals in time, approximates to history” (25; italics in original). Another interesting source of commentary on the state of the novel from the 1970s is a symposium conducted by the New Review in 1979, in which a large number of novelists and critics were asked to respond to two questions, the first on “the development of fiction in English over the last ten years or so” and the second about what they hoped or anticipated would happen in the next decade (“State of Fiction,” 14). The journal printed fifty-six replies, many of them by influential figures, and not surprisingly there is a lot of doom and gloom. Quite a few of the authors refer to economic

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Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s

and material factors: the poor financial rewards for writing fiction, the problems of distribution, and the lack of a public lending right. Two responses in particular exemplify what was and to some extent continues to be a critical orthodoxy about post-war fiction. Isabel Colegate, who to my mind is a significantly under-appreciated novelist, wrote that “As far as English fiction is concerned … times have never been worse, whether as regards the quality of new work, the state of fiction criticism, the general reputation of the novel as a serious literary form, or the economic circumstances in which a novelist has to work” (32). Eva Figes declared that “Mainstream English fiction is locked in the social realist tradition of the nineteenth century and seems unable or unwilling to shake off the shackles of that prescriptive structure” (39). Malcolm Bradbury argued that the last two decades have in fact seen “greater variety, richness and experimental curiosity,” though he concedes that these developments are not generally perceived, so that “we also have a surrounding atmosphere of serious depression” (25). Some writers are more optimistic, notably J.G. Ballard, and also to some extent Kingsley Amis, who anticipates that so-called genre fiction will continue to flourish at the expense of the literary, or as he terms it the “straight” novel (15). A further point that was often made in literary journalism was the small number of readers for serious fiction, especially in relation to the large number of new novels published each year. For example, in the course of a review of Shiva Naipaul’s Fireflies in the Spectator, Auberon Waugh observed with characteristic acerbity: “One of the many unsavoury characteristics of our age is that whereas the spread of education has vastly increased the number of those who wish to write novels, it has actually reduced the number of those who wish to read them” (“Old Order”). John Sutherland’s Fiction and the Fiction Industry (1978) offered some explanations for the lamentations that I have just outlined by approaching the state of British publishing from the perspective of literary sociology. He identifies a number of causes that conspired to make the situation of the novelist a challenging one. Inflation and the energy crisis had vastly increased the costs of publishing, at the same time that libraries, which still bought a significant percentage of hardcover novels in Britain, were cutting back on their

Introduction

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purchases due to budgetary constraints. Increasingly, British authors could only flourish if they had significant American sales, and so the novel was becoming internationalized. Against all expectations, however, things improved for at least some novelists amid the restructuring of the British economy under Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, as will be briefly discussed in my final chapter. Even as the death of the novel was being rumoured, and dire prognostications were being published in the New Review and elsewhere, writers such as Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro were beginning what would be very successful careers in an era that was dominated by the prestige of the Booker Prize, and in which the literary author often became a celebrity figure. The Booker Prize was established in 1969, and grew steadily in influence through the 1970s, while in the next decade it had a large, and, for some, disproportionate influence on the publishing of fiction in Britain. In fact, Richard Todd suggests in his very thoroughly documented study of the influence of the Booker that “the late twentieth-century prize and media consumer culture does not differ substantially from aristocratic patronage in the age of Shakespeare” (Consuming Fictions, 10). The prize was open to books written in English and published in Britain, but authors from the United States were excluded until 2014. The fact that it was not restricted to British authors meant that the Booker played an important role in the increased awareness of post-colonial writing, especially without the presence of Americans to distract attention.6 V.S. Naipaul won the prize in 1971, and in the next two decades winners included Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, Keri Hulme, Ben Okri, Michael Ondaatje, and Arundhati Roy, in addition to Salman Rushdie, who not only won the prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children, but later won the “Booker of Bookers” to celebrate the award’s twenty-fifth anniversary and the “Best of the Booker” on the fortieth anniversary. However, he missed out on the literary equivalent of a Grand Slam when Ondaatje’s English Patient (1992) won the Golden Man Booker Prize, awarded in July 2018 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the prize. In addition to the Booker Prize there are many others. For instance, the Whitbread (now Costa) Book Awards date from 1971, and the Guardian Fiction Prize ran from 1965–98. There has been

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some debate about the extent to which the existence of literary prizes, and especially the Booker, play a role in what James W. English calls “the postmodern economy of cultural prestige” (“Winning,” 110). English argues quite persuasively that the various controversies that have accompanied the award of the Booker from its earliest days have enabled it to outdo all the other British literary prizes combined “in terms of the sheer volume of publicity, renown and book sales it could generate for its winner” (114). A skeptical view of the effect of this prestige is put forward by Graham Huggan in The Postcolonial Exotic. Responding to celebratory accounts of the prize’s positive influence in promoting difference, he says that such views fail to account for “the possibility that prizes like the Booker might work to contain cultural (self-) critique by endorsing the commodification of a glamorised cultural difference” (199). It is hard to separate the effect of the Booker from all the other elements that go into the construction of literary reputation and the literary canon, but it cannot be denied that it played a significant role in the careers of Naipaul, Rushdie, Ishiguro, and Ondaatje, although so did other factors such as the responses of the reading public and the institutions of criticism, and film adaptations. After all, some winners of the Booker Prize are hardly well known today even in literary circles (e.g., Bernice Rubens or DBC Pierre), while other very highly regarded books were not even short-listed (e.g., Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival). Stephen M. Levin reasonably stakes out a middle position in the debate, suggesting that although the Booker might be thought to privilege a literary type he calls “the cosmopolitan global novel,” one should not ignore the “interventions and counternarratives” that the prize can enable. Thus in Levin’s view the Booker Prize “reflects a pervasive tension at the heart of disparate theorizations of ‘world literature,’ between a homogenized globalism and vernacular creativities” (“Booker Aesthetic,” 486). Still on the subject of prizes and global literature, the Nobel Prize for literature played an important role in global politics when it recognized the Russian dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1970. Solzhenitsyn was hailed as an icon of freedom by many in the West, and became an important figure in the Cold War. The Gulag Archipelago, published in English (1974–78) was an international

Introduction

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bestseller, and Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West in 1974, whereupon he was regarded as an exemplary martyr until he turned his criticism onto Western societies. He is mentioned in the state-ofthe-nation novels of Margaret Drabble and John Fowles. It should also be noted that two of the authors in this study were recognized by the Swedish Academy with the Nobel Prize, V.S. Naipaul in 2001 and Doris Lessing in 2007. One of the most striking things about the fiction of the 1970s, when it is compared with what comes after it, is its focus on the contemporary. The historical novel was not a major literary form, in spite of the impetus provided by Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, whose effects would not really be felt until the next decade. The writers I discuss tended to be concerned with, in Anthony Trollope’s words, “the way we live now.”7 This is apparent in the stateof-the-nation novels of Margaret Drabble and John Fowles, as it is in the Cold War fiction of John le Carré, in Muriel Spark’s version of the Watergate scandal, relocated to a British convent, in The Abbess of Crewe (1974), and in the accounts of the post-colonial condition by V.S. Naipaul. There were, of course, some significant historical novels published in the 1970s, though I have excluded them from consideration. Among the most noteworthy are J.G. Farrell’s Troubles (1970), set in Ireland immediately after the First World War, and his The Siege of Krishnapur, which was based on the events of the Indian Rebellion in 1857 and won the 1973 Booker Prize. In 2010, Troubles won the Lost Man Booker Prize, awarded because a rule change had made books published in 1970 ineligible for the prize (see “Lost Man”).

What Is a Political Novel? “Politics” has been a central term in literary studies since the 1980s, but I shall begin further back, with Irving Howe’s classic Politics and the Novel (1957). Howe begins by attempting to define the political novel, and his totally pragmatic definition is that it is “any novel I wished to treat as if it were a political novel,” although he adds that “clearly one would not want to treat most novels in that way” (17). For Howe, the category of “political novel” indicates nothing more

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Politics and the British Novel in the 1970s

than “a dominant emphasis, a significant stress in the writer’s subject or in his attitude toward it,” so that it can be defined as “a novel in which political ideas play a dominant role or in which the political milieu is the dominant setting” (16, 17). In spite of his focus on politics, Howe suggests that his main emphasis remains one of literary form: “My interest was far less in literature as social evidence or testimony than in the literary problem of what happens in the novel when it is subjected to the pressures of politics and political ideology” (11). On the other hand, he begins his book by quoting an analogy from Stendhal that suggests there is something surprising and outrageous about the political novel: “‘Politics in a work of literature,’ wrote Stendhal, ‘is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar, and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one’s attention’” (15). Howe’s approach recognizes that the classification is more the result of the inquirer’s interests and preconceptions than something innate in a particular work. Thus when feminist critics redefined the political to contexts that were previously considered merely domestic or personal, the idea of the political novel underwent a significant modification. For example, Howe regards Jane Austen as a social rather than a political novelist, but Marilyn Butler’s provocative Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (1975) argued that there was insight to be gained in treating her precisely as Howe had not. The reception of Butler’s book suggests that it was perceived by some as “loud and vulgar,” in the manner of the pistol shot in Stendhal’s simile, for there was considerable resistance to the way that it contextualized Austen’s work in the political discourse of her time.8 In the last few decades, various schools of criticism have extended political horizons to the study of almost all literature, so that the idea of politics and the novel has become more a matter of business as usual than the shocking eruption of something loud and vulgar into an aesthetic occasion. Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, and Elaine Showalter, to name some influential literary scholars, are very different kinds of critics, with divergent understandings of politics and approaches to literary analysis, but they have in common the fact that their political convictions have fundamentally shaped the way they read texts. Each of them

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exemplifies the power of commitments in the political sphere to generate new modes of reading, and their effect has been to reshape the literary canon and alter the way in which established classics are perceived. Historical and political commentary has come to dominate literary studies, in a way that some suggest has become formulaic and predictable, and there have been calls, for example in some of the essays collected in Allen Dunn and Thomas Haddox’s The Limits of Literary Historicism, for a return to the kind of close reading that was practised by the New Critics. Joseph North makes a similar case in his eloquent polemic Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, in spite of his declared radical leftist allegiance, arguing for a return to what he calls a “materialist aesthetics,” which he locates in I.A. Richards’s concept of criticism. North’s central and carefully constructed argument is that literary studies has been characterized by a long battle between literary scholarship and literary criticism, and that the dominance of historicist analysis over the past several decades constitutes the victory of scholarship over criticism. However, North also suggests that it would be wrong to see this as in any way a victory for the left; in fact, “it is better to say that the opposite is true” (3). My own approach seeks to affirm the value both of close reading and of historical contextualization, making it an essentially liberal approach. The relationship between liberalism and Marxism will be a motif in a number of the novels that I discuss, and I will briefly explore the complexities of liberalism below. One of the problems with North’s book is that, as Stefan Collini pointed out in a review, he really has only two political categories, Marxism and what he calls liberalism, by which he seems to mean more or less everything that is “not Marxist” (“A Lot”). I also think that North overlooks the genuine criticism to be found in writers such as Fredric Jameson, Raymond Williams, or Stephen Greenblatt, not to mention numerous feminist projects of re-evaluation and recovery. In my analysis of the novels of the 1970s, I have followed Irving Howe in using a flexible and pragmatic definition of the political, rather than a conceptually rigorous one. There is a lot in this book about politics in the traditional sense of political parties and their policies and leadership struggles, elections and election issues, and

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conflicting theories about the organization of the state and the role of the state in society. A significant part of my research has been in political history, journalism, and memoirs. On the other hand, critics such as Fredric Jameson and Marilyn Butler have found the political in unlikely places, hidden from sight, displaced into symbols that must be decoded, and some of what I call politics would not be recognized as such by writers like Benjamin Disraeli or Anthony Trollope. Nevertheless, the dominant concern is with novels where ideological positions are consciously represented and where the narrative implies the need for some kind of action, whether joining a political party, as suggested by John Fowles’s Daniel Martin, or taking steps to reduce the adverse effect of human behaviour on the natural world, as suggested by the work of Doris Lessing and Richard Adams. One of the most subtle and suggestive discussions of the social and political implications of literature is Theodor W. Adorno’s “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” an essay that originated as a talk on German radio in 1958. Focusing on what one would think to be the most intransigent of literary forms to Marxist analysis, Adorno argues that “the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism” (45), but his analysis never loses sight of the integrity of the individual poem. In retrospect, “On Lyric Poetry and Society” can be seen as a prophetic warning to the forms of literary criticism that would come to dominate in the late twentieth century and beyond: Social concepts should not be applied to the works from without but rather drawn from an exacting examination of the works themselves … Special vigilance is required when it comes to the concept of ideology, which these days is belabored to the point of intolerability. For ideology is untruth, false consciousness, deceit. It manifests itself in the failure of works of art, in their inherent falseness, and it is countered by criticism. To repeat mechanically, however, that great works of art, whose essence consists in giving form to the crucial contradictions in real existence, and only in that sense in a tendency to reconcile them, are ideology, not only does an

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injustice to their truth content but also misrepresents the concept of ideology. (39) I would identify Adorno’s essay as an important overarching inspiration for my approach. I am also sympathetic to Stephen Greenblatt’s resistance to theoretical abstraction in “Towards a Poetics of Culture.” Greenblatt suggests that capitalism, for example, should be “invoked not as a unitary demonic principle, but as a complex historical movement in a world without paradisal origins or chiliastic expectations” (Reader, 22). Finally, Amanda Anderson’s Bleak Liberalism is a critical book that strikes me as exemplary in the way that it is attentive both to the specificity of the literary text and to the text’s exploration of political ideas. In an elegant and economical argument focused on a series of individual authors, it illuminates the history of the novel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and suggests the outline of a robust form of liberalism that resists the facile caricature of that ideology that is frequently constructed by theorists of both the left and the right. I will return to Anderson’s argument at several points in the chapters that follow. Liberalism is one of the most slippery terms in the contemporary intellectual lexicon, and since it is an important concept in relation to most of the authors I discuss, I will explore it in a bit more detail here. Commenting on North’s use of the word “liberal” in the review previously cited, Collini says that “it’s hard not to feel that in recent years it has become almost unusable unless prefaced by elaborate definitional preliminaries” (“A Lot”). Collini himself had defined political liberalism at some length in his first book: As a political theory, Liberalism is generally taken to be characterized above all by its individualism, that is, by its tendency to take the rational individual pursuing the satisfaction of his non-context-dependent wants as both the unit of analysis and the locus of value. A belief in maximizing the individual citizen’s freedom from restraint and a corresponding commitment to restricting the role of the state are seen as its typical expressions. It is identified historically with protest against religious and political authority. (Liberalism, 1)

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Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies can be seen a classic expression of economic liberalism, or what is now generally called neo-liberalism. One of the goals of Anderson’s Bleak Liberalism is to rescue what she calls “existing liberalisms” from the occlusion brought about by the pervasive use of “neoliberalism as a concept and diagnostic term for the contemporary condition” (39). Like many others, she looks back to Isaiah Berlin’s essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” with its distinction between negative and positive freedom.9 The former is expressed “in its classical form” by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (“Two Concepts,” 128), while the latter is an idea of self-realization, which can lead believers in a specific idea of the good to seek to impose it on others by coercion. Berlin identifies a moment of what Anderson would see as bleakness in the necessity to make political choices between incommensurable values. Negative and positive freedom are not reconcilable: “it seems to me that the belief that some single formula can in principle be found whereby all the diverse ends of men can be harmoniously realized is demonstrably false” (169). This means that the possibility of tragedy is always present in human existence. Berlin advocates pluralism as an ideal, for it recognizes “that human goals are many, not all of them commensurable, and in perpetual rivalry with one another” (171). If one aspect of liberalism found expression in the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher, another found expression in the social legislation associated with Roy Jenkins, who, though the holder of several cabinet posts in Labour governments, was not so much a socialist as someone who viewed the Labour party “as the natural inheritor of Asquithian Liberalism” (Campbell, Roy Jenkins, 148). He is associated with legislation legalizing homosexuality, easing access to abortion, abolishing stage censorship, and reforming the criminal justice system. All of these are classically liberal policies, which went along with an interventionist view of the state in other areas, such as improving “race relations.” Jenkins is often remembered for an epigram which he didn’t quite say, but also did not repudiate when it was attributed to him: “The permissive society is the civilised society” (299). My own use of the term often has the political example of Jenkins in mind. At the same time, I seek to

Introduction

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balance his sanguine view of human existence with the more pessimistic perspective of Anderson’s bleak liberals. She quotes Reinhold Niebuhr as saying that “Democracy is a method of finding proximate solutions for insoluble problems” (qtd in Bleak Liberalism, 28). I affirm Anderson’s hope that a better understanding of the range and depth of liberalism “will allow us to perceive a literary history more complex and various in its political imaginings than many of the dominant frameworks admit” (45). A related sense of liberalism refers to liberal humanism as an approach to literary culture, in the tradition of Matthew Arnold and E.M. Forster. Malcolm Bradbury’s fiction explores the viability of this mode of thinking and interpreting in post-war Britain. For Berlin, liberal humanism is “a form of secularized Protestant individualism, in which the place of God is taken by the conception of the rational life” (“Two Concepts,” 138). Liberalism is a negative term for both conservatives and Marxists, though in the context of Britain in the 1970s, in both politics and literary studies, its primary intellectual antagonist is Marxism. For Lodge, Bradbury, and Bergonzi, liberalism as an ideology was paralleled by realism as a literary practice. Fowles and Lessing, well read in the European tradition, draw on the Marxist understanding of realism in their poetics of the novel. They agree with Georg Lukács that the novel gives objective form to the totality of significant social relationships in a particular society (see The Meaning of Contemporary Realism). It may be helpful to explore a little further the question of what the political work of the novel is, both in relation to the genre in general and in terms of its more overtly political examples. Some works of fiction are explicitly concerned with human beings as political actors, like the Palliser novels of Anthony Trollope, and some consider the clash of political ideas in relation to social problems, for example, the Young England trilogy of Benjamin Disraeli. At certain moments a writer can take on a representative status in a political struggle, as was the case with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn during the Cold War, when he represented individual freedom and opposition to totalitarianism both to Russian dissidents and to the West. The relation of literature to politics was brought to the fore once again with the turbulent political scene during and after the 2016

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American presidential election. At the end of January 2017, a week after the inauguration of Donald Trump as president, it was widely reported that amazon.com’s bestsellers included Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (e.g., Stelter, “Amazon’s”). Peter Boxall makes a large claim for the role played by the novel in the history of the modern liberal state: “it is the novel that has allowed us to narrate to ourselves the passage of modern democracy, the novel that has given us the closest and most intimate access to the minds of others, so that we might build collective lifeworlds” (Value, 11). The novel thus has helped to define the notion of citizenship, a topic that is important in several of the novels I discuss in detail. Writing in collaboration with Bryan Cheyette in the concluding essay of British and Irish Fiction since 1940, Boxall elaborates further on the relationship of the novel to history: “if the novel is fashioned by history, it also maintains a critical relationship with it … The novel … is not a historical symptom, or not only a historical symptom; it is also a kind of historical diagnosis, a means both of exhibiting historical change, and of seeing into the place from which historical change arises” (British and Irish, 565–6). This double vision seems to me a very useful account of the political work of the novel. Boxall and Cheyette suggest that novels are the product of historical forces, so that they can be read symptomatically, as a way of understanding historical change. At the same time, and more importantly, novels themselves read the forces of history, making them visible to us as readers. Novels allow us to better understand the social and even physical world that we inhabit, they actively shape our understanding of that world, and they can also influence our action within that world. For example, reading the campus novels of the 1970s might make us more aware of the variety of reasons why people hold the political positions that they do, and cause us to think more deeply about the nature of liberalism and its limitations as well as strengths. To take another example, reading Watership Down might affect our perception of nature, so that instead of a vague canvas of weeds and wildflowers we see the distinct and diverse species that comprise a roadside embankment, and this in turn might change our attitude towards the

Introduction

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way we interact with nature. Furthermore, Adams’s novel was a precursor to and probably an influence on the resurgence of British nature writing in the twenty-first century, and the contemporaneous revival of rural fiction, accompanied by the rise of ecocriticism.

the 1970s Novel and Literary History Kerry McSweeney’s book Four Contemporary Novelists (1983) provided a critical account of Angus Wilson, Brian Moore, John Fowles, and V.S. Naipaul, emphasizing that, at a time when many regarded the realist novel as an exhausted form, these writers “remained committed to the representational, communicative, and instructive functions of the novel” (3). A generation later, what was contemporary to McSweeney has become part of a defined historical period, but the issue of realism remains central to any attempt to write its literary history, and in focusing on politics and the novel, I will comment in detail on two of McSweeney’s four novelists. I will conclude this introduction with some comments about the literary history of the 1970s, and about the authors I have chosen as principal points of attention. In the appendix to Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City, one character writes in a letter that all through his life “there has been an obsession with dates, decades, periods, times. It is because the ‘flavour’ of living changed so much from decade to decade, even from year to year” (654). There is always something artificial about taking a decade as the subject of a historical study, and there have been forceful criticisms of “decaditis,” but as the quotation from Lessing suggests, through the twentieth century people have increasingly thought about the passage of time in ten-year units.10 Bloomsbury has published a series of books that provide a history of the British novel in the post-war period, with a volume for each decade, under the overall title “The Decades Series.” The general editors defend this approach as a way of “making meaning,” however arbitrary it may seem (Hubble et al., 1970s, viii). It should also be pointed out that several facts of political and literary history serve to give the 1970s a logical coherence as a unit of investigation beyond the simple measure of the calendar. In politics, the decade began with

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a new Conservative government, and after five years of Labour it concluded with the election of a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher that in retrospect can be seen as the ending of the post-war political consensus. In terms of literature, Bernard Bergonzi’s Situation of the Novel, which serves as both symptom and diagnosis of the anxieties about the state of British fiction, was published in 1970. At the end of the decade, V.S. Naipaul’s acclaimed A Bend in the River (1979) signified the increasing “globalization” of British fiction, as did Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the winner of the Booker Prize in 1981. As Bruce King observes in the conclusion to his The Internationalization of English Literature, in the 1970s and 1980s decolonization was “overtaken by a larger historical movement of which it was a part, the globalization of the world’s economy, communications, transportation, education, and the internationalization of modern technology” (322). This transformation had a major impact on the production and reception of literature. Thus 1980 is probably as convenient a point as any to date the commencement of a new phase in British literature. In their different ways, Rushdie and Thatcher are key British figures of the 1980s.11 Rushdie can be seen as emblematic of the increasingly global nature of writing in English, and of the internationalization of British literature; he is also an exemplary case of a postmodern author, and of the turn to history, and so for Linda Hutcheon he is a key example of her concept of “historiographic metafiction,” which she defines as “those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages (Poetics, 5). Because of the fatwa pronounced against him by the Ayatollah Khomeini and his experience of going into hiding, Rushdie also represents, in a way that Solzhenitsyn did for the previous decade, the inextricable involvement of literature in public discourse and global events. Thatcher represents, among other things, the assertion of individualism and the entrepreneurial spirit, and the economic and social aspects of Thatcherism had counterparts in the sphere of literature, as I will argue in my concluding chapter.

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Cheyette and Boxall view the period of post-war British literature as concluding with the oil crisis of 1973, which, as John Sutherland has shown in Fiction and the Fiction Industry, had a transformative effect on British publishing (British and Irish, 8).12 This point of division is one of the principal structuring devices of their contribution to the Oxford History of the Novel in English, a volume, one should add, that is the most compendious and authoritative overview of the post-war British novel to date. Alternatively, a focus on politics might locate a punctual moment for Europe and in fact globally in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, I regard 1979 as a significant moment of historical transition, and for the purposes of this study I shall consider the election of Margaret Thatcher as the end point of my investigation, paralleled not exactly in time, but closely enough, by the literary-historical event of the publication of Midnight’s Children. This book does not aim to be a comprehensive history of the British novel in the 1970s, but rather an account of the relationship between politics and the novel in that decade, developed through critical readings of a series of representative texts whose importance is indicated by their critical reception when they first appeared, their popularity, their literary and cultural influence, and their current academic reputation. I am aware that I am implicitly making an argument about a canon, for the 1970s exists in that hinterland between a period where there is at least a provisional decision about which books will endure and the immediate past as it forms part of the experience of the “present” or “contemporary.” Some of the authors I am discussing are still part of the present-day horizon of literary experience, while some of the books are not even available in print format in North America, which is an inhibiting factor in terms of continuing their influence by teaching them in undergraduate courses. There are a variety of ways in which literature can represent political issues and have a political effect, and a number of them are illustrated in the novels that I have selected. The political novel in the English tradition often seeks to scrutinize the state of the nation, representing a variety of social types and different settings.

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This type of novel is exemplified by Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age, which was from its first appearance commented on as much as a statement about the condition of English society as it was discussed as a work of fiction. It appeared in 1977, the same year as John Fowles’s Daniel Martin, a Bildungsroman incorporating ambitious social and political commentary. Drabble’s political position is elusive, and there is a significant religious dimension in The Ice Age, which is not typical of her work, while Daniel Martin is written self-consciously from a socialist perspective. Both authors were bestsellers, and their books were available in drugstore pulp format in North America. The Cold War was a central concern of the 1970s, and that was no doubt a factor in the immense popularity of John le Carré’s espionage fiction. His unglamorous spy George Smiley was a household name, especially after Alec Guinness memorably brought him to life in the television adaptations of the first and third books of the Karla trilogy. Le Carré’s novels are also concerned with the state of England and explore the dilemmas of Cold War liberalism. Phrases and scenes from these novels formed an important strand in the cultural discourse of the time. Richard Adams’s Watership Down is surely one of the most popular books of the decade. It was originally conceived of as a children’s book, but its success led it to be marketed as a work of fantasy literature for all ages, and it appealed to the developing environmental consciousness. It is also a book about different kinds of societies. Watership Down is not often discussed in literary studies, yet it has the status of an enduring classic with young readers, and I think its influence can be detected in much recent British fiction, especially works that are attentive to country life and nature such as Melissa Harrison’s At Hawthorn Time (2015) or Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (2017). In both of these works, the story is set in a small rural community that is powerfully evoked as a physical environment, and the passage of time is marked by references to natural history as well as human experience. When read in the context of British nature writing and rural fiction, Adams seems a considerable figure in literary history, in spite of the relative neglect of his work by academic literary criticism. As a writer shaped by his experience of

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service in the Second World War, Adams is preoccupied with many of the same issues as John le Carré, and in his use of fantasy and fable to express concern about the environment, he can usefully be compared to Doris Lessing. Another popular literary category in the late twentieth century is the campus novel, and it offers an opportunity to explore and satirize politics in an enclosed world where a symbolic kind of politics plays a central role. David Lodge began his celebrated campus trilogy of novels about Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp with Changing Places in 1975, the same year that his friend Malcolm Bradbury published The History Man, a mordant satire on campus radicalism. Bradbury’s novel did not travel across the Atlantic as successfully as Lodge’s, but it probably had a more significant impact in Britain, and like two of le Carré’s novels it was adapted into a very successful television mini-series. Lodge’s most effective commentary on the state of Britain would come in the Thatcher era, with Nice Work (1988), the third instalment of his campus trilogy. Doris Lessing is a writer whose political commitments and fictional treatment of politics make her an essential part of this study. She was associated with the feminist movement, more by adoption than by her own conscious design, but her novels also explore other aspects of politics, from colonialism and imperialism to the environment. In her work of the 1970s there is a strongly apocalyptic tone, as she pushes beyond the conventions of the realist novel in her feminist apologues of inner and outer space. One must decide if Lessing rejected politics altogether, or if she redefined it in ways that suggested, as feminists argued, that the personal is the political. Finally, V.S. Naipaul is a writer who, like Lessing, was already well established at the beginning of the 1970s. However, he emerged as a major figure after winning the Booker Prize for In a Free State in 1971. Like Lessing, Naipaul diagnoses an apocalyptic tendency in the political movements of his time, though this is something he regards with deep suspicion. In a Free State is a harbinger of the globalization of British fiction, and in works by Naipaul like Guerrillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979) England is not the major setting, but rather is seen as playing a diminished,

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but still symbolically important, role within a post-imperial world where nothing is secure and where genuine political action often does not seem a possibility. For Bruce King, “Naipaul became the great international writer of the second half of the twentieth century” (Internationalization, 57), writing his powerful portrayals of the post-colonial world in a secluded cottage on a decaying estate in rural Wiltshire. A number of political threads run through the history of the 1970s. The liberal consensus was pulled in opposite directions by the emergence of both Thatcherism and the far right on one side and by a newly energized radical left on the other. This led to sharp disagreements about the nature of society and the role of the state. The issues of the environment and women’s rights moved to centre stage, while the politics of class was the focal point of industrial disputes and educational policy. In terms of international affairs, the Cold War persisted, though with signs that it was moving into a new phase, and the dismantling of the British empire continued. The attendant anxiety about the future informed the debate about whether Britain should be part of the European Economic Community. Some of the themes and motifs that link the novels I discuss are the decline of the nation, especially as expressed by images of deteriorating urban settings, migration and citizenship, journeys across the face of the country as a means of exploring its condition, relations between the human and animal world, and the persistent aftermath of the Second World War. The latter is a frequent point of reference in the texts I discuss, and indeed the Second World War continues to play a conspicuous role in British political discourse to the present day. The spring of 2020 saw the seventy-fifth anniversary of vE -Day, Queen Elizabeth invoking the war in her address to the nation during the CovID -19 pandemic, and the hundred-yearold war veteran Captain Thomas Moore (known to the public as “Captain Tom”) becoming a celebrity for his fundraising efforts for the National Health Service. I will explore the political issues and thematic elements I have identified in a selection of novels from the 1970s, and in the context of the contemporaneous debate about the state of the novel and its future as a genre. The aim is to see the novels I discuss both within

Introduction

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the horizon of the specifically literary history of the novel and within the larger horizon of the general history of the period, and to show how novels not only represented the politics of the time, but played a meaningful role in its political history. Underlying my approach is the aesthetics of reception of Hans Robert Jauss, who sought to locate the individual work of literature in the horizon of expectations of its first and subsequent readers. The horizon of expectations consists of both the literary assumptions of various types of readers and their more general historical experiences, and it overlaps with the concept of ideology in Marxist criticism.13 The criticism of Stephen Greenblatt and Raymond Williams has also been an important inspiration in terms of the way that they include a historical dimension in the study of culture as a system. While this is primarily a work of literary history and literary criticism, I hope that it will also be seen as a contribution to British studies, and I have followed the lead of that interdisciplinary field in writing with an awareness of the complexities of the idea of the “British nation” and the slipperiness of the terms “English” and British.” This entails writing about Britain with an attentiveness to the global context, and particularly in the 1970s – as in many other periods – with a consciousness of the immediate contexts of Ireland and of Europe for any idea of Britain. As Krishan Kumar observes in The Making of English National Identity, in summing up a survey of recent work in British studies, “What stands out in all these studies is the impossibility of considering ‘England’ or even ‘Britain’ as independent or intelligible units of study. Both are fragments of a larger whole whose boundaries extend to the very limits of the globe” (15).

1 the fiction of Discontent: margaret Drabble’s The ice Age and John fowles’s Daniel Martin We must run glittering like a brook In the open sunshine, or we are unblest: the wealthiest man among us is the best: No grandeur now in nature or in book Delights us. Rapine, avarice, expense, this is idolatry; and these we adore: Plain living and high thinking are no more. WILLIAm WoRDSWoRtH, “WRIttEN IN LoNDoN, SEPtEmBER, 1802”

In 1977, two critically esteemed and popular authors published novels that focused on the state of the nation, Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age and John Fowles’s Daniel Martin. They had each begun to publish fiction in 1963, though Fowles was born thirteen years earlier than Drabble, and by 1977 they were both sufficiently well known to be extensively reviewed on both sides of the Atlantic. The Ice Age has subsequently attained an iconic status among British popular historians of the period as the archetypal novel about the decline of Britain in the 1970s. In a review of five histories of Britain in the 1970s, the historian Lawrence Black comments that The Ice Age “is a favorite of historians seeking evidence of disaffection with modern England” (“New Histories,” 183). Indeed, it is quoted in

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two of the books of popular history that Black is reviewing, Alwyn W. Turner’s Crisis? What Crisis? (104, 276) and Andy Beckett’s When the Lights Went Out (127, 179). It also figures as a recurrent point of reference in the two volumes about the 1970s in Dominic Sandbrook’s history of post-war Britain: State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970–1974 (20, 187, 342) and Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979 (80–1, 85, 88, 367). Additionally, each of Sandbrook’s volumes has an epigraph from The Ice Age, further reinforcing the novel’s representative quality. In Seasons in the Sun, he suggests that the themes of “death, decline, desolation, disillusionment” are prevalent in much of the literary fiction of the later 1970s, and he quotes both Daniel Martin and The Ice Age as key examples (88).1 This chapter will look at the similarities between these two novels in their presentation of the state of Britain, and then at the way they diverge in terms of the contexts they provide for their diagnoses and the course of action they recommend. Some attention will be paid to the reception of the novels, both at the time of publication and in subsequent literary criticism. During the 1970s, there was a common belief that there was something wrong with the state of Britain. There is considerable historical evidence to support this perception, even if other evidence suggests that for many people living conditions had never been better.2 There was a pessimistic tone to much of the cultural, social, and political discourse of the decade, and that tone persists significantly in the communal memory, perpetuated in cultural artifacts, journalists’ references, and politician’s speeches, and thereby handed down to those too young to remember the events of the 1970s. When people think of those years, they recall, or think they recall, confrontations about wages, attempts to control inflation, the three-day week, states of emergency, miners’ strikes, and power cuts. The especially harsh winter and the series of public sector strikes of 1978–79 became known as the “Winter of Discontent,”3 a phrase taken from the familiar opening lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III: Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this son of York,

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And all the clouds that loured upon our house In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. (I.i.1–4) In the discourse of politicians and journalists, Shakespeare’s metaphorical winter became a statement of historical fact. The phrase “winter of discontent” had been used in political contexts before 1979, and was applied to the public sector strikes of 1978–79 by several journalists,4 but its reference was indelibly established by the Sun newspaper’s use of it in the headline of a centre-page feature on 30 April 1979, only days before the 1979 general election, admonishing readers not to forget the ordeal of the previous winter (James Thomas, Popular Newspapers, 84). The admonishment was repeated by the Conservative Party in subsequent election campaigns, and even by the rebranded “New” Labour Party of Tony Blair, in the campaign that returned Labour to power after eighteen years in the electoral wilderness.5 The phrase thus lives vividly in the popular imagination, often conflated with images from earlier crises of the 1970s. In her book on the Winter of Discontent, Tara Martin López documents the various labour disputes of 1978–79, and also analyzes the way that the crisis functions as “myth” rather than history in later political discourse. Although historical references in a political context always serve some sort of ideological function, the Winter of Discontent crystallized a group of related anxieties about Britain into an exceptionally potent and durable myth, compounded from a passage in Shakespeare and images of disruptive trade unions and craven government. The Winter of Discontent is most frequently epitomized in a triplet of what Martin López calls “‘synecdochic’ images”: “piles of rubbish strewn about the streets of Britain, striking gravediggers, and hospital pickets (and most often in this order)” (Winter, 21). Though there were other strikes during the winter of 1979, it is the public squalor of the uncollected garbage and the assault on the most basic tenets of human decency, burying the dead and caring for the sick, that became key elements in the myth.6 A consensus was established that the winter of 1978–79 encapsulated everything that was wrong with Britain in the 1970s. The crisis was furthermore seen as the responsibility of the government of James Callaghan

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(prime minister from 1976 to 1979), who appeared powerless in the face of the trade unions and the growing power of the left within the Labour Party, even though Labour and Conservative governments had pursued similar, and similarly inconsistent, policies regarding the economy and industrial relations for at least the past ten years. Commenting on the confused remembering of the events of the time, Andy Beckett claims in When the Lights Went Out to have often read “that the punk revolt of 1976–7 was a ‘reaction’ to the Winter of Discontent of 1978–9” (6). Ironically, the only hint of Shakespeare’s contrasting image of “glorious summer” among the events of 1978–79 is James Callaghan’s trip to Barbados after attending a summit in Guadeloupe in January 1979. In a press conference on his return, he dismissed the idea that Britain was in a state of chaos, and his attitude was summed up by the Sun in the infamous headline “Crisis? What Crisis?”7 He was presented as sunning himself in the Caribbean while England froze and was paralyzed by strikes. In a manner similar to “the winter of discontent,” the phrase “crisis? what crisis?” entered the cultural lexicon, providing a damning verdict on Callaghan even though he did not actually use the words.8 Perhaps ultimately the judgment of history will be kinder to Callaghan than the view that is summed up by this headline. At the time, it changed his reputation from that of the avuncular “Sunny Jim,” the competent Old Labour patriot, to that of a man out of touch with the country and unconcerned with the hardships that ordinary people were suffering. It has often been argued that he should have called an election in the fall of 1978, as it was widely anticipated that he would.9 But perhaps he was the author of his downfall in a different way: as a former trade union official, he had been a strong defender of the rights of unions, and he played a key role in sabotaging Barbara Castle’s efforts at union reform in the Wilson government in 1969, earning him the nickname “Keeper of the Cloth Cap” (Sandbrook, Seasons, 460). There is a kind of tragic inevitability in the way that Callaghan’s efforts to restrict pay claims to 5 per cent during the Winter of Discontent were disregarded by union leaders, causing his government to look weak and unable to pursue its stated economic policy goals.10 Even Callaghan’s sympathetic biographer Kenneth O. Morgan

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concludes that “no government in British history, Labour or otherwise, had been so helpless in the face of the undisciplined brute force of union power” (Callaghan, 672). The fractious years that led up to the 1979 general election provide the context for the writing and the reception of The Ice Age and Daniel Martin. The two novels are prefaced by epigraphs that reflect on the state of the nation and that establish reference points for the allusions that permeate the narratives that follow. Drabble begins with a passage from Milton’s Areopagitica (1644) comparing England, “a noble and puissant Nation,” to both a strong man rousing himself after sleep and to an eagle moulting. This is followed by a passage from one of Wordsworth’s political sonnets, “London, 1802” (Drabble quotes the opening one and a half lines and lines 6–10).11 Wordsworth’s poem is written in a Miltonic mode and expressly invokes the precursor poet as a figure of not only poetic but also ethical force, capable of returning in spirit to renew the nation: “Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: / England hath need of thee” (lines 1–2). Wordsworth seeks to revivify, in fact to embody in himself, Milton’s integrity, both to inspire his own verse and to inspire the nation to a return to virtue during the bitter national conflicts of the Napoleonic period. He included the sonnet in the section of his collected poetry entitled “Poems Dedicated to National Independence and Liberty.”12 Simon Bainbridge has argued that Wordsworth appeals to Milton, in his sonnets written during a time of national crisis, as a means of asserting the masculinity of his own poetic voice in a genre that had come to be seen as feminine, and at a time – when Napoleonic invasion was feared – when the act of writing poetry itself might have seemed an inadequate, feminine response to the present state of emergency. Bainbridge writes that “The implication of Wordsworth’s adoption of the model of Milton’s sonnets seems clear: to write like Milton is to write like a man” (“Men Are We,” 219). Drabble’s epigraphs prepare the reader for a novel that reflects on the decline of Britain into selfishness and greed, and that makes its argument in part by reference to a literary tradition of radical criticism of the nation from an ethical and political perspective, a tradition that includes Milton, Blake, and Wordsworth

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as central figures.13 Writing a social novel set in 1975–76, Drabble sees the need for the spirits of these writers to reinvigorate an England whose cultural productions she views with a jaundiced eye. It is interesting that in this condition-of-England novel, she writes extensively from the perspective of a male protagonist. Her earlier novels had concentrated on the experiences of young women in settings that were domestic, academic, or artistic. When she addressed the social and political state of the nation as a whole, she found herself in the same position that Wordsworth did, needing to find a voice that spoke with authority to a power structure that was still emphatically male-dominated. It is clear that in The Ice Age the masculine world of financial speculation and property development is responsible for much that is wrong in England, while the traditional worlds of the humanities, the arts, and the learned professions are seen as an ineffectual alternative. Drabble embodies these conflicts in her characters and plot, though she is not able to find an effective resolution. The epigraph to Daniel Martin is from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, in keeping with a novel that is much more cosmopolitan in its range of reference than is The Ice Age, looking not only to English literature for points of reference, but to the western Marxist tradition, European literature, and eventually to ancient Egypt. The epigraph reads as follows: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appears.” Yet as Kerry McSweeney points out, although it is from Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, the epigraph to Daniel Martin can be regarded as “Arnoldian” in sentiment (Four, 143), expressing an idea similar to that in Arnold’s well-known lines from “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” where the speaker sees himself as Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born. (lines 85–6) Arnold’s poem has specific reference to the Victorian loss of faith in Christianity and longing for a new metanarrative to make sense of the world; many in 1970s Britain felt themselves in an analogous

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situation regarding the rapid social and technological changes that were dissolving the post-war consensus. The epigraph is from Gramsci’s notes on “State and Civil Society,” the last section of which discusses “the crisis of authority.” He writes “If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant,’ exercising coercive force alone, this means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously” (Prison Notebooks, 275–6). These words are followed by the sentence that Fowles uses as his epigraph. In the novel that follows, he dramatizes a quest for authentic beliefs, drawing on both Marxism and existentialism. There are many parallels between Daniel Martin and The Ice Age. It is striking that each begins with a rural scene involving the death of an animal. Daniel Martin begins with a chapter (“The Harvest”) precisely dated 21 August 1942.14 Daniel, a teenaged boy, is helping with the harvest, and as the horse-drawn reaper completes a field, rabbits hiding in the final swaths run out and are killed by the assembled villagers. The last rabbit is wounded by the reaper blade as it cuts the final stalks of wheat. The scene evokes the novels of Hardy, especially as its west country setting is emphasized with the use of rural and regional words such as “combe,” “spinney,” and “byre” (7, 16). On the other hand, also in the manner of Hardy, the narrator marks a distance between himself and the scene by the use of Latinate diction such as “fenestrated” (9) and by cultural allusions: “his terrible Oedipal secret; already at the crossroads every son must pass”; “as in a Brueghel” (15). The Victorian scene is interrupted by the passage of a German warplane which flies over the field, bringing in a moment of extreme danger and a glimpse of the modernity that will be the subject of the rest of the novel. Daniel regards himself as having had a Victorian childhood, and he thinks that the nineteenth century really only ended with the Second World War, not only for him but in varying degrees for his whole generation (99); Daniel Martin is concerned with the effects of modernity on Daniel and his small group of family and friends, and by implication with the wider social consequences of what Gramsci termed the “state of crisis.”

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The Ice Age begins with the death of a pheasant, a game-preserved bird frequently shot for sport in the country, but which in this passage ironically dies of a heart attack, connecting the bird to the novel’s main character, Anthony Keating, who has also suffered a heart attack, although not a fatal one, and who is now in retreat from London in the Yorkshire house that he purchased with the proceeds of a brief career in property development. High Rook House might be thought to have antecedents in the Blunderstone Rookery of David Copperfield, along with the Yorkshire houses of the Brontë novels, especially Thornfield with its rook-infested trees. Drabble often alludes to nineteenth-century fiction, and she names the heroines of her early works after characters from major novels of the period, along with writers and other historical figures. For example, the heroines of her first three novels are Sarah Bennett, Emma Lawrence (married name Evans), and Rosamund Stacey; The Waterfall (1969) is the story of Jane Gray, whose relationship with her cousin Lucy is a rewriting of The Mill on the Floss (Showalter, “Greening,” 303). Drabble’s own position in the debate about the state of British fiction was made clear in an interview with the BBC in 1967, which was given wide currency when it was quoted in Bernard Bergonzi’s Situation of the Novel: “I’d rather be at the end of a dying tradition, which I admire, than at the beginning of a tradition which I deplore” (65). Just as she must negotiate her relationship with the realist tradition of English fiction, so must her characters negotiate their relationship with their idea of England and Englishness.

the Condition-of-England Novel Unlike Drabble’s early novels, and indeed her previous novels of the 1970s, The Ice Age does not focus primarily on women’s experience; the subject is rather the nation. She is drawing on the tradition of what has come to be called the condition-of-England novel, as she signals by her choice of epigraphs. The importance of place, and especially of buildings, is another sign, since novels concerned with the state of the nation have always made houses and other buildings central to their metonymic vision, from Bleak House to

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Tono-Bungay and Howards End to The Enigma of Arrival.15 The tradition of condition-of-England writing originates with Thomas Carlyle, who addressed the “Condition-of-England Question” in his pamphlet Chartism (1840), and who began his book of social prophecy Past and Present (1843) by writing that “The condition of England … is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this world” (7). During the socially turbulent 1840s, novels frequently addressed the condition of the nation, including works by such canonical figures as Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, along with writers who remain just on the edge of canonicity such as Charles Kingsley and Benjamin Disraeli. Many of these novels offered some sort of solution to the social problems entailed by the Industrial Revolution, however vaguely it was articulated in political terms. Some writers, such as the High Church novelist William Sewell, looked to a revival of the authority of the Church of England for a reform of English society. There is something in common between the High Church Toryism of Sewell’s Hawkstone: A Tale of and for England in 184- (1845) and the politics of the Young England movement, the romantic Toryism that Disraeli expounded in his trilogy of political novels: Coningsby (1844), Sybil (1845), and Tancred (1847). Disraeli also sets out in these novels a reading of British history very different from the progressive Whig view that underwrote the Reform of 1832 and its developments in Victorian England. As Michael Flavin argues, “it is in Disraeli’s novels that we are best placed to evaluate Disraeli’s political philosophy” (Disraeli, 197).16 In Feeling for the Poor, Carolyn Betensky has argued that the nineteenth-century social-problem novel functioned to make people feel better about their attitude to the poor, whether or not they actually did anything other than feel, and she rejects Raymond Williams’s analysis of the political effect of these books, and also the idea that one can classify any of them as having a particular political tendency. This seems to me what one might term a “strong misreading” of the tradition of condition-of-England writing. Betensky’s afterword reveals the sources of this misreading when she analyzes the prominence accorded to compassionate feelings in American politics in recent decades (187), and also discusses the way that the

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literary criticism of the last two decades of the twentieth century valued “subversion” in literary texts even if they never actually subverted anything (188). However, even if Betensky’s approach makes some sense in the contexts she reveals in her afterword, I think that in terms of a historical analysis, Williams is on stronger ground when he suggests that the writers he calls “industrial novelists” found valuable ways of articulating the new experiences, or in his terms the new “structures of feeling,” that were produced by the industrial revolution (Culture and Society, 99–119). And, in company with a major stream of Marxist and leftist commentary on Dickens, I think it remains accurate to describe Dickens as a great radical novelist, even if one can identify ideological confusions or blind spots within his writing.17 Novels in the condition-of-England tradition often include passages that stand out for their prophetic tone, using poetic imagery, sometimes of a biblical and even specifically apocalyptic cast, and looking towards a time of greater justice and harmony that may also be a restoration of an imagined earlier golden age. These are also often passages in which the narrator addresses the reader directly, in the manner of a preacher or political activist. David Lodge has analyzed the way that such novels are constructed in the insightful chapter on H.G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay in Language of Fiction, where he argues that the nation itself is the central character in Wells’s novel (231). He notes that the major technical problem posed by a condition-of-England novel “is how to accommodate within an imaginative structure an abundance of material of a kind which is usually treated discursively. Wells’s solution is to use a narrator who asserts at the outset his intention of commenting, describing, and theorizing, and to invest his most powerful literary resources in this area of the novel” (234). Such novels overlap with the imaginative kind of polemical writing exemplified by writers such as William Cobbett, Thomas Carlyle, and John Ruskin. The condition-of-England novel is loyal to the roots of the novel in journalism, and it emphasizes truthfulness of representation over purity of aesthetic form. Another important work concerned with the state of the nation is D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as has been demonstrated

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by Nils Clausson, who suggests that “The remarkable similarities between Sybil and Lady Chatterley indicate just how firmly Lawrence’s novel is rooted in this tradition of fiction” (“Lady Chatterley,” 297). Lawrence’s novel had a belated reception, since it was originally privately published in 1928 to avoid prosecution for obscenity, and its full publication was delayed until 1960, when Regina v. Penguin Books Limited decided that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was not obscene under the terms of the Obscene Publications Act.18 The publication and the large sales of Lady Chatterley’s Lover during the 1960s were indicative of changing norms with reference to the discussion and representation of sexuality. This is evidenced in one of Philip Larkin’s best-known poems, “Annus Mirabilis” from High Windows (1974), which links the Chatterley trial with the Beatles’s first album, Please Please Me (1963), as markers of the shift in sexual attitudes. Thanks to the championing of F.R. Leavis, which culminated in D.H. Lawrence: Novelist (1955), Lawrence was highly regarded as a social prophet who had diagnosed the ills of industrial and technological society. Raymond Williams modified Leavis’s analysis by providing greater emphasis on social class, and Williams noted the considerable affinity between the style and rhetoric of Lawrence and Carlyle: “There is in each the same mixture of argument, satire, name-calling, and sudden wild bitterness” (Culture 200). Leavis’s famous “Analytic Note” on Hard Times in The Great Tradition (1948) made a connection between Dickens and Lawrence as critics of utilitarian thinking, illustrating his comparison by quoting a lengthy extract from the description of Lady Chatterley’s drive through Tevershall (Great Tradition, 255–6). This is one of the great prophetic set pieces of Lawrence’s novel, and it is present in all three versions, though with key differences in each of them. It was not until 1972 that the first two versions of Lady Chatterley were published by Heinemann under the titles The First Lady Chatterley and John Thomas and Lady Jane.19 Graham Martin compares the three accounts of the car journey, and argues that the version in the second Lady Chatterley contains the fullest awareness of historical change, especially with reference to the ownership of land and industrialization, while in the final version Lawrence attempts to overcome history by myth (72–4). In the second Lady Chatterley,

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he presents Constance Chatterley’s feeling of alienation from the industrial Midlands in terms of the associations of place in the classics of English literature: Tevershall! – the home village for Wragby. How utterly and unspeakably dismal it was! Connie had been accustomed to Scotch hills, Kensington, or Sussex, and she had always felt a certain connection still with the old England, Shakespeare’s, Chaucer’s even, Jane Austen’s, Dickens’. But transplanted into these Midlands, she seemed to have left England altogether, to have entered some weird and unnatural country where everything came from underground. It was no country. It was another no-man’s-land. (First and Second, 362–3) In the third Lady Chatterley, the one usually reprinted, the emphasis is more on the inevitability of historical process, but also the way that the “new England [that] blots out the old England” is the product of a continuity that is “mechanical” rather than “organic” (Lady Chatterley, 156). As a result there is a landscape populated by people who are like zombies: Tevershall! That was Tevershall! Merrie England! Shakespeare’s England! No, but the England of today, as Connie had realised since she had come to live in it. It was producing a new race of mankind, over-conscious in the money and social and political side, on the spontaneous intuitive side dead, but dead. Half-corpses, all of them: but with a terrible insistent consciousness in the other half. (Lady Chatterley, 153) The political inclinations of Lady’s Chatterley’s Lover are elusive, and Williams points out that when one compares the alternative drafts “the social identity of Mellors” emerges as “the characteristic difficulty,” as Lawrence looks for the conditions that would make possible a “radical renewal” (English Novel, 147). The imagery of the final Lady Chatterley is more readily accommodated to a modernist ideology that condemns ordinary life as squalid, ugly, and inauthentic, while in both the earlier versions, where Mellors is

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named Parkin, the character had more affinities with the working class, as in the scene where Lady Chatterley visits him while he is lodging with the Tewsons, a working-class family in Sheffield, after he leaves his employment as Sir Clifford’s gamekeeper. There is some social comedy here, and the kind of realistic observation of working-class life that we find in Lawrence’s early work. In the first version, Parkin is even secretary of the Communist League at his new workplace, a point Graham Martin emphasizes in his analysis of the three novels (“History,” 69). By contrast, the Mellors of the final Lady Chatterley is a former officer and almost a gentleman. We thus see Lawrence developing and then suppressing a political analysis of the state of England in the decade after the First World War; he shifts the emphasis decisively in the third version to a parable of sexual emancipation and personal authenticity, but the class issues do not disappear entirely. There is considerable evidence of the influence of D.H. Lawrence on both Fowles and Drabble; indeed, it would have been hard for either of them to have escaped it, given that they each studied literature in the mid-twentieth century (Fowles read French at Oxford from 1947 to 1950, and Drabble read English at Cambridge ten years later). This was the time of F.R. Leavis’s greatest authority in literary studies, and also, in no small part because of that authority, of the high point of Lawrence’s critical ascendancy, before the decline in his reputation that began with the impact of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1970). Fowles has acknowledged Lawrence as a major influence, for example in interviews with James Campbell and Aaron Lathem (Vipond, Conversations, 36, 48), and he mentions Lawrence frequently in his journals and essays. He wrote an introduction for an edition of Lawrence’s novella The Man Who Died.20 Daniel Martin is a generically mixed work, blending Bildungsroman, condition-of-England novel, academic novel, and travel book. It is in the latter aspect of the novel that D.H. Lawrence is most present, and he is alluded to in passages relating to Italy and New Mexico (123, 361), while the long Middle Eastern travel narrative with which the novel concludes is also in the mode of Lawrence, exploring the way that “the power of the landscape resists the crushing uniformity of intellectually lopsided modern

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life” (Colletta, “Geography,” 226). Daniel Martin is a journey into the past both personally, for its protagonists Daniel and Jane, and collectively, as it explores the nature of societies and civilizations. A number of important scenes are set in ancient ruins and monuments. The chapter “Tarquinia” invokes Lawrence in the context of the vestiges of the Etruscan civilization; “Tsankawi” focuses on New Mexico, where Lawrence lived for some time and where his ashes are buried; several chapters involve Egyptian sites and the climactic chapter takes place in the ruins of the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria. Lisa Colletta relates Fowles’s sense of place in Daniel Martin to Lawrence’s travel writing, and notes that many of the chapter titles in the novel are either place names or words pertaining to travel and direction, such as “Passage” and “North” (“Geography,” 214). The influence of Lawrence is vividly evident in the pastoral eroticism of the sections dealing with Daniel’s youth, notably the chapter “Phillida,” and in the juxtaposition of a vivid description of a gentleman’s estate and social satire of the right-wing gentry in the chapter “Compton,” which owes much to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Fowles’s interest in personal and sexual freedom in relation to political freedom is also something that would have been fostered by his reading of Lawrence. In 2013, Margaret Drabble discussed Leavis on the BBC Radio 3 program “Night Waves” along with David Ellis, author of Memoirs of a Leavisite. She commented that she was “profoundly influenced” by Leavis at Cambridge, and that his influence remains “quite deep. I have resisted it at various points in my life, but it never goes away” (Drabble and Ellis, “Leavis”). She also argued that Leavis was neither an elitist nor puritanical, noting that he advocated the work of D.H. Lawrence, and helped bring about a liberalization in writing about sex. That liberalization was something Drabble took advantage of in her own portrayals of women’s sexuality. As I have already mentioned, the maiden name of Emma Evans, the heroine of The Garrick Year, was Emma Lawrence. Like Fowles, Drabble also shares in Lawrence’s sense of place, and her Yorkshire upbringing gave her an additional awareness of the importance of his Nottinghamshire settings. She writes about Lawrence in her illustrated book A Writer’s Britain in the chapter “The Industrial Scene,” observing

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“the curious intermingling of countryside, housing and industrial development” in the Midlands of Arnold Bennett and D.H. Lawrence (217). Drabble writes about both of these writers with a sense of personal identification, as when she comments on a passage from Bennett describing a Sunday in the Potteries: “What escaped provincial has not shuddered like him, at the sight of those gloomy goal posts?” (223). While she did not write a whole book on Lawrence, as she did on Bennett, her analysis of Lawrence’s ambivalent relationship to the Nottinghamshire of his childhood is analogous to the treatment of Yorkshire in her own fiction. On the one hand, Lawrence asserts the ugliness of Nottinghamshire, which he says was perpetrated by the Victorian industrialists. On the other hand, Lawrence’s early work, written when he was closer to what he describes, shows “a powerful though painful love, an appreciation of the harsh industrial landscapes, a keen sense of the pleasures of ordinary working people” (224). Such passages complicate nostalgic pastoral ideas of Englishness by connecting national identity to humble lives and to landscapes that are urban or industrial rather than agricultural. This is not the Home Counties of Tory patriotism, but rather a landscape that might speak to the patriotism of Old Labour. In The Ice Age, we see the Victorian industrial townscape in the process of being destroyed by modern urban planning, which in its well-intentioned desire to replace dilapidated housing destroyed the communities that populated that closely knit world. Thus Drabble is rather more influenced by the early Lawrence, the realistic observer of working-class community, than is Fowles, to whom the later Lawrence matters most. But she too is concerned with personal freedom and fulfillment, as she explores the ways in which a series of quite different women deal with sexuality, maternity, and marriage in her novels of the 1960s, from A Summer BirdCage in 1963 to The Waterfall in 1969. These novels established her reputation as an important young novelist, and earned her the nickname of “the novelist of maternity” (Showalter, Literature, 305). Both Drabble and Fowles are concerned with the nature of Englishness, and their novels even glance at that favourite topic of Victorian novelists, the idea of the gentleman. They suggest that this idea persists in an anachronistic manner in the 1970s, shaping the

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behaviour of some of their characters.21 Drabble and Fowles each have their prophetic passages. In The Ice Age a section of the first part, about a quarter of the way into the book, surveys the condition of England in a Dickensian manner. It begins “Not everybody in Britain on that night in November was alone, incapacitated or in jail. Nevertheless, over the country depression lay like fog” (62). This metaphorical fog (accompanied, the narrator observes, by some real fog in East Anglia) recalls the opening of Dickens’s Bleak House, a wonderful evocation of the London fog that has inspired a host of of literary allusions.22 In a series of metaphors and brief sketches of representative characters, Drabble develops the picture of a country that has lost its sense of itself. The state of depression is both psychological and economic, and there seems no ready way out of it. The novel’s title is explained by one of the most striking metaphors, which also echoes the epigraph from Areopagitica: “A huge icy fist, with large cold fingers, was squeezing and chilling the people of Britain, that great and puissant nation, slowing down their blood, locking them into immobility, fixing them in a solid stasis, like fish in a frozen river” (62–3). The passage, which spans four pages in total, ends with a single-sentence paragraph: “This is the state of the nation” (65). So Dickens might have said at the end of one of his visionary passages, like the first chapter of Bleak House, or the heightened descriptions in Dombey and Son or Little Dorrit. Drabble alludes more explicitly to the latter novel, whose original title was “Nobody’s Fault,” when the narrator of The Ice Age enumerates a long list of grievances of people all over the country, including trade unions, miners, and comprehensive education, and concluding “Nobody knew whose fault it really was, but most people managed to complain fairly forcefully about somebody: only a few were stunned into honourable silence” (62). Daniel Martin does not have such an extended set-piece comment on England, but the novel is full of images and comments that link it to the condition-of-England tradition. Daniel’s actress girlfriend Jenny, who is of Scottish descent, describes England as “already a thing in a museum, a dying animal in a zoo” (265). His Marxist friend Jane explains her political commitment to Daniel by saying, “I just feel our society has got so blind. So selfish. It’s all I can ever

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see nowadays. And the only people who could change anything, change it intelligently, do absolutely nothing about it. Refuse to give up anything. Share anything. It seems almost beyond politics. A kind of universal blindness” (432). There is an echo here of Milton’s digression on the corrupt clergy in “Lycidas”: Blind mouths! that scarce themselves know how to hold A Sheep-hook, or have learn’d aught else the least That to the faithful Herdman’s art belongs! … The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed. (lines 119–21; 125) Fowles suggests that in breaking with its nineteenth-century past, a world of religious faith and relatively fixed social identities, England has lost touch with a set of defined values without replacing them with anything of equivalent weight. He spends considerable time anatomizing the world of the media and arts centred in London, exactly the world that F.R. Leavis condemned in his later writing, and he explores the idea of Englishness through the narration of Daniel’s personal history and his research into the life of Lord Kitchener for a film that he is writing. In fact, Fowles’s first title for the novel was “The Englishman” (Warburton, Fowles, 341).

Early Reception of The ice Age and Daniel Martin The reviews of The Ice Age and Daniel Martin were quite mixed, and many of the reviewers focused on the literary challenges of addressing the state of the country in a novel. There is often a rather defensive tone, which is not surprising considering that both writers treat the London liberal media establishment quite satirically. Several of them saw The Ice Age as overly schematic, concerned with the condition of England to the detriment of the individuality of its characters. This point was made most strongly by Michael Irwin in the Times Literary Supplement. A more positive review in the Listener ends with the backhanded compliment that The Ice Age “is a good 19th-century novel about the modern world,” which Drabble, given her strong sense of literary tradition, may not have been offended by

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(Jones, “Age Concern”). A rather condescending and sexist review in the New Statesman compares Drabble’s narrative technique to that of Arthur Hailey, writer of bestsellers such as Airport (1968) and Wheels (1971). It is worth noting that Hailey’s well-crafted and extensively researched novels, which sold in vast numbers in the 1970s, did not originate the technique of shifting the narrative point of view among multiple characters; one could equally have instanced Charles Dickens’s multiplot novels or, for more rapid shifting of the perspective, James Joyce’s Ulysses. The New Statesman review characterizes Drabble’s style by means of a variety of snide insults about gender, class, and moral seriousness: “Quaker-drab and graceless, her style remains more laboriously unattractive than that of any modern writer of equal seriousness” (Keates, “What?”). Drabble attended a distinguished Quaker school, the Mount School in York, and her parents became Quakers as a result of sending their daughters to this school.23 The Quaker ethos thus played an important formative role for Drabble, as she told Eleanor Wachtel in an interview in 2013, though she is not herself a practising member of the Quaker community (Wachtel, “Drabble”). The above-mentioned reviewers of The Ice Age resist or mock Drabble’s ambition to write a work of social and political commentary. However, the most perceptive of the reviews, by the poet and critic Donald Davie in the New York Review of Books, admires her for taking risks, especially in the way that she evokes a specifically English tradition of literary patriotism. He begins by saying that Drabble writes as though Henry James had never written “his agonized disquisitions about, and experiments in, composition and narrator’s point of view” (“Attitudes”). Although he doesn’t explicitly say so, Davie is in effect aligning Drabble with H.G. Wells rather than James in their celebrated quarrel about the nature of the novel, and he suggests that Drabble dispenses with aesthetic niceties to speak “urgently and directly” in a time of national crisis.24 It might be more accurate to say that such a crisis demands that the writer use a different set of artistic techniques, which the long tradition of condition-of-England writing has shaped. Davie’s review of the novel is ambivalent, as he is both impressed and dissatisfied with it, and he concludes, “The Ice Age is an embarrassing book, and it betrays more

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than its author intended about the present state of England and the English. It is, though, a brave and bold book, one that English men and women can be grateful for and even, though awkwardly, proud of” (“Attitudes”). Davie’s position as a self-consciously English poet who chose to live and teach in the United States no doubt was a factor in the intensity of his response to Drabble’s novel. Davie’s recognition that Drabble sounds the note of English patriotism as “a response to crisis” is similar to the argument that Seamus Heaney makes in a fine critical discussion of Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and Geoffrey Hill: “I believe they are afflicted with a sense of history that was once the peculiar affliction of the poets of other nations who were not themselves natives of England but who spoke the English language. The poets of the mother culture, I feel, are now possessed of that defensive love of their territory which was once shared only by those poets whom we might call colonial” (“Now,” 471). We can find this same “defensive love” of England not only in The Ice Age, but in Daniel Martin, and in the fiction of John le Carré and Richard Adams, although it is often love of an England that is regarded as irretrievably lost. The conclusion to The Ice Age expands the scope of the novel to the international political situation, and it explores the lingering fantasy of British imperial power. Daniel Martin was praised in the highest terms by the American novelist John Gardner, writing in the Saturday Review. Gardner began his review by asserting that John Fowles seems to be “the only novelist now writing in English whose works are likely to stand as literary classics – the only writer in English who has the power, range, knowledge, and wisdom of a Tolstoi or James” (“Defense,” 22). Daniel Martin, he says, “is a masterpiece of symbolically charged realism” and is “Fowles’s best book so far” (23, 22). The British reviewers were not as a rule so kind, and like The Ice Age, Daniel Martin was treated quite disdainfully in the literary and political weeklies. Writing in the Listener, Neil Hepburn said that the 350,000 words of Daniel Martin constitute “a suit of words designed for a bigger man” than its eponymous hero (“Loose Fit”). The Times Literary Supplement review by Michael Mason attacks Fowles’s style, and the “sickeningly inescapable” presence of

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“Fowles the sage” (“Pulling”). In the New Statesman, Jeremy Treglown began his review with the charge that Daniel Martin is overwhelmed by “long-windedness and didacticism,” qualities present in even Fowles’s more successful novels (“Generation”). It is not surprising that, after the popular success of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a highly discursive and generically very mixed novel of seven hundred pages would meet considerable resistance, especially in a literary culture that had for some time set itself in opposition to the European novel of ideas. Even Tom Paulin, who is as one would expect sympathetic to the Marxist ideas that Fowles explores in Daniel Martin, asserts that the ideas are not integrated into a living work; they remain “intellectual curios” while the characters are “talkative transparencies” (“Talkative”). As with The Ice Age, the most intellectually rigorous review of Daniel Martin was published in the New York Review of Books, this time by Denis Donoghue, an Irish critic working in the United States. He argues that in spite of its proclaimed ambition, signalled by its Marxist references, Daniel Martin is really only concerned with the private life: “the new structure which emerges at the end of the novel in the renewed love of Dan and Jane has nothing to do with social structure; it arises from individual acts of will, feeling, recognition – the old idiom of consciousness and affection and need” (“Disconnect”). Donoghue thus contests the basic premise of the novel, which is that the renewal of Daniel and Jane’s relationship has everything to do with social structure. Personal integrity and authenticity are for Fowles the necessary prerequisites for social transformation. Like several of the British reviewers, Donoghue also faults the style of Daniel Martin, suggesting that it fails to discriminate between different “styles,” or what a follower of Bakhtin might call discourses. He concludes sarcastically: “If Fowles can hear enormous semantic subtleties in middle-class English intonation, no wonder his Daniel Martin endorses the values delivered in that intonation: a compound of Oxford, money, leisure, and mildly left politics. And this from a writer who finds his epigraphs in Marx and Gramsci.” Donoghue’s comment is perhaps overdetermined by issues of national and class difference; if these are set aside, it is possible to suggest that Fowles is dealing with different discourses

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in the sense of different fundamental attitudes towards being, and these various discourses are capable of being expressed in the same educated, middle-class English register. In a similar manner, Bakhtin praises the novels of Dostoevsky for their polyphonic or dialogic quality, by which he means their ability to represent diverse world views in the same work, not their use of an array of writing styles. As Bakhtin wrote in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics: “what matters here is not the mere presence of specific language styles, social dialects, and so forth, a presence established by purely linguistic criteria; what matters is the dialogic angle at which these styles and dialects are juxtaposed or counterposed in the work. Yet this dialogic angle is precisely what cannot be measured by purely linguistic criteria” (182). Daniel Martin has never been a general favourite among Fowles’s novels; his earlier works had more appeal to the reading public, and The French Lieutenant’s Woman was a key text in Linda Hutcheon’s formulation of the concept of historiographic metafiction in A Poetics of Postmodernism. Yet I think that one can make a strong case that Daniel Martin is one of the outstanding works of fiction of the post-war period in Britain.

Anthony Keating’s Spiritual Quest The Ice Age is, in Bakhtin’s terms, a dialogical novel in the sense that it represents a number of ideological positions and their characteristic linguistic discourses without authoritatively pronouncing in favour of any single viewpoint. In Bakhtin’s useful formulation in The Dialogic Imagination, “the language of a novel is the system of its ‘languages’” (262). One thing that is particularly striking about The Ice Age is the way it questions many of Drabble’s own values and allegiances. It raises questions about the liberal humanist and professional class ideology associated with venerable English institutions such as the two oldest universities, the church, the legal profession, and literature and journalism. It explores the attraction of property development and speculation. The Ice Age satirizes the attitudes and practices of urban liberals, and one could go so far as to say that there is some sympathy with, or at least understanding of, the roots of Thatcherism in the novel’s social analysis. Furthermore, the conclusion represents the Cold War in a way that does

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not really reflect well on either side; instead of endorsing a set of political and economic values it rather, in the manner of Dostoevsky or Solzhenitsyn, turns towards spirituality, in spite of Drabble’s professed lack of religious belief.25 This is not a path that she would develop much in her later fiction, but the view of the world in The Ice Age has quite a bit in common with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard Commencement Address of 1978, where he turned his criticism to the West and its lack of spiritual values. Like Daniel Martin, Anthony Keating, the protagonist of The Ice Age, is the son of a clergyman, though in this case a clergyman who is also a schoolmaster at a cathedral school.26 He has two brothers who become barristers; Drabble herself came from a family that was both literary and legal. Her father was a county court judge who published novels in his later life; one of her sisters is the art historian Helen Langdon, while her other sister is the novelist A.S. Byatt, and her brother is a barrister. Drabble worked briefly as an actress before her literary career, and she draws on her experience in the theatre in The Ice Age. Again like Daniel Martin – and like John Fowles – Anthony went to a public school, then to Oxford, followed by a career in the worlds of entertainment and broadcasting, before his “conversion” to the world of business. Although Drabble does not present the money-obsessed people Anthony now associates with as being especially admirable or attractive, her critique of the humanistically educated middle class has the power of intimate knowledge; she describes the child of the professional middle class as being “reared in an anachronism as an anachronism” (Ice Age, 21). It is likely that the egalitarian disposition of the Quakers helped to give Drabble this critical distance from the world that she represents in the novel. Anthony rejects the world he has grown up in to become “a modern man … at one with the spirit of the age” (34), and although his enthusiasm for his choice may be presented ironically, it resonates with the spirit that was informing the Conservative Party in the late 1970s: Enough apology, enough politeness, enough self-seeking high-minded well-meaning well-respected idleness, enough of quite-well-paid middle-status gentleman’s jobs, enough of the Oxbridge Arts graduate. They had killed the country, sapped

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initiative, destroyed the economy. This was the new line of the new Anthony, Oxbridge Arts graduate turned property dealer. (34) In the post-war period, the free market was championed by the Institute of Economic Affairs, a think tank founded in 1955. It played an important role in shaping the economic ideas of what became known as Thatcherism. In part due to the influence of the Institute of Economic Affairs, Margaret Thatcher and other Conservative mP s were exposed to the ideas of economists such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman (Moore, Thatcher, 1:254; Vinen, Thatcher’s Britain, 29). In Drabble’s account of Anthony Keating’s conversion, she explores the appeal of these neo-liberal ideas to people who would previously have rejected them for reasons that were at once cultural, ethical, and social. Education was an important theme of both political policy and literature in the post-war period, arising from the effects of the Butler Education Act of 1944. The Labour Party promoted educational reform as a means of abolishing social inequity and creating a meritocracy, and the kind of education which Anthony received was attacked by idealistic politicians who had themselves benefited from it. Unfortunately their attempts to create a national system of comprehensive schools had the consequence of increasing the prestige of independent schools; it is striking that while the prime ministers of the 1970s and 1980s were all products of grammar schools, Tony Blair, David Cameron, and Boris Johnson attended elite public schools. The fictional cathedral town of Crawford, where Anthony grew up, seems straight out of the pages of Trollope’s Barchester novels, except that the passage of time since the mid-Victorian period has rendered it even more anachronistic, an ecclesiastical island in a godless nation. Anthony returns to Crawford when his father dies, and Drabble describes the cathedral at length; it is a masterpiece of medieval architecture, a testament to the continuity of English history, and a monument to what Anthony considers an “illusion” (Ice Age, 195). Then, in a sudden shift to the domestic and personal scale, he is reminded by the patterns carved into the stone of the

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rosettes on a birthday cake that his mother managed to make for him in spite of wartime rationing. He realizes that in some way he was the favoured son, though the youngest, which is appropriately biblical, and that he must “win,” whatever the contest is, whatever the terms (198). The implications of the scene are clear: the war has somehow severed an important continuity in English history, and Anthony’s generation have to make sense of the world in terms that they will help to define. His career as a property developer involves him in creating a new urban landscape where office towers dwarf the old cathedrals and churches, but this achievement leaves him still looking for meaning in his life. Before what came to be called neo-liberalism was even properly established, Drabble is both analyzing its appeal and diagnosing its inadequacy. Anthony will undergo several more tests involving alternative identities before the novel concludes, and on the threshold of these ordeals, Drabble returns to the image of the cathedral in a passage which strikingly echoes Arnold’s “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,” in an intriguing oblique connection with the epigraph to Daniel Martin. At the end of Arnold’s poem, the speaker compares himself and kindred souls to “children rear’d in shade / Beneath some old-world abbey wall” (lines 169–70). In like manner, Anthony reflects “I might as well accept that I belong to the world that has gone, reared in the shelter of a cathedral built to a faith that I have sometimes wished I could share, educated in ideals of public service which I have sometimes wished I could fulfil, a child of lost empire, disinherited, gambler, drinker, hypocrite … I am nothing but weed on the tide of history” (253). Drabble provides further commentary in a memorable description of a one-man theatrical production performed by a college friend of Anthony, a Welsh actor and miner’s son called Mike Morgan, whose privileged and liberal audience enjoy his mockery of them: “They liked it when he began to berate them for being what they were: drunk, idle, affluent, capitalist, elitist” (210). As in Wordsworth’s “London, 1802,” the various components of the nation “Have forfeited their ancient English dower / Of inward happiness” (lines 5–6). In a conversation after the show, Mike disparages the English as self-denigrating masochists and “island xenophobes” (214), and

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Anthony wonders what the future will hold for the nation. Mike’s one-man show is also attended by one of Anthony’s friends, the Oxford classics scholar Linton Hancox, who as he drives home reflects that Morgan was right, “the people of Britain are selfish, mercenary, greedy, corrupt” (216). Sometimes in The Ice Age, it seems that Drabble uses the terms England and Britain interchangeably, but here her usage is significant. As a Welshman, Mike Morgan is satirizing the English, while when reflecting on national decline and the loss of past glory, Englishmen like Linton Hancox tend to use the term Britain. Hancox’s particular preoccupation is the decline of the classics as a university subject. The temple of humanistic learning is as empty as the cathedral. In rendering Anthony’s reflection on the future of the nation, Drabble rather riskily uses Shakespeare to invoke England’s glorious past and to suggest the extent to which it has declined. She alludes to John of Gaunt’s “this England” speech from Richard II, though she transposes it into a suitably ironic modern version. John of Gaunt famously celebrates This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England. (II.i.45–50) Drabble’s echo of this passage occurs in Anthony’s consciousness, as he thinks of the possible future for England in silent response to the question of one of his friends, “What do you prophesy?”: it seemed to Anthony, as he sat there listening to the silences in the room, and the creaking sounds of London, that there would be an answer, for the nation if not for himself, and he saw, as he sat there, some apparition, of this great and powerful nation, a country lying there surrounded by the grey seas, the land green and grey, well worn, long inhabited, not in chains, not in thrall, but a land passing through some strange

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metamorphosis, through the intense creative lethargy of profound self-contemplation, not idle, not defeated, but waiting still, assembling defences against the noxious oily tides of fatigue and contempt that washed insistently against her shores. An aerial view, a helicopter view of this precious isle came into his head, and he saw the seas washing forever, or more or less forever, round the white and yellow and pink and grey sands and pebbles of the beaches, this semi-precious stone set in a leaden sea, our heritage, the miles of coast, as yet unenclosed, not yet roped and staked and parcelled. (215) Anthony, and Drabble speaking through him, implies a patriotic attachment to the nation, even as the decline from its past glory is emphasized. The reference to “our heritage” is also ambiguous, as it suggests the way that the past is turned into a commodity, the “heritage industry” that would grow significantly during the next decade. The other major commentator on national decline in The Ice Age is Anthony’s partner, Alison Murray, a former actress who has given up her career to care for her disabled daughter Molly and to work as an advocate for the disabled. When the novel begins, Alison is visiting the fictional Balkan country of Wallachia, where her older daughter Jane is in prison after being involved in a fatal car accident. This allows Drabble to explore the kind of east–west contrast frequent in literature of the Cold War period, and in fact in the final section of the novel Drabble incorporates elements of an espionage novel, signalled by several allusions to John le Carré. During her weeks in the austere and archaic world of Wallachia, Alison misses the conveniences of a consumer society and longs to return home, even though she realizes that England too has problems, the problems of a post-imperial society still trying to adjust to its new status: “England was a safe, shabby, mangey old lion now: anyone could tweak her tail” (92). This is brought home to Alison by the fact that the British consul is unable to help her very much, and Jane remains in prison. However, when she returns to England Alison finds it alienating in a way that she had not expected. Even a short time in Wallachia has defamiliarized her home country, and she sees it as a foreigner

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might. In British Fiction and the Cold War, Andrew Hammond describes The Ice Age as a novel that represents “the eastern bloc as an economic catastrophe” (33), but things are not as straightforward as that. England has serious economic and social problems of its own, and Wallachia has a simplicity that helps both Alison and Anthony to gain a critical perspective on England, and that, as we shall see, sends Anthony on a spiritual quest. The account of Alison’s return can be seen as the heart of The Ice Age, for in a powerful description of her arrival in London and subsequent railway journey to Yorkshire, Drabble comments metaphorically on the state of the nation in a manner analogous to Lawrence’s description of Constance Chatterley’s car journey, with a similar emphasis on ugliness and change. The focus on litter in the streets foreshadows the preoccupation with the garbage in Leicester Square that became the defining visual image of the Winter of Discontent. It captures an aspect of life in England in the 1970s especially vividly, and perhaps this is the main reason why commentators look to The Ice Age so frequently when they want an example of the despondency that afflicted the nation and its literature during that decade. When Wordsworth returned from post-revolutionary France in 1802, he pronounced of his countrymen “We are selfish men” (“London, 1802”); similarly, Alison is struck by the lack of generosity, the selfishness, of her nation. In words that might have been written by D.H. Lawrence, Drabble begins this section of the novel “When the filthy little train reached filthy Victoria station, it was eight thirty” (154). After spending the night in London, Alison goes to St Pancras station to get a train north. As at Victoria station, the scene is dispiriting: She looked up, at the crazy Gothic façade, at the impressive iron arches. Victorian England had produced them. She had so loved England. A fear and sadness in tune with her own breathed out of the station’s shifting population: old ladies with bags, a black man with a brush and bin, pallid girls in jeans, an Indian with a tea trolley, a big fat man with a carrier bag, they all looked around themselves shiftily, uneasily, eyeing abandoned packages, kicking dirty blowing plastic

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bags from their ankles, expecting explosions. It can’t be like this, thought Alison: how can it have got to be like this? (165) At least Wallachia had been clean. The train journey is a diagnostic tour through the heart of England. She sees scenes of dereliction that lead her to speculate that British industry has exhausted the natural resources of the nation, leaving only ruins and waste behind: “was it true that the English had ransacked their riches for two centuries, had spent like lords, and were now bankrupt, living in the ruins of their own past grandiose excesses?” (166). In a more apocalyptic mode, a similar vision of England is expressed in Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, published three years earlier. It is also worth noting that Drabble is alert to the racial issues that were conspicuous in the political discourse of the late 1970s, for in the dispiriting scene the two people who are actually working are “a black man” and “an Indian,” reminding the reader that after the war immigrants were actively recruited from the Commonwealth and colonies because of a labour shortage. Alison arrives in the fictitious northern city of Northam, which figures in other novels by Drabble, and is partly based on Sheffield. The Victorian city centre has been ruined by poorly planned development, creating a network of roads and traffic islands that make pedestrianism virtually impossible. Some shops are visible a few hundred yards away, but it is impossible to work out how to get there without crossing a flow of traffic. In one of a macabre pattern of images of dead and dying animals that runs all through the novel, Alison sees a wounded dog making its way along the road. And in an inversion of the centrality of the cathedral in the ancient city where Anthony’s parents lived, she sees, marooned on a traffic island, “an isolated church … abandoned, a strange relic, a survivor from another age, another world” (169). The church remains as a vestige of the values that once underpinned English life; while it is now marginal and hard to access, nothing has taken its place. One could also see the enisled church as a microcosm of the cathedral city where Anthony grew up, an oasis of the past within the nation as a whole. It is interesting that Zadie Smith uses a similar image to striking effect thirty-five years later in NW. She has her central

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characters, the friends Leah and Natalie, visit a church in Willesden: “A little country church, a medieval country church, stranded on this half-acre, in the middle of a roundabout. Out of time, out of place” (60). When Alison finally gets back to High Rook House she speaks, as though prophetically inspired, to Anthony about the state of the nation, telling him he is in part to blame for everything that is wrong. When he protests, echoing Kingsley Amis, that “I like it here,” she replies that she wasn’t talking about the seventeenth-century house they are in, but about “what people like you have done to the face, to the very face of the country” (176). People like him, she suggests, have made it impossible to navigate the centres of towns and cities without difficulty, and have broken the continuity between past and present, symbolized by the church now stranded on a traffic island. In the final section of The Ice Age, Anthony Keating travels to Wallachia to bring back Alison’s daughter Jane, who is going to be released as part of a power struggle within that country; he is at the same time recruited by the Foreign Office as a British spy. Thus the Cold War theme dominates this last section. Hammond notes that “many authors produced at least one major Cold War novel during their careers, a novel in which their attentiveness to global events, present elsewhere in their work, achieved particular intensity” (British Fiction, 13); The Ice Age is that novel in Drabble’s oeuvre. There is a metafictional element to this, in that Anthony seems to live out the contents of the le Carré book he is given to read – presumably, from the date of the setting, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974). Drabble begins this third and shortest section of her novel by declaring, “It ought now to be necessary to imagine a future for Anthony Keating” (237). She does this by removing him from England, which is a convenient way of solving the otherwise difficult problem of imagining what he is going to do with himself, just as the narrative device of emigration sometimes serves to resolve a character’s situation in a Victorian novel. This problem is representative of the general problem of imagining the future for a nation that in Drabble’s view has clearly lost its way. After becoming disillusioned with the world of property development and pursuit of money, Anthony

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envisions a traditional English course of action, settling in Yorkshire, his ancestral county, in his seventeenth-century house, and devoting himself to the contemplation of nature, or good works, some form of cultivating his garden (172). But it is rather late in the day for him to take up the role of a country squire, even if the attractions of the country house never seem to go out of style. As though to suggest the impossibility of this way of life for him, Molly’s caregiver, who has visited High Rook House, regales his friends with tales of how Anthony has gone “melancholy-mad and locked himself up in a great house in Yorkshire, where he ranted and tore his hair, like a latter-day Heathcliff” (183). When he is recruited as a spy, Anthony is taken into another kind of traditional role, that of the public-spirited gentleman serving the British empire. He is instructed by Humphrey Clegg, who is an ultra-respectable civil servant from the Foreign Office, a perfect figure of the British establishment who turns out to be both rather incompetent beneath his superficial plausibility, and also a secret transvestite. Anthony’s residual public school ideal of service and patriotism are readily manipulated by Clegg for his own diplomatic purposes. The detailed description of the guest room in Clegg’s London home, where Anthony stays before flying to Wallachia, shows that it is as much an anachronism as the cathedral town where Anthony grew up: The bed was high, wide and soft, the carpet a patterned Victorian Indian, the wardrobe solid mahogany … Framed prints of the nineteenth century hung on the walls: there was one of Chelsea before the embankment had been built, one of the Great Exhibition, one of Windsor Castle, a prospect of Eton College, a prospect from Westminster Bridge … The room was a room of the past. Nothing in it spoke of a future. Victorian England surrounded him, as it had hung on Clegg’s office wall, in the shape of camels and an oasis. (251–2) The iconography of this scene is well chosen: there are numerous literary associations (for example, Thomas Gray’s poem about a

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prospect of Eton and Wordsworth’s Westminster Bridge sonnet), and the Embankment and camels will turn up again in V.S. Naipaul’s examination of the post-imperial world in A Bend in the River. Anthony goes to rescue Jane out of an archaic sense of chivalric gallantry, reinforced by the Victorian setting in which he receives his instructions. He is successful in getting her out of the country, along with the papers he has been charged to take back for Humphrey Clegg. However, he is unable to get out himself; he is delayed at the airport, missing the last plane to depart before a change of regime plunges the country into chaos, and he is eventually arrested for spying and sentenced to imprisonment in a labour camp. The Ice Age takes one more generic turn before it ends, as Anthony turns towards God. His spiritual conversion and sojourn in a labour camp are accompanied by an allusion to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (259), and there are echoes of Crime and Punishment in the conclusion, as we learn of Anthony’s enlightenment amid the harsh conditions of the camp, which is located in a mountainous region surrounded by woods. There are also other literary allusions in the final section of the novel. In a somewhat absurdist scene, when Anthony is left at the airport as fighting breaks out and the last plane has left, he sits down in the abandoned departure lounge and finishes the le Carré novel. He then starts reading his other book, a translation of Antigone, and he reflects on the meaning of the sacrifice it represents. He has already come to the conclusion that he does not “know how a man can do without God” because it is clear to him that “man cannot behave well through his own manhood” (258). In the prison camp, Anthony reads The Pickwick Papers and Boethius, two rather different examples of prison literature, and he starts to write a book “about the nature of God and the possibility of religious faith” (285). The novel ends with him still in prison, although the extra-textual evidence of Anthony’s appearance at a London party on New Year’s Eve, 1979, in Drabble’s The Radiant Way (1987) indicates that he survives his imprisonment and returns to his life in England, in an unspecified capacity, and still “talking of God” (41). There are two further points to be made about the conclusion of The Ice Age. The first is that Drabble carefully brackets the ending,

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distancing the narrator and the reader from Anthony’s conversion. Anthony’s thinking resembles Solzhenitsyn’s: the latter said in his 1978 Harvard address, “The West has finally achieved the rights of man, and even to excess, but man’s sense of responsibility to God and society has grown dimmer and dimmer” (Reader, 573). Solzhenitsyn spoke more directly of his Christian belief in the Templeton lecture of 1983, where he says that “the major crimes” of the twentieth century were caused by “the failings of human consciousness” that take place when “men have forgotten God” (Reader, 577). As though to prevent her novel from endorsing such a conclusion, Drabble asserts that because she, and her readers, are in the West, the insights Anthony attains are not readily available to them. As the narrator comments: “one cannot enter the camp, with Anthony Keating. It is not for us; it is not, anyway, now, yet, for us” (286). The second point is that Drabble does nevertheless allow us to enter into one of Anthony’s experiences in the camp, a thoroughly Wordsworthian one. At the very end of The Ice Age, she describes Anthony in prison observing a rare bird, a wall creeper, whose brilliant life balances the dead pheasant of the novel’s opening page.27 The wall creeper is “a messenger from God,” though its message is not completely clear; it brings Anthony “joy,” and he seems to have achieved some sort of spiritual illumination (287). There is a parallel with Wordsworth’s “I know an aged Man constrained to dwell,” where an old man who lives in almshouse, “as in a Prisoner’s cell” (line 3), is sustained in the absence of human fellowship by his relationship with a robin that he feeds every day. Because of the love that exists between the old man and the bird, it is a kind of messenger of the divine, just as the wall creeper in The Ice Age is a sign of something to come, “an angel, a promise” (287). The healing power of nature which Anthony did not adequately find in Yorkshire has touched him in the mountainous region of eastern Europe where he is imprisoned. The final paragraph of The Ice Age takes us back to England and to Alison. In a bleak conclusion the narrator again gestures towards the unnarratable: “Her life is beyond imagining. It will not be imagined. Britain will recover, but not Alison Murray” (287). Drabble deliberately refrains from “imagining” the rest of Alison’s life, and

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her commentary on another of her favourite Wordsworth poems is relevant here. In her critical study of Wordsworth, Drabble admires the way that “The Small Celandine” “is a cold, bleak look at old age” (Wordsworth 115), and the way that the poem “tells us what is, not what ought to be” (116). It commences what she terms the last great phase of Wordsworth’s poetry, the “poetry of resignation,” consisting of poems “written not with joy, nor about joy, but about the loss of joy. They are poems about the problem of living without joy” (117). This, it seems, is to be Alison’s fate. Anthony’s joy at the end of the novel is balanced by Alison’s sorrow, for the ice age has cast a chill on her life, as in the poem rain, storm, and cold have buffeted the small celandine. Drabble may have begun her novel with epigraphs appealing to an idea of national destiny, but she ends it with the personal situation of two individuals, and with allusions that call to mind the later Wordsworth of resignation and endurance. Anthony seems to have attained a greater inner freedom in prison, on the limited evidence that we have, than Alison has in her ostensibly free life in the West. But the almost throwaway line “Britain will recover” implies that Drabble has stopped trying to imagine a solution for the problems of the nation. The novel ends with Anthony in prison like a Dostoevsky character and Alison in a state of Beckett-like hopelessness. It is no wonder that The Ice Age became the iconic 1970s novel of decline and discontent. We must turn to John Fowles for a novel that attempts to chart a course for national recovery.

Personal Responsibility and Socialism in Daniel Martin In Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), George Eliot declared, in one of her more quotable sentences, that “this history is chiefly concerned with the private lot of a few men and women; but there is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life” (129). John Fowles, or at least his narrator Daniel, makes a related statement in his most political novel, Daniel Martin: “The effect of public on private history is mysterious; or perhaps I should say – since our century can hardly be accused of not trying to solve the enigma – mysterious to me” (178). This “effect” was what Denis Donoghue claimed he could not find in Daniel Martin when he argued that it

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was concerned only with the private life. In a work that advertises its author’s reading of Marxist theory, the relationship between private and public life is a good place to begin a critical analysis. Fowles thought of himself as a socialist, and he affirmed his political beliefs late in his life in an interview with the Socialist Review (Vipond, Conversations, 221–2). In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, he refers to and quotes from Karl Marx regularly, including the epigraph to the work as a whole, which comes from Zur Judenfrage and might stand as an epigraph to all of Fowles’s writing: “Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself.” In Daniel Martin, Daniel visits Jane Mallory, his former sister-in-law and friend from Oxford days, whom he has not seen for many years. She is a lapsed Catholic who has been rethinking her place in the world and exploring the European Marxist tradition, and when Daniel notices that she is reading a copy of The Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci he leafs through it, reading the sentences she has underlined. One of them develops the idea of the relationship between individual and collective life: “For each individual is the synthesis not only of existing relations, but of the history of these relations” (221). This sentence is a key to the structure of Daniel Martin. By means of its temporal shifts, it probes the relationship between the social relations of Daniel’s childhood, the Victorian world that came to an end only in 1945, and his present alienated half-life in Los Angeles. This theme is highlighted by recurrent descriptions of the ruins of earlier times, whether the remains of past civilizations in New Mexico, Egypt, and Syria or the vestiges of medieval fields visible in the contemporary landscape of southwest England. As a result of revisiting his past, Daniel starts to plan what will eventually become the novel that we are reading, and his decision to explore his past honestly, not in terms of any fashionable philosophical position, is presented as both a moment of personal authenticity and a “supremely socialist” decision (454). His exploration, and his developing relationship with Jane, lead him by the end of the novel to become “a fully paid-up member of the Labour Party” (700). There are some interesting contrasts to be made between Daniel Martin and another novel of moral and political reflection on the state of England, Piers Paul Read’s A Married Man (1979). At the

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beginning of Read’s novel, a barrister who is experiencing a crisis of identity becomes involved in the Labour Party; this decision is eventually shown to be mistaken, or at least an inadequate means of addressing his problems, from the authorial perspective of Roman Catholic faith. The intellectual and spiritual progress of John Strickland, Read’s protagonist, is a mirror image of Jane Mallory’s; A Married Man ends with Strickland in a position where he might begin to discover faith, while Daniel Martin ends with the former Catholic Jane translating her left-wing sympathies and Marxist reading into membership of the Labour Party. Initially Jane’s Marxism had attracted her to the Communist Party even while she realized the danger of becoming something of a joke, an eccentric left-wing Oxford lady. It is equally somewhat amusing to see Daniel and Jane conclude their quest by joining the party of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, who were pragmatic and often astute politicians far more than they were doctrinaire socialists. However, given the controversy about Trotskyite entryism that was beginning in the late 1970s, and the concomitant move of the party towards the left, it is plausible that Jane could have retained her radical views in the Labour Party, while Daniel’s contribution to the building of socialism will be writing the novel that we are reading, about his past and that of his whole post-war generation. Another way in which Daniel Martin explores links is in its preoccupation with the connections between literature and politics. The novel, in a manner characteristic of its time, includes a metafictional element, for it is a novel whose writing forms part of its own subject; there are also shifts between the first and third person and “contributions” narrated by Daniel’s girlfriend Jenny. For Kelly Cresap, “Even more than The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Daniel Martin reveals a postmodernism engaging with realism and modernism on equal terms, each of them operating with a new degree of autonomy and independence, but also with surprising strengths in collaboration” (“World-Making Capacity,” 164). Fowles playfully makes references to various types of fiction which his/Daniel’s novel resembles, just as Drabble mentions le Carré in The Ice Age. Thus a scene in Los Angeles is related to the enormously popular bestsellers about Hollywood intrigues by Harold Robbins (21); in

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the Oxford section there are allusions to Iris Murdoch (232) and C.P. Snow (259), while the city of Luxor, in the Egypt section, is described in terms of Graham Greene (531). Fowles draws attention to the title and name of his character when Daniel is first thinking of writing a novel, and Jenny asks him “Who’d ever go for a character called Daniel Martin?” (24). The name suggests the titles of two major Victorian novels, Daniel Deronda and Martin Chuzzlewit, the former of which ends with a journey to the Middle East while the latter presents a satirical vision of the United States. In Daniel Deronda, the hero, like Daniel Martin, must choose between two women (a decision that Daniel is confronted with more than once) and in Martin Chuzzlewit two sisters are rivals in love, just as Daniel marries Nell but later realizes that he should have married her sister Jane. Furthermore, the scenes set in the countryside in Daniel Martin are partly, as already discussed, reminiscent of Hardy, while the part of the book concerned with the remnant of the landed gentry suggests Jane Austen, whose name is connected to that of Fowles’s character Jane more than once. In one of the scenes from the past, Jane is compared to Fanny Price from Mansfield Park as being “deeply certain that she lived by some central moral tradition and deeply oblivious of the fact that the failure of anyone else to live by it might represent more than a contemptible lack of taste” (185). In the other important Austen allusion, Jane Mallory’s moral values are described as “not unlike those of the far more famous Jane she had already reminded him of that evening” (528). Finally, D.H. Lawrence is the presiding influence on not only the travel writing in the novel, but on its bitter satire of class relationships and the media and arts worlds. These literary allusions combine to create an affirmation of the nineteenth-century realist tradition and of its twentieth-century developments. In interpreting the allusions, and Daniel Martin itself, Fowles offers the Marxist critic Georg Lukács as a guide. Lukács is introduced to Daniel by Jane, with the significant comment that he is instructive on the “proper and improper uses” of the novel (437). Daniel is suspicious, as a liberal individualist, and implies that Lukács was the servant of a dogmatic orthodoxy, but Jane defends him as “a very great humanist” (437), a term that she also applies to

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Gramsci (439). She describes Lukács as an ordinary person, lacking heroic bravery, who tried to work within the system, in contrast with Solzhenitsyn, whom Jane characterizes as a “mad martyr” (437). For Daniel, Solzhenitsyn at least had the advantage of knowing what he was fighting against, the “dragon on every street-corner,” whereas in the West one doesn’t know where to begin (438). The first volume of Solzhenitsyn’s exposé of Russian labour camps, The Gulag Archipelago, was published in Russian in Paris in 1973, and appeared in English the following year. He became an icon of freedom in the West, and was referred to numerous times by Margaret Thatcher, including in one of her best-known speeches, the so-called “Iron Lady” speech in Kensington Town Hall in 1976.28 The actual title of this speech, “Britain Awake,” shows that Thatcher was addressing the same set of issues that Drabble and Fowles are concerned with; the image of awakening is also present in Drabble’s Miltonic epigraph to The Ice Age. In the speech, Thatcher said that “we must also heed the warnings of those, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who remind us that we have been fighting a kind of ‘Third World War’ over the entire period since 1945 – and that we have been steadily losing ground.” She promises that a Conservative government will restore a sense of Britain’s greatness in the world: “We are often told how this country that once ruled a quarter of the world is today just a group of offshore islands. Well, we in the Conservative Party believe that Britain is still great … the Conservative Party has the vital task of shaking the British public out of a long sleep” (“Britain Awake”). There are two further scenes where Daniel reads Lukács on the voyage down the Nile, and each of them includes a substantial quotation from his work. The first, of very direct relevance to Daniel Martin in his quest to become a novelist, concerns the need of “the contemporary bourgeois writer” to choose between Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, that is between the “morbidity” of modernism and the “social sanity” of realism (559; Lukács, Contemporary Realism, 80). The former quality is represented in Daniel Martin by negative references to Samuel Beckett. As for the sanity of realism, Daniel Deronda as a whole might be seen as a novel in the tradition of Mann, with its encyclopedic allusions, its extended meditation

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on ancient Egypt, and its intellectual discursiveness. There are numerous affinities with The Magic Mountain in particular. Lukács adds an explanation that makes it clear that he is writing about a connection between literary and ethical, and ultimately literary and political responsibilities: “What counts is the personal decision … These are not primarily, of course, literary questions; they relate to a man’s behaviour and experience of life” (559). It is a question of whether one is wholly a victim of “transcendental and inexplicable forces” or whether one has the power to play some positive role in the making of history. The second lengthy quotation from Lukács is from The Historical Novel and relates to Daniel’s ruminations on the English character and the nature of Englishness vs. Britishness. Fowles reproduces a passage dealing with Sir Walter Scott, and his typical hero, “a more or less mediocre, average English gentleman” (617), followed by Lukács’s argument that Scott is one of the “honest Tories” who perceive the revolution brought about by capitalism and who “deeply sympathize with the unending misery of the people which the collapse of old England brings in its wake; yet who, precisely because of their conservatism, display no violent opposition to the features of the new development repudiated by them” (617). Daniel finds in this reflection something more than merely literary criticism; in fact, he finds in it an analysis of his own pervading sense of loss or defeat, which is linked to the loss of the sacred places and pastoral idylls of his own childhood. It is something intrinsic to the sense of Englishness, as Fowles anatomizes it, a nostalgic love of a past that never quite really existed, and that impedes the creation of something better in the present. The nature of Englishness is a major theme in Daniel Martin; in fact, Neil Hepburn’s review of the novel described it as “an anatomy of Englishness” (“Loose Fit”). Fowles likes to contrast what he sees as the reserved and introverted quality of Englishness with its assertive, imperialistic antithesis, Britishness. Englishness is associated with what Fowles calls the “archetypal national myth” (Daniel Martin, 303), the story of Robin Hood, associated with a green, private, almost sacred place. In his essay “On Being English but Not British,” ironically published first in the Texas Quarterly in

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1964, Fowles contrasts John Bull as the archetype of Britain with Robin Hood, the “Just Outlaw,” who embodies the essence of England (96). Margaret Drabble discusses the oaks of Sherwood Forest in A Writer’s Britain, in a chapter she entitles “Sacred Places,” noting that the forest was a place of freedom in the Robin Hood ballads, and also a place of escape from “the sexual hypocrisy and inhibition of Edwardian England” in E.M. Forster’s Maurice (24). The same is true of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a better-known novel involving a gamekeeper. In all three versions of that novel, the wood is a place of freedom where Lady Chatterley and Parkin/Mellors can meet as equals, since it partakes of the ambiguous social position of the gamekeeper, and is neither part of the mining village nor fully associated with the world of the gentry. Instead, it is associated with English history. In the second Lady Chatterley, Lawrence writes that “The wood seemed as yet to hold some of the old inviolate mystery of Britain, even Druid Britain” (241), and Robin Hood is explicitly mentioned in the first and third versions (First and Second, 30; Lady Chatterley 41). This imagery of the green place is used by Fowles in the story of Daniel’s adolescent love for a local farmer’s daughter, Nancy Reed; she is socially somewhat below him, since he is the vicar’s son, and they meet in a concealed place surrounded by exceptionally tall bracken. Fowles calls the privileged hiding place in nature the “sacred combe” (306) and also, using a name from Restif de la Bretonne’s eighteenth-century autobiography Monsieur Nicolas, “la bonne vaux,” a valley of fertility and abundance (306, 308).29 Daniel is working on a film script about Lord Kitchener, now most often remembered as the figure in the famous First World War recruiting poster: “Your Country Needs You.” Daniel sees two possible angles of approach to his subject, “the folly-of-imperialism line” and “the psychological enigma” (349). Although Kitchener exemplifies British imperialism, he had a very reserved and private side, symbolized by his island in the Nile where he created a botanical garden. The British imperialism for which Kitchener was literally the poster boy is presented as an external mask fitted over a tormented and concealed (and English) inner self. Fowles argues

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that empire is “profoundly un-English. The whole nineteenth century was a disease, a delusion called Britain” (474). The empire is thus confidently attributed to what in existentialist terms might be thought of as an inauthentic self. Fowles seems to be suggesting that there is a danger in the English nostalgia and longing for a pastoral retreat, as it becomes a means of evading confrontation with the real problems of self and society, but this is an issue that remains unresolved in the novel, because some of the most powerful passages in Daniel Martin evoke the very kind of nostalgia that at other points he wants to critique. Like Kitchener, Daniel retreats to his bonne vaux when the pressures of public life become too much. Peter Mandler’s history of the idea of “the English national character” documents what he calls “periodic bouts of obsessive selfscrutiny among the English since the eighteenth century” (English National Character, 229). He notes how the champions of Union and Empire sought to promote a British identity, appealing to “the heroism of exceptional military and political leaders, especially but not exclusively those from elite backgrounds” (134). Mandler’s analysis sheds light on Fowles’s preoccupation with Englishness in Daniel Martin, and on the fact that Daniel is writing a film about Lord Kitchener. But Fowles has an overly restrictive notion of what constitutes English identity. In “On Being English but Not British,” he identifies a split between “Red-White-and-Blue Britain” and “Green England,” unequivocally allying himself with the latter, with the elusive Robin Hood who runs for the trees (95). Although he attempts to dissociate himself from inward-looking Little Englanders, the terms of his analysis are problematic, especially from the perspective of the twenty-first century. For Fowles, the requirements for being English include being educated in England and spending at least half of your life there, having English as your mother tongue, and “having at least two grandparents out of four be English” (91). This is a rigorous standard, which would disallow the claims of not only many recent immigrants to be English, but also their children and possibly their grandchildren. The 1970s debate over immigration, overshadowed by the memory of Enoch Powell’s anti-immigration “Rivers of Blood” speech of 1968, was really a debate about who is English, and the issue resurfaced

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during the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign. Now that the empire is long gone, “British” can be a more inclusive term, not just in terms of the various members of the union, Wales, Scotland, and, more problematically, Northern Ireland, but in terms of minority groups who seek to be included in the idea of the nation. As Linda Colley noted in a new introduction to her book Britons on its twentieth anniversary, citizens of the United Kingdom who are Muslim or of African or Caribbean descent often identify themselves as “British Muslims” or “Black Britons” rather than using the term English (xxx). Englishness is an elusive quality, and during the years from the Act of Union in 1707 to the decline of the empire in the twentieth century, it was generally subsumed into Britishness. However, beginning in the latter part of the nineteenth century one can trace a preoccupation with a specifically English identity, evidenced by such things as the growth of Anglo-Saxon studies, the Oxford English Dictionary, and the proliferation of literary histories as English became an academic discipline (see Kumar, Making, 202–23). These cultural products were at least in theory available to anyone who wanted to acquire them, as did large numbers of people who experienced a colonial education. And as Peter J. Kalliney has shown in Commonwealth of Letters, there was a brief period during which ties flourished between colonial writers and intellectuals and their counterparts in the imperial centre. The idea of Englishness was not translated into legal concepts of citizenship in explicitly racial terms until the post-war period. After 1945, there was a significant wave of immigration to Britain from colonies and former colonies, now known as the “Windrush generation.” In London Is the Place for Me, Kennetta Perry studies the Afro-Caribbean migrants of this generation in order to show how they “shifted the political landscape in post-war Britain by asserting their sense of belonging and exposing anti-Black racism, all while challenging the state to acknowledge and guarantee their rights as British citizens” (4). Indeed, the British Nationality Act of 1948 gave the migrants full citizenship rights as citizens of the United Kingdom and Colonies. These rights were short-lived, for immigration became increasingly controversial, and a form of English nationalism developed in response, typified by

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Enoch Powell, which argued that citizenship ought to be defined in racially exclusive terms.30 The Immigration Act of 1968, though less stringent than John Fowles, created the concept of “patriality,” by which immigration controls did not apply to anyone with a grandparent born in the United Kingdom. Meanwhile Commonwealth citizens who were not patrials (essentially those who were not white) were subject to increasing restrictions.31 Thus although Fowles’s idea of Englishness does not on the face of it have anything to do with citizenship, ideas strongly resembling it formed the basis for a racially selective immigration policy in the period immediately after he wrote “On Being English but Not British.” It is remarkable that the heated debates about immigration of the 1960s and 1970s leave so little trace in Daniel Martin, especially if one reads the novel in conjunction with V.S. Naipaul’s almost exactly contemporaneous A Bend in the River (1979). Daniel’s retreat to his Devon farm can therefore be seen as a way of avoiding some of the most pressing political questions in Britain in what is in other ways a very self-consciously political novel. Another aspect of Daniel Martin that stands out in tone, and that has analogues in The Ice Age, is Fowles’s acerbic representation of what F.R. Leavis called “the metropolitan literary world” (Two Cultures, 19), by which he meant the BBC , the British Council, the Sunday newspapers, and the “intellectual weeklies” (18). In Nor Shall My Sword, Leavis writes that “In the BBC world and the weeklies (under which head fall the Sunday magazine-sections and the Times Literary Supplement) coterie reigns – in such conscious security that it feels no shame, or at any rate shows no sign of it” (221). On the evidence of Daniel Martin, Fowles’s view of what he calls “the communications industry” (293) is quite similar to that expressed by Leavis, with the difference that writing in the late 1970s he is aware of the increasing dominance of television within that industry. In a chapter with the title “Hollow Men,” which both alludes to T.S. Eliot and also might have served as the title of a C.P. Snow novel, Daniel has lunch with Barney Dillon, a journalist and media personality he first knew at Oxford. The experience of sitting in the restaurant full of arts and media people has the effect of making Daniel more sympathetic to Jane’s Marxist critique of British

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society, and it also prompts in him the rather Leavisite reflection that “When the history of the period came to be written, the communications industry would have to go in the dock. Somewhere in Britain a conduit between national reality and national awareness of it had been blocked” (293). In the conversation with Daniel, Barney Dillon speaks resentfully about the changing world and the way that one has to pander to a lowering of standards in order to succeed, asking “who could be a Junius in a culture that’s forgotten how to read?” (291). Barney is caught between his desire for professional success and his recognition of the fact that such success is dubious according to a genuine intellectual and ethical standard. In that respect, he can be compared with the embittered classicist Linton Hancox in The Ice Age, both looking back somewhat nostalgically to the educational standards of their youth. Once again, Fowles sounds the Arnoldian theme of being caught between two worlds that is expressed in the novel’s epigraph from Antonio Gramsci, as Daniel reflects on what Barney says: Dan knew what was being stated: that when everyone wanted instant fame and significance, the lasting kinds were unattainable. Perhaps theirs really had been the unlucky generation. They had just caught the last of the old Oxford, which had trained them to admire and covet the enduring accolade of history, aere perennius as the supreme good … and just as the essential corollary, all the stabilizing moral and religious values in society, were vanishing into thin air. (294; ellipsis in original) In the course of the conversation, Barney sardonically comments of a fellow journalist, “The best we have,” and Daniel wonders “whether that famous putting-down Barney had just appropriated, of a bad prime minister by a jealous rival, was not the single most English remark of the post-war years; behind all our discourse, and well beyond the political” (291). Barney’s use of R.A. Butler’s jibe at Anthony Eden is so significant because it represents an awareness of the narrowed horizons of post-imperial Britain. This context

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heightens the significance of Daniel’s redefinition of his vocation as a writer and of the political commitments that will accompany that redefinition. In a reading of Daniel Martin as a political novel, the chapter entitled “Compton” is especially important. Compton is the name of the country house owned by Daniel’s Oxford acquaintance Andrew Randall, a baronet who still farms his land and preserves some of the traditions of his family while realizing that he is a member of a species doomed to imminent extinction. Andrew is now married to Daniel’s ex-wife Nell. In this chapter, Fowles reflects on the significance of the dream of the country house in English literature, just as he does in his intriguing short story “The Enigma,” published in the collection The Ebony Tower (1974). The story is about a Tory mP and rural landowner who mysteriously disappears without a trace. It is largely narrated from the perspective of a young policeman who is going over the case one more time to try to find a neglected lead. The missing mP has the wonderfully English and literary name John Fielding, connecting him not only to the eighteenth-century novelist but to the protagonist of A Passage to India. When the police officer interviews the girlfriend of Fielding’s son, she offers the theory that he may have realized that his existence was totally inauthentic: “He’s like something written by someone else, a character in fiction. Everything is planned. Mapped out. He’s like a fossil – while he’s still alive” (233). She adds, “He feels more and more like this minor character in a bad book. Even his own son despises him. So he’s a zombie, just a high-class cog in a phony machine” (234). In Daniel Martin, a similar idea of the living dead is suggested by Jane, when she says that country houses and their way of life have the effect of embalming or mummifying people (341). It is interesting to note that shortly after the publication of The Ebony Tower, the Labour mP John Stonehouse faked his own death in Miami as an escape from both financial trouble and his role as a Czech spy. He was later arrested in Australia (see Sandbrook, Seasons, 174–6). Daniel has visited Compton once before, on the occasion of Andrew’s twenty-first birthday, and he finds the vestiges of the old way of life seductive: “It was all very well condemning such worlds politically – nothing easier. But it was like some of Ezra Pound’s

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poetry. You could blow the philosophy to bits; the lines and images still haunted you” (133). Daniel’s analogy with Pound emphasizes the extent to which the allure of the country house is reinforced by the literary (and more recently cinematic) tradition. Daniel is self-consciously aware of the incongruity of, as well as the persistence of, the dream of the country house, a topic which would soon be revived as nostalgia in the Tv adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, first broadcast in 1981, and reconsidered rather more critically in novels such as V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989), with a further television manifestation in Downton Abbey (broadcast 2010-15). Daniel writes “I think what surprised was not so much the décor in itself as the fact that anyone could still live in such surroundings in contemporary England” (331). Fowles uses evolutionary biological metaphors, as he did much more pervasively in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, to suggest that Andrew’s way of life will not last very much longer; his possessions and his way of life are seen as analogous to the armour of a brontosaurus, dragging him down (346). Fowles reflects on the public performative aspect of life in a country house. Daniel experiences the visit to Compton as a piece of theatre: “Perhaps it was partly the house, the deep silence outside, that curious air the traditional English upper classes, in their traditional backgrounds, manage to give of being in a play by someone else – of being so used to such surroundings that they no more own them than actors own a theatre set” (336). One thinks of the games of charades and other forms of theatricality that are often described in memoirs of country house life, and that are represented so eloquently in the scene in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time when the various guests at Stourwater Castle dress up to be photographed in tableaux of the seven deadly sins (The Kindly Ones, 2:117–35). Fowles frames the account of his characters self-consciously performing a country-house weekend by posing the philosophical question that preoccupies all of his work, of how far human life is predetermined, and to what extent we are free to make choices, or in a political sense to make our own history. Daniel expresses his skepticism about the claims of dogmatic socialism by thinking that “The only true and real field in which one could test

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personal freedom was present possibility. Of course we could all lead better, nobler, more socialist lives; but by positing them only in some future perfect state. One could so clearly only move and act from today, this present and flawed world” (343). He will later accept that socialism and existentialism can be compatible, since socialism need not be utopian. Inevitably conversation during the weekend at Compton turns to politics, first during a tour of the estate, when Andrew pronounces a “comprehensive judgment on his nation,” that it comprises sixty million blind mice (346). His not wholly serious judgment is articulated more seriously and at length after dinner the next day by a senior Tory mP named Fenwick, who suggests that liberal intellectuals are blind to the danger of “mobocracy” (351), and that it will soon, if things do not change, slide “into chaos and an eventual bloodbath” (352). The latter word would have been enough to bring to mind Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech for British readers of the novel in 1977, and Fenwick’s dire warnings can be paralleled by the more sensationalist columns in the Spectator during the 1970s, or some of the conspiracy theories advanced in popular fiction.32 Fenwick concludes his after-dinner diatribe by declaring that “This country’s last chance of waking out of its coma is very rapidly disappearing” (354). Daniel’s view of Fenwick is that at bottom he believes only that the fortunate must be allowed to retain their advantages at all costs; as an old man who has had a privileged life, Fenwick doesn’t even really care about what will happen in twenty years’ time. Daniel’s response is once again to feel more sympathetic to Jane’s Marxism, and he even says to her, if somewhat jestingly, “you can tell me where I join as well. And speed the day” (356). This is, of course, what they both do at the end of the novel. The political conclusion is thus anticipated in the important political dialogue at Compton, which coming at a dinner table takes Daniel Martin briefly into the genre of the political symposium. It is noteworthy that Thomas Love Peacock, author of a number of satirical symposia such as Nightmare Abbey (1818), was one of Fowles’s favourite nineteenth-century writers (Vipond, Conversations, 11, 26). Already before returning to England, Daniel had started to think about writing a novel as his next creative project, and following

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the visit to Compton, Fowles describe a late-night walk that Daniel takes in the orchard attached to his farm, where he comes to an important realization. In trying to sketch out the idea for his novel, he is forced to confront his own complacency, which Fowles seems to equate with that of bourgeois liberals who live in a privileged manner but cultivate pessimism. Daniel thinks of ways in which he could modify his life to make the hero of his novel less problematic, perhaps by giving him disadvantages that Daniel has not experienced. Then, as he walks in the orchard and hears a nocturnal animal, whose lack of self-consciousness he almost envies, he sees how he must write the novel. His realization is presented rather elliptically, but the main drift is apparent as he declares “To hell with cultural fashion; to hell with élitist guilt; to hell with existentialist nausea; and above all, to hell with the imagined that does not say, not only in, but behind the images, the real” (454). He also suggests something which becomes more plausible as the novel develops, that his decision about how to write his novel, “though it may seem to be a supremely self-centred declaration … is in fact a supremely socialist one” (454). This will be explained when he reads Lukács in Egypt and finds philosophical and political support for his belief in the real and his affirmation of the humanist tradition. Daniel Martin ends with its eponymous protagonist announcing that he has just thought of a first sentence for the novel he may never write; it is presumably the first sentence of the novel that we have just finished reading: “Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation” (7).33 Daniel works out his new attitudes on the Nile cruise he takes with Jane; ironically, he is wrestling with the problems of living in post-imperial Britain while he works on a film script about a British hero of the age of empire. More recent empires are brought in by means of references to the Russian presence in the Middle East and through an American couple whom Daniel and Jane meet on the cruise. An East German Egyptologist instructs them about the ruins that they see, and about the nature of the ancient Egyptian civilization, and the relationship between individual and social identity. He too, as Fowles portrays him, is something of a great humanist. The penultimate scene of the novel takes place in Syria, in the ruined city of Palmyra, where the sight of a wild dog

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protecting its young prompts Jane to bury her wedding ring and agree to marry Daniel. This scene balances one that takes place very early in the novel, when Jane and Daniel find the body of a drowned woman while they are punting on the river at Oxford. The twenty-first century has added a further dimension to Fowles’s novel, as Palmyra was used as the stage for atrocities during the Syrian civil war, and some of the remaining ruins were severely damaged. One does not imagine that Fowles would have been very surprised, given his focus on ruins throughout the novel, and on the violence of history. But he ends Daniel Martin with an image of artistic creation and wisdom, as Daniel, having reordered his life and remade himself, contemplates a Rembrandt self-portrait in Kenwood House in Hampstead. In the truth of the artist’s stern countenance, Daniel reads a declaration of humanism: “No true compassion without will, no true will without compassion” (703). Once again, one is reminded of George Eliot, and of her embrace of the truth-telling aesthetic of the Dutch realists in chapter 17 of Adam Bede. Daniel’s novel, which he has yet to write, and which we have just about finished reading at this point, is an exploration of the ways in which human beings can make choices and make their own history. It is striking how many parallels there are between the two novels of decline that Drabble and Fowles published in 1977. In both cases, the hero is the son of a clergyman who has a career in the entertainment industry, though Anthony Keating abandons his earlier than does Daniel Martin. In each case, the clergyman father represents the certainties that came to an end with the Second World War, and each character is a student at Oxford at the last moment before university expansion and intellectual change transformed the nature of the humanities. The key difference is that Anthony Keating goes on a spiritual quest, as a result of his incarceration on the other side of the Iron Curtain, that seems emblematic of a possible deliverance for the people of Britain and yet is an experience that is not, or not yet, available to them. Daniel, on the other hand, sees religious belief as something that has been lost irretrievably, although there is a religious quality to the ethical intensity of the existentialism he

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articulates, which prompts him to a political commitment and to writing his novel, as well as being part of his reconciliation with and marriage to Jane. Neither novel really offers a socially comprehensive portrayal of England. Although Drabble does venture into some proletarian scenes, the contrast with a novel by Dickens is quite striking, and Fowles rarely moves out of the world of the south of England and the academic and professional middle class. Drabble expresses the faith that Britain will recover without offering any hint of how that might come to be, and her principal character remains in prison writing his religious book at the end of the novel. Fowles, on the other hand, connects personal responsibility with political commitment in a way that engages with his critique of the communications media and especially the political discourse of national life. Drabble may give the more memorable picture of what is wrong with Britain, but Fowles has a stronger conviction that politics can remedy the state of the nation.

2 “England made me”: John le Carré’s Karla trilogy At the moment, when we have no ideology, and our politics are in a complete shambles, I find it a convenient microcosm, to shuffle around in a secret world and make that expressive of the overt world. JoHN LE CARRé, INtERvIEWED By mELvyN BRAGG, 1976

One of the key literary genres for exploring political ideas in the 1970s was the espionage novel, a category of fiction that is closely entwined with the political and military history of the twentieth century. It has its origins in the late Victorian period, developing from elements of the imperial romance and the detective story. One of the defining features of British spy fiction has been a preoccupation with dangers to the nation’s security. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the first great work in the genre, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), focused on the Russian threat to the northern borders of Britain’s Indian empire. Closer to home, the nation’s vulnerability to domestic terrorism forms the subject of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). The fear of German invasion is the subject of two more early classics of the genre, Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903) and John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915). The politics of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the Cold War are represented in spy novels by Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, Helen MacInnes, and Ian Fleming. In the first part of his career, John le Carré was seen as the novelist of the Cold War par excellence. The

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end of that war led him to new subjects, including the exploitation of Africa by multinational corporations (The Constant Gardener and The Mission Song) and the international “war on terror” (Absolute Friends and A Most Wanted Man).1 As Oliver Buckton observes, the spy novel throughout the century has served as “a significant barometer of political attitudes and, at times, contradictory cultural assumptions in Britain and, indeed, many other parts of the world” (Espionage, xii).2 Le Carré’s career has spanned more than fifty years, and he experienced a renaissance of interest in the second decade of the twenty-first century due to the topicality of his recent novels, the success of several new film and television adaptations, and the publication in 2016 of a major biography by Adam Sisman, along with a memoir by le Carré himself, The Pigeon Tunnel.3 Nevertheless, he can be identified with the 1970s more than any other decade, since the three volumes of his Karla trilogy were international bestsellers in that decade, consolidating the reputation that he established with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). (The trilogy comprises Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 1974; The Honourable Schoolboy, 1977; and Smiley’s People, 1979; an omnibus edition was published in 1982 under the title The Quest for Karla.) In addition, the celebrated television adaptations of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) and Smiley’s People (1982), starring Alec Guinness as George Smiley, coincided with an obsession with the secret world in the British press, and this gave le Carré a remarkable cultural centrality and drew serious critical attention to his fiction. In spite of the impressive array of novels that he has published over subsequent decades, I think that the Karla trilogy remains le Carré’s defining achievement. This chapter will look at the political implications of the trilogy, focusing on the idea of Britain, and more specifically England, that it presents, and on what the trilogy says about British liberalism in the Cold War period. I shall emphasize how a narrative of decline similar to that expressed in John Fowles and Margaret Drabble is at work in le Carré’s novels of the 1970s, but at the same time each novel, and the trilogy as a whole, tells the story of a quest. In spite of the fact that some aspects of the quest narrative are rendered in an ironic or anti-heroic manner, there is an underlying romance structure to the trilogy as a whole, which le Carré indicates when

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he refers to Smiley’s “lonely quest” (sp , 151).4 In two of the novels, the Russian spymaster Karla is described as Smiley’s “black Grail” (hs , 551; sp , 161). This romance dimension works against the disillusioned rendering of character and setting, and indicates the persistence of an idea of British greatness, or at least it expresses the desire to believe in such an idea, drawing on a long tradition of national romance going back to the Arthurian stories. The quest narrative also connects le Carré’s work with the popular imperial romances and espionage novels of the turn of the century, as David Monaghan has demonstrated (Novels, 115–22). The romance structure of the le Carré’s trilogy has been recognized from early on. Tom Paulin suggested that it forms a new version of the Faerie Queene (“Myths,” 58), while Glenn Everett has concentrated on the allusions to Tennyson, arguing that the Idylls of the King is the source of “the hazy code of chivalry” that informs the world of the British intelligence services (“Smiley’s,” 497). There are many specific parallels to the Arthurian story: George Smiley, who like six English kings is named after the national patron saint, is the Arthur figure.5 Bill Haydon combines within himself the adulterous Lancelot and the treacherous Mordred, while Jim Prideaux is a wounded hero dedicated to an archaic notion of honour. Karla’s daughter Tatiana is presented as an enchanted princess. Among the heroes, Jim Prideaux and Jerry Westerby conform most fully to the old type of hero, associated with the imperial romances of earlier generations. George Smiley is a twentieth-century ironic version of the hero, unprepossessing in appearance, but nevertheless effective in his undertakings, and thus ultimately more of an affirmation of British prowess than anti-hero. At the end of The Honourable Schoolboy, the old journalist and spy Bill Craw alters famous lines from Idylls of the King as though to resist the inevitable passing of Arthur and all that he represents. As Arthur departs for Avalon in the barge, accompanied by the three queens, he tells Sir Bedivere: “The old order changeth, yielding place to new, And God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.” (“The Passing of Arthur,” lines 407–9)

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Craw angrily addresses the assembled journalists in the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong: “‘Don’t change anything,’ he advised them, shaking his stick in fury. ‘The old order changeth not, let it all run on’” (587). Nevertheless, in Smiley’s People the old order in the secret service has given way to something very new, even though Smiley is once again called back to continue his quest. Le Carré moves back and forth between the idea of the British empire, for which his characters sometimes exhibit a nostalgia that he may occasionally be thought to share, and a patriotic love of an idea of England as a place of beauty and honour. His view of both empire and England is connected to his representation of public schools, which is an important feature of his work. Englishness is often presented with a nostalgic or romantic note, whereas le Carré is generally skeptical or ambivalent about the concept of Britain. One way that he conveys this is by featuring Scottish characters who are portrayed unfavourably. It is noteworthy that at one point Smiley muses “not for the first time in his career,” on the affinity of Scots and the secret service: “Ship’s engineers, Colonial administrators, spies … Their heretical Scottish history drew them to distant churches, he decided” (sp , 45; ellipsis in original). Espionage was very much in the air in Britain in the 1970s. The Cambridge spy scandal had been headline news in the 1950s and 1960s, with the defections to the Soviet Union of first Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951, and later of Kim Philby in 1963. In 1979, the public learned that in addition to these Soviet spies, there was a “fourth man,” identified as Sir Anthony Blunt, a renowned art historian who was in charge of the royal collection of paintings.6 Blunt’s spying had been known to mI 5 in 1964, but he was not prosecuted. As a result of these scandals, and of the pervasive background of the Cold War, espionage plays a role in literary works that are far from belonging to the espionage genre.7 The conclusion to Drabble’s The Ice Age is one example. Another is David Lodge’s Out of the Shelter (1970), a Bildungsroman the main action of which takes place in 1951. As Lodge’s sixteen-year-old protagonist leaves on a trip to Europe the newspapers are full of stories about the mysterious disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Lodge includes a minor espionage plot involving two American officials in

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Heidelberg who attempt to sell secrets to East Germany. Like le Carré, Lodge was greatly influenced by Graham Greene, who in the 1970s was probably at the height of his fame and critical esteem.8 Spying is a recurrent subject in Greene’s fiction, connected to his obsession with the theme of betrayal, and the extent of Greene’s own involvement in the secret world is still a subject of debate and investigation.9 In 1978, Greene published The Human Factor, a novel about the secret service whose protagonist bears a considerable resemblance to Kim Philby; Philby was also the basis for the character of Bill Haydon in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It is interesting to note that the same issue of the New Statesman that reviewed Smiley’s People in 1980 featured a substantial article about the various offices and training sites of mI 5 and mI 6, among them Fort Monkton near Portsmouth, which “seems to conform fairly closely to the ‘Sarratt’ training centre in John le Carré’s novels” (Campbell, “Big Brother’s,” 197). A number of scholars have discussed le Carré as a political novelist, including Myron J. Aronoff, who writes as a professional political scientist rather than a literary critic. Aronoff focuses on the “ethical dilemmas that confront citizens, particularly of democracies, when their states engage in espionage” (Spy Novels, ix). In one of the earliest critical books on le Carré, Tony Barley suggests that most of his works are best categorized as “political novels” (Taking Sides, 25). Barley also maintains that le Carré has a simplistically negative view of Communism (92–3), a view that is developed at length in Toby Manning’s recent book John le Carré and the Cold War. Manning claims that le Carré’s espionage novels “are among the finest cultural expressions of the Cold War” (2). Unlike many who see him as staking out a middle ground between East and West, Manning argues that “le Carré offers a trenchant condemnation of communism, in a characterization almost as Manichaean as that of his proclaimed polar opposite, Fleming” (7). Manning’s book is rigorously researched and carefully argued from both the texts of le Carré’s novels and from the history of their reception. However, like some others who criticize Western anti-Communism, Manning does not have much to say about the documented excesses of the Soviet Union. He invokes Margaret Thatcher’s name

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in a pejorative way, but there is no mention of Solzhenitsyn, whose Gulag Archipelago and other works were an important component of the literary horizon of expectations within which the Karla trilogy was first read. Le Carré is often seen as a writer who explores the state of postimperial Britain, and he has encouraged such views by suggesting that the secret services are a useful means of exploring the state of the nation as a whole. In an interview in 1978, he suggested that the Circus, as he calls mI 6 in his novels, is “a very beautiful microcosm of English behaviour and English society altogether,” drawing an analogy between the self-contained world of the secret service and the more widespread use of the English country house as a social microcosm, especially in detective fiction (Bruccoli, Conversations, 50). He made the same point a decade earlier, in a revealing essay he wrote as the introduction to Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation, a book by three journalists associated with the London Times, where he says that the secret services are “microcosms of the British condition, of our social attitudes and vanities” (Introduction, 15). With mordant irony, le Carré describes the social assumptions that enabled Philby to get away with his treachery for so long: “The belief went further: SIS would not merely defend the traditional decencies of our society: it would embody them. Within its own walls, its clubs and country houses, in whispered luncheons with its secular contacts, it would enshrine the mystical entity of a vanishing England” (18). Allan Hepburn makes a similar point about the political nature of espionage fiction in general: to him, the identity of the spy is always political, and situated within an allegorical framework, so that “Spies are icons of political identity in the twentieth century” (Intrigue, 276). Aronoff agrees, for the premise of his ethical and political reading of le Carré’s fiction is that “The spy represents, in an extreme form, the obligations of citizenship” (Spy Novels, 201). As I will argue shortly, citizenship is a recurrent concern of le Carré in his trilogy. It is on the topic of Kim Philby that le Carré differs most strikingly from his literary precursor Graham Greene. Greene defended Philby in an essay expanded from an introduction he wrote for Philby’s memoir My Silent War by saying that “he was serving a

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cause and not himself” (“The Spy,” 418). Justifying his own refusal to condemn Philby, Greene writes: “‘He betrayed his country’ – yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country” (415). There is perhaps an echo here of E.M. Forster’s statement in “What I Believe”: “I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country” (82). As Aronoff points out, Forster’s position is “simplistic and unsophisticated”; betraying one’s country, especially during a time of war, usually involves betraying numerous friends and family members (Spy Novels, 204). In le Carré’s view, Greene was “politically a child,” and his response to Greene’s evasions and justifications is an unambiguous condemnation of Philby, whom le Carré describes as “a perfectly disgusting person. To this day no one realizes what havoc he created by delivering up dozens of our agents to a gruesome fate in the Soviet Union” (Bruccoli, Conversations, 165; 119). In his introduction to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, le Carré expands on the reasons for his dislike of Philby, offering a revealing glimpse into some of the motivations of his own fiction. He suggests that the reasons for his dislike have much to do with the inverted snobbery of my class and generation. I disliked Philby because he had so many of my attributes. He was public-school educated, the son of a wayward and dictatorial father – the explorer and adventurer, St. John Philby – he drew people easily to him and he was adept at hiding his feelings, in particular, his seething distaste for the bigotries and prejudices of the English ruling classes. I’m afraid that all of these characteristics have at one time or another been mine. (ttss , xv) In the twenty-first century, John le Carré has been increasingly critical of his own society, especially of the threat to liberty caused by global capitalist enterprise and the war on terror. From early on, one could see his radical side in his attacks on class privilege, especially as it is reproduced by the elite educational institutions in Britain, which have long been imbricated in the British class system.

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In terms of politics, one only needs to look at where the leaders have been educated. From Sir Robert Walpole to Boris Johnson, roughly a third of British prime ministers went to Eton College, while half of them, from Spencer Compton, Earl of Wilmington, to Boris Johnson, attended Oxford University. In Reading the Thirties, his classic critical study of the literature of the thirties generation, Bernard Bergonzi devotes a chapter to the importance of prep schools and public schools in the formation of the major writers of the decade, and their frequency in the imagery and plots of their works: “Never before or since have English writers been so heavily marked by the homogeneous educational formation of the English upper and upper-middle classes. It provided a potent source of myth or allusion, and a figure of fun or sympathy in the ambivalent schoolmaster-schoolboy, in both aspects the prisoner of an institution” (37). In this respect, le Carré has a great deal in common with the writers of the thirties generation. At least two of those writers can be counted as major influences on him. The influence of Graham Greene has already been mentioned, and le Carré acknowledges it repeatedly in interviews. He has a special affinity for Greene’s statement that “childhood is the credit balance of the writer.”10 W.H. Auden is another writer of the 1930s who made a major impact on le Carré; he quotes from him in several novels, including lines from “September 1, 1939” as the epigraph to The Honourable Schoolboy, and Tony Barley has made a convincing case for Auden’s influence on le Carré’s descriptive style (Taking Sides, 108–9). John le Carré’s father was a con man who gave the impression of wealth and respectability (he ran for parliament for the Liberal Party), but who frequently was unable to pay his debts and served time in prison for fraud. Le Carré’s mother left his father when he was five, and he did not see her again until he was an Oxford undergraduate. Due to the instability of his home life, he went to boarding school as a very young boy, and from the beginning found himself acting a role at school. He would later recall being invited to sit at the table where the sons of landed gentry sat and were fed on game sent from home: “I had never tasted pheasant, and this one was high and undercooked, but I ate every morsel I was offered

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before vomiting in one of the doorless prison lavatories of what we called the Fleet” (“England Made Me”). Vivian Green, the history master at le Carré’s public school, became a mentor figure for him. Le Carré himself later had a brief career as a schoolmaster. He took time out from his undergraduate studies to support himself by his first job at Edgarley Hall, a prep school (Sisman, John le Carré, 151). After graduation, he taught languages at Eton. The first chapter of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy begins at Thursgood’s, a minor prep school of relatively recent foundation. One suspects that in addition to le Carré’s own experience as both pupil and schoolmaster, there is some influence of Evelyn Waugh at work in the portrayal of the eccentric world of Thursgood’s. The wounded secret agent Jim Prideaux comes to the school through the intermediary of Stroll & Medley, “one of the shiftier agencies specialising in supply teachers for prep schools” (3), clearly a close relation of “Church and Gargoyle, scholastic agents” in Waugh’s Decline and Fall, who class the schools they service into four grades: “Leading school, First-rate School, Good School, and School” (16–17). (Thursgood’s would most likely fall into the latter category.) Manning elides the negative elements of le Carré’s representation of Thursgood’s when he writes that “the school exemplifies the British nation, its hallowed way of life, and offers an evocation of what is being defended in the Cold War” (John le Carré, 109). In 1979, le Carré took part in a BBC Radio 3 program “Graham Greene at 75,” a version of which was published in the Listener. In his contribution to the discussion, after an obligatory reference to their differences with respect to Kim Philby, le Carré says: “It’s astonishing how international Greene is, how he has succeeded in appealing to those Europeans from whom frequently he derives his inspiration in a cultural sense, rather than from British literature. I think that he’s done something amazing in making his form of Englishness a universality for literary purposes. I can’t think, offhand, of any other English writer who’s done that” (“Man of Mystery”). These comments are as much a self-description as a commentary on Greene as a novelist: le Carré formed himself on German literature, as well as on two very European British writers, Greene and Conrad, and he has similarly succeeded in making novels

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preoccupied with Englishness, and with the very English subjects of class and education, appeal to readers around the world, both in English and in translation. Greene was the son of a headmaster, and his preoccupation with schools and schooldays can be seen in The Old School (1934), a collection of essays he edited by writers including W.H. Auden, Anthony Powell, and Antonia White. In his own concluding contribution to the volume, Greene observes that “To me there emerges from these essays more than anything else the great importance of individuals to the schoolboy’s happiness, while the system, by which I mean the rules, routine and tradition of the school, seems generally designed only for the convenience of the authorities and often works for the boys’ unhappiness” (230). Le Carré would certainly concur, and in Jim Prideaux he gives a portrait of an individual who makes a difference to the boys’ happiness, while the system of Thursgood’s clearly works to benefit its headmaster and proprietor. Le Carré wrote a sardonic account of his schooldays and the role of the public school system in Britain which was published in the Observer under the title “England Made Me.”11 He gives a rather sensational account of his school experiences, stressing the prevailing violence and prejudice in a manner that recalls George Orwell’s essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” though it should be noted that Adam Sisman’s biography provides testimony that the quality of education le Carré experienced was not as dire as his account suggests (John le Carré, 33). Le Carré’s real purpose in “England Made Me” is to use the English education system as a means of exploring how the ruling class perpetuates itself and resists meaningful change: “The joke, you see – the Catch-22 of the whole so-called English social experiment – is that in all my life, from that first empty house I was never really born in, right up to the present day, nothing, but absolutely nothing, has changed. The preparatory school was indeed a preparation. In English politics and English society we live with the same in-built conviction that promises are by definition empty.” For many Englishmen, he claims, “childhood is … the lodestone of their innate unconscious feudalism” (“England Made Me”). He also notes that an ideal of imperial service was inculcated at the schools he attended. In a 1979 interview for

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the Listener, he said “I think that I belong almost to the last of that particular generation who still, after the war, were being advised by their careers masters at public school to go and govern India, Kenya, the Sudan or where you will … And, of course, within fifteen years of that, we realised that our problem was not to run the world but to come to terms with the fact of the world running us” (Bruccoli, Conversations, 59). A particularly vivid moment is recalled in Sisman’s biography: “He retained an uneasy memory of his schooldays, when English boys were prepared for the burdens of imperial rule in the colonies: remembering in particular the flutter caused by a well-intentioned careers adviser, who had warned that anyone who condemned a native to death jolly well ought to attend his execution” (John le Carré, 531). In 1980, le Carré told the Observer that his experience as a schoolmaster at Eton taught him the nature of the English class system: “People who rail against the English upper classes don’t know how awful they really are” (Bruccoli, Conversations, 67). It is interesting that in The Honourable Schoolboy a retired Baptist missionary has a thoroughly unillusioned view of the British merchants he encountered in Shanghai: “Some of those so-called English gentlemen would have made your Lancashire mill-owner into a shining example of Christian charity by comparison (270–1). In view of all this, it is noteworthy that le Carré sent his four sons to public schools “because the state system is unreliable” (Bruccoli, Conversations, 68). In addition to influences from the British literary tradition, le Carré acknowledges Balzac and the tradition of German literature, which he absorbed at a formative early period in his life (Bruccoli, 39, 49–50, 70–1).12 Like Balzac, Conrad, and Greene, his works are characterized by a strong sense of place. Places are often used symbolically in le Carré’s novels, in ways that are connected either directly or ironically to his patriotism. One can also detect a strong influence of German Romanticism in his preoccupation with integrating the various aspects of the self in the face of the conflicting demands of social allegiances, often represented by different places.13 It may be helpful to begin a discussion of le Carré’s symbolic use of the landscape with a scene from early in Tinker Tailor

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Soldier Spy involving a car trip. The journey across a part of England is a feature of much political writing about the state of the nation, whether in the form of fiction or journalism. Such writing draws on the historical and cultural associations of the places that are traversed, while it contrasts the way of life of different social groups and makes symbolic use of landscapes and buildings to diagnose the condition of England. As discussed in the previous chapter, Lady Constance Chatterley’s excursion across the face of the industrial midlands in Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a classic example of such a journey, drawing on a literary tradition which goes back to the early work of Thomas Carlyle and the social novels of the 1840s and 1850s. Another venerable precursor of such writing is William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830). In le Carré’s Smiley’s People, George Smiley chooses Rural Rides to read late at night, when his mind is full of the early stage of his investigation into the death of one of his old agents, at the same time that he ponders “among other weighty matters, his sense of civitas” (160). Rural Rides is certainly concerned with the idea of civitas, which means citizenship, or membership in the community (see Nicolet, World of the Citizen, 17–47). The full title of Cobbett’s work lists all the counties in which the rides were undertaken, followed by an explanation of his method: “with Economical and Political Observations relative to matters applicable to, and illustrated by, the State of those Counties respectively.” He emphasizes the way in which the state and financial institutions exploit the productive labour of the rural population, and he draws political conclusions, including the need for parliamentary reform. To put Smiley’s cross-country journey by road into context, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy begins with Jim Prideaux’s rather mysterious presence at Thursgood’s prep school, then in chapter 2 shifts to Smiley, who is familiar to le Carré’s readers from his appearances in several previous novels. We first see Smiley in the dark and in the rain, at the end of what has been a very bad day, “a day of travail” (19). He has retired from the secret service and is contemplating divorcing his wife. He has been manoeuvred into having a tedious dinner with Roddy Martindale, an intolerable Old Etonian and Foreign Office gossip. There is a parallel with The Ice Age, as Smiley reflects on rising property values and thinks of selling his

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house in Chelsea in order to move to the country, as both Anthony and Linton Hancox do in Drabble’s novel: “He would set up as a minor eccentric, discursive, withdrawn, but possessing one or two lovable habits such as muttering to himself as he bumbled along pavements. Out of date, perhaps, but who wasn’t these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time” (ttss , 26). He reflects that three attachments, to his wife, to the Circus, and to living in London (the latter two perhaps representative of the nation as a whole), are “emotional attachments that have long outlived their purpose” (ttss , 25). Wet through and miserable, Smiley returns home to be greeted by a former Circus colleague, Peter Guillam, in one of a series of surprising twists, rebirths, and “resurrections” that run all through the trilogy and contribute to its romance structure. During their awful dinner, Martindale had asked Smiley “Do you love England still?” (ttss , 20), and what follows is in effect a test of that love, as Smiley is put on the scent of a traitor in the Circus. This comes after Guillam drives him across the heart of the south of England, beginning at Smiley’s house in Bywater Street, and ending in Ascot, “a place famous for women and horses” (ttss , 28). As they drive rapidly through the night, under a full moon and accompanied by smells of autumn, Guillam fills Smiley in on some of the changes that have taken place at the Circus since he retired. Le Carré mentions that the car races through Runnymede, which is where King John agreed to the Magna Carta, and up Egham Hill, once the home of the poet John Denham (ttss , 30); the area is full of other historical and cultural associations, as close by are Cooper’s Hill, Windsor Castle, Eton College, and numerous historical monuments. Their destination is the Berkshire home of Oliver Lacon, the civil servant responsible for the secret service. Le Carré describes Lacon’s house in terms that suggest Tony Last’s Victorian Gothic house Hetton Abbey in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, with its bedrooms named for characters out of Malory: It was the ugliest house for miles around and Lacon had picked it up for a song. “A Berkshire Camelot,” he had once called it, explaining it away to Smiley, “built by a teetotal

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millionaire.” The drawing-room was a great hall with stainedglass windows twenty feet high and a pine gallery over the entrance. Smiley counted off the familiar things: an upright piano littered with musical scores, old portraits of clerics in gowns, a wad of printed invitations. He looked for the Cambridge University oar and found it slung over the fireplace. The same fire was burning, too mean for the enormous grate. An air of need prevailing over wealth. (ttss , 32) Manning’s discussion of Lacon’s house emphasizes both the Arthurian reference and the fact that it is a country estate with stables, but neglects the pervasive irony (John le Carré, 108). The novels of the Karla trilogy present an England, and a Europe, that resemble the political topography of Drabble’s Ice Age. A sense of social community seems to be imperilled, and government departments are more concerned with self-protection and self-perpetuation than with public service. The idea of civitas, citizenship or membership in the community, is central to the trilogy, which begins in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with two alienated individuals. Jim Prideaux has been cast adrift from the secret service after the failure of Operation Testify, and is living in a kind of exile as a language teacher at Thursgood’s, the rather dubious prep school. Bill Roach, the new boy at Thursgood’s, doesn’t think he is good at anything; he has been sent to the school after the failure of his parents’ marriage, for which he blames himself. Jim befriends Bill, one solitary watcher bonding with another and seeking to make the best of whatever community exists at Thursgood’s. He teaches the boys an out-of-date imperial patriotism focused on “the privilege of being born an Englishman … Best place in the whole damn world” (12). He also reads to them from “extremely English” adventure books (13), including “a story by John Buchan” (283). The latter is read at a particularly tense moment in the plot, when Smiley has just appeared and asked Jim to give his version of Operation Testify, in the course of which he was shot in Czechoslovakia. The plot of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is difficult to follow, especially on a first reading, as le Carré places the reader in the same position as George Smiley, having to solve a complex problem with

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very little information. As he says in his introduction, he set out to describe “the inside-out logic of a double-agent operation” (ttss , xiv). In essence the novel is a quest narrative, with the goal of finding the identity of the traitor, or “mole,” in the Circus. As P.D. James has observed, it is also “a perfectly constructed detective story” (Detective Fiction, 6). There are five possible suspects, though one of them, George Smiley, becomes the questing detective. He retreats to a shabby hotel near Paddington Station, where he seeks the truth by reading old files, occasionally venturing out of his lair to interview key witnesses, mostly former agents who have now left the secret service. If the structure and plot of the novel are complex, the solution to the mystery is in essence quite simple. Smiley’s journey into the past reveals what he has perhaps intuited but resisted believing, that Bill Haydon, the golden boy of the Circus, is the Russian mole. For a long time Haydon successfully deflected Smiley’s knowledge of this fact by having an affair with Smiley’s wife Ann, so that jealousy and resentment of the personal betrayal took away any suspicion of a political betrayal. Haydon is presented as a Lawrence of Arabia figure who was born too late to achieve similar glory: “He was of that pre-war set that seemed to have vanished for good, which managed to be disreputable and high-minded at the same time … He had connections in every embassy and consulate across the Middle East and he used them ruthlessly. He took up remote languages with ease, and when 1939 came, the Circus snapped him up; they had had their eye on him for years” (ttss , 159). Smiley acknowledges “that Bill in his time had fiddled with substantial pieces of history; had proposed all sorts of grand designs for restoring England to influence and greatness – like Rupert Brooke, he seldom spoke of Britain” (159). This devotion to England is one way in which Haydon’s devoted friend and lover Jim Prideaux emulated him, as illustrated in his patriotic declarations to his pupils. However, Haydon’s “grand designs” are clearly impractical and probably delusional, and few of them ever got off the ground. Haydon’s ambition was to become a major player in the “world’s game,” whereas in reality England had been reduced to “a poor island” with a vastly reduced global authority (ttss , 354). Thus he

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became a Russian agent and eventually a decorated Soviet citizen. However, he was defeated in the end by the combined efforts of a small band of patriots whose love of England was less marked by grandiosity and more honest in its recognition of historical realities. The novel ends with Jim Prideaux killing Haydon, who is being held in captivity at the Circus training centre. Haydon’s death is an act of revenge for both a personal and a political betrayal. All three novels of the Karla trilogy present a bleak view of social existence. In the opening of The Honourable Schoolboy, the second book of the trilogy, Jerry Westerby is living in a strange kind of exile in Tuscany, along with a rather angry young woman referred to as “the orphan.” The third novel, Smiley’s People begins with a woman in Paris, Maria Ostrakova, haunted by the horrors of Stalinist terror, then switches to a young man in Hamburg reflecting on the fact that the newspapers are all about terrorists (29). After these two somewhat enigmatic scenes, the novel moves to England, where we see the crime scene of the brutal murder of an old man on Hampstead Heath, a death which precipitates a meeting of senior figures of British intelligence, one of whom repeats the phrase “troubled times” (sp , 54). All three novels make use of symbolic description, which emphasizes the contrast between a pastoral England of the past and the shabby and dangerous world of the present. In Monaghan’s words, the symbolic world of le Carré’s fiction is “a country with moribund tendencies which are powerfully expressed through images of darkness, decrepitude, emptiness and coldness” (Novels, 42). As Tom Paulin observed in a review of the completed trilogy, “Not since Auden – whose early work le Carré most subtly draws on – has a writer succeeded in making the English landscape so intensely political” (“National Myths,” 58). In The Honourable Schoolboy, there is a striking contrast between the last vestiges of the British imperial presence in Hong Kong, which are presented as ineffectual and focused on past glory, and the raw energy of the Chinese city. For the first time in his work, le Carré gives the American secret service a significant role, exploring the problematic nature of the so-called “special relationship” between the two wartime allies. In fact, Toby Manning astutely observes that “The Honourable Schoolboy’s antipathy to the Cold-War

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ally can sometimes seem stronger than its antipathy to the Cold-War enemy” (John le Carré, 137). In a recurring pattern of futility, the novel presents several parallel scenes of characters who are locked into repetitive patterns that border on madness, as their lives are controlled by the past or by their fantasies. These characters could almost have walked out of a Beckett play to take their place in le Carré’s novel. In the first of these episodes, we see Jerry Westerby staying with his stepmother, the third Lady Westerby, who lives in “a tiny frilly flat crammed with huge antiques salvaged from abandoned houses” (hs , 101–2). Contemplating “a magic mountain of junk … made of everything that was useless: old press cuttings, heaps of yellowed newspapers, legal deeds tied in green ribbon, and even a pair of custom-made riding boots, treed but green with mildew” (102), they reminisce over the past glories of the now ruined and late Lord Westerby, whose memory they cling to in spite of the wreckage that his bankruptcy left behind. In a series of demoralizing vignettes of failed lives in contemporary Britain, George Smiley – who is now head of the Circus – and his fellow agents visit various people connected to the rogue British agent Elizabeth Worthington, who has emerged as an important figure in their investigation in Hong Kong. First we see Peter Worthington, the husband she abandoned, idealistically working in a state school and clinging against all evidence to illusions about his marriage. Smiley then visits Elizabeth’s parents, Mr and Mrs Pelling, whose bizarre connubial life is at once comical and deeply troubling. The description of their home associates it with past glory and present failure: There are blocks of flats near the Town and Country Golf Course on the northern fringes of London that are like the superstructure of permanently sinking ships. They lie at the end of long lawns where the flowers are never quite in flower; the husbands man the lifeboats all in a flurry at about eightthirty in the morning, and the women and children spend the day keeping afloat until their men-folk return too tired to sail anywhere. These buildings were built in the thirties and have stayed a grubby white ever since. Their oblong, steel-framed

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windows look on to the lush billows of the links, where women in eye-shades wander like lost souls. (243) Lastly, two members of the Circus visit a retired Baptist minister, Mr Hibbert, and his daughter Doris in the south of England. Hibbert had run a Christian mission in Shanghai, and it was in that mission that Elizabeth Worthington’s wealthy Chinese lover Drake Ko grew up. Doris seems to embody the British nation itself in its post-imperial phase: “A daughter sat with them, thirty to forty-odd, blond, and she wore a yellow frock and powder but no lipstick. Since girlhood, nothing seemed to have happened to her face beyond a steady fading of its hopes” (260). The room is similarly antiquated: From the ceiling hung a pronged parchment lampshade made in the shape of a star. An upright piano stood along one wall with the score of “Lead, Kindly Light” open on its stand. A sampler of Kipling’s “If” hung over the empty fire grate, and the velvet curtains on either side of the sea window were so heavy they might have been there to screen off an unused part of life. There were no books; there was not even a Bible. There was a very big colour television set and there was a long line of Christmas cards hung laterally over string, wings downward, like shot birds half-way to hitting the ground. There was nothing to recall the China coast, unless it was the shadow of the winter sea. It was a day of no weather and no wind. In the garden, cacti and shrubs waited dully in the cold. Walkers went quickly on the promenade. (260) Mr Hibbert’s home parallels the decor of the safe house in Lock Gardens, Camden Town, where the unmasking of Haydon takes place in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The safe house is maintained by the spy and former missionary Millie McCraig, who has “run Bible schools in Mozambique and a seaman’s mission in Hamburg” in the interest of “God and the Circus” (345). Her rooms are “full of plants and that medley of old postcards, brass table-tops, and carved black furniture which seems to attach itself to travelled British ladies of a certain age and class” (345).

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In contrast to the decrepitude of England, Hong Kong preserves its British colonial traditions as though caught in amber: we hear of cricket matches and races at the Jockey Club, and there is a memorable description of the old Colonial Cemetery, where Drake Ko’s son is buried in a tomb marked by the statue of “an entirely English child” who is dressed “in Victorian knickerbockers and an Eton jacket, life size, with tousled stone curls and rosebud stone lips, reading or singing from an open stone book while real butterflies dived giddily round his head” (180). Beyond this frozen world is Chinese Hong Kong, not very accessible to most of the Western characters, and characterized by energy and vitality, but also presented through an orientalizing discourse, which Sabine Vanacker has characterized as a “faux-naïf use of racial and national stereotypes” (“A Desk,” 27). She argues that this deliberately stereotypical representation of foreignness is connected to the novel’s central anxiety about the nature of Britishness, which has become a simulacrum, “a set of nostalgic clichés to be acted out” (33). A shocking scene of brutal violence brings to the surface the cruelty that secures colonial rule. A Chinese boy attempts to steal a watch from Fawn, Smiley’s bodyguard, who is in the company of Peter Guillam. Fawn ends up breaking both of the boy’s arms, and the British agents abandon him, “terrified of a scandal” (hs , 509). This “disgusting incident” (hs , 508) casts a long shadow over the novel, combining with other incidents mainly involving Jerry Westerby to generate grave doubts about what from some perspectives is the story of a triumph of British intelligence. The novel ends with the death of Jerry Westerby, along with what would now be called the extraordinary rendition of Nelson Ko, the spy who was enticed from China to join his brother Drake, to the United States. Jerry has disobeyed orders to return to England, and when he appears on the scene at the most critical moment of Operation Dolphin he is shot from an American helicopter, perhaps by Fawn, as Nelson is seized. There are strong hints that Smiley knew this is how the operation would end, and that he accepted this inevitability: these are Peter Guillam’s conclusions, at the very end of the book (hs , 588). In support of his interpretation, Guillam is described as having seen a letter in which Smiley explains his motives for serving in the secret service, and acknowledges the

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problematic nature of what that entailed. The letter was written by Smiley to his wife Ann “in the heat of the crisis” of Operation Dolphin. Ann showed it to Guillam, who was trying to bring about a reconciliation between Smiley and his wife. Guillam claims to have memorized part of the letter and to have written it down immediately afterwards. Although this somewhat untrustworthy means of transmission casts a shade of doubt over what Smiley actually wrote, the letter does set out his moral code. In the context of the novel as a whole, the letter raises questions about his actions even as it offers his justification for them. As Guillam reconstructs it, he wrote “I chose the secret road because it seemed to lead straightest and furthest toward my country’s goal … Today, all I know is that I have learned to interpret the whole of life in terms of conspiracy. That is the sword I have lived by, and as I look round me now I see it is the sword I shall die by as well. These people terrify me, but I am one of them” (588). Speaking to an interviewer in 1978, le Carré spoke about how the espionage novel had come to articulate a general cynicism about government statements and actions in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal in the United States. As le Carré put it: “We have learnt in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy” (Bruccoli, Conversations, 48). Similarly, British politics had seen a series of spy scandals and conspiracy theories, culminating in 1979 with the revelation that Anthony Blunt had been a Soviet spy. Thus it is not surprising at all that le Carré’s tales of betrayal and honour in the secret world are among the defining works of their time. There are many references to American politics and institutions in The Honourable Schoolboy. In a scene set in the CIa office in London, Peter Guillam contemplates a picture of Richard Nixon, who had resigned six months earlier (289); by the time that he reaches the American Consulate in Hong Kong, later in the operation, he sees a picture of Gerald Ford on display (499). Jerry Westerby finds sanctuary in an American airbase in Thailand, where he hears of the recent evacuation of the American embassy in Saigon (479).14 One of the reasons for the concern with American politics is that le Carré is exploring the nature of the so-called “special relationship”

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between the British and Americans, which exists as a result of their shared history and their role as major powers and allies during the Second World War. Writing during the prime ministership of Gordon Brown, William Wallace and Christopher Phillips sum up the “core elements” of the special relationship from Churchill to Brown as “shared global leadership, shared history, shared values, shared commitment to a liberal world order” (“Reassessing,” 263). George Smiley invokes this relationship at a committee meeting in a secure Foreign Office conference room: “I have a standing instruction from this committee to repair our American liaison. It is written into my charter, by yourselves, that I am to do everything possible to nurture the special relationship” (hs , 202). The nature, and indeed the very existence, of the “special relationship” form a recurrent topic of debate in Britain. At the beginning of 2017, British newspapers were full of the image of British Prime Minister Theresa May and American President Donald Trump holding hands. Shortly before May’s visit took place, Jonathan Freedland, one of the Guardian’s main political columnists, wrote, “Perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of the so-called ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US – besides the fact that it’s so clearly unrequited, with Britain using the term while the US doesn’t – is the neediness. Time and again, London abases itself in its desperation to be noticed by Washington, and especially by the White House – no matter how appalling the incumbent of that office” (“Gove”). The relationship began with Winston Churchill’s cultivation of Franklin Roosevelt, and Churchill remains revered by many in the United States. The Suez Crisis gave Anglo-American relations a severe setback, and Edward Heath in the early 1970s sought to orient British policy towards Europe rather than across the Atlantic, but the special relationship seems to have “a Lazaruslike quality” (Wallace and Phillips, “Reassessing,” 280). It was revived by Margaret Thatcher, who assiduously courted the favour of Ronald Reagan, and again by Tony Blair in relation to both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.15 It is probably fair to say that there is more cynicism and more public debate each time that a new British prime minister seeks to reassert the relationship. It is also virtually a commonplace to observe, as Jonathan Freedland did in

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relation to Theresa May, that the special relationship seems to be a very one-sided affair. In an analysis of Tony Blair and the Iraq war, the historian Alex Danchev quotes Oliver Franks, the British ambassador in Washington from 1948 to 1952: “In the Anglo-American relationship British policy has to pass the test: can the British deliver?” (“Blair’s Vietnam,” 190). In The Honourable Schoolboy, the British deliver to the extent that they provide a valuable source of information to the Americans, atoning for the fact that a Russian mole had previously infiltrated the Circus at almost the highest level. But the way that the Americans take possession of their prize suggests the unequal nature of the special relationship. The British may have one or two superior agents and experts, but the Americans have almost unlimited resources. Whereas Britain sends a handful of agents to Hong Kong, the Americans deploy an aircraft carrier. The ending of The Honourable Schoolboy, with the death of the good-natured patriot Jerry Westerby and the hijacking of Operation Dolphin by the CIa , is the bleakest of the three novels in the Karla trilogy. Smiley’s People has some of the features of a detective novel, like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, as it begins with the murder of a British agent, the former Soviet officer and Estonian patriot General Vladimir, who had been trying to assist a Russian émigré, Maria Ostrakova. Smiley, now retired once more, is asked to assist with the investigation into Vladimir’s death in a way that will prevent embarrassment to the Circus, but while looking into the case he discovers a complex chain of evidence that allows him to arrange a final showdown with the Russian spy chief code-named Karla. The novel includes a variety of settings both domestic and continental, with some striking symbolic uses of place. Early on, we see a shabby modern London where the old Cold Warriors, Smiley and the General, do not really belong. Although General Vladimir maintains his strong personal code of honour and his passionate commitment to the liberation of Estonia, the world has moved on. The General seems old-fashioned to the new men in the Circus, and a new Labour government is generally suspicious of the secret services, impatient of the activities of emigrés, and committed to promoting détente. Oliver Lacon says that Vladimir’s “only link was

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with the past,” a form of disloyalty and neglecting of history that prompts Smiley to quote Schiller to himself: “Against stupidity, the gods themselves fight in vain” (sp , 66, 69). Vladimir’s irrelevance to the new priorities of the Foreign Office means that he has come down in the world materially, and his flat in Paddington is located amid one of the scenes of urban squalor that soon become familiar if one reads very far in the fiction of the 1970s: “There are Victorian terraces in the region of Paddington Station that are painted as white as luxury liners on the outside, and inside are dark as tombs. Westbourne Terrace that Saturday morning gleamed as brightly as any of them, but the service road that led to Vladimir’s part of it was blocked at one end by a heap of rotting mattresses, and by a smashed boom, like a frontier post, at the other … A squadron of grounded sea-gulls scavenged gracefully at the spilling dustbins. If sea-gulls are taking to the cities, he thought, will pigeons take to the sea?” (81).16 One of the most disturbing and powerful scenes in all of le Carré’s fiction, memorably dramatized in the television adaptation of Smiley’s People, is Smiley’s visit to a “water camp” in Germany. Peter Lewis praises this passage for its “haunting” quality; he also suggests that it “verges on surreal nightmare” (John le Carré, 179). There are a large number of allusions to fairy tale and myth in Smiley’s People, including a significant pattern of references to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” and this is one of the places where they come most vividly to the fore.17 Looking for the General’s fellow spy Otto Leipzig, Smiley receives directions from a young Polish couple who are staying in Leipzig’s house near Hamburg, and is directed to the water camp, a place where people are squatting in caravans and houseboats near a community of modest summer homes. The scene is something out of a post-apocalyptic landscape, infused with a sinister and brutal absurdity. The mood is strikingly similar to some episodes in Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor. As Smiley looks around he notes that “a ragtag group had formed: a girl in shorts, an old woman, two blond teen-aged boys dressed alike. There was something that linked them in their disparity: a prison look; submission to the same bad laws” (244). He finds Leipzig’s body on a decrepit motor launch, and realizes that

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he was tortured in the hearing of these people. Their sullen apathy and incipient violence are emblematic of a hollowness beneath the prosperous surface of the Federal Republic. The squatters exist outside the legal and social structures of the nation, suggesting that these are somewhat superficial and fragile, though Smiley also fears that, having failed to intervene on Otto Leipzig’s behalf, they will report him to the police to demonstrate their civic involvement. In the anarchic world of the water camp, words can mean their opposite, as the teenagers vandalize Smiley’s car and then try to bill him for “repairs.” He realizes that he is outside of all of the civilized conventions of social order, and when he looks at the face of the boy who asks for money, he “saw no human instinct that he understood” (251). It is interesting that this incident takes place close to the border with East Germany; the camp is a kind of no-man’s land, apart from either of the opposed ideologies that divide at the Berlin Wall, where the novel ends. The whole episode also partakes of the surreal menace and violence that characterize Hoffmann’s tale. The use of ruined abbeys and similar Gothic settings goes back to Romantic literature, and le Carré, who has strong roots in German Romanticism, frequently describes once-grand buildings, usually country houses, that have fallen into disrepair. The secret service headquarters, the Circus, so-called because of its location in Cambridge Circus, is similarly a building that has seen better days and that exists among an eclectic array of styles. In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, le Carré describes Cambridge Circus from the perspective of the retired policeman Mendel, who is undertaking surveillance in support of Smiley’s sting operation: “the buildings were gimcrack, cheaply fitted out with bits of Empire: a Roman bank, a theatre like a vast desecrated mosque. Behind them, high-rise blocks advanced like an army of robots” (340). V.S. Naipaul, as we shall see in chapter 6, carefully observes some “bits of Empire” in the London section of A Bend in the River. The secret service training centre in le Carré’s novels, nicknamed the Nursery, is a country house in a Hertfordshire village called Sarratt. It too has seen better days: “Sarratt was a sorry place after the grandeur that Smiley remembered. Most of the elms had gone with the disease; pylons burgeoned over the old cricket field. The

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house itself, a sprawling brick mansion, had also come down a lot since the heyday of the cold war in Europe, and most of the better furniture seemed to have disappeared” (ttss , 363). Dutch elm disease reappears twice in Smiley’s People, first when Smiley visits Connie Sachs in her makeshift cabin near Oxford, surrounded by “dying elms” and rooks sounding “a Shakespearean omen of screams” (199). Connie herself grew up in an estate in Berkshire called Millponds, with a “beautiful Palladian house … near Newbury,” the grounds of which were expropriated to build a motorway (ttss , 114). The second reference to Dutch elm disease in Smiley’s People comes during a more extended description of another estate in decline, the Cornish house where Lady Ann Smiley grew up, which now belongs to an unspecified relation whom Smiley thinks of as “mad Harry” (300). The dilapidations seem partly the result of changing social and financial conditions, and partly the result of Harry’s eccentricity. He is described as holding far-right prejudices about Chinese people and Jews, and as being generally antagonistic towards the world: The house stood on a hill, in a coppice of bare elms still waiting for the blight. It was granite and very big, and crumbling, with a crowd of gables that clustered like torn black tents above the tree-tops. Acres of smashed greenhouses led to it; collapsed stables and an untended kitchen garden lay below it in the valley. The hills were olive and shaven, and had once been hill-forts. “Harry’s Cornish heap,” she called it. (sp , 299) Again there is an interesting parallel with V.S. Naipaul, this time with The Enigma of Arrival, where the narrator lives on a deteriorating estate in a tenant cottage, and observes the changing landscape, in the context of the passing of the British empire. Naipaul describes the ruined grounds in exhaustive detail, and there are intriguing similarities between the eccentric landlord, who is rarely ever glimpsed, and Lady Ann’s “mad” relative. During Smiley’s visit to Connie in Oxford in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, she not only laments the despoliation of her childhood stately home; she also utters a lament for a vanished time when

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“Englishmen could be proud,” and an elegy for the lost idealists of that last age of empire, when young men were brought up to serve their country overseas (ttss , 114). This elegy echoes through the last days of colonial Hong Kong in The Honourable Schoolboy, to culminate in the modern world of Smiley’s People, where honour is a thing of the past: “Poor loves. Trained to Empire, trained to rule the waves. All gone. All taken away” (ttss , 114). The decline of Britain is expressed much less romantically, but vividly and emphatically, by Major Masters, an American intelligence officer in The Honourable Schoolboy, who is still reeling from the news of the evacuation of the Americans from Saigon. Masters drunkenly welcomes Jerry Westerby to the CIa office in an American air base in Thailand: “I want you to extend to me the hand of welcome, sir. The United States of America has just applied to join the club of second-class powers, of which I understand your own fine nation to be chairman, president, and oldest member. Shake it!” (480; italics in original). Le Carré himself belongs, as he is well aware, to the last generation who were educated in the belief that they would serve a powerful global empire. While much of his fiction is critical of British imperialism, there are moments when the decline of empire is linked to a decline in values. At the end of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley reflects on the reasons for Bill Haydon’s treason in a manner that suggests considerable sympathy for them: “He saw with painful clarity an ambitious man born to the big canvas, brought up to rule, divide and conquer, whose visions and vanities all were fixed … upon the world’s game, for whom the reality was a poor island with scarcely a voice that would carry across the water” (ttss , 354). Yet in spite of all of the imagery of decline, and in spite of the ascendancy of the Americans, le Carré suggests that there is a countervailing force embodied in the persistence and intelligence of George Smiley. This point was recognized in a perceptive review of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by Karl Miller that compares le Carré to his bête noire Fleming: “As Ian Fleming’s ebullient Bondage once did, le Carré’s tales, for all their disenchantment, seem to be trying to make Britain great again by feigning a situation in which she still has secrets that the world covets and there are moments

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when le Carré’s characters seem to be doing the same” (“Gothic Guesswork”). Le Carré is often seen as writing novels that are, consciously or not, the polar opposite of Fleming’s James Bond series. Though he denies that he set out to write “anti-Bond” thrillers, le Carré cheerfully admits that “I despise Bond. I despise the short answer in the perfectly-made world. I believe that most of us live in doubt” (Bruccoli, Conversations, 29, 13). In a satirical “Open Letter to the Moscow Literary Gazette” (1966), he mocked the simplicities of Fleming’s world: “Bond on his magic carpet takes us away from moral doubt, banishes perplexity with action, morality with duty” (“To Russia,” 6). However, in a manner strangely parallel to Fleming, le Carré’s novels imply that there is a kind of superior virtue in British intelligence. The Americans have all the resources and put on a big show, but the British are the ones who come up with the goods, such as Nelson Ko in The Honourable Schoolboy or Karla in Smiley’s People, just as in Fleming’s novels James Bond is superior to the CIa operatives who assist him. In her famous “Iron Lady” speech in Kensington Town Hall, “Britain Awake” (1976), Margaret Thatcher said that “the Conservative Party has the vital task of shaking the British public out of a long sleep.” The metaphor has connotations of the return of Arthur or Merlin. In a related manner, the Karla trilogy is haunted by the ideas of return and resurrection. Smiley keeps leaving the Circus, only to be recalled to deal with corruption or calamity. Like a returning Arthur, he restores something of the institution’s past glory. Characters who are thought dead often turn out to be alive, particularly in The Honourable Schoolboy, where Jerry Westerby also returns to the secret service as an agent, only to be murdered in Hong Kong. Le Carré’s view of Britain is complex and hard to pin down. On the one hand, there is in his work a persistent patriotism, and an affirmation of British decency, individualism, and freedom, with implications of nostalgia for a more ordered and hierarchical age. But he is widely read as a chronicler of British decline, and his view of British political and educational institutions is deeply disillusioned. Certainly in his personal life John le Carré has demonstrated his commitment to and love of his country, which, like his characters Prideaux and Haydon, he frequently refers to as

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England. During the 1970s, the extremely high tax rates led many successful writers to become tax exiles, and interviewers seemed obsessed with both le Carré’s wealth and the fact that he chose to remain in Britain in spite of taxes. He told the Daily Telegraph in 1974 that having tried living in various other places, “I weighed it up and decided I wanted to live in England. I like English values … wouldn’t it be the most asinine thing in the world if success limited your freedom? I don’t honestly see why having a lot of money should prevent me living where I want to. I want to have my home here, and I’m readily paying the bill for it” (Bruccoli, Conversations, 22). A reading of le Carré’s fiction must seek to balance its nostalgia and patriotism with its criticism of the British establishment, and it is time to turn to a more specifically political reading of his trilogy, and to an assessment of its conclusion. In an introduction to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy written in 1991, le Carré comments that “It’s odd, in these altered days, to discover that Tinker Tailor is already an historical novel,” alluding to the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (ttss , xviii). The political sphere in the novel is anchored in the recent past and in the longer perspective of the post-war era: we are recognizably in the world of Edward Heath’s England. For example, there is a reference to the recently decimalized coinage, which still puzzles George Smiley (ttss , 136). In The Honourable Schoolboy, the key references are international: as we have seen, the Watergate scandal hovers in the background, along with the fall of Saigon and the impending end of colonial rule in Hong Kong. In Smiley’s People, on the other hand, the emphasis is more on mood and character, and the political context in which Smiley is working does not always correspond to the facts of history. The main focus is on personal relationships, and it is noteworthy that Lady Ann Smiley appears for the first time onstage, as it were. There are also several chapters that focus on the troubled consciousness of Karla’s daughter Tatiana. Tony Barley suggests that the novel “continues the de-politicizing trend of The Honourable Schoolboy; in fact he takes it much further” (Taking Sides, 127). This is true in the sense that Smiley’s People is closer in structure to a thriller, with more literary allusions and fewer historical ones than in the earlier two novels. However, I would argue that it

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remains a political novel in the sense that it explores the same issues and dilemmas that go all through the trilogy, with the difference that in Smiley’s People we see their impact primarily on individuals, on an emotional and even somatic level. In 1980, an interviewer from the Observer asked le Carré how he votes, and he replied “I always vote Socialist – with misgivings. I would like to be able to vote Social Democrat” (Bruccoli, Conversations, 68). Elsewhere he commented with reference to his political opinions, “All I desire is that humane values be maintained in our institutions, codes of conduct and systems of thought. It is probably nothing more than old-fashioned liberalism” (Bruccoli, Conversations, 89). And it makes sense to treat le Carré’s novels from the 1970s in terms of “Cold War liberalism,” a term that has wider currency in American usage, but that is an accurate description of the Karla trilogy. However, the novels are not straightforwardly liberal. As Aronoff argues, le Carré “subjects liberalism to a particularly severe critique,” although “ultimately his position is rooted in a liberal disposition” (Spy Novels, 25). In the remainder of this chapter, I will explore le Carré’s conflicted liberalism and his complex attitude to Englishness and the English establishment. Toby Manning’s reading of le Carré’s Cold War novels in many respects resembles my own, except that he finds ideological incoherence where I see a praiseworthy ideology of compromise. He concedes that “some considerable anxiety is expressed in every novel about the more ruthless actions of the British state.” For Manning, there is a fundamental contradiction within liberalism, for its “ontological political purpose – to protect property, profit and power – will always be at odds with the social ideology of ‘rights’ which developed in later liberalism” (John le Carré, 190). There is, however, no reason why the ideology of “rights” should not be expressed in political action. In The Honourable Schoolboy, Connie Sachs talks about fighting for the survival of what she calls “Reasonable Man” (354). This is in the context of the discovery of the torture and murder of the banker Frost, whom Jerry Westerby has blackmailed to obtain information essential to his mission, and who is killed for releasing that information. Smiley recognizes his own role in the circumstances leading to Frost’s death, and is consoled by Connie that Karla, the Russian

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spymaster, would not care at all about one, or even ten dead Frosts, whereas Smiley is troubled by what he had to do in defence of liberal ideals. The underlying assumption here is articulated most clearly in an earlier work by le Carré, when Control says to the agent Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold: “We do disagreeable things so that ordinary people here and elsewhere can sleep safely in their beds at night” (14). At the end of the novel, Leamas sums up the same idea more cynically, when he tells his girlfriend Liz that the only law of spying is expediency, and that the motives of those involved in espionage are very mixed. Spies, he tells her, are not saints and martyrs; “They’re a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives” (205). Leamas does not care for moralizing about the ethical dilemmas of spying. Impatient with Control’s theorizing, he reflects, “it’s like working for a bloody clergyman” (15). Similarly, in The Honourable Schoolboy Westerby tires of Smiley’s attempt to engage him in the ethical issues involved in undertaking a secret mission, thinking that “there was a bit of the failed priest in old George” (116). Westerby, on the other hand, likes to see himself as a simple soldier. He tells Smiley, “You point me and I’ll march” (116). But Leamas and Westerby die in part because they cannot accept the moral compromises necessary to their missions. Smiley always faces the paradoxes of, as he puts it, being “inhuman in defence of our humanity … harsh in defence of compassion” (hs , 508; italics in original). In an interview in 1979, le Carré said that his books include “a strong line of simplistic, wishful, chauvinistic thinking in one or another character, people who, for very honourable reasons, often for reasons of their own natural intellectual limitations, are loyal, decent, unashamedly patriotic blokes,” naming Jim Prideaux in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Jerry Westerby in The Honourable Schoolboy as examples. The problem they experience is that “you simply cannot cease to criticise, however noble one’s reasons” (Bruccoli, Conversations, 57–8). In 2017, le Carré returned to his Cold War material in A Legacy of Spies, a novel that features Peter Guillam and that provides both a complicated backstory and a sequel to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In a brief appearance at the end of the novel, George Smiley reaffirms the necessity of the choices that

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he made, and tells Guillam, “We were not pitiless, Peter. We were never pitiless. We had the larger pity” (261). In one of a number of revisionary moves in this late work, le Carré rewrites the English or British patriotism of the earlier works in a post-Brexit context, making Smiley’s mission one on behalf of Europe. Smiley denies that he acted in the name of capitalism, or of Christendom: “So was it all for England, then?” he resumed. “There was a time, of course there was. But whose England? Which England? England all alone, a citizen of nowhere? I’m a European, Peter … If I had an unattainable ideal, it was of leading Europe out of her darkness towards a new age of reason. I have it still.” (262) If unreflective patriots are simplistic, in le Carré’s view, another kind of limited thinking is that shown by the civil servants and politicians who use appeals to the national interest to promote their own ambitions. Oliver Lacon tells Smiley that he must put his personal feelings aside in order to pursue the traitor in the Circus. He reminds him that “There’s always a part of us that belongs to the public domain, isn’t there? The social contract cuts both ways; you always knew that, I’m sure” (ttss , 76). Later, when Bill Haydon is revealed to be the Soviet mole, Smiley “felt not only disgust, but, despite all that the moment meant to him, a surge of resentment against the institutions he was supposed to be protecting: ‘The social contact cuts both ways you know,’ said Lacon” (ttss , 354). Smiley is disgusted by what he sees as Lacon’s self-serving invocation of the social contract, but he nevertheless accepts the implications of this central myth of liberal democracy. For him, spying is part of his duty to the state, even if other servants of the state invoke that duty in sanctimonious or self-serving ways. Le Carré’s liberalism permits a quite drastic critique of the institutions of the British state, particularly those, like the education system, that exist to maintain class privilege. Manning emphasizes Smiley’s role as a reliable servant of the British state, and writes that the “gentlemanly class” has produced both the traitor Haydon and the patriot Smiley (John le Carré, 192). This ignores an important fact of social difference that runs through the novels. Although Smiley’s

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social background is not described in detail, it seems from details scattered through the novels in which he appears that he is from a middle-class family that is not especially affluent or well-connected, whereas his wife Lady Ann and her cousin Bill Haydon are “from an old family with a strong political tradition,” that is, from the British aristocracy (ttss , 72). Smiley is a thoroughly unromantic hero, whose main interest outside the secret world is literary scholarship, and he is never fully at home in the Establishment. He is introduced in a chapter entitled “A Brief History of George Smiley,” at the beginning of le Carré’s first novel, Call for the Dead (1961), where he is described as “without school, parents, regiment or trade, without wealth or poverty” (Murder, 157). Le Carré’s liberalism is so self-critical that there is a widespread assumption that the conclusion to Smiley’s People shows that Karla and Smiley are equivalent, or even that they have changed places, because Smiley has used emotionally manipulative methods, exploiting Karla’s human weaknesses, while Karla has been revealed as a man with human affections and loyalties.18 This conclusion is supported by a passage in the text of the novel where, just before Karla crosses from east to west, Smiley reflects on what it has taken to bring about his victory: He looked across the river into the darkness again, and an unholy vertigo seized him as the very evil he had fought against seemed to reach out and possess him and claim him despite his striving, calling him a traitor also; mocking him, yet at the same time applauding his betrayal. On Karla has descended the curse of Smiley’s compassion; on Smiley the curse of Karla’s fanaticism. I have destroyed him with the weapons I abhorred, and they are his. We have crossed each other’s frontiers, we are the no-men of this no-man’s-land. (sp , 394) One should remember, however, that this passage represents Smiley’s consciousness at the most critical point in his whole career, so the presence of an element of self-questioning should not be surprising. From a larger perspective, though, I think that the novel

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does not support his feelings in this moment. Similarly, Aronoff concludes that le Carré’s position is ultimately a liberal one, and he sees Smiley’s liberal humanism as characterized above all by “skeptical balance” (Spy Novels, 37; italics Aronoff’s). Aronoff’s summary of Smiley as a character is both insightful and nicely expressed; he argues that le Carré “created in Smiley a reluctant team player, the bearer of paradoxes in the interest of the greater good, a romantic who reluctantly serves established Western society, an individual whose private morality constantly confronts institutional necessity, a committed doubter, and a disgusted patriot. It is not unreasonable to assume the author shares some and perhaps many of these traits” (Spy Novels, 34). A “disgusted patriot” may be another way of saying a “bleak liberal”; Amanda Anderson writes of a “facet of the liberal character that has been present since the beginning – a pessimism or bleakness of attitude that derives from awareness of all those forces and conditions that threaten the realization of liberal ambitions” (Anderson, Bleak Liberalism, 22). Smiley’s People represents the liberal Western state quite negatively. The London scenes at the beginning suggest a violent and decadent society, while Smiley’s visit to Hamburg and its surrounding region includes Herr Kretzschmar’s expensive club, where sex is a commodity, and the water camp, where none of the basic human decencies seem to apply. Set against this, however, are characters whose lives are structured with more loving connections. Villem Craven is determined to put his past associations with Estonian nationalism behind him, and when Smiley visits him, Villem’s English wife is protective of her husband and child. Before the visit to the water camp, Smiley meets an engaging Polish couple at Otto Leipzig’s house whose whimsical and romantic qualities are in stark contrast to the squatters at the camp. Even though Smiley himself doubts his actions, there is hardly an equivalence between him and Karla. Smiley has not callously sent people to their deaths simply to protect himself and his domestic affections. Apologists who emphasize Karla’s humanity at the end seem to forget his inhumanity, represented for example by the descriptions of the suffering body of Maria Ostrakova, or by the gruesome murder of General Vladimir. The novel begins from

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Ostrakova’s point of view, and we learn about her difficult life, shaped like the General’s by the traumatic events of twentiethcentury Russian history. Painful memories of the past are rekindled by a threatening encounter with a Soviet agent, leading her to write to General Vladimir. The General sends Otto Leipzig to visit Ostrakova, and she tells him her story, thinking of him privately as “the magician.” The eruption of her dissident past in the present ends up threatening her life, as two of Karla’s agents try to kill her by throwing her in front of a speeding car. Allan Hepburn has an interesting analysis of the role of fear in espionage fiction. In effect, Hepburn provides a phenomenology of the thriller. Espionage fiction, he argues, “works its effects through the body, by putting the body in jeopardy while the mind takes a holiday … Novels habituate readers to social, psychological, and political fears. Fear inoculates the reader by delivering small doses of terror through representations” (Intrigue, 29). As well, Hepburn insightfully shows the connection between the politics of the spy novel and its representation of physical pain. In his example of The Bourne Identity, by Robert Ludlum, the disagreement of the spy with the ideology of a regime “can be measured by the harm inflicted on the spy’s person … Political exigency is felt as bodily pain” (Intrigue, 8–9). This analysis illuminates le Carré’s presentation of Maria Ostrakova. Her bruised body becomes an emblem of all of the suffering victims of Soviet terror, as it is identified with the very map of the nation: To walk was just possible for Ostrakova, and to walk was all she asked. To walk and wait for the magician. Nothing was broken. Though her dumpy little body, when they had given her a bath, was shaping up to become as blackened and patchy as a map of the Siberian coalfields, nothing was broken. And her poor rump, which had given her that bit of trouble at the warehouse, looked already as though the assembled secret armies of Soviet Russia had booted her from one end of Paris to the other; still, nothing was broken. (sp , 139) A later chapter begins with Ostrakova hiding in fear and enduring her injuries. She is in an extreme state of anxiety which would be

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thought paranoid were it not entirely justified by the circumstances she is in. George Smiley arrives as her unlikely-looking white knight to rescue her, telling her “The magician is dead, madame … I have come from London to help you in his place” (267). Another suffering woman is Karla’s daughter Tatiana, whose mental illness corresponds to Ostrakova’s physical injuries; they are further linked by the fact that Ostrakova’s long-lost daughter Alexandra was used to provide a “legend” for Tatiana to come to the West. In fact, Tatiana’s “delusions” are accurate representations of her vulnerable position in the Soviet Union, as the daughter of the spymaster Karla: Alexandra had spun these tales before. How her father was a secret prince more powerful than the Czar. How he ruled at night, as the owls rule while the hawks are at rest. How his secret eyes followed her wherever she went, how his secret ears heard every word she spoke. And how, one night, hearing her mother praying in her sleep, he sent his men for her and they took her into the snow and she was never seen again: not even by God. (334) Smiley visits Tatiana/Alexandra, just as he had visited Ostrakova, and there is a compassion in his manner that exceeds the operational reasons for his visit. Karla, on the other hand, has had Tatiana’s mother killed, and is willing to kill repeatedly in order to protect his daughter and provide asylum for her in a sanatorium in Switzerland. In contrast with Karla, Smiley is a humane man, a scholar of German literature. He is so courteous to others that he is unable to get out of dinner engagements with men he dislikes. In a memorable moment early in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy he is alarmed when Oliver Lacon’s little girl falls off her pony. Lacon tells him impatiently “You’re not responsible for everyone, you know, George” (68). Given the extent of Smiley’s compassion and self-reflection, it is not surprising that he has a moment of deep questioning at the end of the trilogy, as he bleakly contemplates the price of safeguarding Western liberty and individualism, but there is no suggestion that there is a moral equivalency between the East and the West. The

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price is very high in terms of both the necessary compromises with ethical ideals and the personal cost to Smiley himself, but le Carré believes that it is a necessary price and one that is worth paying. The powerful description of the Berlin Wall and its environs serves to remind the reader of the radical difference between the two sides. It is reinforced by imagery out of fairy tale, imagery of the classical underworld, and Christian imagery: They passed between black, dead buildings, then right, across the cobbled road, in pitch-frozen darkness to the river bank, where an old timber bullet-shelter with rifle slits offered them the whole span of the bridge. To their left, black against the hostile river, a tall wooden cross, garnished with barbed wire, bore memory to an unknown man who had not quite escaped. (sp , 392) In Intrigue, Hepburn stresses what might be called the illiberal nature of the espionage genre, and argues that it produces the experience of “catharsis as confirmation of ideological authority” (46); “spy fiction enacts a conservative political fantasy of wholeness and like-mindedness within nations” (52). As a writer of espionage fiction who is often regarded as transcending the genre, le Carré creates a more dialogical form of spy novel, and his Karla trilogy reveals the conflicts within liberalism. Perhaps those conflicts are what save the West from being the mirror-image of the East, even if there are moments when it seems to his protagonist that such an equivalency is in fact the reality. There is therefore in le Carré’s liberalism, as expressed in the novels of the Karla trilogy, a dialectic between progressive ideals and political realism. The dialectic is most evident in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which alternates between scenes at Thursgood’s prep school and Smiley’s hunt for the traitor in the Circus. The two institutions have numerous parallels in terms of social class, the arcane systems of rules and conventions, and the complex range of relationships among their members. Jim Prideaux is the direct link between the two worlds, and they come together in a scene where Smiley visits him at the school as part of his investigation.

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They drive into the country, and the lyrical description of the night landscape embodies a tranquility far from the world of London, in stark contrast to the violent dangers of the forest in Czechoslovakia, again like something in a fairy tale, to which Jim was enticed with the prospect of vital intelligence in Operation Testify. The two English patriots discuss betrayal in a rural scene, the description of which suggests a painting by Samuel Palmer: “The night landscape seemed to Smiley suddenly innocent; it was like a great canvas on which nothing bad or cruel had ever been painted. Side by side, they stared down the valley over the clusters of lights to a tor raised against the horizon. A single tower stood at its top and for a moment it marked for Smiley the end of a journey” (310). As numerous commentators have observed, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy begins by telling us “The truth is … ” and it ends with Bill Roach having convinced himself that the gun that he saw Jim Prideaux dig up from the ground beside his caravan “was, after all, a dream” (3, 379). Perhaps one could relate this to the alternation of realism and romance that characterizes le Carré’s trilogy as a whole. On the one hand there is a novel of the present day, telling a story of self-interestedness, cynicism, and disillusionment. On the other, there is a considerable residue of Edwardian patriotism and archaic notions of honour. Le Carré is often thought to be the “anti-Bond,” writing about what espionage is really like, rather than telling heroic boys’ stories about British supremacy. He learned to write with this worldly-wise perspective in part from Conrad and Greene. Yet both of those writers, like le Carré, draw on the heroic traditions of boys’ stories of the imperial age. Le Carré seeks to recuperate and preserve aspects of a tradition of patriotic heroic service, while at the same time attacking the class structure in which they flourished. This self-proclaimed Labour voter often has a strong resemblance to a Tory radical. It is probably healthy for Bill Roach to think that the gun was a dream. That leaves open the possibility of a future world where a grown-up Bill Roach can be good at noticing things without suffering physical harm as a result.

3 the Green World of Richard Adams Watership Down is a real place, like all the places in the book. RICHARD ADAmS, INtRoDUCtIoN to WATership DoWn

In John Lanchester’s novel Capital, which is set around the time of the 2008 financial crisis, an investment banker called Roger Yount is part of a shooting party at the home of one of his bank’s wealthiest clients. For a moment, he finds himself alone in the countryside, while he waits for the others to catch up with him. He observes a rabbit sniffing at the roots of an oak tree, and he suddenly has a sensation of freedom, a realization that he could live an entirely different life from the one he is living, “a simpler and economically smaller life … These thoughts belonged to Roger but he also felt that they came from the air around him, from the fact that he was standing next to a copse in a field in Norfolk on his own, watching the grass sway and the clouds race, being ignored by a rabbit” (95–6). But first the rabbit and then Roger hear the other members of the party coming up to the copse, and the realization fades. The rabbit “raised its head, twitched its nose, and then with three hops was gone in the long grass” (96). This is like a scene from Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972) turned inside out. In Watership Down, human beings occur infrequently, and are almost exclusively seen from the rabbits’ point of view. They smoke cigarettes (“white sticks”) and drive dangerous, smelly vehicles

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(hrududil in Lapine, the rabbit language). In the episode in Capital, by contrast, we see the world of the rabbit, which appears only for this moment, from a human perspective. Was Lanchester thinking of Watership Down when he wrote this scene? It is quite possible, given the immense popularity of the book, which was given further impetus by the animated film of 1978, featuring Art Garfunkel’s hit single “Bright Eyes.” Certainly Roger’s transitory realization that he could live a less complicated and materialistic life than he does is in keeping with the values of Adams’s novel, as is the way that the rabbit embodies freedom and connection with nature. In his London existence, Roger is encumbered with a life of conspicuous consumption that, in spite of his sizable income, threatens to make him a bankrupt if he does not receive a very large Christmas bonus. This brief but memorable moment in Lanchester’s condition-of-England novel offers a valuable insight into some of the reasons why a children’s book about rabbits, the first publication of a conservative middle-aged civil servant, became one of the defining works of British culture in the 1970s.1 The story of the rabbits of Watership Down was first told by Richard Adams to his daughters Juliet and Rosamund on a long car trip. With their encouragement, he wrote the story down and tried to find a publisher. After a number of rejections it was published by Rex Collings, a small firm who came to Adams’s attention because they had recently reissued Richard Jefferies’s late-Victorian Wood Magic, a book about a child’s interaction with nature. Watership Down won the Guardian Award for children’s fiction in March 1973, was picked up in the United States by Macmillan USA, and then was issued in Britain in paperback by Penguin, both as a Puffin children’s book and as a work of adult fiction. Although it is a long book (472 pages in the Penguin fortieth anniversary edition) full of literary allusions and epigraphs from classical literature, it has appealed to readers of all ages. It is widely reported that Watership Down has sold over fifty million copies, and it is often described as the best-selling Penguin book of all time (see McFadden, “Richard Adams”). On the occasion of Adams’s death at the age of ninety-six, late in 2016, a BBC news article presented the literary historical question

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that the success of Watership Down inevitably raises, by noting that “Richard Adams was essentially a traditional Englishman with a love of the countryside and a belief that, somehow, things were better in the past. It is perhaps surprising that this natural conservative, from a conventional middle-class background, should have written a book which had such a revolutionary impact on children’s literature” (“Richard Adams”). Indeed, Watership Down was read by more than just children. When my friends and I read it as university students, we thought of it simply as an exciting work of literature that happened to be about animals. The book appealed especially to those with a love of the countryside, or at least of the idea of the countryside, and those who enjoyed heroic fantasy literature. Many British people grew up reading C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, which were published between 1950 and 1956. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was extremely popular through the 1970s, and his posthumously published The Silmarillion was a bestseller when it appeared in 1977. Both Adams and Tolkien had a strong countercultural appeal.2 Significantly, Adams quotes Lewis when discussing children’s literature in his autobiography: “A book that’s not worth reading when you’re sixty is not worth reading when you’re six” (Day Gone By, 22). Watership Down has been a steady seller since its initial popularity. I have found that many of my students at least know of the book, and quite a few have seen the film version.3 The book has been issued with illustrations (by John Lawrence in 1976 and by Aldo Galli in 2012), with a new introduction by the author (2005), and in a Penguin fortieth anniversary edition (2012). A new animated adaptation co-produced by the BBC and Netflix was released in December 2018, with a strong voice cast that included Ben Kingsley, Gemma Arterton, and Tom Wilkinson. Most of the published criticism on Watership Down appears in specialized journals focused on children’s and fantasy literature. I will treat it here primarily in the context of the other novels I am studying, as an important and popular work of fiction with social and political overtones. I think that by situating it within the history of “mainstream” literary fiction in the 1970s, new aspects of the work are highlighted and its popularity and cultural influence

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can be better understood; in return, it illuminates aspects of the other works in this study, even, improbable as it may seem when first suggested, those of John le Carré. While this may appear an incongruous interpretive method, I think that it is a valid approach to Watership Down. In the horizon of expectations of the early 1970s, Tolkien’s works, the postmodern fabulation of early John Fowles, The Gulag Archipelago of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and the realistic stories of women’s lives by Margaret Drabble represented a range of possible consumer choice for the educated reader. Furthermore, Adams himself wrote in a variety of fictional genres, from the fantasy novel Shardik (1974) to the Gothic thriller The Girl in a Swing (1980), which is anchored in a precisely rendered English country town. Lastly, in view of the political resonances that I will identify in Watership Down, it is worth pointing out that George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) provides a precedent for a story about animals that is based on actual experience of agricultural life and that is at the same time a political allegory. Adams’s 2005 introduction to Watership Down tries to shut down interpretation by saying that it is only a “story about rabbits” made up for children to listen to in the car, and that it “was never intended to be some sort of allegory or parable” (xvi).4 Yet at the same time the introduction raises an abundance of critical perspectives on the book. Adams relates some of his rabbit characters to men whose bravery and leadership he admired during the Second World War, which immediately suggests one possible interpretive frame. Both in the introduction, and in the text itself, he makes reference to various literary traditions which have an affinity with Watership Down, including classical texts in the heroic mode. He proudly comments that his daughter Juliet recognized the hermeneutic power of the chapter epigraphs, quoting her as saying, “I like them because when you read one for the first time, you can’t imagine how it is going to have anything to do with the story; and then, as you read on, you see how it does” (xiv). Watership Down is a generically complex book, influenced by the traditions of rural writing and animal stories, including beast fables and tales from the golden age of children’s literature. Hazel and his companions, and the rabbits in the stories they tell of the mythological trickster

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rabbit El-ahrairah and his companion Rabscuttle, have analogues in other lapine tales, including the trickster Br’er Rabbit in the stories adapted by Joel Chandler Harris, and the rabbits in the tales of Beatrix Potter.5 The chapter epigraphs also connect Watership Down to classical epic and tragedy, and some of the scenes have analogues in both classical and biblical literature. The story recapitulates elements of the Aeneid and the Exodus narrative.6 As Robert Miltner usefully summarizes, “To a greater or lesser degree, Watership Down is a beast fable, a fantasy, a mythological tale, an epic, a political/ Utopian novel, and an allegory. Richard Adams emerges not just as a storyteller but as a master teller of many types of stories” (“Genre,” 63). In this respect, one can make a comparison with Doris Lessing, whose Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) is at once a work of fantasy (featuring hybrid animals), science fiction, a psychological allegory and quest narrative, and a novel about mental illness and psychiatry that includes realistic accounts of the Yugoslavian partisans during the Second World War. Adams worked as a civil servant in what would later become the Department of the Environment, where among other things he was responsible for policies related to air pollution (Dunn, “Adams’s Heroes”). His environmental awareness is reflected in the book, as he imagines what the smells and noises of human activity might seem like from the perspective of another species. It is this aspect of the work that most strongly connected with the emerging environmental movement in the 1970s. Unlike Tolkien’s fantasy, Watership Down is set in a realistic world of the present day. Its countryside is crossed by roads busy with motor vehicles and electricity wires on pylons, and studded with farms equipped with tractors and other modern equipment. Furthermore, the imagined world is based on a naturalist’s careful observation of a few square miles of land in southern England. What makes it unique, in addition to the welltold heroic story and the diverse cast of characters, is its extremely detailed and precise observation of what the countryside of Berkshire and Hampshire is really like, and of the way that human beings have impinged on that countryside. Adams’s introduction asserts that the places in the book are “real,” and he even identifies the exact square of Sheet 174 of the Ordnance Survey Map

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in which Watership Down is located (xiii–xiv). The fact that the “story about rabbits” is so solidly grounded in close observation of the countryside generates social and political implications for the reader, in spite of the disavowals of the author’s introduction. As in The Ice Age, property development plays a key role in the action of Watership Down, since its action is precipitated by the beginning of work on a new housing estate. It is a book with solid roots in a radical Tory tradition of authors and thinkers who value tradition and individual resolve, but speak out on behalf of the rural poor and against environmental degradation. This tradition includes nineteenth-century figures such as William Cobbett and John Ruskin. George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939) is another book that looks back fondly at a rural childhood and laments suburban housing development, and there are quite a few similarities between Orwell and Adams in spite of the obvious political differences. Adams also published Shardik (1974) and The Plague Dogs (1977) in the 1970s. However, neither of these works has had anything like the cultural impact of Watership Down. Shardik seems to have appealed primarily to hard-core devotees of myth criticism and perhaps some readers of fantasy literature.7 For me, its elaborately invented fictional world remains rather lifeless. What makes Watership Down so compelling is the way that it is anchored in real places, with their actual flora and fauna. As we shall see, this enables it to address a variety of political and social concerns in a displaced way, through the interaction of the realistic setting and the fable-like story. The Plague Dogs lacks this quality of displacement, which may be why it is a less successful work, in spite of its obvious appeal to animal lovers and its similar use of an epic quest narrative, again set in a real landscape. Because the protagonists are dogs rather than wild animals, they interact with human beings far more than do the rabbits of Watership Down, and The Plague Dogs becomes a vehicle for Adams to editorialize on technology, tabloid journalism, religion, and various other contemporary concerns. Thus, although I will make a few references to The Plague Dogs, my focus here is concentrated on Watership Down, as a novel and as a cultural phenomenon. The description of rabbit life in Watership Down is based on Adams’s own lifelong observation of nature, especially during his

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walks on the Downs, supplemented by a source he credits both in the 2005 introduction and in the text itself: R.M. Lockley’s study of The Private Life of the Rabbit. Lockley’s book explains one reason why rabbits make good characters in literature: “The field naturalist finds it extremely difficult to study in a completely wild state an animal which lives underground for most of the day, which comes forth to feed above ground largely by night, and which hides its newborn young deep in the earth. Its habit of running to cover when it sees man, and indeed living much in the cover of woodland, copse and hedge make it correspondingly difficult to study as an individual” (25). There is, therefore, considerable room for a writer to invent, though some may object that even if Adams’s rabbits are authentic in many ways, they are remarkably anthropomorphic in others. This is an objection that he acknowledges in a conversation that occurs late in The Plague Dogs between two naturalists, Sir Peter Scott and the rabbit expert Ronald Lockley. The latter expostulates about “Well-intentioned amateurs like that chap Richard Adams – fond of the country – reasonably good observer – knows next to nothing about rabbits – hopelessly sentimental” (442). Adams also told the Guardian’s Elisabeth Dunn that real rabbits would never rescue another rabbit from a snare: “I’ve seen them walk past another rabbit in a snare and not give it a second look” (“Adams’s Heroes”). In 1990, Adams published The Day Gone By: An Autobiography. This book is essentially a memoir of his childhood and military service in the Second World War, ending with him completing his interrupted studies at Oxford. It is not perhaps a great autobiography, but it is a readable and engaging book, revealing of the sources of Adams’s imagination, and at the same time a valuable social document. The Day Gone By is self-consciously an act of memory, for many paragraphs begin with the words “I remember” or “I recall.” Adams describes a childhood out of Georgian literature, and his account is full of references to Housman, de la Mare, and The Wind in the Willows. He writes that he reacted to Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” in 1949 with “instant recognition” (119), and Thomas’s imagery of a “green and golden” age of childhood (line 15) is echoed in many of Adams’s memories, though there are also some dark moments. His father was a country doctor based in Newbury, who before the First

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World War “had been one of the first ‘Toad of Toad Hall’ motorists, with a De Dion Bouton” (2). Adams grew up with a Wordsworthian love of nature, which was given a naturalist’s rigour by his father’s insistence that he identify each flower, bird, or insect accurately. He imbibed a conservative and patriotic ethos from his social milieu, his prep school, and his public school, which was Bradfield. The Greek theatre at Bradfield inculcated a love of classical literature, and especially tragedy, which is apparent in Watership Down. Like many writers, Adams is revealing and interesting when he writes about his childhood experience of reading. He identifies a number of key influences, including Walter de la Mare’s book The Three Mulla-Mulgars, the story of a quest in which most of the characters are animals (155–6). Other animal stories that made an impression were A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories and Beatrix Potter. Adams praises Milne for his characters, but thinks that the stories are trivial in comparison with Potter’s books, which he says “will survive on story, style and characters” (22). Adams’s father read him adventure stories, and “above all, we read Dr Dolittle.” In spite of the shortcomings of Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle books, in the best of them “the narrative grip is powerful. Above all, the author obviously felt real compassion for animals. If I am up to the neck in the animal rights movement today, Dr Dolittle must answer for it” (22). Adams frequently recalls that he was able to read what he wanted as a child, including some things that might have been deemed unsuitable, so that he tended to resist the idea that Watership Down is too violent for children.8 Adams recalls that as a boy he once saw a rabbit swim across a stream, something he would never see again in all of his observation of nature (Day Gone By, 60). This vivid memory inspires two important incidents involving streams in Watership Down, first when the rabbits swim a small stream when they are leaving Sandleford warren and are suddenly aware of a dog, and later when they must swim under a bridge while escaping from the terrifying pursuit of General Woundwort and his officers. Adams also narrates another memory involving rabbits, this time of a traumatic experience that seems to have induced an awareness of the transience of living things. He explicates the significance of this memory by juxtaposing the account with a quotation from Hopkins: “It is the blight

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man was born for. / It is Margaret you mourn for” (“Spring and Fall,” lines 14–15). This memory of human indifference and animal suffering must surely inform some of the more intense moments of Watership Down, not to mention Adams’s work on behalf of animal rights. It also undercuts the general tendency towards the pastoral in his memories of his Georgian childhood: One of my early memories is of walking hand-in-hand with my mother along Bartholomew Street, when we saw coming towards us a dirty, bearded man who was pushing up the roadway a home-made handcart, a thing of soap-boxes and old pram wheels. This was full of and hung about with dead rabbits. Their back legs were tied together and as the cart rattled along their ears and poor, eye-glazed faces swung and bobbed. The man, to leave his hands free, had tied the shafts with a bit of cord under his armpits, and as he went he was very deliberately skinning a rabbit with an old knife, and tugging off the loose fur where he had got a grip. (80–1) Any commentary on the political dimension of Watership Down should consider the book in relation to the traditions of British animal fantasy and British rural and nature writing. The former is often rather conservative in tendency, whereas the latter is, in terms of conventional maps of the political spectrum, often both radical and conservative. To begin with one of the best-known examples of an animal story, Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows is in many ways a conservative text. The main animal characters strongly resemble Edwardian gentlemen, while the upstart stoats and weasels from the Wild Wood who occupy Toad Hall have working-class traits. In addition, the world it represents is almost entirely male, and there is a notable reticence about sexuality. The otter has a young son, who goes missing and then is found, but there is no reference to a female otter. The conservative tendency of Watership Down is emphasized in a structuralist Marxist reading by Christopher Pawling, who comments insightfully on the relationship between the pastoral world of nature and the way that Adams draws on his wartime experience. Pawling suggests that “the subtext is a thinly disguised political

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allegory which asserts that élites are vital to the survival of any species” (“Watership,” 226). Responding to various readings by myth critics, Pawling caustically notes, “Of course, it is possible to show how Adams’ fable draws on the ‘universal’ archetype of the Quest for much of its basic narrative pattern, but the core of the text has far more in common with the imaginative ‘universe’ of Biggles or Bulldog Drummond than that of Odysseus” (230). However, that is only one aspect of the book, and it has connections to condition-of-England writing and nature writing in which we can detect more radical affinities, and which help to account for the way that Adams’s book took off among young adult readers soon after it was published. Responding to Pawling’s critique, Tony Watkins allows for the existence of some of these radical tendencies. He discusses Watership Down in relation to The Wind in the Willows and The Lord of the Rings, noting that anti-industrial nostalgia produces contradictory effects that cannot be pigeon-holed under a single political label. Just as Tolkien’s sympathies were with the common people, so there is an ecological dimension to Adams’s novel (“Reconstructing,” 168–9). The most rigorously intellectual discussion of Watership Down is by the eminent theologian Stanley Hauerwas, in his book A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic. He analyzes the role of storytelling in Adams’s novel in order to explicate his “Ten Theses toward the Reform of Christian Social Ethics,” one of which, significantly for a focus on politics, is that “Christians in America have too readily accepted liberalism as a social strategy appropriate to the Christian story” (11). For Hauerwas, “Watership Down is fundamentally a political novel. It is concerned with exploring what conditions are necessary for a community to be a viable polity” (13). He notes that the various communities in Watership Down are to be judged by their ability to sustain the narratives that define the nature of their inhabitants (12). From a political perspective, this provides a good way of looking at their various strengths and weaknesses, in relation to issues such as security, freedom, and the relationship of the individual to the community. The core group of rabbits whose epic adventure makes up the main action of Watership Down begin their lives in Sandleford warren, a society that relies on tradition and a quite well-defined class

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structure, and that has something of a military character. The trusted Chief Rabbit, Threarah, is generally referred to as “the Threarah,” and is a rabbit who won his position by a combination of strength and level-headedness. He “never let himself become excited by rumour or danger,” maintaining “a certain self-contained detachment” (10). The action is triggered by the encroachment of construction workers on what was previously the rabbits’ territory in order to commence the building of an estate of “high class modern residences” on “six acres of excellent building land,” as the workers’ sign proclaims (8). Fiver, a rabbit gifted with visionary powers, sees the field where the warren is located as “covered with blood” (7), and says that all the rabbits must leave. He and his brother Hazel go to the Chief Rabbit to tell him of this prophecy. However, the Threarah disregards the warning of danger, both because of his sanguine nature, and because he is growing old, and cannot imagine going wandering over the countryside. He thinks that as it is May, and rabbits are generally enjoying themselves, everything will work out for the best. As the story progresses, we realize that there is something of Neville Chamberlain about the Threarah. After Fiver’s Cassandra-like prophecies of doom go unheard by the Threarah, a group of rabbits led by Hazel, who becomes the hero of the novel, leave the warren to set up on their own. They are accompanied by the powerful Bigwig, a member of the Owsla, the group of strong rabbits who support the Chief Rabbit of a warren. After surviving a number of tests of their intelligence and strength, and of Hazel’s leadership skills, they arrive at the second society represented in the book, a place where the rabbits initially seem to be thriving, but where Fiver again has intimations that there is something wrong. This unnamed warren, generally referred to by critics as “Cowslip’s warren” after the rabbit who first greets the wanderers, is materially comfortable: the rabbits have a lot of space, and they easily feed themselves on food that mysteriously appears in the fields. They do not seem very invested in the traditional stories of rabbit mythology, but instead enjoy a rather melancholy, “decadent” style of poetry, and they have a great deal of personal autonomy. Hauerwas describes this warren as both a welfare state and as a liberal society.9 The rabbits are large and healthy-looking,

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although they do not seem particularly strong or courageous, and their needs are all taken care of. There is no chief rabbit, so each individual can act as he or she wishes, with no sense of responsibility for others, and “No one must ever ask where another rabbit was” (Watership Down, 114). There is a hint about how we are to react to Cowslip’s warren in the fact that the epigraph to chapter 13, where it first appears, is from Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters”: In the afternoon they came unto a land In which it seemed always afternoon. All round the coast the languid air did swoon, Breathing like one that hath a weary dream. (69) Tennyson bases the poem on a passage from Book IX of the Odyssey where those of Odysseus’ crew who eat the lotos fruit do not want to continue on their voyage home, and must be forced back into the ships and lashed fast (Homer, 9:91–117). Tennyson expands his source, including a long “Choric Song” of the mariners, in which duty competes with and is overwhelmed by decadent aestheticism.10 Francis O’Gorman’s political reading of “The Lotos-Eaters” relates the poem to the political issues of the years before the Reform Bill, and he writes that the poem describes a group of men “once heroic and active, who have succumbed to lethargy and abandoned their responsibilities both for their own immediate tasks and for those whose lives they lead and support … The poem is an instance of Tennyson’s early much debated preoccupation with a fantasy of withdrawal; part of his effort to find ways of bringing epic back into the poetics of the nineteenth century” (“Tennyson’s,” 4). Adams’s epigraph is thus especially appropriate to introduce a representation of a liberal society that has become decadent, forgetting the civic virtues. The rabbits of Cowslip’s warren do not behave like rabbits. They resemble the Eloi of H.G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895) in having a somewhat effete quality, with a sensitivity to the aesthetic. They seem to live in a world where identities are in flux: some of their behaviour is human, and furthermore it suggests a human society that

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lacks vigour and spiritedness. The rabbits seem to Hazel’s group to possess “a curious, rather unnatural gentleness” (Watership Down, 61); unlike other rabbits they have formal gestures: “a curious, dancing movement of the head and front paws” (70). They make representational art with stones (76), and they laugh and speak in an unnatural way (78, 80–1). They carry the food that a man leaves for them back to their warren, making them in Fiver’s analogy “like dogs carrying sticks” (86). The rabbits of Cowslip’s warren have an aestheticized attitude to the traditional stories of El-ahrairah, like liberal Christians in relation to the Bible and traditional teachings, and they respond somewhat condescendingly to the story Dandelion tells them about El-ahrairah and the King’s lettuce. As Cowslip explains, “we don’t tell the old stories very much … Our stories and poems are mostly about our own lives” (99). Their poet Silverweed shares one of his compositions, a melancholy romantic poem whose images of nature all encourage the acceptance of death and indeed express its appeal. It is noteworthy that the poem includes some words – “the heart of light, the silence” – that are taken from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (101). Fiver finds Cowslip’s warren very troubling, and he refuses to stay in the burrows. When Bigwig is caught in a snare, it is revealed that the existence of the warren is tolerated by a farmer who feeds the rabbits in order to be able to snare a regular supply of them. The price of living in this comfortable place is that one must not acknowledge the existence of certain rebarbative facts. The rabbits do not ask questions, especially not questions beginning with the word “where.” Again, there is a parallel with The Time Machine, where the sinister Morlocks provide the Eloi with the necessities of life, but in return they feed on them. As Hauerwas’s discussion suggests, Adams uses Cowslip’s warren to represent the dangers of a decadent and excessively liberal society that has lost any notion of history, tradition, or the common good. The result is a lack of the virtues of civic responsibility and courage that leads to a focus on personal satisfaction and a refusal to consider ultimate questions. The emphasis on how well-fed and healthy the rabbits are is indicative of a consumer society where needs are easily met, but this comes at the cost of not thinking about

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the possibility of being snared by the man who provides the food. The sexual revolution and the variety of styles of dress and social behaviour that proliferated in the late 1960s may be echoed in the “un-rabbitlike” behaviour that Hazel and his companions observe. Adams suggests in his chapters about the sojourn in Cowslip’s warren that material security and comfort can come at the cost of forgetting about communal responsibility, sacrifice, and courage, qualities which are also necessary in speaking on behalf of the environment against human depredations of it. In some of his other writings, Adams’s conservatism, which is really a kind of radical Toryism – what in Canada is called red Toryism – is also connected to an orthodox understanding of Anglican Christianity. In The Plague Dogs, negatively portrayed characters are associated with technology and with the popular press; the person who is kindest to the two runaway dogs is a saintly “muscular Christian” vicar who is in fact a portrait of one of Adams’s friends: It will have been about an hour later than their bedraggled forms were seen, lurking at the bottom of his garden, by Roy Greenwood, former Himalayan mountaineer and Outward Bound instructor, the vicar of Ulpha-with-Seathwaite. Roy, as was his practice, had got up in the dark of the winter’s morning to pray for two hours before breakfast and a full day’s work; and as he knelt in intercession for the sins and grief of the world and the misery of its countless victims, human and animal, he caught sight, through the window, of two furtive shapes beneath the bare ash trees. (402) Greenwood feeds the two dogs with his own breakfast. The “real” Roy Greenwood is mentioned as a climbing companion in Adams’s Nature Diary (88), where he is described as “a model for the Rev. Tony Redwood in The Girl in a Swing” (146). Redwood is an unconventional clergyman, a combination of conservative respect for the Book of Common Prayer and disregard of the social conformism sometimes associated with the Church of England. At the beginning of the communion service, he always reads the Ten Commandments “in full, as appointed” (Girl in a Swing, 314).

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In spite of his Tory and Christian values, however, I do not think that Adams rejects liberalism in the thoroughgoing way that Hauerwas, writing in his rather different American context, implies. The social and political ideal of Watership Down is a genuinely liberal society, offering the individual a degree of autonomy and freedom, and seeking to incorporate the different contributions of all of its members, while remaining in touch with its traditional myths and accepting the tragic dimension of existence. This is the “bleak liberalism” described by Amanda Anderson; it is recognizably a form of liberalism, but it has a pessimistic aspect that acknowledges the difficulty of realizing liberal aspirations, and that is connected to the disenchantment of the Cold War era. Anderson notes that this disenchantment led some liberal intellectuals to acknowledge the insights of certain religious thinkers, such as Arnold Toynbee, Reinhold Niebuhr, or T.S. Eliot, whose view of human nature was more pessimistic than that of classic nineteenth-century liberals (Bleak, 26). Adams’s ideas about society and citizenship are suggested by the warren that Hazel and his fugitive companions establish high up on Watership Down, a flexible social order where tradition is leavened by innovation. It is located, both geographically and in the narrative chronology, between the false freedom of Cowslip’s warren and the totalitarian security of Efrafa. In digging and organizing their new warren, the rabbits incorporate things they have learned from the other societies. When it comes time to defend Watership Down they look back to lessons learned at Sandleford. They build an underground chamber like the one at Cowslip’s warren, while telling the traditional stories, and needing to rely on their physical strength, courage, and ingenuity. They eventually incorporate some of the lessons of security from Efrafa, while permitting a far greater degree of individualism. As Hazel tells the Efrafan dissident Blackavar, “you’re going to find us a sloppy lot, I’m afraid” (376). Civitas does not mean blindly obeying orders, but rather using one’s abilities for the greater good and exercising one’s own judgment. Various of the Watership Down rabbits are characterized by special talents: Hazel’s is leadership, Blackberry’s is intelligence, Bigwig’s is physical courage; Dandelion is the storyteller, Fiver has visionary powers, and Bluebell is the jester.

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Watership Down does not have a clear structure of authority, unlike Efrafa, where the society is highly organized and hierarchical. In fact, as Hauerwas points out, Hazel is never formally made the Chief Rabbit (Community, 29); instead, his leadership causes the other rabbits simply to begin to regard him in that way, though it takes Bigwig much longer than the others (see 56, 448). As the narrator explains, Hazel “was simply the one – as a Chief Rabbit ought to be – through whom a strong feeling, latent throughout the warren, had come to the surface” (186). Hazel is not the strongest or the cleverest of the rabbits, but he is the one endowed with the charismatic gift of leadership, like his human inspiration, Major John Gifford, whom Adams describes as “the most unassuming man I have ever known” (The Day Gone By, 304). In his exploration of leadership and citizenship in a novel that tends towards the philosophical romance, Adams had a celebrated precursor in William Golding. According to Allan Hepburn, “Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) provides an allegory of colonialism gone awry, but it can also be interpreted in light of mid-century debates about statehood, authority, and leadership” (Around 1945, 5). Watership Down can be interpreted in the same way. In the warren of Efrafa, Adams completes his range of sociopolitical types by representing a highly structured, in fact totalitarian, society that is inward-looking and does not co-operate with other communities. The Watership Down rabbits first send representatives to Efrafa in the hope of bringing back some does, having realized the need to reproduce in order to maintain their number. However, the rabbits barely escape from Efrafa with their lives, and the extent of social control that they describe as existing there resembles the Soviet Union in Cold War espionage fiction. Efrafa is ruled by a rabbit called General Woundwort, whose charismatic and frightening leadership and military title perhaps indicate an affinity with Joseph Stalin.11 He is a paranoid leader whose only response to a threat is to fight it. He maintains his authority in Efrafa by terrorizing its inhabitants through a hierarchy of authority, through a kind of secret police, and through his own brooding presence. The narrator’s explanation of General Woundwort’s view of the social order of Efrafa sounds rather like the kind of justification often offered for Soviet terror by fellow-travellers in the West:

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“To feel that rabbits were competing to risk their lives at his orders gratified Woundwort, although he believed – and so did his Council and his Owsla – that he was giving the warren peace and security at a price which was modest enough” (305). Part III of Watership Down, “Efrafa,” details the mission to liberate a group of does from Efrafa, and the ensuing battle when a party from Efrafa invade Watership Down. Bigwig infiltrates Efrafa by posing as a solitary wanderer looking for a home, and he is initiated into the Efrafan Owsla. Like James Bond, or like a le Carré character, Bigwig is a secret agent with a cover story, dissembling in order to defend freedom and liberal values. He experiences the stress of a double life, feeling vulnerable in a situation where physical strength and courage are not all that is required, and uncertain about whom he can trust. His lucky escape is more out of Ian Fleming than John le Carré and makes for some of the most anxious and exciting pages of Watership Down, while the terrifying power of General Woundwort is akin to that of some of Fleming’s outlandish villains. The cruelties of Efrafa call to mind many scenes in espionage fiction and Cold War literature. In the course of his mission, Bigwig encounters the victims of a totalitarian society, and here the analogues one thinks of are classics of Cold War studies of totalitarianism, by authors such as Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Some of the oppressed rabbits in Efrafa suggest dissidents in the Soviet Union, as they are punished for any rebellious actions, and their sufferings are exhibited as a warning to others. One of the signs that Efrafa is an unnatural and oppressive society is that the does are reabsorbing their young rather than giving birth, because no one is allowed to leave Efrafa. As a result, there is a lot of female discontent in the warren (306). Thus oppression of women is another of the crimes we can attribute to General Woundwort, and there is also a classical analogue that was surely not lost on Adams, with his great love of Greek tragedy, for in Oedipus the King part of the curse on Thebes is that children are stillborn: In the unnumbered deaths of its people the city dies;

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those children that are born lie dead on the naked earth unpitied, spreading contagion of death, and grey haired mothers and wives everywhere stand at the altar’s edge, suppliant, moaning. (Sophocles, lines 181–5) I have already discussed the significance of the suffering body in espionage fiction in the previous chapter. This motif recurs in Watership Down, where rabbits routinely contemplate their own violent deaths from predatory enemies as well as threaten to tear each other apart in combat. Because the animated film adaptation did not flinch from this violence it has been controversial at times, and troubling to many young viewers. In Cowslip’s warren, death from the snare is the price that the rabbits have accepted for living their pampered, decadent lives, fed by the same hands that snare them. In Efrafa, on the other hand, as in the novels of Fleming and many others, torture and death are the ways that a totalitarian society controls its subjects. In fact, the very identity of the various groups of rabbits within the warren is bestowed by an act of violence, the “marking” that scars them on a particular part of their body as a badge of membership in the particular group they belong to. The “dissident” rabbit Blackavar is tortured for trying to escape, and his maimed body is put on display. Bigwig first sees Blackavar between his two guards: “This rabbit had very dark fur – almost black. But this was not the most remarkable thing about him. He was dreadfully mutilated. His ears were nothing but shapeless shreds, ragged at the edges, seamed with ill-knit scars and beaded here and there with lumps of proud, bare flesh. One eyelid was misshapen and closed askew” (314). The lacerating of the ears, the most distinctive feature of the rabbit, is a central motif throughout the book. Blackavar is forced to testify about his treachery to the state to the rabbits who pass by, again calling to mind the victims of Soviet show trials, or scenes from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). He tells Bigwig that “Every Mark should see how I have been punished as I deserve for my treachery in trying to leave the warren. The Council were merciful – the Council were merciful” (314–15). It is also noteworthy that Efrafa resembles East Germany or the Soviet

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Union in the elaborate security procedures it must undertake to ensure that its citizens do not leave its boundaries. This is all done in the name of safety; if a warren is discovered, men may infect it with myxomatosis, the “white blindness.” Thus, as Captain Holly explains after the first encounter with Efrafa: “The whole warren is organized to conceal its existence. The holes are all hidden and the Owsla have every rabbit in the place under orders. You can’t call your life your own: and in return you have safety – if it’s worth having at the price you pay” (231). Throughout the novel, Adams emphasizes the vulnerability of rabbits at the times when human beings can see them. In one of the narrator’s pronouncements about natural history we are told that “Rabbits above ground, unless they are in proved, familiar surroundings close to their holes, live in continual fear” (123). This state of perpetual anxiety can readily correlate to the condition of human beings in a society dominated by the Cold War and the fear of nuclear annihilation, and it can at the same time be generalized to represent the vulnerability of the natural life of the countryside as human beings gradually encroach on their territory with more and more dangerous technologies. Here, as in a number of places, the text is capable of both a Cold War political reading and an environmental one. This is not surprising if one considers that the fear of nuclear catastrophe and the fear of environmental catastrophe represent the two dominant apocalyptic strains in recent cultural discourse. In chapter 5, I will discuss the way these fears shape the work of Doris Lessing, notably in The Four-Gated City. Bigwig, the largest and most courageous of the Watership Down rabbits, is repeatedly injured, like the protagonist of an espionage or crime novel. (A real human being, however strong, would be reduced to a helpless invalid if he suffered all the physical injuries and assaults endured by James Bond, or by a detective like P.D. James’s Adam Dalgleish or Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, in the whole series of novels in which they appear!) It is Bigwig who must be rescued from the snare in Cowslip’s warren, and after the battle with Efrafa is over he bears his scars like a decorated soldier. In fact, Bluebell, the jester among the rabbits, observes that “if he went back to Efrafa now they couldn’t decide which Mark to put

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him in, could they? He’s got them all” (466). In another moment reminiscent of a spy thriller, Bigwig, undercover in Efrafa, takes the doe Hyzenthlay into confidence about his plan to help a group of does to escape. He assures her that the plan will work, and she grimly replies, “If you were wrong, those who died quickly would be the lucky ones” (327). The plan that Hazel and his fellow rabbits concoct is successful, and the threat of Efrafa is defeated. In fact, after the disappearance of General Woundwort, friendly relations are established between Watership Down and Efrafa, a kind of premonition of the end of the Cold War. Watership Down itself, with the infusion of the does from Efrafa, becomes a flourishing society, and we read in the subsequent Tales from Watership Down that it learns some lessons in homeland security from Captain Campion, the new Chief Rabbit of Efrafa. However, in spite of this eirenic and happy ending, as far as the principal characters are concerned, Adams suggests that the threat to liberal democracy is never very far away, as no one knows for certain what happens to General Woundwort. After the battle, Groundsel, one of the Efrafans who joins Watership Down, asserts that General Woundwort is not dead, “and mother rabbits would tell their kittens that if they did not do as they were told, the General would get them – the General who was first cousin to the Black Rabbit himself” (464, 471). The Second World War was the decisive experience of Richard Adams’s life, and to a considerable extent it informs the narrative of Watership Down as well. Adams was fifty-two in the year that Watership Down was published, so in terms of his formative experiences he really belongs to the generation of post-war writers that includes Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, and thus it is useful to think of Watership Down as in some ways a “post-war” book. It is a recurrent theme of Adams’s memoir The Day Gone By that the Second World War radically transformed British society, and the pastoral aura that hangs over much of the first part of that work is not simply the pastoral of childhood, but the remembrance of a social and a physical world that Adams recognizes has been lost forever, except as it remains in memory and in literature. The second half of The Day Gone By deals with Adams’s military service, and Evelyn Waugh’s fiction

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several times serves as a reference point. Like Waugh, although without his bitterness, Adams stresses the social transformation brought about by technology and by the war. He does not see it entirely in negative terms, for he is aware that the society he grew up in had deep class divisions and was in some ways profoundly snobbish. After the war, “one could not remember what things had been like before. Anyway, that no longer mattered much: they weren’t ever going to be the same again” (379). He measures his experience against that of Guy Crouchback in Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy (245, 320). Adams’s service was of course not without its challenging and frustrating moments, and he compares his feeling towards his commanding officer during a period of service in Northern Ireland with those of Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited (271). Overall, however, Adams has a very positive view of his experience in the army. He was commissioned as a supply officer, and spent some time in the Middle East, which explains the traces of Arabic in the invented language in Watership Down. He was able to secure a transfer to the Airborne Division of the army Service Corps, and was present at the liberation of Brussels, of Copenhagen, and of Singapore. His admiration for his fellow officers is unbounded; he considers them “the bravest men who ever lived” (300), and the internationally acclaimed author writes, nearly fifty years after the events in question, that “I have never felt more proud, fulfilled or happy before or since” (300). Adams’s tone becomes rhapsodic, as he is well aware, when he describes the esprit de corps of the Airborne Division, and especially his C Platoon (308–9), and it undoubtedly inspired his account of the band of rabbits who leave Sandleford warren. He indicates in The Day Gone By that the two officers he most admired, Major John Gifford and Captain Paddy Kavanagh, provided him with models for Hazel and Bigwig, the two most important characters in Watership Down (303). The seagull Kehaar, who assists the rabbits in their adventures, is based, at least in his manner of speech, on a Norwegian resistance fighter (“Introduction,” xii). Although Adams does not say this explicitly, it may be thought that the experiences of dislocation, fear, battle, and various forms of decadent or authoritarian society that are represented in Watership

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Down were also shaped by the experiences of the war, just as William Golding’s experience of military conflict is an important component of Lord of the Flies. The old Chief Rabbit of Sandleford warren, who is so confident in the way that he runs his rather class-ridden and archaic society, has something in common with those who thought that the Munich agreement had brought “peace for our time,” while the totalitarian warren of Efrafa, presided over by the frightening General Woundwort, has some of the characteristics of both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. At the time Watership Down was published, most of the leading politicians in Britain, and indeed many of the senior figures in the British establishment, had fought in the war, and those who had not had vivid memories of it. Furthermore, the Second World War had a very large footprint in popular culture, from children’s toys and comics to television series (see Sandbrook, Seasons, 316–17). Adams was a conservative patriot who infused his fantasy novel with accounts of personal courage and heroism, and based it on the epics of the ancient world. His other writings miss no opportunity to celebrate the heroic virtues. The last page of The Day Gone By lists the officers of C Platoon, 250 Light Company R .a .S .C . (Airborne) in 1944. The entry in Adams’s Nature Diary for 17 September includes a prayer for fallen members of the Airborne Division on the anniversary of the Arnhem landings (126–7). However, by the beginning of the 1970s there was, especially among the young, a strong countercultural suspicion of anything that might seem to celebrate military heroism. This was prompted by the Vietnam war, and extensive media coverage not only of the war itself but of opposition to it in the United States, leading to an international peace movement. In this context, it is relevant to consider David Lodge’s 1985 afterword to Out of the Shelter, a novel published in 1970 but focused on the Second World War and the immediate post-war years (the longest part of the narrative is set in the summer of 1951). In the afterword, Lodge alludes to the famous “generation gap” that was much discussed in the late 1960s, exemplified in the slogan “Never trust anyone over thirty” (276). He explains this as the difference in attitudes between those who were old enough to have memories of the war, and those who were not.

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Adams represents something similar in Watership Down, in one of the interpolated tales of El-ahrairah and his companion Rabscuttle. The rabbits are fighting a losing war against their enemy King Darzin, so El-ahrairah and Rabscuttle journey to the underworld to seek help from the Black Rabbit of Inlé. The Black Rabbit represents “fear and everlasting darkness” (267) and is an embodiment of the bad dreams of the rabbit world. They succeed in their mission, after many trials, and after a very long time they return to their warren, where they find that the young rabbits have no memory of the war, but instead espouse what seems to be a version of 1960s pacifism: “If this Loosestrife fought King What’s-His-Name, that’s his business,” said one of the does. “It’s not our business, is it?” “It was all a very wicked thing,” said another doe. “Shameful, really. If nobody fought in wars there wouldn’t be any, would there? But you can’t get old rabbits to see that.” “My father was in it,” said the second buck. “He goes on about it sometimes. I always go out quick. ‘They did this and then we did that’ and all that caper. Makes you curl up, honest. Poor old geezer, you’d think he’d want to forget about it. I reckon he makes half of it up. And where did it get him, tell me that?” (278–9) The young rabbits’ lack of interest in the war that their seniors fought on their behalf recalls the way that the rabbits in Cowslip’s warren are not interested in the traditional tales that explain who they are and where they have come from. Yet in spite of the “generation gap,” Watership Down was one of the most successful literary works of the 1970s, with an enormous appeal to young readers, including many who were suspicious of both authority and military heroism. The passage I have just quoted from the story of the Black Rabbit is capable of different interpretations. On one level it could be seen as a comic account of the way that younger people sometimes thought of people of Adams’s own generation, seeing them as preoccupied with bygone heroic times, or with tales of austerity, and

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resisting the burgeoning consumerism of the time. But it can also be seen as a warning not to forget the lessons of the war, and it is significant that the story of the Black Rabbit of Inlé is told at Bigwig’s request before he leaves on his mission to infiltrate the totalitarian society of the Efrafa warren. From this perspective, Watership Down, like the novels of John le Carré and Ian Fleming, is a document of the Cold War. Bigwig’s mission to rescue the captive does of Efrafa is the equivalent of a descent into the underworld and a confrontation with the face of evil, analogous to the missions of James Bond. At the same time, General Woundwort has a history out of Beatrix Potter, as his parents are killed by a man after his father robs the man’s garden (301–2). This trauma turns him into a monstrous figure, a psychopathic leader who knows only how to attack. In an interview in 2015, Adams looked back on his writing career and said of General Woundwort, “Yes, I remain pleased with Woundwort. He is terrifying. He’s the making of it, really. It wouldn’t be the same without him” (Flood, “Watership”). The General also resembles the figure of Big Brother in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in his uncanny ability to gather information and to appear at an opportune moment. Bigwig nearly despairs of his mission when he realizes that “there was no information that failed to reach [General Woundwort] … Woundwort had every advantage. He sat secure at the junction of all paths, seeing clearly down each, while he, Bigwig, ludicrous in his efforts to measure up to him as an enemy, clambered clumsily and ignorantly through the undergrowth, betraying himself with every movement” (339–40). Thus in both his depiction of the countryside and celebration of its traditional ways in contrast to technology, and in his focus on Cold War paranoia, Adams has a lot in common with George Orwell, whose Animal Farm is a very different kind of animal fable. Issues of gender are one place where Watership Down is a conservative work, and it was not long before feminist critics, who in the early 1970s were in their pioneering phase, pointed out the limitations of Adams’s female characters. He responded with a more active role for the does in Tales from Watership Down, which appeared in 1996, after the women’s movement had become mainstream and after Britain had had a woman prime minister throughout the 1980s.

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The passive nature of the does and the unsentimental attitude of the Watership Down rabbits towards the acquisition of breeding stock led a reviewer in New York Times to refer to the “Rape of the Sabine rabbits” (Lehmann-Haupt, “Review”), a classical parallel that would almost certainly have been in Adams’s mind. In telling his story of the wandering band of young bucks, Adams exaggerates the passivity of the does, and strays from natural history for the sake of his story. R.M. Lockley points out that young rabbits of both sexes are often forced to leave a warren in order to survive, and “it is always the doe who initiates the new colony,” which he further describes as “a matriarchy” (Private Life, 135). Thus for Adams the conventions of the traditional epic and adventure story outweigh fidelity to the biological facts when it comes to the question of gender roles in the rabbit world. It is here that the book is limited by its closeness to its sources in Edwardian adventure stories. While it would be highly unlikely in the rabbit world for an exclusively male group of rabbits to set out from a warren, this is the paradigm of the adventure story from Homer to Joseph Conrad. Nevertheless, the story enthralled its first audience, Adams’s two young daughters. Selma Lanes wrote a feminist critique of Watership Down in a column in the New York Times, concluding by suggesting that Adams’s book “is marred by an attitude towards females that finds more confirmation in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy than R.M. Lockley’s The Private Life of the Rabbit” (“Male Chauvinist Rabbits”). For example, after Hazel bluntly asks whether the two hutch rabbits who have been brought back to Watership Down are “any good,” the narrator explains that The kind of ideas that have become natural to so many male human beings in thinking of females – ideas of protection, fidelity, romantic love and so on – are, of course, unknown to rabbits, although rabbits certainly do form exclusive attachments much more frequently than most people realize. However, they are not romantic and it came naturally to Hazel and Holly to consider the two Nuthanger does simply as breeding stock for the warren. This was what they had risked their lives for. (246)

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Another feminist argument can be found in a brief essay by Jane Resh Thomas in a children’s literature journal; Thomas argues that Adams draws on “an anti-feminist social tradition which, removed from the usual human context and imposed upon rabbits, is eerie in its clarity” (“Old Worlds,” 405). Perhaps responding to such commentary, Adams sought to make amends by including stories featuring a matriarchal warren in Tales from Watership Down. In one story, a female Chief Rabbit on the run finds refuge at Watership Down, where her former status makes her suspicious to conservative rabbits like Bigwig, whereas Hazel likes the idea of a female chief rabbit and appoints the doe Hyzenthlay as his co-chief. In a subsequent story, she takes charge during his absence (208–19). In a manner consistent with a great deal of English writing, Adams anchors the values of courage, loyalty, and individual liberty in a pastoral ideal of the British countryside. Raymond Williams has an insightful discussion, in The Country and the City, of the early twentieth-century rural novel and of the Georgian poets, summing up the dominant pattern of representation in these writers as follows: “A critique of a whole dimension of modern life, and with it many necessary general questions, was expressed but also reduced to a convention, which took the form of a detailed version of a part-imagined, part-observed rural England” (312–13). Adams is not free of the idealizing imagination of the Georgians, but by the intensity of his observation of the natural world he avoids the ideological traps that beset much rural writing and that Williams so astutely identifies. Watership Down can be illuminated by reference to David Matless’s book Landscape and Englishness, a study of the “intertwining” of the two concepts named in its title (31). Matless discusses suburban development and the binary opposition of country and city that pitted modernity, typified by advertising, smoke, and automobiles, against a nostalgically evoked rural landscape of villages, fields, and trees. In Watership Down, human beings are perceived as dangerous beings who litter the ground with their smelly “white sticks,” an example of what Matless, writing about anti-litter campaigns, terms the “cultural trespass” of those who do not know how to appreciate the countryside (101). It is also interesting to note that modernist-preservationists in the 1920s and 1930s

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celebrated the way that electricity pylons – such as were celebrated by Stephen Spender in his poem “The Pylons” – could be integrated into a rural scene (Matless, Landscape, 81–3). The rabbits of Watership Down would concur, since Fiver assures the others that what they call an “iron tree” is harmless (121).12 E.M. Forster described the encroaching brick suburbs at the end of Howards End, and a few decades later George Orwell made housing developments a major element in the contrast of past and present in Coming Up for Air, a novel discussed by David Matless several times. In “Going, Going,” a poem first published in the same year as Watership Down, Philip Larkin similarly gloomily prognosticated that the countryside would not, as he had once assumed, last at least for his own lifetime, but would be “bricked in,” which, Larkin’s speaker says, will be the end of England.13 The English landscape in le Carré’s novels, as we have seen, is blighted with the effects of Dutch elm disease. A similar concern for conservation informs Richard Mabey’s The Common Ground (1980), a book written at the instigation of the Nature Conservancy Council as part of their effort to educate the public on environmental issues. Mabey begins with a quotation from the autobiographical writings of John Clare, and he suggests that Clare is so important to the contemporary environmental consciousness because we recognize in him “the sense of affront, of an invasion of personal territory by forces beyond our control” (20). I think the opening of Watership Down prompted exactly this type of recognition in many of its readers. Just as the Aeneid tells the story of the defeated Trojans seeking a new territory to call their own, so the rabbits of Watership Down undertake an epic journey (in rabbit terms) to found a new society, because their own territory has been invaded by the men preparing to build a new housing estate. Stanley Hauerwas does not really focus on environmental issues in his theological and political reading of Watership Down, but there is a fascinating footnote in which he muses about the reasons for the popularity of the book. He writes “it may be that we identify with rabbits because we suddenly feel that like them we do not have control of our world. But even more disturbing we do not know how to get control of our world, nor are we sure how to live in such a

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world” (Community, 232n15). Hauerwas refers to the oil crisis of the early 1970s as a context for this feeling of loss of control. Given their shared love of the natural world, it is not surprising that John Fowles spoke approvingly of Adams’s activities on behalf of nature conservation (Vipond, Conversations, 147). Like Fowles, and like D.H. Lawrence, Adams includes references to Robin Hood in Watership Down, for example, the epigraph to chapter 24, which suggests an analogy between Hazel and Robin Hood, just as earlier the trickster El-ahrairah is described as the Robin Hood of the rabbit world (195, 23). It seems that Robin Hood is a recurrent symbol for a lost “green world” whose mythic status inspires much literary environmentalism. A tradition of nature writing going back to the Romantics emphasizes what was lost with the Industrial Revolution, and emphasizes the particular and the local. As Richard Smyth argues, it also plays a significant role in the definition of what is British, or English, as the large number of books on landscape and literature testifies. Smyth writes, “It may be that the only thing unique to our natural history is the way we write about it … What do we love? Perhaps not, at heart, British birds, or British mammals, or British insects or wildflowers or trees, but, rather, the extent to which these shore up or act as a keystone in our jerrybuilt sense of what it means to be British” (“How British”). Adams’s representation of rural England appeals to this nostalgic sense of identity, and his use of the rabbit’s-eye perspective makes an agricultural region seem far wilder than it would if described from the point of view of a human being walking across the same land. Although in some ways old-fashioned in its influences, Watership Down appeared at a fortuitous moment and appealed to an emerging environmental consciousness. During the 1970s, with the impetus of the oil crisis that began in 1973, environmentalism moved from the fringes to the political sphere. Under a variety of names, what are now usually called “Green Parties” emerged in many European countries, most prominently in Germany. In Britain, the Ecology Party attracted a lot of attention in the latter part of the decade, before it was temporarily eclipsed by the rise of Thatcherism and the founding of the Social Democratic Party (Müller-Rommel, “Greens,” 489). There were long-established organizations for rural

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conservation, such as the National Trust (founded 1895) or the Ramblers’ Association (1925); other groups, notably the Conservation Society (1966) and the Friends of the Earth (1969) came to prominence in this period (O’Riordan, “Public,” 413–14). Environmentalism was a cause that appealed to Tory squires attached to rural life as well as to hippies inspired by Rousseauian dreams of going back to the land. Raymond Williams wrestles with the political implications of rural literature in The Country and the City, where he writes that “there is almost an inverse proportion, in the twentieth century, between the relative importance of the working rural economy and the cultural importance of rural ideas” (297). Williams is a relentless critic of nostalgic dreams of a rural golden age, but is also someone deeply attached to certain rural ideas of community, and he begins The Country and the City with a multi-layered introductory chapter that fuses memories of his Welsh childhood, references to history and literature, and a description of the village in East Anglia where he is writing the chapter. There is a disjunction between Williams’s Marxist demythologizing of the rural tradition, and the way that his personal and moving introduction contributes to it, and in this disjunction there is room for an environmental politics that looks back to Clare and Cobbett even as it formulates responses to the new technological challenges of what would soon become known as postmodernity.14 Similarly, Richard Adams connects with both a conservative set of values and the new radical politics of environmentalism. Adams has the precise knowledge of wild flowers and wildlife that characterizes the devoted nature writer and amateur naturalist. It has been denigrated as “fetishistic” (Pawling, “Watership,” 219), but it is part of his effort to represent nature in all of its specificity, and one also should remember that as herbivores the rabbits presumably have a more differentiated sense of wild flowers than human beings, so that the detailed catalogues are a way of suggesting their way of perceiving their world, just as the names of many of the rabbits are those of plants, flowers, and trees, such as Dandelion, Bluebell, and Hazel. In the first chapter alone, I counted the names of fifteen different plants and trees. There is similar attention to birds, with references to their appearance, their behaviour, and their song,

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and to a lesser degree an awareness of insect life. The same observant eye can be found in Adams’s Nature Diary, published in 1985. He presents it as a “very ordinary nature diary,” though he also alludes to James Woodforde’s Diary of a Country Parson as a precursor (8). John Lawrence’s charming illustrations make up for the lack of narrative interest in many of the entries. There is a significant overlap between the minute observation of ordinary plant and bird life in the diary and some of the descriptive passages in Watership Down. The entry for 10 April is a fairly typical “ordinary” entry: A smell of new-mown grass and a wood-pigeon cooing down by the Neb. Also a smell of box, for the weather is much warmer. Box needs sun to bring out its scent. Saw a fresh, new plant of red campion in bloom, very different from the washed-out winter leftovers. Also the first greater stichwort (Stellaria holostea) just coming out. Two or three fronds of new bracken, each about six inches high, curled like a bishop’s crozier and sandy in colour. (50) There is something in common between Watership Down and Richard Mabey’s book of 1973, The Unofficial Countryside. Mabey’s very personal account of a year of observation seeks to capture what he calls in his Prologue “the common, everyday experience of bird and flower and tree, cohabiting with us in our urban areas.” The emphasis is on a different way of seeing: looking at the wild flower stubbornly growing between cracks in concrete rather than focusing on the largely human landscape in which the cracks are situated. Although Adams is writing about farmland, his use of the rabbit’s-eye perspective has a similar effect, orienting us to the natural world that flourishes alongside roads, railway lines, and farms. In both works, defamiliarization is an essential technique. In Watership Down, a small copse is a wooded expanse; a roadside ditch a good hiding place, and a square on the Ordnance Survey map becomes the setting of an epic journey. As in Mabey’s environmental writing, the shift in perspective is a means of drawing attention to the remarkable diversity of the most commonplace natural setting. Even if a green world is a myth for human beings, Adams can

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create one that is inhabited by rabbits and other forms of wildlife. We get occasional references to a human world on the margins of that of the rabbits, and it is an unattractive and dangerous place, except in the chapter where Lucy Cane rescues Hazel, who is briefly diminished from the epic hero and leader of an intrepid band to a small limping wild animal. (There is an interesting analogy to the way that Mr Toad, in The Wind in the Willows, is a gentleman who drives a motor-car at one moment, and at another a toad who can be thrown into the water by a washerwoman.) Lucy has the innocence of childhood, as well as a Wordsworthian name, and she represents the possibility of humane treatment of animals, as does her friend the family doctor, “Doctor Adams.” Overall, however, the impression of human activity is that it is malign and destructive. Captain Holly, who escapes from the developers’ horrific assault on Sandleford warren by poisonous gas and a bulldozer, tells the Watership Down rabbits that the evil in the world “comes from men … All other elil [enemies] do what they have to do and Frith moves them as he moves us. They live on the earth and they need food. Men will never rest till they’ve spoiled the earth and destroyed the animals” (149). In an ironic historical footnote, in 2011 the West Berkshire Council proposed to build houses on Sandleford Park, land it had acquired from a private owner. In an article in the Daily Telegraph, Adams noted that this was where he wandered as a boy, and he records the woodpeckers, water rats, bluebells, and rabbits that he saw, adding that this was the location of Sandleford warren in Watership Down (“Hands Off”). Life was trying to imitate art, though Adams’s protest inspired others, and at the time of writing the plan to build two thousand houses on the site of the Threarah’s warren still remains only a plan (Herring, “Council”). Adams’s observation of nature is infused with a Darwinian sense of the struggle for existence and the way that nature favours those who are best adapted to their environment. This can be illustrated from almost anywhere in Watership Down, including the statement about animal life by Captain Holly just quoted, but an early passage describing a steep bank offers the additional advantage of being comparable to Darwin’s famous description of an “entangled bank” in the Origin of Species.15 In chapter 8, “The Crossing,” Adams writes:

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They scrambled down the bank and set to nibbling beside the water. Between them and the stream itself stood half-grown clumps of purple loosestrife and fleabane, which would not flower for nearly two months yet. The only blooms were a few early meadow-sweet and a patch of pink butter-bur. Looking back at the face of the bank, they could see that it was in fact dotted thickly with martins’ holes. There was a narrow foreshore at the foot of the little cliff and this was littered with the rubbish of the colony – sticks, droppings, feathers, a broken egg and a dead nestling or two. The martins were now coming and going in numbers over the water. (33) This description conveys both the diversity of the life on the bank – four species of plants are mentioned – and the way that it is specific to the waterside conditions. The broken egg and the dead nestling represent the inevitable casualties of the struggle for existence: not all individuals can survive and thrive, or as Tennyson put it in poem LV of In Memoriam, Nature is “So careless of the single life” (line 8). There is also a Darwinian element to the stories that the rabbits tell one another, which constitute their mythology and world view. These are loosely based on the Christian creation story, along with elements from the trickster rabbit stories of Joel Chandler Harris. In their explanations of why rabbits and other creatures behave the way they do, the interpolated stories present a kind of mythologized Darwinism. For example, “The Story of the Blessing of El-ahrairah” (25–8) explains how rabbits obtained their powerful back legs, which allow them to stamp as a sign of danger and to speed away from trouble. Daniel Weston has provided a valuable account of the role of place and “the environmental imagination” in British fiction since 1945, referring to the Writing Britain exhibition at the British Library in the summer of 2012 (“Nature Writing”). This exhibition documented and celebrated the way that British writers have shaped how people experience places, and was accompanied by Christina Hardyment’s beautifully illustrated book, Writing Britain. Adams certainly exemplifies the premise of the exhibition: a corner of Berkshire and Hampshire is now inextricably linked to his work, and the Adams plaque on Watership Down can easily be found on

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Google Maps. Although the action of Watership Down is limited to one summer, a wider temporal perspective is suggested by the interpolated stories, which constitute a rabbit creation myth and a series of tales about confrontation with evil and rabbit heroism. Furthermore, the story brings in ancient history of Britain through references to Roman roads and places. For example, the rabbits are confused by the long strip of woodland called Caesar’s Belt, which runs alongside the Portway, a Roman road leading to Silchester (the Roman Calleva Atrebatum). In his account of the environmental imagination, Weston argues for the mutual influence of literature and environmental writing on each other, making reference to the topographical explorations of Iain Sinclair and Richard Mabey, and more generally to the way that the non-human environment is a major presence and influence in some works of post-war fiction such as Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and Wish You Were Here (2011). He does not mention Watership Down, which is a pity because it has been such an influential work, and the way in which the novel overlaps with Adams’s Nature Diary effectively demonstrates Weston’s argument. In Watership Down, Adams powerfully sets out a view of the landscape from an imagined non-human perspective; in the Nature Diary he seeks to see nature in all of its particularity, in the way that his father encouraged him to look at nature as a boy. I have already compared his way of seeing to that of Richard Mabey; one can also compare a reflection on bluebells in The Day Gone By with the journal of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Adams rhapsodizes over a wood thickly carpeted with bluebells, concluding: “There couldn’t possibly be so many bluebells; yet there they were. Examine a single one: it was perfect. Each one in that infinity was similarly perfect” (48). In a wellknown passage, Hopkins wrote “I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebell I have been looking at. I know the beauty of our Lord by it” (18 May 1870; Journals, 199). Weston’s survey of the relationship between post-1945 British fiction and nature writing concludes that the novel is in fact the most likely place where we can find what he calls “the environmental imagination” (“Nature Writing,” 125). An important aspect of environmental consciousness in fiction is the use of place as the primary

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organizing principle. He instances Raymond Williams’s unfinished series of novels People of the Black Mountains, which begins in prehistoric time and was intended to move to the present day. He also mentions Adam Thorpe’s Ulverton (1992), which spans more than three hundred years of history, beginning with the Civil War era. This remarkable novel, consisting of twelve chapters in radically different styles and forms, is unified by its focus on a Berkshire village, and its final chapter, the script of a television documentary film, focuses on a real estate development which is built in 1988 on the site of the events in the first chapter in 1650. The parallel with the opening of Watership Down, also set in Berkshire, is striking. One could add to Weston’s list an earlier work, Alan Garner’s Red Shift (1973), a highly regarded work of young adult fiction that operates in three different time frames: Roman Britain, the Civil War, and the present day. The three periods are united by the recurrence of a stone axe head. In Ulverton, Thorpe uses a similar device a number of times, for example with references to a set of photographic plates, a gate, and a lost tool. As a last example, Edward Rutherfurd’s enormous bestseller Sarum: The Novel of England (1987) narrates a variety of stories in the Salisbury area from prehistoric times to the present. All of these novels are trying to incorporate history and awareness of environment in a way that also characterizes two of the major achievements of British poetry in the 1970s, Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns (1971) and Ted Hughes’s Remains of Elmet (1979). In both of these works early history or pre-history and the present interpenetrate, and there is a consciousness of place that Seamus Heaney described as a “defensive love” of a native territory (“Now and in England,” 471). A similar use of place as an organizing principle, accompanied by a defensive love, characterizes Watership Down and is closely connected to the novel’s environmental politics. Adams can be seen as a precursor of, and probably also an influence on, the recent flourishing genre of British nature writing, which has been accompanied by a renaissance of rural fiction, such as Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land, and the fiction of Melissa Harrison. The latter’s debut novel Clay (2013) focuses on the interactions of several Londoners with the vestiges of the natural world to be found in and around a city park.

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In his critical account of various forms of rural writing in the early twentieth century, Raymond Williams is torn between his admiration of the genuine observation and love of the countryside to be found in these works and his rejection of the idealizing and simplifying myths that exist alongside the observation. The false notes he detects are primarily in the way that the human dimension of the countryside is represented. Williams argues that the disjunction arises from “the loss of a credible common world” (Country and City, 303). Recent rural fiction often begins with place, giving an environmentally aware account of the natural world, and showing the human characters existing for the most part in a problematic or transient relationship to their environment. The authors have moved beyond the impasse that Williams identified in the rural writing of the first half of the twentieth century. In Harrison’s Clay, a young boy and a Polish worker both develop a strong bond with the natural life in and around a London park, and the observation of nature has much in common with Mabey’s Unofficial Countryside. In McGregor’s Reservoir 13 the troubled lives of the inhabitants of a Peak District village are lived amid a setting that is rendered in the manner of a nature diary: August was hot and slow. The seed-heads of cow parsley and thistle blackened in the field margins, collapsing in the early dew. The river was clear and slow and the sun struck it hard. There were brown trout teeming thickly through the water. In the evening Ian Dowsett set up in the shade of a beech tree and tried dropping a few different mayflies but nothing was right for the rise. He could hear voices from someone’s back garden at the top of the steep bank and the air was still. (146) Some of the inhabitants are from families who have lived in the village for generations, but some have come there accidentally, as a result of unexpected events in their lives, and others are tourists. The villages in these novels are connected in various ways to the global economy and yet at the same time are plagued with unemployment and poor transportation. In Craig’s The Lie of the Land, the main local employer is a factory producing frozen pies that

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hires workers on zero-hours contracts. In Harrison’s At Hawthorn Time (2015) a young man realizes his only prospect is to take a job in a huge distribution centre just off the nearby motorway: The scale of Mytton Park had been a shock. All his life he’d lived less than a dozen miles away, yet in the seven years since it had been built he had never known it was there. Its blank, windowless sheds covered, so the site map said, nearly four hundred acres, yet its low, grey mass was hidden from the motorway by trees, and while lorries may have served it like worker ants, at ground level – at deer and boy and village level – the countryside in which it squatted seemed almost to have absorbed the affront, to have agreed not to speak of it. Almost. (37) While these writers are quite different from one another, and from Adams, they share a concern with the interaction of the human and the natural world and an awareness of the interaction of the local and the global. Rural life is far from idealized, though the characters are viewed empathetically, and the natural world is under siege, alien to the human world, and yet a sign of persistence and endurance. Another relevant parallel with Adams is John Fowles, who gives his fictional alter ego Daniel Martin a childhood similar to that described by Adams in The Day Gone By. Like the young Richard Adams, Daniel was taught to refer to flowers and birds by their exact names. It is also noteworthy that Fowles’s novel begins with the arresting description of the end of a harvest, when the rabbits that have taken cover in the uncut part of the field run out and are killed. Some twenty dead rabbits are piled up, and the scene is put into the context of young Daniel’s later life: “And his heart turns, some strange premonitory turn, a day when in an empty field he shall weep for this” (14). In an essay published just two years before Watership Down, Fowles described the cultural or spiritual vision that needs to inform environmental activism: “This, I am convinced, is what practical conservation needs behind it, or beneath it, if it is to work: a constantly repeated awareness of the mysterious, other

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universe of nature in every civilized community” (“Weeds, Bugs,” 306). Fowles’s preoccupation with this vision of nature, this green world, seems to be the most important thing keeping his work alive at present; an analogous vision is present in a powerful degree in Watership Down, where it combines with the strong characters and epic plot to create a work of great cultural power. Watership Down is both a pastoral idyll in the Georgian tradition and a political dystopia that is sometimes Orwellian in intensity. As a political parable, it depicts an ideal of a liberal society infused by traditional values of loyalty and courage, grounded in a shared set of stories. Readers who might not have been interested in a realistic story about wartime heroism were captivated by an epic of the animal world in which human beings equipped with modern technology are largely the enemy. By thus focusing on the world of nature, the novel can be read as an environmental parable and a radical critique of human behaviour. It reveals both the enduring quality and the vulnerability of nature, and even if it was originally a children’s story, it does not shy away from the same darkly apocalyptic qualities that we will find in the novels of Doris Lessing, and that inform an important strain of 1970s cultural production, as evidenced by the television series Survivors. As Adams’s daughter Rosamond told Alison Flood in 2015, on the occasion of the publication of a new illustrated edition of Watership Down, “Yes, he told us scary stories. And I wasn’t able to sleep” (“Watership”).

4 the Campus Novels of malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge: Politics in a Small World the master walked past them with his head lowered and headed for the river wondering why it was that his well-meaning efforts to effect radical change should always provoke the opposition of those in whose interests he was acting … there was something perverse about English political attitudes that defeated logic. tom SHARPE, porTerhouse blue

Oxford University has played a very prominent role in English literature: John Dougill’s Oxford in English Literature: The Making, and Undoing, of “The English Athens” documents a rich tradition, especially of novels. Much of this literature celebrates the university as a place insulated from the outside world. Dougill writes that “Oxford is depicted as a city of dream and a world of its own – enclosed, secluded, conservative and eccentric, a closed community with its own customs, its own rituals, and its own concerns. Idealised, it becomes a cloistered utopia, a student paradise, or an Athenian city-state” (5). From the early Victorian period to the middle of the twentieth century, Oxford was associated with the ideal of Bildung, or self-development, a concept originally deriving from German Romantic thought that was domesticated by English writers such as John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold.1 It was Arnold who wrote two of the most famous

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descriptions of Oxford in English literature, the apostrophe to the “Beautiful city!” in the preface to Essays in Criticism (Complete Prose 3:290) and a line in the pastoral elegy “Thyrsis”: “And that sweet city with her dreaming spires” (Poems, line 19). Furthermore, the writings of John Henry Newman associated Oxford with an ethos that was at once literary and spiritual. The university was depicted as a pastoral world of privileged leisure in novels such as Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street (1913–14), and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), as well as in many memoirs.2 To a much lesser extent, Cambridge plays a similar literary role, for example in the work of Tennyson or the writers associated with the Bloomsbury group.3 It is fitting that Brideshead Revisited appeared just as the Second World War ended; it looks back to the idyllic days of Oxford in the 1920s, an Oxford “submerged now and obliterated, irrecoverable as Lyonnesse, so quickly have the waters come flooding in” (23). Thus the university in fiction up to 1945, and perhaps also often in reality, was generally not a political place, but rather a place apart from politics, where the privileged could enjoy their youth, and where at least a few of them could reflect in a disinterested way on the society in which they would soon be playing a role. Things changed rapidly after the Second World War, and one sign of those changes was Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954), which seems from a number of internal details to be set in the late 1940s. Lucky Jim is generally regarded as a ground-breaking work of fiction, and it looks forward where Waugh’s novel looks back. With Lucky Jim, Amis added a new category to English literature, the campus novel, as distinguished from the university novel.4 The campus novel was usually set in a newer university, exploring the effects of the 1944 Butler Education Act on higher education in post-war Britain, especially in terms of social class, and it was more concerned with the lives of faculty than of students. This chapter will mainly be concerned with two extremely popular campus novels, both published in 1975, Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, set in 1972, and David Lodge’s Changing Places, set in 1969. The use of the American term “campus” reflects the originality of these novels: while many of the newer British universities have

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campuses, the older ones do not. The older universities were the repositories of tradition and privilege, while the newer ones were caught between their mission to act as agents of social change and their efforts to create instant “traditions” that emulated Oxford and Cambridge, so that the university was an excellent setting to explore social and political tensions in post-war Britain. As David Lodge writes in an essay that expands on his obituary tribute to his friend, Malcolm Bradbury always seemed at home when visiting Oxford or Cambridge, “but the redbrick University College Leicester, housed in a converted lunatic asylum, a brief glimpse of which inspired Kingsley Amis to write Lucky Jim, provided more useful material for a first novel in the 1950s” (Lives in Writing, 167). Bradbury’s own Leicester-inspired novel was Eating People Is Wrong (1959). Lodge attended University College London, where he thought he would fit in better than at Oxford or Cambridge, the only two other universities he had heard of when he was applying (Quite a Good Time, 122–3). A London University student figures in Lodge’s first novel, The Picturegoers (1960), while The British Museum Is Falling Down (1965) is a comic novel about a graduate student at the same institution. By the 1960s, the idea of a university as a place apart had disappeared, according to David Bromwich, and had been replaced by a “reflection theory” in which the university began to be seen as a “microcosm” of society as a whole (Politics, 43). One result of this view was that the campus became a theatre of political action, which might take the form of demonstrations, walk-outs, or sit-ins. A generation of campus radicalism is represented in the campus novels of the 1970s. In the United States, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam war inspired a variety of campus protests, including the battle over People’s Park in Berkeley, which figures significantly in Changing Places. In Faculty Towers, her “personal take” on the academic novel, Elaine Showalter opens the chapter on the 1970s by arguing that in that decade “Feminism enters the university, but in indirect, unhappy, and hesitant ways. The university is no longer a sanctuary or a refuge; it is fully caught up in the churning community and the changing society; but it is a fragile institution rather than a fortress” (13, 49). As we shall see, feminism enters the campus

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novels of Bradbury and Lodge in a significant way, although it is far from their primary focus, and both writers are preoccupied with the way the university is caught up in societal change. Jay Parini, in an insightful review of several campus novels, notes that the campus serves as a very effective microcosm: “Novelists adore small, enclosed worlds – ships at sea, country houses, prep schools – and few such enclosures offer as much variety and madness as the college campus.” It is interesting to recall that John le Carré spoke about the secret service in a similar fashion, as a convenient microcosm for an author to write about the state of the nation. Both institutions have their own arcane traditions and procedures that are bewildering to outsiders, and both have been repositories of class privilege. They are “small worlds,” to adopt the title that David Lodge gave to the sequel to Changing Places. Tom Sharpe makes the idea of the college as microcosm explicit in Porterhouse Blue (1974), when a journalist who is an Old Boy of Porterhouse College presents a television program about the college. Sharpe writes, “There was an implication that Porterhouse was something more than a mere college and that the crisis which had developed there was somehow symbolic of the choice that confronted the country” (176).5 In Lodge’s Small World (1984) the academic characters spend most of their time going to conferences and are very rarely seen at their home university, so the primary sense of the title is the way that air travel and conference funding have connected the world into a kind of global campus. In the third volume of Lodge’s campus trilogy, Nice Work (1988), the university is under pressure from the Thatcherite policies that sought to limit public spending, although tuition fees would not come until later, under New Labour, as a concomitant of a rapid expansion of the number of students. It is important to recognize how gradually British university enrolment expanded during the twentieth century. Although the Butler Education Act made it easier for working-class students to complete secondary school and therefore have a chance to attend university, this affected only a very small number of people. In 1950, about 3.5 per cent of young people went to university; by 1970–71, the participation rate for post-secondary education, including both universities

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and polytechnics, was 8.4 per cent. In 1992, the Further and Higher Education Act abolished the distinction between universities and polytechnics, and at the end of the century Tony Blair’s government introduced tuition fees and set the goal of a participation rate of 50 per cent. This was achieved, by some calculations, in 2013.6 Lucky Jim may have established the paradigm for the campus novel, but it ends with its protagonist rejecting the university for life in London. In that, it resembles the structure of the traditional university novel that focuses on student life rather than that of the teachers.7 Given his age and the very tenuous nature of his employment, Jim perhaps has more in common with the students than with the tenured faculty. Janice Rossen concludes her study of The University in Modern Fiction by suggesting that “it is no accident that many of the best University novels are about someone leaving academe at the end of the book” (188). Rossen illustrates this from a number of novels about writers whose creative lives are stymied by their academic work, including William Cooper’s Scenes from Provincial Life (1950), a novel that influenced Malcolm Bradbury. A fairly deep skepticism about academic life informs A. Alvarez’s Hers (1974), which is an Oxford novel more in the tradition of Iris Murdoch than of Evelyn Waugh. A Jewish research student named Sam Green has an affair with Julie Stone, the young wife of the professor who runs the summer school in which he is teaching. Julie mockingly describes them as “a new Frieda and Lawrence” (237). When Sam makes a grand gesture of abandoning his studies, Julie ironically reflects on his likely future: “he’d finish, sure enough, in advertising or publishing or television, well paid, well married, well housed” (146). It is worth noting that in spite of his extremely high-profile academic career at Birmingham University, David Lodge became a full-time writer in 1987, partly out of a commitment to his creative work, but partly due to the feeling that something was missing in academic life in the Thatcher era. There is some political material in Lucky Jim, but it does not add up to a coherent point of view, any more than does the content of Jimmy Porter’s angry outbursts in Look Back in Anger. Both works expressed a dissatisfaction with aspects of British society in the 1950s that could be construed as being leftist in sympathy, but in

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each case there were countervailing tendencies, and both Amis and Osborne ended up espousing Tory positions and lifestyles. Amis did publish a political pamphlet, Socialism and the Intellectuals in 1957. His character Jim Dixon advocates socialism in his dispute with Professor Welch’s son Bertrand, after the latter has attacked the policies of “the lads at Transport House” – then the headquarters of the Labour Party – as simply a strategy of “soak the rich” (50). Dixon’s response is to ask “what’s wrong with it, even if it is that and no more? If one man’s got ten buns and another’s got two, and a bun has got to be given up by one of them, then surely you take it from the man with ten buns” (50). But Jim’s final job as a private secretary to a wealthy businessman seems to be an updated version of Matthew Arnold’s sinecure as secretary to Lord Lansdowne; there is nothing revolutionary in his rejection of the university. Like John Braine’s Joe Lampton, we can assume that Jim Dixon finds a way to get to the top. David Lodge notes in his 1992 introduction to Lucky Jim that its “left-wing stance … is an emotional, intuitive matter, more concerned with class and manners than with politics as such” (xi). By 1967, Amis was ready to announce his rejection of his earlier socialist views in the essay “Why Lucky Jim Turned Right,” in the course of which he notes that he had already started to become “reactionary” on the issue of education in the mid-1950s: “see, if you can be bothered, Lucky Jim, chapter 17” (202). In that chapter, the novel takes a gloomy view of university expansion, prefiguring the famous statement “More will mean worse” in Amis’s 1960 essay “Lone Voices” (163). Malcolm Bradbury writes with considerable understatement that in spite of his early leftist commitments, “in the history of post-Orwellian liberalism, which has a lot to do with modern fiction, Amis did not continue as a striking example of the cause” (No, Not Bloomsbury, 205). And when he returned to the campus novel almost twenty-five years later, with Jake’s Thing (1978), the result is something much darker and more thoroughly disillusioned with the educational endeavour. The campus novels of Bradbury and Lodge are closely involved with the question of the fate of liberalism, a fact which is perhaps most clearly brought out by their harshest critics. Before looking at

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the ideology of liberalism in relation to their work, it may be helpful to consider briefly their social backgrounds and what can be ascertained about their political affiliations. In a review of Lodge’s How Far Can You Go? Blake Morrison begins with the observation that “David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury are so similar in many respects that for some people they have become a kind of confused composite – Ladbury, perhaps, or Bodge. Their careers seem archetypally post-1945 ones: lower-middle and non-Oxbridge, both are now Professors of Literature.” Indeed the confusion of the two men is a recurring motif in their own work and in the comments of others. Lodge relates a number of amusing anecdotes in his essay on Bradbury, including an interviewer who mixed up their identities in a joint interview; he says they were “in danger of becoming the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of contemporary English letters” (Lives in Writing, 187). In Howard Jacobson’s novel Coming from Behind (1985), the disaffected Polytechnic lecturer Sefton Golding “had an idea that somewhere in Hampstead stood a house (to which he fancifully gave the name Bradbury Lodge) where all the famous literary and academic figures of the English-speaking world came together to discuss eros and thanatos and have a good laugh at his expense” (29).8 Malcolm Bradbury was born in 1932 in Sheffield, and attended a grammar school in Nottinghamshire before studying English at University College, Leicester. His father was a railway clerk. David Lodge was born in south London in 1935, the son of a professional dance musician. He was educated at a Catholic grammar school and then at University College London. Both taught at Birmingham University in the early 1960s; Lodge eventually became a professor there, teaching and writing about nineteenth- and twentiethcentury literature and introducing continental literary theory to an English-speaking audience. Bradbury moved from Birmingham to the University of East Anglia, where he taught American studies and built a pioneering and celebrated creative writing program. Both men wrote campus novels, and both wrote about the poetics and the future of the novel. They thus had remarkably similar career trajectories, though Bradbury also wrote a great deal for television, while Lodge was the more prolific novelist. Both were

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of the generation that was old enough to remember the Second World War but too young to have fought in it, and the war casts a long shadow over their writing. Lodge addresses the question of memorializing the war most directly in Out of the Shelter (1970). The sixteen-year-old protagonist Timothy Young visits Germany in 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain. He has to confront his inadequate understanding of the history of the war and his own traumatic memories of the Blitz. As in the famous episode of Fawlty Towers “The Germans,” it seems impossible not to talk about the war, no matter how hard one tries to avoid mentioning it. Timothy is befriended by a Jewish American soldier, who exposes his very limited awareness of the Holocaust, although Lodge does not use that word. “Holocaust” came into general use as the most common English term for the Nazi genocide only during the 1970s, partly as a result of the television series Holocaust, broadcast in various countries late in the decade (Calimani, “Name,” 993). It should be noted that there are few references to the Holocaust in British literature in the first two decades after the war. Lodge’s allusions in Out of the Shelter come only a few years after significant poetic treatments by Sylvia Plath and Geoffrey Hill in the 1960s.9 The main ideological difference between the two writers is that Lodge was a practising Roman Catholic, while Bradbury identified himself as a secular liberal humanist, although one whose views were inflected with the vestiges of a Nonconformist conscience, a cultural identity that he shares with his fictional creation, the “history man” Howard Kirk. This helps to account for a significant difference in the nature of their responses to the crisis of liberalism, even as they both approached it in ostensibly comic campus novels. There is often a tragic or bleak note in Bradbury’s fiction, while Lodge’s is more thoroughly comic in structure as well as in tone. It is possible that his Catholicism allowed him to contemplate the failures of liberalism with greater equanimity. In an ideological self-description, Lodge said, “I would regard myself as a liberal, and in some ways a rather secular kind of liberal in spite of the fact that I’m a Catholic” (Haffenden, 152).10 Perhaps he said this in order to differentiate himself from polemically Catholic writers such as Chesterton or Waugh; it is hard, on the other hand, to

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think that a liberal who is a practising Catholic can be in general “rather secular,” and indeed religious concerns are a major aspect of Lodge’s writing. It is important to remember that while John Henry Newman’s Idea of a University is frequently quoted as one of the great defences of liberal education, Newman’s ideal is situated in the context of a Catholic confessional university. For Newman, and perhaps to some degree for Lodge as well, Catholicism provides a larger framework that surrounds and supports the ideal of disinterested liberal education, preventing it from collapsing because of its own internal contradictions, as it does in Bradbury’s representation of post-war liberal humanism. In terms of ideological and party-political allegiance, both Lodge and Bradbury are located somewhere on the spectrum that runs from classic liberalism to social democracy, with Lodge having the greater affinity for the Labour Party. One can intuit this from various comments in interviews and essays, but a more explicit statement about their politics comes in Lodge’s essay on Bradbury, where he characterizes his friend as a “lower-case conservative, cherishing tradition, hierarchy, and moral principle” (Lives in Writing, 178). Lodge notes that he and his wife Mary both voted Labour and approved of comprehensive education, whereas in a letter that he wrote to Lodge in October, 1964, Bradbury expresses disappointment at the recent election of the Labour Party, led by Harold Wilson, and gloomily predicts dire things for the educational system, including the “ruin” of the universities. Looking at this letter many years later, Lodge observes, “I was surprised to be reminded of how right-wing Malcolm’s views were, especially on education” (178). He says that he is fairly sure that Bradbury voted Liberal in 1964, and adds that he was later “a vocal supporter of the SDP during its brief political life – as I was, less publicly” (178). The SDP , or Social Democratic Party, was founded in 1981, when a group of four disaffected Labour politicians issued what became known as the Limehouse Declaration. Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Bill Rodgers, and Shirley Williams were all former cabinet ministers, and they spoke to the press from David Owen’s house in Limehouse, east London.11 In a polarized political landscape, where the alternatives were Margaret Thatcher’s version of the Conservative

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Party and a Labour Party increasingly dominated by the far left, their goal was to “break the mould of British politics” (Dunne, “SDP ”). The SDP formed an electoral alliance with the Liberal Party and received extremely strong support in the polls until the Falklands War in 1982 reversed the decline in Conservative fortunes. The Social Democrats were unable to break through in the 1983 general election, and eventually merged with the Liberals, though their ideas may be thought to have had some influence on Tony Blair’s New Labour, which finally returned Labour to power in 1997.12 One could even correlate the liberalism of Roy Jenkins with Bradbury’s political values and the mild socialism and Roman Catholicism of Shirley Williams with David Lodge. But the novels of both men help to explain why the attempt of the SDP to chart a moderate middle way initially failed. To some extent, New Labour embodied the philosophy and policies of the Social Democrats, but in other ways the neo-liberalism of the Blair era was a continuation of the Thatcher years. Both Bradbury and Lodge regretted the way that British universities were transformed in the 1990s. Bradbury represented this in his short satirical novel Cuts (1987) and Lodge in Nice Work; one gets a strong sense that for both authors the decade in which they were undergraduates constituted a high point in the history of British academic life, and that they felt something very valuable was lost with the changes that took place at the end of the twentieth century. Although quite a lot has been written about the campus novel, it tends to focus on the relationship between the representation of the university and the perceived “reality,” sometimes tracing originals of characters, sometimes complaining about the preponderance of Oxford, often talking about the connection between changes in higher education and the novels being produced in a particular decade. But there is not much focus on the literary ancestry of the category. As it has evolved in both Britain and the United States, the campus novel is an amalgam of a variety of literary genres. It is not surprising to find connections with the novel of ideas and with the more intellectual forms of satire. One can relate some campus novels to the tradition of Menippean satire as found in the novels of Thomas Love Peacock or earlier in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The

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crazy ideas of Swift’s projectors or the participants in Peacock’s symposia find their descendants in some of the impractical and obsessive characters to be found in university fiction. Often differences of class, culture, or gender are dealt with in campus fiction through a kind of comedy of manners, while the more ludicrous elements are best described as farce. There is also political satire, of a kind that sometimes prompts violent reactions from those who identify themselves with the targets and are not amused. The sociologist Ian Carter seems to have been prompted to write a whole book about the post-war university novel by a reading of The History Man. In Ancient Cultures of Conceit, Carter explains that he finally read Bradbury’s novel after various friends from other departments strongly recommended it, but as a sociologist he read the book “with increasing outrage and contempt” (13). Much of his outrage seems to result from two related facts: first that he felt affronted by the portrayal of sociology and sociologists, and second that he found evidence that others took these portrayals as valid criticisms of the discipline.13 For example, Hilary Spurling wrote in her tLs review of The History Man that one can’t help thinking that the novel is “an essentially accurate portrait of life on a contemporary campus” (“Campus Mentis”). However, it is clear that if Bradbury is scathing in his view of the academic new left, he is despairing in his view of the adequacy of liberalism as a personal and political ideology in the post-war era, and especially since the 1960s. This is a theme that organizes almost everything that Bradbury wrote, beginning with his first novel Eating People Is Wrong, a book that he described in an introduction published in 1976 as being “about the tensions and contradictions and comedies of the liberal life” (1). Bradbury’s liberalism is essentially a very literary form of liberal humanism, with strong roots in Matthew Arnold’s ideals of culture and disinterestedness. E.M. Forster is another writer who is very important to Bradbury, both for his liberalism and for the sense of belatedness that both men had in relation to the liberal tradition. Although Forster was two generations prior to Bradbury in his education and intellectual formation, he already felt that liberalism had seen its best days. In his essay on Forster, Bradbury quotes that writer’s characterization

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of his ideological position in 1946: “In a famous phrase, he also spoke of himself as belonging to the ‘fag-end of Victorian liberalism’” (Possibilities, 92). When Bradbury writes about Forster there is a strong element of self-description: [He] stands exceptionally for the virtues of moral reasonableness, moral passion, and their artistic embodiment in a fictional form. If other writers have risked themselves at the extremes, Forster seems to have held the centre, exploring it, for its moderating virtue, with a complex mixture of commitment and scepticism. These are the admirable virtues of the liberal humanist. (Possibilities, 91) Forster was problematical on political issues, which he tried to dissolve into personal relationships, just as Bradbury has a distinct preference for ethics over politics. Yet Bradbury recognizes the need for politics, and the inevitability of the changes that render Forster’s, and his own, liberalism anachronistic. He writes that in both Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924) “the will to vision, the liberal drive to right reason, the urgent claims of the holiness of the heart’s affections, are confronted with unyielding forces in history” (95). The same statement could be made about The History Man. Another important figure in shaping Bradbury’s critical identity was F.R. Leavis, about whom he wrote in an early essay, published when he was twenty-four (Bradbury is amusingly described in the contributor’s note as a “young Englishman” (“Rise,” 469). There is a significant element of personal identification here as well, as Bradbury characterizes the typical Leavisite: Many of those who admire Leavis (among whom I count myself) share the moral sphere which he defines; they are people who have been brought up in lower middle-class households where this kind of nonconformist strenuousness is to be found, where moral issues are pressing. It has only been in fairly recent years that the children of these homes have been able to obtain university education and even achieve to

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eminence in the world of letters and in the groves of academe. (“Rise,” 471) For Bradbury, although Leavis was a fellow of a Cambridge college, the school of criticism over which he presided fit more appropriately into the world of the provincial university: “where the virtues emphasized are good hard work, keeping decent, and getting on … [T]he training in taste that Leavis adumbrated in Scrutiny is of a different order than that Good Taste that one associates with the dons of Oxford colleges, with Virginia Woolf or E.M. Forster – it is far less dilettante and elite, involving rather a rigorous training in discrimination” (471). David Lodge is also an admirer of Forster, and he has written a fine essay on Howards End (“Forster’s Flawed Masterpiece”). On the other hand, Lodge has always found Leavis a rather problematic figure, someone whose essential puritanism prevented him from being a true liberal.14 Lodge identifies religious difference as underlying his disaffection with Leavis, although Leavis did in fact have a significant following among Roman Catholics (see Hilliard, English, 82–4). In the university in general, but especially in literary studies, liberal humanism was becoming a term of abuse for many by the 1970s, and as Keith Wilson notes, the beleaguered nature of the liberal studies disciplines was a popular motif in campus novels (“Academic Fictions,” 58). Leavis is recognizably present in a number of these novels, and the energy with which his ideas are satirized suggests a strong element of disillusioned discipleship among the authors. There are hints of Leavis in The History Man, when the young Howard is described as often talking of “maturity,” one of Leavis’s key terms: “‘maturity,’ [Howard] explained later, when he preferred other words, happened to be a key concept of the apolitical fifties” (23). Leavis also makes an appearance in Jacobson’s Coming from Behind, but the most vehement fictional riposte to the cult of Leavis is Tom Sharpe’s The Great Pursuit (1977). In that novel, Dr Sydney Louth, a disciple of Leavis and herself an acclaimed critic, pseudonymously publishes a sexually explicit bestseller, Pause O Men for the Virgin. Sharpe’s satire of Leavis, through his representation of Louth and of her adherent the unsuccessful novelist Peter Piper,

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has the bitterness of disappointed love. In a farcical scene in the American deep South, Peter Piper finds himself addressing the congregation of a church and he quotes from Louth’s book The Moral Novel as though it were a sacred text. Meanwhile the literary agent Frederick Frensic bitterly reflects on Louth’s career, prompted by the publication of her new book of essays, The Great Pursuit, dedicated to F.R. Leavis (and its title of course fusing the titles of two of Leavis’s best-known works). Frensic’s reflections seem to be aimed at the master as well as the fictitious disciple: Generations of undergraduates had sat mesmerized by the turgid inelegance of her style while she denounced the modern novel, the contemporary world and the values of a sick and dying civilization … She had praised the obviously great and cursed the rest and for that simple formula she was known as a great scholar. And all this in language which was the antithesis of the stylistic brilliance of the writers she praised. (191) Leavis, as both the suffering saint and the infallible arbiter of literary studies, came to represent for many the embodiment of the humanist tradition, the person who had translated the cultural ideals of Matthew Arnold into a practical program of educational action. Leavisism became an orthodoxy as it also came under attack from new opponents: on the left, the Marxist and culturalmaterialist criticism that was the successor to the more sociological side of Leavis’s enterprise, and on the right a Thatcherite pragmatism that encouraged the study of “useful” subjects. Leavis increasingly was seen as old-fashioned in the 1970s, but his influence remained strong, and he stood for a moral robustness that had become unfashionable without really being replaced by anything else. It is significant that in Literary Theory: An Introduction, one of the most popular and influential of guides to the new approaches to literary studies, Terry Eagleton felt compelled as late as 1983 to conduct a sustained and not always hidden polemic against the legacy of Leavis. Wilson sums up the situation at the end of the 1980s as follows: “Between them, the dramatically revised terms of

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discourse in the humanities and Thatcherite economics have made Leavis’s idea of a university as remote from the reality as Newman’s. More widely, there is no greater monument to the ‘technologicoBenthamism’ that Leavis identified and abhorred than contemporary Britain” (“Academic Fictions,” 70). Some of Leavis’s ideas survived in radically altered form in the work of Raymond Williams, himself an important influence on Terry Eagleton, but by the end of the 1970s the left-Leavisite project itself looked rather antiquated, and Eagleton was as likely to turn on Williams as to honour him.15 There is obvious comic potential in the idea of liberalism as an inadequate or delusive guide to living in the modern world, and both Changing Places and The History Man make use of such comedy. Philip Swallow in Lodge’s novel is a mild-mannered amateur trying to make his way in a world of professionals. In The History Man, Henry Beamish, however decent and well-intentioned, cannot successfully negotiate such everyday transactions as purchasing beer or carrying a tray of food in the cafeteria, let alone stand up to the machinations of his supposed friend Howard Kirk. At the same time, most radical commitments are represented as ridiculous or dangerously myopic. As a result, there is a tendency among those on the left to see the campus novel as a genre, and especially those written by such prominent liberals as Lodge and Bradbury, as inherently conservative. It is true that leftists do not generally fare well in campus novels, but on the other hand, conservative defenders of traditional values do not usually come off very well either. The novelists tend to have an attachment to the ideal of what a university ought to be, which could in different contexts be construed as either conservative or progressive, and they generally are attuned to the ridiculous aspects of radical positions. The liberalism of Lodge and Bradbury is regarded by commentators on the left as complacent in that it is insufficiently attentive to the horrors and inequities of the modern world, or as nostalgic and archaic, longing for an ideal world that never was while resisting the “truths” revealed by Marxist analysis. This raises the questions of first whether this is an accurate diagnosis of the ideological tendency of the novels, second whether comedy and satire are themselves inherently conservative, and third whether liberalism remains a viable ideology

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in the postmodern world. My short answers to these questions are, not surprisingly, liberal ones: to the first, not really; to the second, sometimes, perhaps, but it depends on how you read them; and to the third, to some extent. In the rest of this chapter, I seek to provide less superficial responses. Two of the most thoughtful and incisive critical discussions of Lodge and Bradbury come in essays written by Terry Eagleton and Peter Widdowson from a perspective on the political left. I will discuss these essays first, and then offer my own perspective, reinforced by reference to Robert Morace’s Bakhtinian reading of the two novelists. Eagleton is primarily concerned with Lodge in “The Silences of David Lodge,” while Widdowson’s essay “The AntiHistory Men” looks in detail at both writers. For Widdowson, writing early in Margaret Thatcher’s second term and after the publication of Small World, what Bradbury and Lodge have in common is that they are “anti-history” (6). In spite of their apparent differences, Widdowson argues that the two writers say essentially the same things. He writes, in a sentence that George Orwell might have found a good example of the deleterious effect of politics on the English language, “Beneath the ‘progressive’ surface sophistication and brilliance of their work are ideological implications of considerable reactionary force; or, at least, of a cleverly disguised neutralisation of the potentially disruptive and progressive developments which they themselves purport to deploy” (6). Bradbury is linked to Arnold and Leavis and to a narrative of cultural decline. His persistent attachment to liberalism is seen as a form of conservatism, since although Bradbury himself dislikes Thatcherite monetarism, Widdowson regards Marxism as the only viable mode of critique of that ideology. Widdowson regards Lodge as “a more intelligent critic than Bradbury, and a more poised novelist” (13). Although he lacks Bradbury’s cultural pessimism, Lodge is primarily concerned with the private world, which is a source of meaning in the face of the pressures of the modern public sphere. This is why the theme of nostos, the recurrent motif of return to a marriage, is so central to Lodge’s fiction. In “The Silences of David Lodge,” Eagleton makes a similar argument, though expressed rather more mordantly. He begins with

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some generalizations about the campus novel, “a kind of fiction which equivocates between a satiric criticism of everyday middleclass life and an unshaken commitment to its fundamental values” (93). He argues that at its best, the intellectualism and traditions of ethical and social concern of Roman Catholicism create an affinity among its adherents for the political left, but suggests that Lodge’s fiction presents Catholicism in a “peculiarly privatized, notional form” (96). Lodge’s fiction focuses on the private life, on sex rather than politics. Eagleton looks in some detail at Nice Work, then Lodge’s most recent novel, which he says refuses to acknowledge “the possibility of any theory which might have practical foundations in social life” (102). Thus Nice Work “is in profound collusion with the Britain about which it is so notably uneasy” (102). What is common to the critiques of both Widdowson and Eagleton is their assumption that liberalism is totally bankrupt, and that a refusal to accept a Marxist analysis is a refusal of reality, or in different terms that liberalism amounts to collusion with Thatcherism, a comment that was often made about the Social Democratic Party by those on the left during the early 1980s. Although their arguments are incisive, and expose political implications in numerous aspects of the novels, especially Widdowson’s analysis of the centrality of the nostos theme in Lodge, these Marxist readings reduce liberalism to a caricature, ignoring the possibility that it has its own dialectical aspect. If campus novels expose the shortcomings of liberalism, they also reveal the self-delusions of many Marxists. Revealing shortcomings and contradictions in positions held by the left is not self-evidently being anti-political, and Bradbury in particular shows the tendency to excuse ethical failings and political inconsistencies by the justification that one is on the right side of history and that one’s actions therefore tend in general in a progressive direction. Kenneth Womack’s book on campus novels reads them using the methodology of ethical criticism, and he notes that they employ satire “as an implicit means for advocating the merits of positive value systems, as well as a mechanism for commenting upon the nature of the academy and its institutional politics” (Postwar, 158). In Lodge, the positive values consist of a liberalism that is more

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robust than his critics will allow, as can be seen in his nuanced presentation of student radicalism in Changing Places. It would be hard to read that novel without thinking that Lodge is suggesting that there is a need for change both within and beyond the campus wall, even if, as a liberal who has a Catholic understanding of the weaknesses of human nature, he recognizes that change will inevitably fall short of the ideal. Bradbury is more preoccupied with the failings of liberalism as well as the dangers of radicalism, but the contradictions he explores do imply the possibility of a position that would be less of a caricature than Beamish’s liberalism, and the comments of his principal female characters suggest a recognition of the need for feminism; perhaps that is in fact what is needed to renew liberalism. These are all signs of what Robert Morace sees as the dialogical quality in the novels of Bradbury and Lodge. Morace’s study emphasizes the multiplicity of perspectives in their works, seeing their liberalism as polyphonic and by implication postmodern rather than nostalgic. He reads them through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin, noting that “their novels … have more to do with carnival than conservatism” (Dialogic Novels, 25). For Morace, “far from disguising their liberal values and aesthetic, they put them under increasing and inevitable postliberal pressure in an effort to discover whether any of the tradition can and should be maintained” (26). As Morace suggests through his readings of individual novels by Bradbury and Lodge, they explore multiple ideological perspectives by the use of double-voiced discourse, so that the reader encounters not the authoritative voice of the novelist, but rather an arena of competing perspectives, representing the complexity of the issues, including political issues, that are involved in the novel. Such dialogism is not characteristic of the more conservative “lone-voice” satirists, as will be seen in a brief concluding discussion of some genuinely conservative critiques. Bradbury and Lodge are aware of the changing nature of the times, and this supplies part of the energy in their books. Morris Zapp and Howard Kirk, the representatives of emergent ideas, may not always be morally admirable characters, though the former is far more positively presented than the latter, but they embody a kind of dynamic energy which exemplifies their

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age, while Philip Swallow and Henry Beamish, the representations of English liberalism, are more ineffectual and comic characters, nostalgically attached to the past. Bradbury recognizes at least the inevitability of historical change and the force of the radical position, while Lodge has a considerable degree of sympathy for it. Both writers recognize that in the 1970s universities were places of political struggle, if only of a symbolic kind for the most part, and they acknowledge that such symbolic struggle can be culturally important. As a final note on the alleged conservatism of campus novels, it should be pointed out that Raymond Williams’s Border Trilogy incorporates aspects of that genre, especially Second Generation (1964), which is set mainly in Oxford and explores the different worlds of the university and the Cowley car factory. In the trilogy, Williams seeks to provide the kind of social analysis that he found lacking in much contemporary fiction; as Dominic Head comments, his “aim in Border Country is, in effect, to achieve something like a reinvigorated Lukácsian realism that will reveal the public significance of private action and personal feeling” (Cambridge Introduction, 64). The Border Trilogy is a rather uneven achievement, but what is significant for this discussion is that in Second Generation a prominent socialist intellectual and writer felt that it was appropriate to use the university as the setting for an investigation of the condition of England.

malcolm Bradbury, The history Man Margaret Drabble has said that in The History Man, Malcolm Bradbury “uniquely and influentially captured the zeitgeist of Britain in the seventies” (“Introduction,” vii), and indeed the novel remains a cultural touchstone in Britain. Dominic Head has called it “one of the most important satires of post-war manners” (Cambridge Introduction, 26). The book was quite positively reviewed on its first appearance. Writing in the Listener, John Vaizey said that “it is, all told, one of the few interesting English novels I have read in the 1970s” (“Present Woes”). Its ethical seriousness was recognized in reviews by Valentine Cunningham in the New Statesman and by

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Peter Ackroyd in the Spectator. Its effect was reinforced by, and complicated by, an extremely good television miniseries based on the novel, adapted by Christopher Hampton. The novel was published in 1975, during the turbulent final year of Harold Wilson’s time as prime minister, while the miniseries was broadcast in January 1981, during the first half of Margaret Thatcher’s first term in office, and thus in a very different political climate. This inevitably emphasized the conservative voice in Bradbury’s text, and caused it to be appropriated for attacks on the institutions of higher education in a way that made Bradbury uncomfortable.16 It is striking that The History Man did not make much of an impact in North America, unlike the campus novels of David Lodge, and the television miniseries is not available in North American format. This may be in part due to the novel’s focus on some very specifically English phenomena, and also because, unlike Lodge’s work, The History Man is not really a comedy. There are some funny moments, but it begins and ends with suicide and it presents all ideological positions as in different ways compromised or deluded. Nevertheless, the novel was promoted in a way that stressed its humour. An advertisement in the Guardian on 27 November 1975 quoted two reviewers, Michael Ratcliffe and Auberon Waugh, and both quotations employ the word “funniest” with respect to Bradbury and his novel. The Waugh quotation has been used as a blurb on paperback reprints: “The funniest and best-written novel I have seen for a very long time.” However, I think that A.S. Byatt’s comment, featured on the 2012 Picador paperback of The History Man, catches the novel’s tone more accurately: “Grim wit, chill comedy and a fictional energy which is as imaginative as the tale is shocking.” Howard Kirk, the novel’s Machiavellian anti-hero, is a figure of great force and energy, whose social and personal background are narrated in a lengthy analepsis that takes up most of two chapters (20–54) and that is reduced to a few scattered lines of dialogue in the adaptation. The latter presents Howard as a more thoroughly unappealing figure, as reviewers of the series were quick to point out.17 In Bradbury’s novel, there is always an area of ambiguity as to quite how negatively we are supposed to view Kirk, especially since he seems to embody aspects of the author and is given some

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of the attributes of a novelist in the way that he controls characters and writes the plot of history. There is a striking similarity here to Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), a brilliant novel of education by an author Bradbury greatly admired. In that work, Miss Brodie attempts to play God and arrange the destinies of her pupils, and the reader is never quite sure how much to disapprove of her behaviour. Bradbury wrote an essay on Spark that gives a good idea of how he might have been influenced by her in The History Man. He notes her preoccupation with style, referring specifically to her use of the present tense and her preoccupation with endings, as well as her affinity with the nouveau roman in her use of “an intensive and almost chosiste description” in The Driver’s Seat (“Muriel Spark’s,” 272–5, 275). Above all, however, he seems to have admired her for something very different, namely for the fact that she has – by virtue of her Catholic beliefs that Bradbury does not share – a conception “of the Truth in our truthless world” (278).18 In a lengthy and revealing interview with the literary scholar John Haffenden, Bradbury says that “the writer is always compelled to assert form as history … in style there is an historical imperative. Style is deeply affected by the grammatical and presentational perceptions that come to you from the language of your own culture, and from the language of the philosophies of your culture” (Haffenden, Novelists, 30; italics in original). This is Bradbury’s answer to the question of how literature relates to history, and it looks back to the criticism of Adorno, and has parallels to that of Fredric Jameson. In both of those Marxist critics, history and ideology are involved in the smallest details of style and form. In introducing his translation of Theodor Adorno’s essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” Bruce Mayo nicely characterizes the way that Adorno connects the literary and the social aspects of lyric in his critical practice: “a description of the language inevitably becomes, in part, a description of the world” (“Introduction,” 55). Similarly, Fredric Jameson is interested in style as a manifestation of history. In the preface to Marxism and Form (1971), his survey of the Hegelian tradition of Marxist criticism, he writes: “I remain faithful to the notion that any concrete description of a literary or philosophical phenomenon – if it is to be really complete – has an ultimate obligation to come to

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terms with the shape of the individual sentences, to give an account of their origin and formation” (xii).19 In the same preface, he declares that “the bankruptcy of the liberal tradition is as plain on the philosophical level as it is on the political” (x). Bradbury would probably have agreed, but would have suggested that the Marxist tradition is equally exhausted, deriving as it does from the same Enlightenment sources as Benthamite liberalism (see Haffenden, Novelists, 34). Bradbury also resembles a Marxist critic in the way that he talks about his “history man,” Howard Kirk, whom Bradbury describes in terms that make him seem like one of Georg Lukács’s historically typical characters, containing within himself the contradictions and burdens of a historical moment. This form of representative character is of the essence of Lukács’s valuation of realism and is at the centre of his account of the European historical novel. For instance, Edward Waverley, one of Scott’s “more or less mediocre” heroes, wavers between absolutist monarchy and aristocratic ideology on the one hand and constitutional monarchy and middle-class ideology on the other (Lukács, Historical Novel, 32). Bradbury says that, “For me, in some sense, Howard Kirk was history, marrying himself to the flavour of the age far more profoundly than any of the other characters” (Haffenden, Novelists, 36). However, in spite of the parallels I have just observed, Bradbury is no Marxist, and he explains his historicist view of literary form in terms of the ethical responsibility of the writer to think about the present “with a special responsibility for language” (Haffenden, Novelists, 31). Howard Kirk’s early career is somewhat parallel to that of Malcolm Bradbury. He begins as an anxious and deferential scholarship boy, from a “respectable upper working-class cum lower middle-class” family (20). In this social world, there is a “background of vestigial Christianity and inherited social deference … high ethical standards and low social expectations; the result was an ethos in which ethics replaced politics” (25). We learn of Kirk’s doctoral studies at the University of Leeds and his intellectual transformation and move to the new plate-glass University of Watermouth just in time for the radical years. Though the novel is written largely in the present tense, the past tense is used for what is in effect an embedded and

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abbreviated Bildungsroman, the story of Howard, and Barbara, from their adolescence to the present as they progress from petit bourgeois Nonconformist Leeds to the postmodern world of Watermouth. This story is self-consciously another version of the tale of the northern scholarship boy that Richard Hoggart told in The Uses of Literacy (1957). Bradbury brings it up to date by describing how, after his earnest graduate studies in sociology, Howard finds personal and political liberation in the radical 1960s, the decade for which Philip Larkin famously pronounced himself too old. There is also a significant commentary on gender difference. Barbara is “inherently brighter” than Howard, “as she had to be” (20), for attending university is even more of an achievement for her than it is for him. But instead of pursuing a career “she became, of course, a housewife” (22). It is easy to work out from details given in the text that Howard was born in 1938, which makes him a bit younger than Bradbury, with fewer memories of the war, and also means that he attains the untrustworthy age of thirty in the revolutionary year of 1968. He tells Annie Callendar, the new member of the English faculty, that “for perfectly good reasons these kids don’t trust anyone over thirty,” which prompts her to state that she is twenty-four and to elicit the information that Howard is thirty-four (History Man, 94). Thus Bradbury raises the issue of the generation gap, and also deftly refers to the fact that the gurus of the radical youth were generally quite a bit older than thirty. The novel is set in 1972, the year of Richard Nixon’s re-election, which takes place between the party scenes that open and close the novel, one at the beginning of the term, on 2 October, and the other at the end, on 15 December. The revelations of the Watergate scandal are yet to come in the narrative present of the text. All of these precise details surely make the choice of Annie Callendar’s last name no accident; the structure of the university term plays a major organizing role in The History Man, as it does in many campus novels (one way in which they do accurately reflect the nature of university life). Lodge has commented about Bradbury’s satire: “Like Evelyn Waugh, whose work he admired enormously, Malcolm’s imagination responded with gleeful relish to the things in contemporary

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society he found most alien, extreme and absurd” (Lives, 183). In The History Man those things include the New Left, popularized versions of Marxism, and significant aspects of the social sciences. The epigraph to The History Man is a passage from Günter Grass: “Who’s Hegel?” “Someone who sentenced mankind to history.” “Did he know a lot? Did he know everything?” (xi) As James Acheson points out, this passage, which is found in From the Diary of a Snail, continues, “Thanks to [Hegel’s] subtlety, every abuse of state power has to this day been explained as historically necessary” (“Thesis and Antithesis,” 42). The epigraph thus hints at one of the central arguments of the novel, which is that Hegel’s dialectic, as applied to the political process by Marx, is the ultimate explanation, and source of self-justification, of Howard Kirk’s deviousness, duplicity, and abuse of others. The epigraph is echoed through the novel, as Howard’s students repeat the question “Who’s Hegel?”20 The answer to this question may be the answer to the more fundamental questions that Bradbury is asking about the fate of liberalism and the collapse of liberal humanism. As he himself sees it, Bradbury became a writer of campus novels “largely because I saw the university not as an innocent pastoral space but also a battleground of major ideas and ideologies which were shaping our times” (“Campus Fictions,” 333). In the 1976 introduction to Eating People Is Wrong, Bradbury acknowledges the influence of Cooper’s Scenes from Provincial Life, which, he says, “encouraged many younger writers thereafter to see a straightforward, local common sense realism as a way to renew the novel and adjust it to the political reality of contemporary England, a post-war, welfare England the novel-form chose to explore and colonise” (4). Bradbury wrote in this mode of realism, made possible, he maintains, by the fact that people in the fifties had “a sense of possessing a common and shareable reality” (5), but for his characters “Past and present don’t quite mesh, and so it is hard to know quite where to get one’s values from” (6). By the time that he wrote The History Man, this sense of a shareable reality was

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much more tenuous, and to a liberal like Bradbury the revolutionary dogmas of the New Left were threatening the autonomy and freedom of the individual far more than were the residual forces of the conservative elite. He responded with a novel which for many readers came to define its moment. In creating the overall impression of detachment and irony, the style and narrative technique of The History Man play an important role. Lodge characterizes the authorial voice in the novel as “knowing, sardonic, and educated, but also detached, impersonal, opaque” (“Lord of Misrule”). The various techniques Bradbury uses all have the effect of what Lodge calls “staying on the surface”; that is, they are means of avoiding interiority or subjectivity (Art of Fiction, 117–20). The influence of both Muriel Spark and the nouveau roman of Alain Robbe-Grillet can be detected here in the way that Bradbury dwells on exterior descriptions, things, describing the world as though it is completely alien to him and he is trying to work out the motives for human behaviour. The use of the present tense in all but the flashback episode contributes to this effect, as does his practice of running dialogue into long paragraphs rather than starting a new paragraph for each speech. Furthermore, he sometimes avoids speech tags in the dialogue, and when they are used it is almost invariably “he” or “she says,” without any qualifying adverb. (Here the short stories of Ernest Hemingway may have been an influence.) At times, the narrative is reduced to a parodic simplicity that suggests Beckett: “Howard presses the button; the lift grinds in the shaft. The doors open; the Kirks get in. There are aerosoled scribbles on the lift walls: ‘Agro,’ ‘Boot boys,’ ‘Gary is King.’ They stand together and the lift descends. It stops and the Kirks walk out” (13). The anonymous graffiti is endowed with more life and emotion than the Kirks in this passage, one of many where human beings are reduced to automata. Bradbury also is a master of the non sequitur that leaves the reader wondering what the real message is, as though to suggest that the world is inscrutable and absurd: “They come out among the high buildings, into a formal square. The precinct has straight angles; it has won an architectural award” (13). The relationship between the last two clauses is unclear: is it causal or is it completely contingent?

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The History Man captures many of the fashions and tastes of the 1970s, which are reported in a literary style that is largely without affect, though sometimes with a hint of parody or irony, reducing the characters to figures in an advertisement. It registers the new prominence of the Sainsburys grocery store chain and the popularity among young progressive professionals of furniture and houseware from Habitat.21 A good example is a passage describing Barbara leaving for a weekend in London. It comes well into the novel, after we know quite a lot about the characters, but it presents them in exteriorized terms as clichés: Barbara is smart in a furry coat, and high boots; she runs down the steps, carrying a small striped suitcase, and puts it in the back, and shuts the doors, and gets into the van beside Howard. Felicity waves from the steps. “Have a good time,” she shouts, “I’ll take care of all of them.” Things are well arranged; Barbara smiles, the van starts. The bright sun glares into the van windows as they drive up the hill, through the traffic, and pull into the station yard. “Weekend in London,” say the posters under the covered arcade where the van has stopped; Barbara will. She leans across to her helpful husband; she kisses him on the cheek. She kneels up on the seat, and kisses the children in the back. “Be good,” she says, “all of you.” (207) Similar passages describe shopping or the modernist architecture of Watermouth University. The utilitarian contents of the identical faculty offices – “stark, simple, repetitious, each one an exemplary instance of all the others” (66) – are itemized in precise detail, again in nouveau roman style, down to the “stack of four (4) black plastic chairs” and the “six (6) wall-hung bookshelves” (66). It is hard to perceive any positive values amid the negative energy that circulates through The History Man. Nostalgic conservatism is ruled out by the ironic tone with which anything savouring of traditional Englishness is described. The plate-glass university itself sometimes seems like a kind of demonic parody of the Oxbridge ideal. A key moment is the appearance in class of the conservative student George Carmody, who dresses and acts as though it is

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twenty years earlier. He wears grey flannel trousers and a university tie and blazer, so that “He is an item, preserved in some extraordinary historical pickle, from the nineteen-fifties or before” (140), just as in Tom Sharpe’s Great Pursuit, inside Sydney Louth’s study “it was 1955. In twenty years nothing had changed” (193). People like George Carmody were not absolutely uncommon in British universities in the 1970s, though he is indeed an exotic species in a sociology class at a new university. Bradbury does not make him a very likeable character, and Howard Kirk expresses a withering dismissal of his ideas, which given the continuing prestige of T.S. Eliot in the 1970s were ideas that still had considerable currency in literary studies: “You have a better sociology?” asks Howard, “this AngloCatholic classicist-royalist stuff you import from English and want to call sociology?” “It’s an accepted form of cultural analysis,” says Carmody. “I don’t accept it,” says Howard. “It’s an arty-farty construct that isn’t sociology, because it happens to exclude everything that makes up the real face of society. By which I mean poverty, racialism, inequality, sexism, imperialism, and repression, the things I expect you to consider and account for.” (147) It is hard not to think that Howard speaks more for Bradbury here than does George Carmody. Reviewing the novel in the journal Sociology, Stan Cohen wrote that what makes The History Man interesting is “Bradbury’s worries about his own side” (537). He is not defending ahistorical Bloomsbury “humanism” or “the straight anti-leftism of the contemporary intellectual cold war” (537). Henry Beamish is the most important spokesperson for liberalism in the novel, but from his suicide attempt at the first party through the chapter of accidents and mishaps that befall him, he is clearly not able to function adequately in the modern world, and he cannot be taken seriously as a character, even if he rises to moments of pathos. Henry tries to live a life of rural contentment while working at the university, and argues in Burkean terms to Howard that “there is an inheritance of worthwhile life in this country” (43). The key statement of Henry’s creed

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comes in a conversation with Howard the day after the first party and after a long and contentious department meeting. Henry tells Howard that he rejects his solutions to problems, and he has put his own radicalism behind him: “I’m rather sick of the great secular dominion of liberation and equality we were on about then, which reduces, when you think about it, to putting system over people and producing large piles of corpses. I think Ireland’s done the trick for me, turned me sour on all those words like ‘anti-fascism’ and ‘antiimperialism’ we always used. I don’t want to blame anybody now, or take anything off anyone. The only thing that matters for me is attachment to other people, and the gentleness of relationship.” (185) Henry expresses the great weariness about Ireland that came to characterize British liberalism, as the Troubles polarized the issue until it seemed there was very little ground between two violent and unpleasant alternatives. By the time this fictional conversation takes place, in October 1972, internment had been introduced in Northern Ireland, the Bloody Sunday shooting had taken place, and the British embassy in Dublin had been burned in retaliation. In retreating into quietism, Henry expresses a Forsterian belief in personal relationships, but this offers no solution to intractable political problems such as the perennial “Irish Question.” Annie Callendar is a much less pathetic figure than Henry, younger and with a sharp wit. She also rejects the political sphere, asking a group of students at Howard’s party, “Don’t you think that politics is really just about the lowest form of human knowledge? Lesser than morals, or religion, or aesthetics, or philosophy? Or anything that’s connected with real human density?” (92). One of the students addresses Howard in consternation in response to these questions: “Who is this crazy doll?” she asks. “She says we don’t need a revolution.” “There are people who think like that,” says Howard. “I don’t understand them,” says Beck Pott. “There

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have to be,” says Howard; “if there weren’t, we wouldn’t need a revolution.” (92) In some ways Annie is a worthy opponent of Howard, showing that his interpretation of one of Blake’s Proverbs of Hell is a simplistic and self-interested reading (153–4). But she describes herself as a “nineteenth-century liberal,” a description that not only makes her a self-declared anachronism, but that ignores the fact that nineteenth-century liberals were very involved in politics – one need go no further than Mill to see how thoroughly. Here again Howard might be thought to have the better line when he responds to her declaration, “You can’t be, this is the twentieth century, near the end of it” (114). Furthermore, Annie is often represented in oldfashioned clothing or settings, and is associated with fragile objects. She tries to keep her address a secret, and when Howard finally tracks her down she quickly succumbs to his sexual advances, in an incident that was controversial among readers of the novel and viewers of the television series. It gave offence both to feminists and to traditional moralists (see Lodge, “Lord of Misrule”). What was most troubling was no doubt the fact that Annie capitulates so completely to Howard, who suffers no adverse consequences for any of his actions in the novel. Her liberal defence of George Carmody is forgotten, and after he is expelled from the university she continues her relationship with Howard apparently unperturbed. This relationship is, in Annie’s own words, a product of “historical inevitability” (230), and is precipitated by Howard’s unflattering version of seductive conversation: “You’ll dry up, you’ll wither, you’ll hate and grudge, in ten years you’ll be nothing, a neurotic little old lady … Freud once gave a very economical definition of neurosis. He said it was an abnormal attachment to the past” (228– 9). Howard’s assertion of masculine power raises the thought that perhaps liberalism needs to accommodate itself to feminism, and that is something suggested more strongly through the portrayal of Barbara Kirk, as we shall see. Nineteenth-century liberal humanism is present in the novel through echoes of Matthew Arnold: Howard refers ironically to “sweetness and light” in his suggestion that Henry’s views are

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impractical (185), while the head of the sociology department, Professor Marvin, suggests that in evaluating students one should aim for a kind of “disinterestedness,” to which Howard replies that Marvin lives “in a liberal fantasy” (216). Like Annie Callendar, Professor Marvin is a not inconsiderable opponent, a scholar and a clever administrator, but he also tries to be decent and to see both sides of an issue, which enables Howard to outwit him and obtain what he wants. In university politics, it is very often the case that those who strive to be fair lose out to those whose goal is to win at all costs. As a last example of a liberal, Bradbury inserts himself into the novel in a celebrated cameo.22 Howard goes to the English department, looking for Annie, and like a nocturnal animal “a dark, tousled-haired head, with a sad visage” peers out of an adjacent office: Howard recalls that this depressed-looking figure is a lecturer in the English department, a man who, ten years earlier, had produced two tolerably well-known and acceptably reviewed novels, filled, as novels then were, with moral scruple and concern. Since then there has been silence, as if, under the pressure of contemporary change, there was no more moral scruple and concern, no new substance to be spun. (220) If the liberal novelist has nothing more to say, it can be argued that Howard Kirk the history man is the real author of The History Man. He arranges the destiny of the characters and orchestrates the protest at the lecture by the geneticist Mangel – which he himself has caused to happen in the first place – just as he arranges the rooms of his house to facilitate a good party, for “as Howard always says, if you want to have something that’s genuinely unstructured, you have to plan it carefully” (7). Annie Callendar tells him, “I think you’re very interesting characters, but I haven’t discovered the plot” (114). The plot is of course the plot of history, and by embracing it Howard has become “the history man,” in tune with the movement of the times. Initially the Kirks as a couple tell their story, an

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“exemplary case” (34), but by 1972 Barbara is tired of dirty dishes and is reading Simone de Beauvoir, and she feels she is no longer in control of the story. She tells Howard, “You’re a kind of selfmade fictional character who’s got the whole story on his side, just because he happens to be writing it” (36), and Howard has indeed put their story into his academic work. Bradbury’s novel thus anatomizes the weakness of the values he holds dear, while projecting an almost demonic energy and charisma into the character who embodies everything Bradbury dislikes about the contemporary situation. Anthony Thwaite points out in an inspired phrase that “everything that happens” in The History Man “is given the same utilitarian weight,” and one might feel that the same could be said of everything that is thought (“Faculty”). The question arises whether there is anything that in any way transcends this futile wasteland of the intellect. Christianity does not have much of a presence in Bradbury, except as something belonging to the past. A Nonconformist religious upbringing is one of the aspects of his identity that Howard Kirk has shed in the course of his evolution into a sixties radical. Even as a graduate student, he was attached to his background sufficiently to choose the Christadelphians of Wakefield as a research topic, but he has put all that behind him, and has, it seems, substituted himself for God. In his wife’s view, Howard is “what we have instead of faith” (9). After purchasing the food for their party, she sardonically tells him “Of course, if there’s five thousand you’ll be able to increase the quantity” (15). But these are only ironic traces, and the university itself, as a recent foundation, has no connection with the sacred. Its halls of residence are named after modern thinkers, from Hobbes to Toynbee, including of course one named after Hegel (61). In the centre of the campus is “the high phallus, eolipilic in shape, of the boilerhouse chimney, the absolute focus, the point of maximum architectural eminence, of the entire university, its substitute for a tower or a spire or a campanile” (66).23 This is a clear indication of the utilitarian basis of the contemporary university, and the narrator of the novel declares of the campus, “close it down as a university, a prospect that seemed to become increasingly possible as

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the students came to hate the world and the world the university, and you could open it again as a factory, a prison, a shopping precinct” (69). There is one final point to be made about this bleak landscape, which is that it is haunted by mental illness and suicide. This topic was very current when Bradbury was writing: A. Alvarez published his study of suicide, The Savage God, in 1971, featuring not only a cultural history of suicide but, at the beginning and end, accounts of the suicide of his friend Sylvia Plath and his own attempted suicide. Suicide and mental illness feature in the novels written in the 1970s by Margaret Drabble (notably The Realms of Gold) and Doris Lessing, and in this respect Bradbury is both in tune with an important element of the zeitgeist and writing in a much more sombre mode than David Lodge in Changing Places. The History Man begins with Barbara trying to engage Howard in a discussion about the suicide of a student, a topic that he refuses to take seriously. It ends with Barbara attempting suicide herself, in the same manner that Henry did at the first party, by breaking a window and cutting her wrist on the glass. Bradbury’s representation of liberalism is if anything more negative than that of a Marxist critic, and the corrosive nature of the critique makes the comedy in the book very bitter indeed. In one of the numerous epigrams about liberalism that are distributed throughout his novel Stepping Westward (1968), Bradbury defines liberals as “people who embrace their destroyers” (254). In The History Man he represents a liberalism that is not so much bleak, to use Amanda Anderson’s term, as self-destructive. As far as I can see, the only positive possibility one could take away from the novel is that liberalism could be updated by incorporating the personal (or domestic) into the political, as the feminist slogan of the time put it. This remains a rather distant possibility at the end of the novel, where in the midst of the party Howard has gone off to his study with Annie while Barbara is cutting her wrist on a broken window. Howard has written a book on the obsolescence of privacy as a concept, but he is in fact quite territorial about his study, his office, and his personal life, and it is Barbara who tries to politicize matters by pointing out the contradictions. In Marge Piercy mode she

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tells Howard as they prepare for their October party, “I don’t need a party, it’s just another sodding domestic chore I have to clear up after” (13). The novel thus intimates in a very muted way the fact that in terms of gender, the political horizon was about to undergo a major transformation. For Elaine Showalter “Barbara is one of the many Emma Bovary figures in academic fiction” (Faculty Towers, 61). It is revealing that the female characters in The History Man aroused considerable hostility in male reviewers, indicative of the anxieties about issues of gender and sexuality that the book raises. For example, Stan Cohen writes that Annie Callendar sounds “so endearingly smug in that Bloomsbury type of way, that one wants to strangle her” (539). Similarly, a review in the Guardian by Robert Nye says that Howard Kirk is “spurred on by a wife who would not disgrace a school production of Macbeth.” The History Man now reads like a historical novel about a society that was about to change in a number of very significant ways, changes that had already begun by the time that it became a miniseries. The television adaptation follows Bradbury’s novel fairly closely, but one addition has prompted a lot of discussion. The last episode ends, like the book, with Barbara Kirk’s suicide attempt, and the final frames superimpose a caption: “Howard Kirk is now Professor of Sociology at the University of Dewsbury. In the 1979 General Election he voted Conservative.” In a commentary on The History Man published in 2008, David Lodge suggests that such a transformation “seems highly improbable” (“Lord of Misrule”). Interestingly, reflecting on his novel after more than twenty years, Bradbury himself opines of Howard Kirk that “No doubt in 1979 he would have voted for Thatcher, and in 1997 for Blair” (“Welcome Back,” 254). It is perhaps relevant to recall that in the space of the year 1977 the one-time New Statesman editor Paul Johnson first endorsed the left-leaning Tony Benn as the best prospect for leading the Labour Party, then publicly said farewell to that party, prior to embarking on his new role as a right-wing commentator.24 Like Lucky Jim, like Paul Johnson, the television version of Howard Kirk turned right, and Bradbury provides some context for understanding why such a turn is not implausible. He rather sardonically suggests that the countercultural sociology of the 1960s “provided

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much of the ideological and moral framework of postmodern consumer capitalism”: It gave us much, not least the enquiring, relativistic spirit in which we now perceive our “membership” in society. Despite the many claims it made, it did little to deepen or enrich the sense of society or social existence. The atomized, random, value-free, self-creating, hedonistic self of the Nineties is just as much the product of all that radical sociology as it is of some Thatcherite distrust of the very idea of society. (“Welcome Back,” 253) In addition to Kingsley Amis and Paul Johnson, Iris Murdoch and John Osborne took a rightward path, and a reason underlying many such conversions was a rejection of the collectivism of the left. Even the one-time Communist Doris Lessing championed the individual as the solution to society’s problems, and she would anatomize the pathology of the far left in The Good Terrorist (1985). Although Bradbury himself does not appear to have supported Margaret Thatcher, his novel does provide some insight into the reasons for her success, and that may account for the vociferousness with which those on the left have denounced The History Man.

David Lodge, Changing places David Lodge is not as seriously concerned with politics as Bradbury, though he is an astute observer of social change and political trends throughout his fiction, especially in Out of the Shelter and Changing Places, his two novels of the 1970s, and two of their successors in the 1980s, How Far Can You Go? and Nice Work. I would suggest that Lodge feels that there is less at stake in the political process than Bradbury does; he rarely gives way to nostalgia, and he is optimistic about the ability of human beings to work through problems. In addition, as has already been mentioned, his Catholicism provides him with a larger perspective on political conflicts. Bradbury expects more from the secular world and as a result is more disillusioned about it. Furthermore, Lodge’s attitude to campus protest and student radicalism is far more tolerant than Bradbury’s. While

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he is aware of a large degree of posturing and fashion, Lodge’s representation of the demonstrations he observed while a visiting professor at Berkeley has a great deal of sympathy for the protesters and considerable criticism of the brutality of the forces of law and order and of the weakness of the university administration. In Bradbury’s novel Henry Beamish is injured and his office vandalized by the student protesters, whereas in Lodge it is the forces of law and order who are represented as truly violent. Changing Places is a very important book in the development of Lodge’s career as a writer, for it is the novel that really consolidated his reputation after the poor reception of Out of the Shelter, a book for which he had high expectations, and much of which is closely based on his own experience. He had hoped it would be read as a work of significant social and cultural commentary on the post-war period: “In the late 1960s I was very conscious of remembering the war, feeling myself on the other side of the wall from everybody who came afterwards” (Haffenden, Novelists, 150). The manuscript version of the novel even concluded with an essay, in the voice of one of the characters, “about the social, political and economic life of Britain in 1951” (Afterword to Shelter, 279). Perhaps not surprisingly, this is one of the parts of the text that was cut at the insistence of the Macmillan editors. I think that Out of the Shelter is a remarkable work of social-historical commentary, and a much better novel than was recognized at the time. There are probably several reasons why it was not more successful, but certainly one of them must be the poor job that Macmillan did of producing and promoting the work.25 Lodge candidly told John Haffenden, “I don’t think I really made it as a writer until Changing Places in 1975, when I was forty” (Haffenden, Novelists, 150), and he is probably still best known for that novel and its sequel Small World. The comedy of Changing Places was widely praised on its first appearance, with one reviewer writing “I cannot remember having laughed aloud so much at a book since Lucky Jim” (Hepburn, “Fathering”). Like Malcolm Bradbury, Lodge was preoccupied with questions about the nature and viability of the novel as a form during the early 1970s, and he also felt some anxiety about the scale of ambition of American novelists when compared with English ones. As we have already seen, Lodge addressed these issues in “The Novelist

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at the Crossroads,” while Bernard Bergonzi explored them in his widely read book The Situation of the Novel. In terms of the present discussion, the most important thing about “The Novelist at the Crossroads” is its equation of realism with liberalism. The essay is primarily concerned with the state of the novel and the challenge to realism posed by new developments, mainly in the United States, much of which would now go under the heading of postmodernism. Having explored the various forms of innovative fiction, including the non-fiction novel and fabulation, Lodge reaffirms a belief in the value of realism, even if it must be qualified by a degree of selfconsciousness that makes it in his word “problematic” (22). Lodge’s “modest affirmation” of realism is in part due to his own predilection: “I like realistic novels, and I tend to write realistic fiction myself” (32). His concerns in the essay are largely aesthetic, but he is fully aware that aesthetic issues have political implications, which he addresses most explicitly in the concluding pages: “If the case for realism has any ideological content it is that of liberalism. The aesthetics of compromise go naturally with the ideology of compromise, and it is no coincidence that both are under pressure at the present time” (33). His anxieties about the state of English fiction hint at a feeling of national decline, but this remains far more subliminal than it is in Bergonzi’s Situation of the Novel, partly because Lodge has a more genuine affection for America and things American than most English writers and intellectuals of his day. Lodge’s instinctive liberalism was, as he himself says, conditioned by a wartime childhood and by growing up within a religious minority community, but it also seems to be an intrinsic part of his personality, and it deeply informs the structure of his novels, which often explore opposing sides of an issue, whether the conflict between traditionalists and reformers in the Catholic church (How Far Can You Go?), or between business and the humanities (Nice Work), or cognitive science and the artistic imagination (Thinks …). He not only presents both sides, but does so in a way that is genuinely dialogical, effectively representing the world view of characters very unlike himself. He is a liberal Catholic who understands why some people are conservative Catholics, and a writer and professor of English who understands how the managing director of an engineering firm might experience the world. In his interview with

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Haffenden, Lodge said that “I think I am by temperament tentative, sceptical, ironic, and so that reflects itself in the structure and texture of what I write” (Novelists, 152). He returns to the theme a few pages later: “I don’t take up strongly defined positions. I am by nature a kind of compromiser, I suppose, looking to reconcile apparently opposed positions” (157). In Changing Places, as in its predecessor Out of the Shelter, Lodge writes a version of Henry James’s international theme, but Changing Places doubles the Jamesian model by telling the story of two professors of English, one from the west coast of the United States and one from the English midlands, both forty years old, who exchange jobs for a term.26 Once again, the generation gap is an important theme. The novel is set in 1969, which means that Morris Zapp and Philip Swallow were born in 1929, giving them a few more years of memories of the war than David Lodge himself has, and making them almost a decade older than Howard Kirk. In the final chapter, Philip Swallow talks about the generation gap, relating it to the sense of privacy and “the inviolate self” that he thinks distinguishes people of his generation from the radical youth of 1969 (250). He also observes of the students he meets at Euphoric State that “They seemed to live entirely in the present tense” (96). This observation may elucidate Bradbury’s decision to write The History Man in the present tense, and some parts of the first chapter of Changing Places are also presented in the same manner. As in the “Crossroads” essay, Lodge links the crisis of liberalism to the crisis of the realist novel. It is significant that in his review of Changing Places, Malcolm Bradbury argued for the value of reading it in conjunction with “The Novelist at the Crossroads” (“Donswapping,” 65). A motif that runs through the novel is the case of Professor Karl Kroop, who has been denied tenure but whose case has been taken up by the students, who wear buttons with the slogan “Keep Kroop.” Kroop is an iconoclastic thinker who teaches a course called “The Death of the Book? Communication and Crisis in Contemporary Culture,” and who, according to one student’s comment, “Makes McLuhan seem slow” (68). By the end of the novel, Philip Swallow has been sufficiently influenced by Kroop’s ideas and by his American experience that he can declare that “the novel is dying” and that it is “an unnatural medium” for the experiences of young people” (250).

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By incorporating postmodern elements into Changing Places, Lodge presents a less anxious view of the situation of the genre than he did in his “Crossroads” essay of six years previous. Lodge does not in fact believe that the novel is a dying form – he is after all writing one – but Changing Places is a novel that is very self-conscious about itself as a novel. One of Philip Swallow’s assigned courses at Euphoric State is in creative writing, and he relies for assistance on an old-fashioned book called Let’s Write a Novel, most of whose injunctions Changing Places violates. Each chapter of the novel uses a different narrative technique, including a chapter of letters and one of news items (gesturing at John Dos Passos’s “Newsreels” in his U.S.A. trilogy), while the final chapter takes the form of a film script. These metafictional departures from the form of a traditional realist novel, such as Lodge himself for the most part wrote earlier in his career, mean that Changing Places is an example of what he calls in the “Crossroads” essay a “problematic novel”: a novel in which “the reality principle is never allowed to lapse entirely” and in which the novelist “makes the difficulty of his task, in a sense, his subject” (22, 23). Applying the analogy between realism and liberalism, what is implied is that liberalism needs to become more self-conscious or “problematic,” in a way that accommodates itself to the political concerns and the experiences of the post-war baby boom generation. Lodge’s first book, Language of Fiction, had been mainly concerned with style, but by the time he wrote “Crossroads,” he was well on the way to structuralism and interested in larger aspects of literary form. Although he has always been primarily a formalist critic, whether he has focused on style, voice, or more comprehensive aspects of narrative structure, Lodge has at the same time been attentive to history and issues of class and social context, as for example in his discussion of Kingsley Amis in Language of Fiction. In an analogous manner, Changing Places is a highly crafted and extremely entertaining comic novel that is solidly grounded in history. It is set in 1969, the year of the Berkeley “People’s Park” and Woodstock, and the year before Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics. The early pages evoke the somewhat apocalyptic mood of the time, as Morris Zapp, en route to England for the first time in his life, worries about

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airplane crashes and hijackings. The majority of hijackings in the United States took place between 1967 and 1972, when they often occurred at a weekly pace (Koerner, Skies, 8). Another contentious contemporary issue that is raised immediately is abortion, as Zapp to his consternation realizes that he is the only man on the plane; it is a special charter flight of women going to Britain to take advantage of its more liberal abortion laws. In more general terms, Changing Places comments on the state of Britain, and for comic purposes Lodge emphasizes the differences between Britain and the United States. His protagonist Philip Swallow appreciates the “simple amenities of the American way of life, such as showers and cold beer and supermarkets and heated open-air swimming pools and multi-flavoured ice-cream” (Changing Places, 20). Significantly, amenities like these form the basis of the British journalist Thomas Fowler’s bitter mockery of American consumerism in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (1955), another exercise in the international theme. From the perspective of both Philip Swallow, who is glad to leave, and Morris Zapp, who finds it difficult to adjust to the change, Britain is presented as uncomfortable, shabby, and cold. Nothing works as it should, and the notice board of the Rummidge English department is a collage of handwritten messages on a variety of odd pieces of paper, a sign that in Britain the Gutenberg era has not entirely superseded manuscript culture (59). There are some interesting parallels between the eccentric shabbiness of the English department and the secret service headquarters in le Carré’s novels, especially in the way that, as Zapp remarks, there is “a narrow band of privilege running through the general drabness and privation of life” (61). Lodge presents the British middle class as being preoccupied with maintaining their social status, and accordingly Philip Swallow is very concerned about his children’s education. Désirée Zapp tells him, “You seem really hung up on schools” (82). Philip later reflects critically on this aspect of himself and his wife Hilary in a letter that he writes to her in his mind, explaining the changes he has gone through from the person he was when he set off on the exchange: “We knew what we both believed in: industry, thrift, education, moderation” (196). These values are also inscribed in

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English middle-class linguistic usage, “a language of evasion and compromise” (200). Again from Zapp’s point of view, England is tolerant of eccentricity, and a spirit of genteel amateurism is still to be found in professional life. But this tolerance extends to forms of lunacy that resemble the world of the television comedy Fawlty Towers, especially when it comes to the head of the English department, Gordon Masters. Through this character Lodge presents comically the British preoccupation with the Second World War, which for Masters has never really ended. Zapp describes him in a letter to his wife: “He was captured at Dunkirk and spent the war in a pow camp. I can’t imagine how the Germans stood him. He runs the Department very much in the spirit of Dunkirk, as a strategic withdrawal against overwhelming odds, the odds being students, administrators, the Government, long hair on boys, short skirts on girls, promiscuity, Casebooks, ball-point pens – just about the whole modern world, in short” (126). When the Rummidge students stage a sit-in, Masters acts as though the war has broken out again, and starts coming to work in his Territorial Army uniform (151, 161). He is eventually removed from his job, and Morris Zapp’s American managerial skills resolve the student protest. Near the end of the novel, there is a description of the city of Rummidge being rejuvenated by a new road system, and Zapp sees that the city emerging from the Victorian industrial remains “was unmistakably American in style” (210). As in The Ice Age, there is a utopian aspect to property development suggested here, and more than a hint of the Thatcher era to come. America is liberating for Philip Swallow, as it was for David Lodge,27 and an eloquent passage implies that he has become, quite by chance, a history man himself, embracing the forces of change in which he has been caught up: Philip felt himself finally converted to expatriation; and he saw himself, too, as part of a great historical process – a reversal of that cultural Gulf Stream which had in the past swept so many Americans to Europe in search of Experience. Now it was not Europe but the West Coast of America that was the furthest rim of experiment in life and art, to which one made one’s pilgrimage in search of liberation and enlightenment. (194)

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For the first time in his life, Philip understands American literature in “its prodigality and indecorum, its yea-saying heterogeneity” (195). Part of his transformation comes from his involvement in the protests over the People’s Garden, closely based on the events of 1969 surrounding the creation of the People’s Park in Berkeley, which Lodge witnessed as a visiting professor. He wrote about his experiences in an essay, “The People’s Park and the Battle of Berkeley,” which was first published in a University of Birmingham publication. Lodge’s liberalism shows itself as more vigorous than Bradbury’s in his tolerant treatment of student protest, and his willingness to acknowledge an element of genuine idealism in 1960s radicalism. The campus is also seen as more than a microcosm, in that the student demonstration connects with civic politics, and the enemy is not just the craven university administration, but a repressive state government and the militarized police. Lodge celebrates aspects of American democracy as well as the comforts of American life, but his love of the United States is not blind, for he is highly critical of the forces of law and order in both his essay and in Changing Places, even if the novel is comic in structure and tone. And as we shall see, he sounds a cautionary note about the protesters by introducing a different cause in his conclusion, the nascent feminist movement. Elaine Showalter nicely sums up the essential difference between the responses of Bradbury and Lodge to the state of the university in the mid-1970s. Bradbury despises “the “movers and shakers, the sexist rogues and academic climbers” of the new universities, but Lodge rather enjoys them (61). She adds, “Although Changing Places is critical of the excesses, pretensions, and posturings of the ’60’s university, overall it affirms the carnivalesque and liberatory aspects of the decade without sourness or cynicism” (62). The essence of Changing Places is the comedy of how two men who epitomize many of the stereotypes about their respective national characters exchange social worlds. At the beginning of the novel, Lodge asks the reader to “Imagine, if you will, that each of these two professors of English Literature … is connected to his native land, place of employment and domestic hearth by an infinitely elastic umbilical cord of emotions, attitudes and values” (8). It is in the challenges to those emotions, attitudes, and values that the

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comedy of the novel lies, as well as its serious social and political commentary. Swallow is a rather effete version of a liberal humanist, whose middle-class assumptions and temperamental diffidence seem to comprise the main substance of his values and beliefs. He is an incompetent amateur, a scholarship boy who has assumed the gentlemanly persona of the lecturer in English, and who thinks of those students “of plebeian origin” who do not imitate his own social transformation as “the Department’s Teddy-Boys” (35). As for the Rummidge English department where he works, it resembles the state of British industry, as represented in the standard “decline of Britain” account: overmanned, over-privileged, and lacking in initiative or innovation. Lodge’s satire of British academic administration, in Changing Places and throughout his campus trilogy, has affinities with the popular television comedy Yes Minister (1980–82), where the elaborate procedures of the civil service effectively prevent politicians from bringing about any real change. Each man is a product of not only his social and national origins, but of the academic culture peculiar to his nation. Philip Swallow comments on the American university in a letter to his wife: “I think myself that there’s a lot to be said for the English system of clandestine privilege. Here, for instance, it’s a jungle in which the weakest go to the wall” (133). Morris Zapp is a much more successful and energetic figure than Swallow. He is a Cold War liberal at the pinnacle of his profession, but he too has his insecurities and doubts, both about his professional identity as new forms of interpretation loom on the horizon and about his personal identity as middle age has set in and his wife is tired of him. For Zapp literary interpretation is a deadly serious game in which he is a very successful player, but it does not involve fundamental values, making him vulnerable to the various forms of political criticism that are emerging. Lodge describes Zapp as a “free-thinking Jew (exactly the kind T.S. Eliot thought an organic community could well do without)” (31). In so alluding to Eliot’s notorious remark in After Strange Gods, Lodge draws attention to the dangerous elements in cultural nostalgia, and he distances himself from the same complex of attitudes, high church and high Tory, that Bradbury represents in the person of George Carmody.28 Although he considers himself to be a secular

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person, Zapp has a moment of fear of divine judgment while on the airplane to England, because under his exterior toughness, Lodge says, “there is a core of old-fashioned Judaeo-Christian fear-of-theLord” (31). This idea is developed when Zapp becomes the benevolent intervener in the lives of a series of people who include his Irish Catholic landlord, a pregnant young American woman, and Philip Swallow’s family. He also becomes involved in the administrative workings of the University of Rummidge. Zapp finds himself wondering “what had come over him. Some creeping English disease of being nice, was it?” (93). The transformations of Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp represent the kind of flexibility that liberalism needs if it is to persist in the face of radical social transformation. Lodge does not lament this need for change; in fact, he celebrates it, and leaves us with an openended conclusion which also strongly sounds the theme of women’s liberation that has been a background presence throughout the novel. One of the many aspects of the social transformation of the 1970s was the increasing number of middle-class women pursuing careers, so that the housewives Désirée Zapp and Hilary Swallow represent an endangered species. Just as Barbara Kirk in The History Man becomes interested in Simone de Beauvoir, so by the end of Changing Places both Désirée and Hilary have become in different degrees involved in the women’s movement. Feminism was not on everyone’s radar in 1969, and with his characteristic attentiveness to the zeitgeist, Lodge shows a number of characters coming to their first consciousness of it. A key catalyst is Mary Makepeace, whom Morris Zapp meets while travelling to England. She is pregnant from a relationship with a Catholic priest, and she explains to Zapp how she became involved in the Women’s Liberation movement: “Women’s Liberation? What’s that?” says Morris Zapp, not liking the sound of it at all. “I never heard of it.” (Few people have on this first day of 1969.) “You will, Professor, you will” says the girl. (34) The novel ends with Philip Swallow talking about the difference between endings in novels and in films, and the relationships of

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the main characters are left unresolved, although we can probably guess fairly confidently what will happen (guesses that will be confirmed by a reading of Small World, where we see Philip and Hilary back together and Morris and Désirée divorced). There is also another kind of resolution in the way the two women speak in the name of women’s rights. Désirée laments the sexual exploitation in the radical movement, and when Hilary suggests that they discuss something practical like their future situation, Désirée ironically says “It’s no use, Hilary. Don’t you recognize the sound of men talking” (250). Thus Lodge’s open-ended conclusion is genuinely dialogical, allowing for various political perspectives, and using the nascent feminist movement as a critique of Philip Swallow’s belated embrace of radicalism. Bradbury’s novel, on the other hand, is much bleaker. Howard and Barbara have both exploited vulnerable female students as domestic workers (and lovers in Howard’s case), and rather than developing its hints of feminist consciousness the novel ends with Barbara’s suicide attempt, which seems more likely to be successful than was Henry’s, although we will never know for certain what happens to her.

Conservative voices Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge both examine the limitations of liberalism, even though they characterize themselves as liberals, and they both seek to find the appropriate literary form, the best set of modifications to the conventions of the realist novel, to dramatize the crisis of liberalism. In other words, as Robert Morace argues in The Dialogic Novels of Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge, they approach the political situation of their time dialogically, raising questions, dramatizing a variety of positions, and seeking to advance the debate. However, in other representations of campus politics in the 1970s, we see a scathing satire of all contemporary developments combined with a nostalgia for an earlier golden age. Such novels express genuinely conservative voices, though their implied norms sometimes seem as simple as a mere dislike of change. An example of such a voice can be found in Kingsley Amis’s Jake’s Thing (1978), the bitter successor to the relatively genial and not overtly political

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campus novel Lucky Jim. Jake’s Thing could be considered a novel narrated from the kind of contrarian perspective that Amis had earlier amusingly satirized in his essay “Lone Voices.” As Keith Wilson observes of Amis’s protagonist, “Jake is an elitist, a traditionalist and an individualist who values his privacy. His misfortune is to live in a rapidly changing world which is egalitarian, liberal, and communal” (“Jim, Jake,” 80). Almost every aspect of that world causes Jake distress, most notably the plan to admit women to the Oxford college of which he is a fellow. Having put the case for admission at a College Meeting, Jake is goaded into revealing his real views, which are forcefully misogynist: there will be women everywhere, chattering, gossiping, telling you what they did today and what their daughter did yesterday and what their friend did last week and what somebody they heard about did last month and horrified if a chap brings up a topic or an argument. They don’t mean what they say, they don’t use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that’s the end of the search for truth which is what the whole thing is supposed to be about. (211–12) The college was a last feeble defence against the modern world, but now it too is threatened, and thus, from his very different ideological perspective, Amis too registers the impact of the women’s movement. The last two volumes of Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time present a similarly baleful view of student protest and the contemporary university, and there is a kind of implied academic novel running through these volumes, beginning with the conference in Venice which opens Temporary Kings.29 In the final volume, Hearing Secret Harmonies, Kenneth Widmerpool has red paint thrown on him by Amanda and Belinda, the twin daughters of the leftist J.G. Quiggin, as he is being installed as chancellor of a new university. In spite of this, he astutely embraces student radicalism, and though now a peer, he starts signing his letters “Ken Widmerpool,”

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reminiscent of the Labour politician Anthony Wedgwood Benn’s transformation into Tony Benn in the early 1970s (12:77). Later, making a speech at a prize ceremony, Widmerpool praises the girls for throwing the paint, for “It was the right thing to do … These children are right to have abandoned the idea that they can get somewhere without violence” (12:111–12). At this point the twins set off a nasty stink bomb. Widmerpool is finally converted to a hippie cult and dies while out on a naked run with its other members, an ending that one might think is straight out of a Tom Sharpe farce and that underscores Powell’s disdain for the counterculture of the 1970s. In the problematic novels, as Lodge calls them, of the 1970s, the novel was reinventing itself, for example in the seminal work of Fowles, in the feminist perspectives found in Lessing and Drabble, in Lodge’s combination of realism and postmodernism, and in Bradbury’s adoption of nouveau roman techniques in his campus novel. In the next chapter I will turn to the work of Doris Lessing, which played a central role in the women’s movement, even though Lessing distanced herself from that movement by asserting that other concerns were even more fundamental to the politics of the time than women’s rights, namely questions of human survival. As a transition to another writer who had a great love of the nineteenth-century realist tradition, one more quotation from David Lodge’s “The Novelist at the Crossroads” may be useful. Lodge ends that essay by stating that “while many aspects of contemporary experience encourage an extreme, apocalyptic response, most of us continue to live most of our lives on the assumption that the reality which realism imitates actually exists” (33). Lessing shares Lodge’s commitment to realism and humanism, although at the same time she was far more willing than Lodge to explore the apocalyptic dimension of experience, both in the interior and external worlds.

5 Doris Lessing’s feminist Apocalyptic maybe out of destruction there will be born some new creature. I don’t mean physically. What interests me more than anything is how our minds are changing, how our ways of perceiving reality are changing. DoRIS LESSING INtERvIEWED At StoNy BRooK

Doris Lessing is one of the most manifestly political writers in post-war British literature. She has chronicled both the appeal of Communism and the disillusionment with it that set in with the excesses of Stalinism. These themes are most evident in the Children of Violence series of novels (1952–69), in The Golden Notebook (1962), and in some of her short stories.1 Political issues are present in a more oblique way in Lessing’s novels of the 1970s, while The Good Terrorist (1985) offers a rebuke to the “infantile disorders” of the far left.2 She also wrote a political novel in 1956, Retreat to Innocence, which she never allowed to be reprinted. Stan Cohen has praised her, in his long and hostile review of Malcolm Bradbury’s History Man, as “the novelist with the most serious and consistent vision of the conflict between the personal and the political” (544). Andrew Hammond says that Lessing is one of several British writers “who achieved a geopolitical analysis of such depth that they could be considered Cold War writers of global standing” (British Fiction, 13). Amanda Anderson discusses The Golden Notebook in the context of Lionel Trilling and of the treatment of disenchantment

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with Communism in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, making the point that Lessing’s analysis of post-war political conditions has been “occluded” by the way that her novel was adopted by the feminist movement, resulting in a preoccupation with its treatment of sexuality and gender (Bleak Liberalism, 138). One of Lessing’s most important critical statements is the preface (dated June 1971) to the 1972 reissue of The Golden Notebook.3 It expresses her impatience, which only grew through subsequent years, with readings of the novel that focused solely on the women’s movement: “I have been in a false position ever since, for the last thing I have wanted to do was to refuse to support women” (8).4 The preface concludes with a parable about literary reception. Lessing writes that ten years after the novel was first published, “I can get, in one week, three letters about it, from intelligent, well-informed, concerned people, who have taken the trouble to sit down and write to me.” One of these letters “is entirely about the sex war … The second is about politics, probably from an old Red like myself, and he or she writes many pages about politics, and never mentions any other theme.” The author of the third letter “can see nothing in it but the theme of mental illness” (21–2). The three letters accurately represent the major concerns that inform Lessing’s writing during the 1970s, and that were anticipated in the complex structure of The Golden Notebook. Late in her life, Lessing told Eleanor Wachtel in an interview broadcast on the CBC radio show Writers and Company that she wrote The Golden Notebook to write herself out of “the entire Communist package”; looking back on the way that members of the Communist party were apologists for the Soviet Union, she says that in hindsight they look “like mad people” (Wachtel, “Lessing”). Lessing abandoned any commitment to Communism after 1956. According to Amanda Anderson, she instead articulated a bleak version of liberalism, formed retrospectively in reaction to Communism and prospectively in response to the possibility of nuclear war (Bleak Liberalism, 128). Lessing did not have any time for the New Left or the various radical groups that proliferated in the 1970s; she expressed her view of these movements in The Good Terrorist, a novel which treats the illiberalism of the hard left even more uncompromisingly than does Malcolm Bradbury’s History Man. After

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Communism, Lessing’s politics took an inward and individualistic turn, and she became involved in Sufism, as interpreted in the teachings of Idries Shah.5 In her novels of the 1970s there is a concomitant turn towards spirituality and altered consciousness, and a movement away from realism towards the visionary and archetypal. At the end of Memoirs of a Survivor the main characters, including Hugo, a noble companion animal, disappear into another dimension where they momentarily catch sight of what seems to be a feminine divinity. Jenny Diski memorably comments about this incident, “No, I don’t know either, it was 1974” (In Gratitude, 104). It is significant to Doris Lessing’s political development that she grew up in what was then the British colony of Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. This gave her at once a sense of living far from the metropolitan centre of culture, and an acute awareness of racial inequality and social injustice. (One can speculate that the time she spent in Rhodesia similarly gives a sharper political bite to the novels of Muriel Spark.) Margaret Atwood, in an obituary tribute to Lessing, wrote that “Some of Lessing’s energy may have come from her outland origins: when the wheel spins, it’s on the edges that the sparks fly. Her upbringing also gave her an insight into the viewpoints and plights of people unlike herself. And if you know you will never really fit in – that you will always be ‘not really English’ – you have less to lose” (“Doris Lessing”). She was also aware of the way that the First World War, which ended just a year before her birth, had traumatized her parents’ generation, and she lived through the Second World War as a young adult. These experiences are chronicled in The Children of Violence, a series of five novels about Martha Quest that comprises a kind of gigantic Bildungsroman, as Lessing points out in the “Author’s Notes” at the end of The FourGated City, adding “This kind of novel has been out of fashion for some time: which does not mean that there is anything wrong with this kind of novel” (711). The overall title Children of Violence refers to the way that these traumas have affected all of the main characters in the sequence of novels, and it serves as an epitome of the experience of the twentieth century as a whole. Martha’s father is, from the early pages of Martha Quest, the first novel in the series, presented as someone irredeemably damaged by the First World

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War, and the Second World War is the backdrop to the political and personal experiences of Martha and her friends through the subsequent volumes set in Africa, with the legacy of that war explored in the British setting of the last volume, The Four-Gated City. Elaine Showalter has noted that Lessing’s fiction up to The FourGated City “has many similarities to Victorian feminine and feminist writing” (Literature, 308). The sequence can also be read as a story of colonial female aspiration; it thus has kinship with both George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883). The Children of Violence novels furthermore provide an account of the appeal of Communism, its brief period of respectability during the later years of the war, and then the onset of the Cold War and the reaction against Stalinism. In writing this study of the 1970s, I have found that the ten-year unit I selected for investigation has a remarkable degree of coherence, both in terms of historical events and of literary history. However, with Lessing it is necessary to make a slight adjustment at each end. I will begin my commentary on her work with The FourGated City, published in 1969, because it marks the transition to the apocalyptic tone and concern with “inner space” that characterizes Lessing’s novels and some of her short stories of the 1970s; I will not discuss Shikasta, published in 1979, because it inaugurates a series of five “outer-space” novels that appeared under the general title Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–83). The Four-Gated City was published by MacGibbon and Kee, a press associated with the Angry Young Men movement. (Lessing and Iris Murdoch were sometimes considered honorary Angry Young Men.) MacGibbon and Kee published a number of Lessing’s novels, along with the early work of David Lodge, as well as Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. They were also the publisher of Declaration, a collection of essays edited by Tom Maschler that is a kind of manifesto of the Angry Young Men – inasmuch as that phenomenon ever constituted a literary movement – and that includes one of Lessing’s most important essays, “The Small Personal Voice.” The atmosphere of the first chapter of The Four-Gated City is that of seedy, brown-tinted post-war London, the same world that

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Lodge memorably represented in Out of the Shelter, though the dangerous edges of Lessing’s setting have more in common with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: The dirty sky pressed down over the long street which one way led to South London, and the other to the river and the City. Terraces of two- and three-storey houses, all unpainted since before the war, all brownish, yellowish, greyish, despondent. Damp. Martha stood outside the café where Joe’s Fish and Chips was outlined by the hearse-dark of blackout material: Iris and Jimmy had not got round to taking it down. The shops which were the ground level of the long street mostly had dull black visible; and some windows of the upper rooms showed black above or beside the faded cretonnes and chintzes. The war had been over five years. The street itself was empty. Traffic had been diverted because of a great crater from which protruded the top halves of men attending to gas, or telephone, or electric cables; a great gaping jagged hole. Not war damage; but, according to Iris, ever since the bomb had dropped a couple of hundred yards down the road, the gas mains had been leaking into the earth, and the road was always being dug up, as now. The crater was roped off, and had red-eyed lanterns resting about its lip. Martha stood at its edge and watched a dozen or so men at work. One of them was a black man. He wore a whitish cotton singlet. The bottoms of his trousers were torn. He was a tall spindly fellow and his face was set into the no-expression of a man doing an unliked job of work – as were the faces of his white fellows. (18) There is a suggestion here that the war has unleashed a destructive energy which is still working itself out, and in addition to conjuring up the violent and seedy world of Orwell’s dystopia, the tone of the description also is reminiscent of D.H. Lawrence, who frequently describes industrial landscapes in apocalyptic tones, as we see at moments in The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.6 The workmen might have been described by Lawrence, but

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for the detail that one is black, which is characteristic of Lessing, whose background made her more attentive to racial issues than the majority of her British contemporaries. The Four-Gated City is a quite different book from the earlier Children of Violence novels, a much longer and more generically complex work that expresses many of the anxieties of its time. The copy on the jacket flap of the British first edition includes a warning to Lessing’s readers: “This book is bound to create disquiet and controversy. For one thing, her view of current politics is not everyone’s.” The Four-Gated City is less well known than The Golden Notebook, but equally vast and ambitious, and it is a crucially important transitional text in Lessing’s career. In terms of setting, the Children of Violence series here moves from Africa to Britain; politically there is much more emphasis on the limitations not only of liberalism and the Marxist left, but of all forms of political action as that is conventionally understood. The realistic social and sexual themes that have dominated the series to this point, and that are characteristic of the Bildungsroman, give way to a focus on mental illness, altered consciousness, and extrasensory perception, and with approximately fifty pages to go, the novel ceases to be set in recent history and leaps ahead to an imagined future and an apocalyptic conclusion. The earnestly Bloomsbury Coldridge family are scattered around the globe, and out of post-apocalyptic survival and migration some hope of reconstruction is offered. There is an affinity here with the H.G. Wells of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, and this is not the only place in Lessing where one can make that comparison. The “four-gated city” of Lessing’s title first occurs in a daydream of the young Martha, early on in Martha Quest, the first volume of Children of Violence. Watching the black labourers on her father’s farm, she has a vision of “a noble city, set foursquare and colonnaded along its falling flower-bordered terraces … She could have drawn a plan of that city, from the central market place to the four gates” (22). A key aspect of Martha’s dream is that the city is a place of racial harmony: “its citizens moved, grave and beautiful, black and white and brown together; and these groups of elders paused, and smiled with pleasure at the sight of the children – the

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blue-eyed, fair-skinned children of the North playing hand in hand with the bronze-skinned, dark-eyed children of the South” (22). The image of the exemplary city recurs in The Four-Gated City, where it becomes the basis of a literary work composed by Mark Coldridge (see 161–4), and it is again present in one of the visions experienced by Professor Charles Watkins in the mental hospital in Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971). Its antithesis can be seen in the city in Memoirs of a Survivor (1974), where the social order is dissolving into chaos, though the shape of a reborn civilization can occasionally be glimpsed in that dystopian work. Similar intimations of chaos occur in The Summer before the Dark (1973). There is something virtually Augustinian about Lessing’s fascination with the contrast between the real and the ideal city. The Four-Gated City is a London novel and a state-of-the-nation novel, and it stands in a tradition that includes George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, as well as the great realists of European literature. But it also engages with contemporary debates about the nature and function of the novel; significantly the epigraph to one of the four parts is from Robert Musil’s modernist masterpiece The Man without Qualities. Others are from Idries Shah, Rachel Carson, and from scientific writing, and the novel engages both with fears of nuclear war and with environmental concerns. It is especially impressive in its effort to chronicle the political history of the post-war period, and in its exploration of liberalism and socialism as they manifest themselves in the upper-middle-class Coldridge family.7 The family tree in Mona Knapp’s valuable study of Lessing is very helpful in keeping track of the many various Coldridges, who span three generations, and are centred in a large Bloomsbury house and a country estate (Doris Lessing, 86). Among the political issues the novel deals with are McCarthyism and the beginning of the Cold War, the campaign to legalize homosexuality, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the return of the Labour Party to power in 1964 after thirteen years in opposition, and the process of dismantling the British empire. A long section describes the Aldermaston march of 1963, ending with a discussion in Mark Coldridge’s study about whether political action achieves anything (Four-Gated, 449–91). Approaching Lessing from a Marxist perspective, Mark

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Pedretti sees the Aldermaston chapter as the pivotal point in Lessing’s move away from revolutionary politics: “Lessing is not alone in her diagnosis; her portrayal of Aldermaston is symptomatic of a broader crisis in western Marxism, as thinkers, most notably from the Frankfurt School, contemporaneously articulated a similar perplexity at the diminishing prospects for revolutionary praxis in the face of the nuclear threat” (“After Aldermaston,” 7). Lessing explores London in The Four-Gated City in both spatial and social terms. As Martha Quest explores the city after her arrival in 1950, she gradually learns to decode the meaning of the history written in the complex, layered signs of its decaying topography. Christine Sizemore has suggested that in Lessing’s fiction the city appears as a palimpsest, a text whose real meaning “is hidden beneath the surface text” (Female Version, 29). Beneath the surface of the city, the interpreter can find the histories of the many lives it contains. Lessing explores this explicitly through the image of a fragment of a wall from a bomb site, which contains thirteen layers of wallpaper (Four-Gated, 93). Later, Mark Coldridge’s study is gradually “papered” with news clippings and quotations that represent his attempt to comprehend the world events that are leading to a cataclysm; this in turn can be seen as a figure for Lessing’s own work as a novelist, trying to write about events and activities that almost defy comprehension. To return to Lessing’s presentation of London, it is significant that she represents the city as dynamic and evolving, as the damage of the war is cleared away and new buildings are constructed. This rapid transformation parallels the description of property development in Drabble’s Ice Age, or the endless redevelopment of London in both life and fiction in the second decade of the twenty-first century (see, for example, John Lanchester’s Capital): London heaved up and down, houses changed shape, collapsed, whole streets were vanishing into rubble, and arrow shapes in cement reached up into the clouds. Even the street surfaces were never level; they were always “up,” being altered, dug into, pitted, while men rooted in them to find tangled pipes in wet earth, for it seemed as if the idea of a

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city or town as something slow-changing, almost permanent, belonged to the past when one had not needed so many pipes, cables, runnels, and types of machinery to keep it going. If time were slightly speeded up, then a city now must look like fountains of rubble cascading among great machines, while buildings momentarily form, change colour like vegetation, dissolve, reform. (Four-Gated, 336) The sense of perpetual destruction and renewal here looks forward to the total devastation of a nuclear war that takes place in the narrative ellipsis between the end of the main part of the novel and the collection of documents, dated from very late in the twentieth century, that comprise the final Appendix. And that in turn anticipates The Memoirs of a Survivor, where the collapse of the social order and the return of the city almost to a state of nature form the background to the story of the narrator and Emily, the girl left in her care. Lessing was fascinated by the way that pockets of nature can be found in a city, frequently describing urban trees and birds in her novels.8 She also wrote several short stories about the parks of London, sketches without much plot beyond the natural cycle, and with characters who appear and disappear in the same way as do the various animals and birds that can be seen in the parks.9 Like Richard Mabey in his nature writing, discussed in chapter 3, Lessing is good at seeing around the corners of human civilization to notice the edges of nature, and she likes to imagine what would happen if various forms of human technology were to fail. Early on in the novel we are presented with Martha’s impressions of post-war England, seen through her defamiliarizing leftist and colonial eyes. Peter J. Kalliney has suggested, in words that can be applied to Lessing, that while modernist novels critique London “as a primarily imperial incarnation of the urban environment, postcolonial novels … participate in the project of imagining London as a postimperial city” (Cities, 33). Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, published in 1979 and set in the early 1960s, similarly presents a city in flux, literally so in that it is about a group of people who live on converted barges anchored in the Thames. Both the boats and the people have seen better days. There are two children, Martha and

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Tilda, who seem likely to survive and prosper, and they have family connections to both Canada and continental Europe. The lives of the other barge dwellers seem to be dominated by incompetence, petty crime, and delusion. In Martha Quest’s observations of London in The Four-Gated City, the emphasis is on division: she sees markers of class in food, dress, and speech, where others are blind to them, regarding their own social world as completely natural. The series of contrasts between working-class and upper-middle-class life give this part of the novel an anthropological tone. Martha divides the people she meets into two categories, based on her memories of the English servicemen who trained in Africa: “officer of the R .a .F .” and “aircraftman” (24). The contrast between her perceptions and those of the middleclass English people she encounters are often funny, notably when Martha goes out for dinner with Henry Matheson, a lawyer who hopes she will work in his office, and who observes “there is no class left in this country,” even as he entertains Martha at “a restaurant where people ate, not to eat well, but to eat conformably … She could fault, even as a housewife, a dozen points on this table: the bread rolls were not fresh; the tablecloth only just clean; the parsley on the fish limp; the peppermill was nearly empty; the roses sagged; everything was second-rate. But Henry did not care, he was at home, cosy with his kind” (43, 40–1). Martha spends some time living near the docks and then in a working-class café, but her connections from the African colony have also given her entrée into the professional middle class and into the inner circles of the Labour Party; wandering between these social spheres she encounters people who don’t really belong to any of them and are therefore lacking in a social identity. Overall, London strikes Martha as fragmented, a series of worlds that do not connect one with another, for “this was a country where people could not communicate across the dark that separated them” (99). Ideology and class division prevent most people from seeing the truth, which is that England is “a country absorbed in myth, doped and dozing and dreaming, because if there was one common factor underlying everything else, it was that nothing was as it was described” (28). Kalliney writes that “Lessing’s work

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demythologizes Englishness by relativizing it, making it appear less robust and comfortable with itself, more vulnerable and parochial instead” (Cities, 146). Martha’s desire to connect across the divisions of class can be related to Forster’s Howards End, with its motto “only connect.” As in the condition-of-England novels surveyed in chapter 1, Lessing seeks to view England as a whole, but the attempt at whole vision is also a more general philosophical striving to transcend what she sees as the limitations of rationalist forms of thinking. As John Fowles would write a few years later at the beginning of Daniel Martin, “Whole sight; or all the rest is desolation” (7). Lessing wrote in the preface to The Golden Notebook that Marxism was an attempt to look “at things as a whole and in relation to each other,” but its insights have now been so thoroughly absorbed into ordinary thinking that it “is finished as a force” (14, 11). It was replaced for her by Sufism, which provided an even more comprehensive view of existence, and saw the individual as a microcosm; Sufism, she said, “believes itself to be the substance of that current which can develop a man to a higher stage in his evolution” (“In the World,” 133).10 The first four volumes of Children of Violence are dominated by realistic political and sexual themes, and by a series of domestic spaces, from the farm where Martha grows up to the various rooms and flats she inhabits. These themes and motifs are continued in The Four-Gated City, and Martha, previously seen as a rather disaffected and slapdash housekeeper, becomes the person who holds the Coldridge household in Bloomsbury together, negotiating the domestic politics that divide the generations and the floors of the house. But these domestic concerns give way to a sense of impending catastrophe, as Mark Coldridge and some of his new acquaintances draw up plans of survival. In the Appendix, we have moved into a post-apocalyptic world. Generically, the novel has shifted from realism to a form of fabulation or magic realism, and this will become the dominant mode of writing for Lessing for the next decade and a half. One strand of the novel concerns Mark Coldridge’s “mad” wife Lynda. Under the influence of R.D. Laing, Lessing develops a critique of psychiatry and suggests that those who are considered

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mentally ill may in fact have superior powers of perception, a theme that is developed when Martha, under Lynda’s guidance, realizes that she has some sort of extrasensory powers. The novel also explores the psychological problems of the next generation, another set of “children of violence,” and it concludes with yet another generation, some of whom are preternaturally gifted. These children are a more benign version of the xenogenetic children in John Wyndham’s science fiction novel of 1957, The Midwich Cuckoos. Lessing’s move away from politics and society to interior vision and subjectivity, picking up on themes in The Golden Notebook, represents her turn towards what she called “inner space” in contrast to the “outer space” of a particular category of science fiction. But both her inner and outer space fictions are apocalyptic in tendency, and along with the preface to The Golden Notebook they constitute her intervention in the wide-ranging debate that was going on in the late 1960s and early 1970s about the “situation of the novel.” In addition to imagining a post–nuclear holocaust situation, The Four-Gated City persistently raises environmental issues. One of the first descriptions of London concerns Martha’s experience of the polluted Thames. She wonders, “what race was this that filled their river with garbage and excrement and let it run smelling so evilly between the buildings that crystallized their pride, their history” (28). When she visits the bomb site where she finds the fragment of layers of wallpaper, she imagines future archaeologists coming to the remains of “a ruined city, a poisoned city” (93). Much later in the novel, Lynda has a hallucination, a kind of prophetic vision, that “England was poisoned … some enemy was injecting England with a deathly glittering dew” (619). This is something that could have come out of Richard Adams, perhaps from one of Fiver’s visions in Watership Down, or from the dogs’ dread of biological agents in The Plague Dogs. As the parallel with Adams suggests, Lessing was tapping into a popular anxiety. The final page of the historical narrative of The Four-Gated City, before it leaps twenty-five years and more into the future, is a news item from the Observer (11 August 1968), headlined “RaF Man ‘Victim of Porton Nerve Gas,’” describing an accidental exposure to gas at the notorious Ministry of Defence research facility in Porton Down (646–7).

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From 1975 to 1977, the BBC broadcast thirty-eight episodes of the television show Survivors, a post-apocalyptic drama that focused on a small group of survivors of a plague that has killed the vast majority of the population. The title sequence shows a Chinese scientist accidentally dropping a container and releasing a deadly biological agent, which is rapidly spread across the globe by air travel. I am indebted to Dominic Sandbrook’s State of Emergency for drawing my attention to Survivors; he comments amusingly that, “Thanks to its terrifying global pandemic opening, its earnest back-to-the-land message, its endless shots of Volvos trundling down country lanes, and its cast of balding men in parkas and feisty women in dungarees, Survivors captured the spirit of the mid-1970s better than almost any other cultural product of the day” (208). The drama of the show is concerned with the basics of survival: shelter, food, and fuel for vehicles. There are recurrent threats of violence and the characters must make quick decisions about whether or not to trust the people they encounter. Many of the episodes are harrowing, and the representation of infectious disease, improvised personal protective equipment, and quarantining is especially affecting when one revisits the show in the context of the CovID -19 pandemic of 2020. There is much in common between Survivors and Lessing’s apocalyptic fiction. For example, Mark Coldridge writes a memorandum to himself about the coming state of catastrophe, and it includes the possibility of both biological disaster and nuclear war: In five years, ten, fifteen, twenty, something “unforeseeable” will happen, such as that a mysterious disease will decimate a country, emanating from a factory which manufactures disease, or that a container full of some poison, or destructive material sunk in the sea-bed in an (indestructible) container will be washed up or explode or release its contents. (606) The apocalyptic Appendix is in some ways an accurate prophecy about the 1970s, even if the decade was not as catastrophic as Lessing envisions, and some of the things she predicts, such as massive data gathering by corporations, took longer to come about than she imagines in the novel. The Four-Gated City also depicts widespread environmental degradation, sudden conversions from one set of

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beliefs to another, people retreating into what was called in Nazi Germany “inner emigration,” anarchic violence, and the failure of the material basis of everyday life: “the most striking ingredient of the early ’seventies was that nothing worked, everything fell apart – that is from the point of view of ordinary living, where one caught buses and trains and posted letters” (657). The latter failure is a poetically exaggerated version of something that many people felt living in Britain in the early 1970s, as the myth of superior British workmanship was proven again and again to be more fantasy than reality. The idea of “things falling apart” is also one of the central concepts of The Memoirs of a Survivor. It is noteworthy that Lessing describes Mark Coldridge’s son Francis walking across Wiltshire and Somerset, like a latter-day William Wordsworth. Francis writes in one of the documents that comprise the Appendix to The Four-Gated City that “All that part of England was more or less army property. It was the seat of a dozen military establishments of various kinds. Of course Salisbury Plain, which once held the sacred places of England had long since been in the hands of [the] army” (668). V.S. Naipaul would set his Enigma of Arrival on Salisbury Plain amid the same sacred places, and his autobiographical narrator is cognizant of both the military presence there and the increasingly industrialized nature of agriculture, as he walks about the area around his cottage. The Children of Violence series records a gradual disillusionment with the possibility of revolutionary politics, and The Four-Gated City records the inadequacy of the liberal tradition to face the transformations brought about by modern technology. In Lessing’s vision of the future, the ordinary political processes are powerless to prevent a cataclysm, in part because “progressive” positions rely on the assumption that things continue to get better in a linear manner, which Lessing regards as a dangerous delusion. Yet at the same time she maintains a faith that human possibility is greater than we think. She will continue to explore these questions in the novels that she published in rapid succession in the early 1970s and in some of the short stories that came out during the same period. The first edition of Briefing for a Descent into Hell carried a note on the half-title page: “Category: / Inner-space fiction / For there is

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never anywhere to go but in.” Mona Knapp popularized the term “inner space,” defining it as “the subconscious, extrasensory, and ‘mad’ realms” (Doris Lessing, 104), topics that are strongly present in the final third of The Four-Gated City. Knapp points out that the note about “inner-space fiction” did not appear in paperback reprints of Briefing (105). The “inner-space” novels are distinguished from the “outer-space fiction” of Canopus in Argos: Archives, a series of five works. There is an overlap between these two categories, with outer-space elements in the earlier books, especially Briefing, and both categories share a desire to transcend the realist tradition. In 1972, Lessing published one of her strongest collections of short fiction, The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories. It includes the outer-space fiction “Report on the Threatened City” (first published in Playboy in 1971), which continues the focus on cataclysm found at the end of The Four-Gated City and also looks forward to the Canopus in Argos novels. The Story of a Non-Marrying Man also includes “An Old Woman and Her Cat,” a story that serves as a good introduction to the apocalyptic world of “inner space” of Lessing’s novels of the 1970s. “An Old Woman and Her Cat” is firmly grounded in a social and historical world, and in that way it is continuous with the Children of Violence novels. Hetty, the protagonist, was born in 1900 and she dies in 1970, making her a representative figure of the twentieth century. Her husband died soon after the Second World War. She lives in a Council flat, and the story comments on various topical issues concerning public services: housing and homelessness, care of the elderly, urban redevelopment, and animal welfare and control. Hetty, however, is not at all like Martha Quest; she is an intuitive member of the working class, not very literate, but extremely good at trading clothes. Her children have been socially mobile: they “were all respectable people, with homes and good jobs and cars” (89). Like the protagonists of Lessing’s novels of the early 1970s, Hetty experiences a “dislocation from the normal” (89), and other people and the social services are unable to fit her into any of their categories or to help her. Her only companion is Tibby, the intrepid tomcat who hunts his own food and establishes a position for himself in the hierarchy of local cats. Hetty and Tibby both

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end up as feral creatures, living in the heart of the metropolis as though they are in the wild. This is both symbolic, and a commentary on the failure of social supports in an increasingly atomizing society. The street they live on is explicitly presented, in relation to the issue of homelessness among the poor, as a microcosm of the area and of the city as a whole: “half of it being fine, converted, tasteful houses, full of people who spent a lot of money, and half being dying houses tenanted by people like Hetty” (94). When Hetty falls through the cracks, having refused the help of social services because they want to take her cat away from her, she finds refuge in an abandoned house where she eventually dies “of cold and malnutrition” (89). The story is a bleak parable about the death of the poor, the dispersion of the family, and the transformation of London (which in 1970 would still have had numerous bomb sites and abandoned buildings). In its depiction of a gentrifying city and its perspective of the homeless person rather than of the social services and the social structure, it is as topical now as when it was first written, if not more so. The various officials who encounter Hetty are not very zealous or effective in their attempts to help, and are increasingly irrelevant to her needs. The way that she gradually becomes detached from the social order, using an old perambulator on her trading rounds, foreshadows the general collapse of civil society in The Memoirs of a Survivor, with a new structure of loosely organized bands of young people and street markets taking its place. Lessing had affirmed the value of literary realism in her contribution to Declaration, identifying herself with the great novelists of the nineteenth century. While making clear her humanist commitment, she also anticipated the post-colonial turn of British literature in the next generation, as she contrasts the provincial concerns of the Angry Young Men with the need for a global perspective, incorporating an awareness of issues of race and colonialism (“Small Personal,” 198–200).11 Inevitably, given her preference for the nineteenth-century realists, Lessing raises the question of the “death of the novel,” though she is able to close her essay with an assertion of the continuing importance of the genre: “The novel is the only popular art-form left where the artist speaks directly, in

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clear words, to his audience. Film-makers, playwrights, television writers, have to reach people through a barrier of financiers, actors, producers, directors. The novelist talks, as an individual to individuals, in a small personal voice” (201). There is an echo here of Wordsworth’s definition of the poet in the preface to Lyrical Ballads as “a man speaking to men” (Poetical Works, 737). Lessing’s manifesto seeks to reconcile liberal individualist views of art with the more collectivist vision of socialist theories, and to relate her synthesis to the Western humanist tradition. However, Lessing sounds a troubling note when she says that “We are living at a time which is so dangerous, violent, explosive, and precarious that it is in question whether soon there will be people alive to write books and to read them,” for the development of nuclear weapons means that “we are living at one of the great turning points of history” (190). The challenges of nuclear weapons and environmental degradation caused her to rethink her commitment to realism, and she redefined her practice in ways that began, as we have already seen, in The Four-Gated City. Earlier signs of this rethinking were already apparent in The Golden Notebook, and the preface that Lessing added to that work in 1971 sets out some of the reasons why her attitude towards realism became more complex. She suggests that The Golden Notebook has not been properly understood because it “is more in the European tradition than the English tradition of the novel” (14). Insufficient recognition of the significance of writers such as Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann may be one reason why in Britain “to attempt a novel of ideas is to give oneself a handicap: the parochialism of our culture is intense” (14). Michael LeMahieu quotes this comment of Lessing’s in an essay about the novel of ideas in post-1945 British fiction, tracing a tradition of resistance to ideas back to Henry James and the poetics of modernism. He observes that in post-war Britain, dystopian fiction is a prominent tradition within the category of the novel of ideas, as evidenced by books such as Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Golding’s Lord of the Flies, and Burgess’s Clockwork Orange, along with more recent examples by Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro (“Novel of Ideas,” 180–1). Some of Doris Lessing’s work would obviously fit in here as well, notably The Four-Gated City and The Memoirs of a

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Survivor. In fact, Lessing was an important influence on Atwood, as Atwood acknowledged in the obituary tribute she wrote (“Doris Lessing”). Lessing is recognized in some quarters as an important writer of speculative and space fiction, but this recognition has not always extended to academic criticism, perhaps because of the wide variety of work that she published over a very long career.12 The Four-Gated City appeared in the same year as the original periodical publication of David Lodge’s “The Novelist at the Crossroads.” Lessing was less sanguine than Lodge about the possibilities for realism, judging by her fictional practice; as Andrew Gąsiorek says, “Fabulation, she clearly thought, was better equipped than realism to evoke her apocalyptic fears” (Post-War British Fiction, 92). The clearest statement Lessing herself makes along these lines is in the prefatory remarks to Shikasta, the first of her outer-space fictions: It is by now commonplace to say that novelists everywhere are breaking the bonds of the realist novel because what we all see around us becomes daily wilder, more fantastic, incredible. Once, and not so long ago, novelists might have been accused of exaggerating, or dealing overmuch in coincidence or the improbable: now novelists themselves can be heard complaining that fact can be counted on to match our wildest inventions. (Shikasta, ix) Lessing’s turn to fabulation was more thoroughgoing than most of her British contemporaries, and more in tune with what was happening in United States, which perhaps helps to account for her appeal to American feminist critics. In terms of Lessing’s practice, The Four-Gated City illustrates parts of the argument of “The Novelist at the Crossroads” quite well. In Lodge’s view, the novel should become self-aware, or as he calls it “problematic,” by hesitating at the crossroads where the realistic novel can go in the direction either of the “non-fiction novel” or of fabulation. Lessing’s chapter about the Aldermaston march strongly resembles a passage from a non-fiction novel, while the Appendix moves into the realm of fabulation. As Gąsiorek says, by the end of the novel “realism has collapsed into apocalypse, myth, and a form of science fiction”

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(Post-War British Fiction, 92). Several feminist critics have called Lessing’s novels of the early 1970s “apologues” (Sizemore, Female Version, 47), and there is definitely a fable-like quality about these works, and about incidents within them, not to mention a significant presence of animals in each of them. Lessing’s apologues focus on breakdowns, both personally and socially. They feature shifts of scene and games with time that bear some resemblances to a film by Alain Robbe-Grillet. What they tell us is that ordinary politics will no longer suffice; instead, a radical transformation of consciousness is needed. Lessing had lost all her faith in the power of mass movements to effect progressive change. In the preface to The Golden Notebook she suggests that the changes sought by the feminist movement are trivial compared with the kind of transformation that will be forced on human civilization: “it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through” (8).13 More than a decade later, she said in her 1985 CBC Massey Lectures, “it is my belief that it is always the individual, in the long run, who will set the tone, provide the real development in a society” (Prisons, 71). Lessing’s novels of the early 1970s depart in different ways and to different degrees from the realist conventions that dominated her career to that point. They are linked by a powerful vein of apocalypticism that informs both their presentation of “inner space” and their representation of public events. This is apparent even in their titles: Briefing for a Descent into Hell, The Summer before the Dark, and The Memoirs of a Survivor. All three dramatize a movement into a state of chaos or incomprehension. These novels crystallize in a more radical form tendencies that can be found in much of the literature of the period. For example, the concern with psychological breakdown is manifested, as was discussed in chapter 4, in A. Alvarez’s study of suicide and in the mental breakdowns that proliferate in Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, and plays a significant role in Margaret Drabble’s The Realms of Gold. On the other hand, novels of the 1970s like Daniel Martin and The Ice Age display anxiety about political breakdown and the collapse of the social order. Such anxiety is frequently expressed in imagery similar to that of The Memoirs of a Survivor: disorderly public spaces, the failure of

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means of travel and communication, and sudden, random death, whether of people or of animals. In London’s Burning, Anthony Taylor writes that “Images of London as a city in the throes of post-imperial malaise recur in such literature. Seedy and in decline, the London described in both popular and mainstream fiction was a demoralized city on the brink of disintegration” (147). Like many other commentators on British culture and history in the 1970s, Taylor refers to The Ice Age several times. The young squatters who move into Anthony Keating’s house in that novel are disturbing in their distance from the ordinary conventions of human life. It is a small incident in the work as a whole, but carries an important symbolic weight, and expresses a mood characteristic of much of The Memoirs of a Survivor. Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971) is not as directly relevant to a discussion of politics and literature as are its two successors. It focuses almost entirely on “inner space,” as the bulk of the novel is composed of the visions of the amnesiac Professor Charles Watkins; they include an ocean voyage, the ascent of a mountain, interactions with strange hybrid animals, the ruins of a city, and, in an outer-space episode, the preparation for a descent to Earth by beings charged with a mission to save the planet from its follies. The realistic frame is very thin, and at a number of points the novel resembles nothing so much as one of C.S. Lewis’s fantasy novels, especially Perelandra.14 Douglass Bolling has usefully summarized Briefing by suggesting that Watkins “symbolizes the loss (perhaps irreversible) of psychic wholeness by modern-day Western man” (“Structure and Theme,” 551). One of the more accessible sections of the novel involves recollections of Watkins’s military service, but these are shown to be a fiction that is partly based on the experience of a friend. The novel also implies the critique of psychiatry that is present in numerous of Lessing’s works. Joan Didion wrote in her review of the novel in the New York Times that “much of the time, Briefing for a Descent into Hell reads like a selective case study from an R.D. Laing book” (“In the Service”). One of the visionary scenes includes a passage that is an especially clear statement of Lessing’s Sufi-inspired belief in the need for a shift in human consciousness to avert disaster: “An ability to see

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things as they are, in their multifarious relations – in other words, Truth, will be part of humanity’s new, soon-to-be-developed equipment” (121–2). Charles Watkins seems to have been tasked with enlightening people on earth, so that they can “stop being zombies” and realize how things really are (248), but the novel concludes with the psychiatrists successfully restoring his memory so that he can return to his place in society. In her two subsequent novels, or feminist apologues, Lessing’s themes are explored in much more densely rendered social worlds, which makes them more relevant to the purposes of this study, and I imagine also makes them more accessible and rewarding to the majority of readers. As Bolling diplomatically puts it, “Some readers of Briefing may find the weight of psychological and mythic material to be either oppressive in itself or else insufficiently compensated for by other novelistic values” (“Structure and Theme,” 564). On the other hand, readers in the early 1970s were very receptive to the visionary and the fantastic, whether in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien or Richard Adams, or in the purportedly anthropological writings of Carlos Castaneda, beginning with The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge (1968). Briefing is an important statement of themes and motifs that would dominate Lessing’s work for the next decade and more. The Summer before the Dark (1973) is in many ways an expanded version of “To Room Nineteen,” one of Lessing’s best-known short stories.15 Like that story, it employs a technique of free indirect discourse whereby the experience of the protagonist Kate Brown is at key moments represented by the kind of clichés that people of Kate’s social world habitually use, suggesting a life lived at one remove, its texture obscured by a discourse that cannot capture its true interiority. As the narrator observes, “towards the crucial experiences custom allots certain attitudes, and they are pretty stereotyped” (Summer, 7). These stereotyped attitudes are sometimes summed up in proverbial expressions that are italicized in the text, and thus held at a somewhat ironic distance, for example, “I’m afraid I am not as young as I once was,” or “There has to be give and take in any marriage” (12, 15). Kate becomes more self-aware than does Susan Rawlings in “To Room Nineteen,” though whether the conclusion of Summer is less bleak than that of the story is debatable.

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“To Room Nineteen” frequently uses archetypal imagery, and tends towards myth, whereas the novel includes considerable social and political detail, notably in its references to the politics of food. A series of connected dreams that runs through the novel provides an archetypal commentary on Kate’s progress, and in a manner typical of Lessing there is a disjunction between the resolution of the situation in the dreams and the conclusion of Kate’s waking story. Setting is always very important in Lessing, and the descriptions of her characters’ inner lives often merge with the descriptions of the “deeply imagined” houses and flats in her fiction. In The Summer before the Dark, setting “seems to be the organizing principle,” as each of the chapters sees Kate in a very different place, and with a different degree of maternal or quasi-maternal responsibility.16 The novel begins with Kate at home in the role of hostess, wife, and mother, except that because of a power failure she is boiling the kettle not in her kitchen, but on a campfire in her garden. A vague sense of impending catastrophe is introduced: The strike was likely to go on for some time, they said. This series of power-cuts did seem to have come very fast after the last? It did rather look as if crises over power – heat, light, fuel – were bound to become more frequent, and it would be wise to make provision? … There were the public, or communal, events – wars, strikes, floods, earthquakes; what are felt as Acts of God. There was the feeling abroad, irrational or not, that these events, once high and rare (or had they ever been, was that just false memory?), were moving into the first place of everyone’s experience, as if an air that had once been the climate of a distant and cataclysmic star had chosen to engulf our poor planet. (8–9) In this passage, as throughout the novel, there are frequent questions, many of which would more conventionally be punctuated as statements, and this device suggests a tentativeness to all the novel’s discourse, whether it is the narrator’s or Kate’s – and it is not always possible to distinguish between the two.

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Strikes were a central political issue through the 1970s, especially confrontations between the miners’ union and the government. In fact, shortly after Summer was published, Edward Heath’s government was forced to restrict the use of electricity drastically, including by recourse to the famous “three-day week” during the winter of 1974. Strikes in essential services often led British people to contemplate a total breakdown of the social order, and such apocalyptic thoughts were strengthened by the global energy crisis, by terrorism domestically and internationally, and also by a general sense of decline of standards, whether of civility, or of service, or of manufacturing quality. Such anxieties are strongly present in Margaret Drabble’s novels of the 1970s, The Needle’s Eye, The Realms of Gold, and The Ice Age, where they suggest a kind of dangerous edge to professional middle-class life, and Lessing was an important mentor for Drabble. Anthony Burgess’s 1985 co-opted George Orwell in a satirical rendering of the state of British industrial relations, but due to its intemperate and unfunny exaggeration the book has not worn well; Clive James noted in a memorably negative review that “Burgess establishes with marvelous thoroughness that he has misunderstood Orwell” (“Looking Backward”). In The Memoirs of a Survivor, Lessing envisions the social collapse that some people feared was imminent, whereas in Summer these hints of unrest remain in the background, as part of the context of Kate Brown’s personal breakdown. The novel begins with Kate at an important stage of transition, as for the first time in her marriage she is not needed: her husband is about to go away on a posting to the United States, and her youngest child has decided to spend the summer away from home, so that all her children will have left the nest. She is faced with the realization that her whole identity has been as a nurturer and provider, but now her services are no longer required. The Summer before the Dark is one of Lessing’s most sustained explorations of gender issues, and the novel can be compared to other important texts of the second wave of the feminist movement in its deconstruction of the roles a middle-class woman is brought up to play, but it also anticipates more recent feminist writing in its concern with body image.17 As well, it recalls the examination of a married woman’s

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life in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, where we see the protagonist alternate between her roles as “Clarissa” in her memories of her youth and “Mrs Dalloway” in the present. The following paragraph is especially reminiscent of Woolf: A woman walked out of a side door over a lawn that needed cutting and was attractively dotted with daisies towards a tree in her garden. This woman was Kate Brown; to be accurate Catherine Brown, or Mrs Michael Brown. She carefully carried her tray, and she was thinking about the washing-up while she continued her private stock-taking, her accounts-making. (11) Woolf is also alluded to in the characterization of Kate’s dilemma in relation to the forthcoming summer: she is going to be at “a loose end from June to late September. With not so much as a room of her own” (24).18 Like Woolf, Lessing did not want to be pigeonholed as a feminist writer, and she declared as much in the preface to The Golden Notebook. Nevertheless, that is how she was read by many, especially in the 1970s. When The Summer before the Dark was published, Marigold Johnson wrote in the Times Literary Supplement: “It will inevitably be said of Doris Lessing’s new novel that it offers a case-history for the files, maybe even a few platform quotes, in the cause of Women’s Liberation” (“Middle-Aged Lib”). One of the main motifs in the novel is Kate’s hair, and the way it is styled and coloured. When she becomes ill, and also suffers some sort of mental breakdown, she stops colouring her hair, and at one point it is so unkempt that she resembles the “madwoman” that she has earlier felt herself to be due to her mood swings and contradictory thoughts about her marriage (42). Some feminist critics were disappointed that this novel, like many others about the lives of middle-aged women, did not offer a very hopeful conclusion. As Alison Lurie noted in her review, “The only apparent result of all Kate has gone through is a resolve not to dye her hair any more” (“Wise-Women”). In defence of Lessing, one might note the importance of hairdressing in female experience. According to an article in the New Statesman in 1970, “Shirley Williams recently

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quoted a random survey of a girls’ school class in which two-thirds of the children wanted to be hairdressers, and the rest secretaries” (Adam, “Britain’s”). A more wide-ranging reading of The Summer before the Dark may be constructed by focusing on Kate’s series of dreams about a seal, which are part of a larger pattern of animal imagery that runs through the novel. The seal is stranded on land, sometimes injured, and it is Kate’s task to return it to the sea, which she eventually succeeds in doing. This might seem to suggest a recovery of wholeness by a reconnection of conscious and unconscious life. The dream sequence continues in a minor key the psychological concerns that form the major part of Briefing for a Descent into Hell. If the dreams and the waking narrative are viewed as existing in a productive dialectic, then Summer can be read in a more hopeful way than Lurie suggests. However, Barbara Lefcowitz suggests that Kate’s “imagination has outrun the realistic possibilities of her life to the point where she is two separate beings” (“Dream and Action,” 119), for “surely, the decision not to dye her hair any longer, while not entirely without significance, is in itself not sufficient to weld what seems an irreparable split between action and imagination at the end of the novel” (118). Sima Aghazadeh tries to suggest otherwise, arguing that “The Summer before the Dark offers a positive paradigm for aging” (“Ageism and Gender Performativity,” 21). In the two novels published together as The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984), Lessing would explore the experience of old age in a depth that few writers have equalled. Gayle Greene, in a very interesting article on Doris Lessing and Margaret Drabble, also reads the conclusion of Summer quite negatively, in a context that provides a transition to the public and even global dimension of the novel’s politics: “The dark that awaits Kate, the ‘chill wind from the future,’ is also England’s … Nor is this apocalyptic vision alleviated by any sense of new creation: far from creating anything new, female empathy and receptivity are mere liabilities” (“Bleak Houses,” 306). What is most striking about the novel’s representation of British and international politics is the prophetic way that Lessing anticipates many of the developments of the next two decades. Summer explores the issues of global

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inequality, the need for more environmental consciousness, and the emergence of far-right movements. The topic of transnational social justice is raised through Kate’s job at Global Foods, a non-governmental organization where an international managerial class meet for conferences about feeding the hungry. She is paid a large salary for her work as a translator and organizer. Food and meals are important in each of the sections of the novel. After finishing her contract at Global Foods, Kate goes to Spain for a holiday with a younger man, and first stays in a coastal tourist resort where the beaches are so polluted that few people risk swimming, and eating the local fish is considered a risky activity. She and her lover then travel inland on a bus to a village that is still not really part of the modern world. Whereas Kate’s family are spending the summer in various countries around the world, the Spanish villagers are tied to their hard labour, for which they receive little reward. On the other hand, their food is wholesome and inexpensive, in contrast with the “bad dead food” that Kate finds in a shop in a working-class neighbourhood of London on her return to England (169), and they live free of the aimless neuroses that characterize the privileged British and American characters. The fifty miles that separate the austere life of the village from the superficial life of the tourists in the resorts on the coast represent a divide that is an insoluble social and political problem for Lessing, and in the second half of the novel she sketches in some of the various inadequate solutions that are on offer in the established and emerging politics of the time. The Brown family in Summer are a more modest version of the Coldridges in The Four-Gated City, professional-class liberals who are “political as their parents had been religious. All their adult lives, ever since the war that had formed them, they had been setting their course, holding themselves steady in self-respect with words like liberty, freedom, democracy. They were all varying degrees of socialist, or liberal” (191). One wonders whether Lessing used the name Brown because of the way that the Brown family in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s School Days (1857) typifies middle-class England, or whether without being conscious of this she chose the name for the same reason that Hughes did. Whatever the case, “a large

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number of people, in many countries, knew the Michael Browns as an enviable family” (24). Kate’s children have a variety of political perspectives. One son seems to be a cynical proto-yuppie, while two children engage in “welfare work of different kinds,” and the fourth, James, is a revolutionary socialist who considers anything less than a revolution to be “insulting to the suffering poor, and a waste of time” (81). In the final section of the novel, Kate stays for a time with Maureen, a young woman of her children’s age, before she returns to her home. Maureen is a flower child who is being courted by several young men, including Philip, a member of a neo-fascist group, and William, the younger son of an aristocratic family. Philip laments that “everything is in a mess” and argues that the solution is “to get back to the old values. That’s all. And eliminate what’s gone rotten” (189). He belongs to an organization called the Young Front, which is linked to “something only recently formed, called the British League of Action” (187). Lessing’s young characters represent the extremes that would become prominent in 1970s Britain, from the Socialist Workers Party on the far left to the National Front on the extreme right. Even if these groups did not themselves gain much power, their policies and attitudes had a strong impact on the main political parties, as they each moved in opposite directions from the significant consensus that, in an earlier generation, they had shared on many issues. Kate’s reaction to the political speeches of Maureen’s friends is to wonder which of her own children might be attracted to rightwing extremism, while at the same time she realizes that she thinks politics is “all nonsense,” that “political attitudes seemed like the behaviour of marionettes, or little clockwork figures wound up and continuing to display their little gestures while they were being knocked about and around and blown in all directions in a typhoon” (191). Although he is a welfare-state social democrat, Kate’s youngest child ultimately has an apocalyptic, rather than a political, view of the state of the world: “Tim believed the end of civilization was close, and that we should shortly be looking back from a world-wide barbarism formalized into a world-bureaucracy to the present, which would, from that nasty place in time, seem

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like a vanished golden age” (81). This prophecy could almost serve as a summary of the scenario of Lessing’s next novel, The Memoirs of a Survivor. Memoirs is one of Lessing’s most artistically achieved works: it is vividly imagined and at about 180 pages in most editions it is more economically organized and succinctly expressed than are, for example, the novels of the Children of Violence series. Rosemary Dinnage’s review in the New York Review of Books said that its descriptions of the breakdown of society “have an energy and ingenuity reminiscent of Defoe,” and this highlights the imaginative power of the dystopian narrative told by the unnamed narrator and survivor. Memoirs is also an inner-space novel, as the narrator has a series of experiences that unfold with the logic of dream and that take place in a dimension she accesses through the wall of her flat. These two incommensurable aspects have resulted in radically divergent readings of the text. Judith Kegan Gardiner discusses Memoirs, along with Drabble’s The Ice Age and novels by Joan Didion and Marge Piercy, in order to argue that in the 1970s women novelists were turning away from the domestic sphere “and entering the public realm of war, politics, and economic upheavals” (“Feminist Fiction,” 74). Others have read Memoirs entirely in terms of inner space, seeing the realistic dimension of the novel as part of a psychological fable and the social breakdown thus as representative of a personal crisis. For example, Lorelei Cederstrom’s Jungian reading is all about the integration of the self, and she argues that the novel is not a prophecy, but the exploration of a present situation. For her, the novel’s description of cultural decline “is not a futuristic vision, but instead, an accurate portrayal of a contemporary interior landscape” (“Inner Space,” 116–17). This level of symbolism is undeniably part of the novel, but equally one cannot deny that the landscapes of the novel are more than symbolic; they represent the kind of social deterioration that many people in Britain felt they were experiencing, and the spread of which was among their deepest fears. In generic terms, the novel incorporates both of the poles that David Lodge identifies in “The Novelist at the Crossroads” as comprising fabulation: it is an allegory of a psychic state and a dystopian romance.19

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Alvin Toffler’s best-selling book Future Shock (1970) was a report on the enormous changes that science and technology were producing in Western societies, and the stress that those changes caused individuals, with predictions about trends into the future. When Toffler died in 2016, many commentators noted the prescience of his book (e.g., Manjoo, “The Future”). The ideas in Future Shock were an important part of the cultural context in which The Memoirs of a Survivor was first read, and the back cover of the Canadian paperback edition by PaperJacks (1976) featured the following publisher’s blurb: “Memoirs of a Survivor is Doris Lessing’s ‘ghost story of the future,’ a world of daily disintegration where barbarism is the norm and human life consists only of survival. A chilling portrait of what Future Shock is doing to us all.” Lessing’s own view in her Massey Lectures a decade after the publication of Memoirs is that people are living in a frightening time “when it is hard to think of human beings as rational creatures. Everywhere we look we see brutality, stupidity, until it seems that there is nothing else to be seen but that – a descent into barbarism everywhere, which we are unable to check.” But this gloomy prospect was balanced by the fact that we may not notice “equally strong forces on the other side, the forces, in short, of reason, sanity and civilization” (Prisons, 11). The descent into barbarism is apparent from the first pages of Memoirs, and is captured well in the opening scene of the 1981 film adaptation, which features that most characteristic of 1970s images, the rubbish-strewn urban space, followed by an eruption of random violence against a vulnerable person by a group of youths. Such scenes reflect a sense of alienation and pessimism about the future, a loss of faith in narratives of progress and the promises of modernity. In The Ice Age, Drabble connects this feeling to misconceived projects of urban renewal, whereas in Memoirs Lessing is more concerned with social organization and the presence or absence of personal connections. Throughout the novel, young people congregate in groups of various degrees of coherence and are to various degrees threatening, culminating in the lawless and cannibalistic feral children whom many critics have compared to the children in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954). A fascination with and fear of youth culture are also present in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork

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Orange (1962), a work that was given great prominence by Stanley Kubrick’s controversial 1971 film. As Roger Luckhurst notes, Burgess drew on “the discourse of juvenile delinquency and generational collapse that was typical of the moral panics that gripped the press and policy-makers in the 1950s,” but his essentially theological concerns are absent from the film, which “was part of the new screen violence that emerged after the relaxation of censorship in the late 1960s” (“An Introduction”). Kubrick withdrew his film from UK distribution after several acts of violence were attributed to its influence. It is not clear exactly what has happened to cause the social breakdown that is the backdrop to the narrator’s story in Memoirs. Andrew Hammond assumes that it is a nuclear disaster (British Fiction, 68), perhaps based on the precedent of The Four-Gated City, but Lessing also mentions environmental problems such as polluted air and water (161–2), and the narrator fantasizes about escaping to a farm in North Wales where she has stayed in the past (31–2). It is probable that we are not supposed to think that there is any specific cause, just a gradual decline in the efficaciousness of the social structure and its material components. When the narrator looks back to the beginning of what she evasively refers to as “it,” she reflects, “Things weren’t too good, they were even pretty bad. A great many things were bad, breaking down, giving up, or ‘giving cause for alarm,’ as the newscasts might put it” (Memoirs, 9). This leads to a loosening of all the unspoken norms and practices that constitute and regulate civil society, so that “everything, all forms of social organization, broke up” (19). In the anarchic dystopia that results, people are trying to reconstruct some sort of social order. It is the accumulation of all the individual symptoms that constitutes the catastrophe; almost all of these different symptoms could be seen somewhere in Britain at the time the novel was published, and the general feeling that things were not good was widespread, exemplified in The Ice Age by Kitty Friedmann’s letter to Anthony Keating: “These are terrible times we live in” (10). The breakdown of society can be seen in terms of Marx’s prediction that the contradictions of capitalism will cause it to collapse from within (Knapp, Doris Lessing, 122), for a shadowy elite remain,

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carrying out the simulacrum of government, and they run schools and a police force, but public institutions are increasingly irrelevant to the majority of the population, as they gradually lose all of what were once considered essential services. The elite class are disdainfully referred to by the rest of the population as the “Talkers,” for they “spent their lives in their eternal and interminable conferences, talking about what was happening, what should happen, what they fondly hoped they could make happen – but of course never did” (Memoirs, 45). This is a remarkably comprehensive condemnation of politics as usual. Meanwhile, in the streets of the city, young leaders organize people into groups who are ready to defend themselves with crude weapons. People improvise means of survival, leaders emerge, and places are established for the exchange of goods and services. Gradually people leave the city in archaic migrations that have a biblical or epic quality. Looking down on the city at one point, the narrator sees the clusters of people living self-sufficiently off the grid as “nucleii of barbarism” (91), but by the end of the novel the will to survive manifested in these communities is linked to the spiritual hope that is revealed in the concluding scene. Memoirs is full of descriptions of people scavenging, gardening, and trading, or as the narrator puts it, “contriving and patching and making do” (46). This is what Rosemary Dinnage was referring to when she compared the novel to Defoe, and it also makes it very much a work of its time, for there was a fascination with selfsufficiency and survival in the 1970s, as well as with squatting, which, according to Jon Savage, “often had a utopian edge” (“London Subversive,” 23). Lessing’s narrator says that “squatter” is an obsolete word (108), for that is how many people now live; in London in the 1970s squatting was often organized, and was both a practical solution to the housing crisis and a political act. Photographs of squats from the period feature in Goodbye to London: Radical Art and Politics in the 70s, the catalogue of a 2010 German exhibition of British radical art, and they would make perfect illustrations to an edition of Memoirs of a Survivor. The ownership of property and the usurpation of that ownership by squatters is an evocative topic for Lessing, and it appears significantly in The Four-Gated City, “An Old Woman and Her Cat,” and The Good Terrorist as well as in Memoirs.

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The word “survivor” in the title is important in making the reader think about where the narrator is when she is writing her memoirs, and it is also ironic in that she often does not understand what is happening around her, but rather tries to preserve as much as possible of her old way of life while others leave the city or evolve new social structures in order to support themselves. This concern with the practicalities of survival provided much of the drama in the television series Survivors, where the characters, with varying individual skills, have to try to construct a communal life out of what they can salvage from what others left behind. At first they raid abandoned homes and grocery stores for canned foods, then they work the land with horses, grow potatoes and carrots, make soap, and raise pigs and chickens. One reason for the popularity of Survivors must have been the way it showed the challenge of finding the necessities of life in a world where there are no social supports. By the end of the third season, larger-scale organization is beginning and engineers and skilled workers are reactivating the means of industrial production. Similarly, in the situation comedy The Good Life (BBC , 1975–78), Tom and Barbara Good drop out of the middle class to live a life of self-sufficiency, while remaining in their suburban home in Surbiton. The Good Life was an extremely popular show, establishing Felicity Kendal, Penelope Keith, and Paul Eddington as new television stars, along with the already well-known Richard Briers. Many of the Goods’ domestic contrivances and their attempt to produce their own food have close parallels in Lessing’s novel. Although The Good Life was a comedy, much of its humour arose from the same juxtapositions that in Memoirs are signs of the decline of civilization: raising livestock and growing crops in a suburban garden, hunting rabbits on a golf course, defending one’s crops from marauding neighbours. The Goods’ house may seem to the neighbours to be a nucleus of barbarism, but from another perspective it is a sign of a more sustainable way of life, something that many people were becoming interested in with the growth of the environmental movement, the energy crisis, and a reaction against the consequences of consumer excess. Tom Good was a designer of toys for cereal boxes before he quit his job. Lessing hints at similar themes when she

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describes how an affluent society gradually, even without realizing it, passed into crisis: “We were all experts at making a great deal out of very little, even while we all still had a lot, and were still being incited by advertisements to spend and use and discard” (46). The main story of Memoirs concerns the relationship between the narrator and Emily Mary Cartwright, a girl who is mysteriously left in her care. Lessing gave a home to a teenaged girl who later became well-known as the writer Jenny Diski, and Diski recalls in her memoir In Gratitude the way that Lessing acknowledged using this as the basis for her novel: “‘Emily’s you, of course,’ Doris told me, handing me the final draft manuscript of The Memoirs of a Survivor in 1973” (In Gratitude, 26). Emily appears mysteriously in the narrator’s flat with a man who says “This is the child,” and then tells her that Emily is now her responsibility, before he disappears as inexplicably as he had arrived (17). The scene has overtones of a biblical story or a fairy tale. The narrator soon realizes that Emily is accompanied by Hugo, a strange dog-like creature with a cat’s face and rather human qualities of perception and emotion. Diski amusingly refers to him as Emily’s “dog/cat-thing” (In Gratitude, 104). Hugo is completely unlike the semi-wild Tibby in “An Old Woman and Her Cat,” for he is the most loyal and devoted character in Memoirs, patiently waiting at home for Emily to return whenever she leaves the flat. Most readers probably identify with him more than any other character in the book. Mona Knapp suggests that Hugo stands for “the lost values of the old order” (126). In that respect, he seems like the talking animals in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. In contrast, the tribe of feral children who appear late in the novel hunt for their food like predatory animals, and wantonly destroy everything within reach. In the foreword to Shikasta, Lessing gives as an example of reality imitating fantasy the fact that after she had imagined Hugo she read about scientists who were attempting to create a cross between a cat and a dog (ix). Hugo’s hybrid nature, both dog and cat, and animal with human qualities, associates him with the various borders in the novel, between the inside of the narrator’s flat and outdoors; between the world of the flat and the world behind the wall; between the past, before the catastrophe, and the present. As Clare Hanson suggests, “Hugo’s

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undecidable ontological status disrupts the narrator’s anthropocentric assumptions,” and his relationship with the narrator and Emily “exemplifies a more equitable mode of human/animal relation” (“Catastrophic,” 170). Hybrid animals play a significant role in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, a work that has many affinities with Lessing’s fiction of the 1970s, and a similarly pessimistic view of the state of the world. The city in Memoirs is never actually named, but it is hard not to read the book in the context of Lessing’s novels and stories of London. From this perspective, it can be seen as an extreme version of a London novel, a novel of London transformed. It is also a version of the invasion narratives that were common in the late nineteenth century, describing the occupation and sometimes destruction of the capital city. The most celebrated of these is H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), where the invaders are Martians seeking to colonize earth.20 Wells’s narrator, a survivor like Lessing’s, has witnessed some of the worst moments of the fighting and yet lived to tell the tale. A set piece in Wells’s novel is his intense description of the flight of the population of London to the coast as the Martians approach in their fighting machines; what Lessing describes is a kind of slow-motion version of a similar evacuation of a great city. Wells includes every means of modern transport, including what must surely be one of the earliest appearances of a motor car in British literature (116). In Lessing’s account technology has failed, and there is even a motor car that has been converted into a horse-drawn cart (173). She would also have been acutely aware from her intense interest in modern history of the vast migrations of people during and after the Second World War. Gender politics play a role in the novel, as Emily realizes that she cannot become a leader in her own right, but instead serves as one of the female lieutenants and lovers of the charismatic young leader Gerald. Later, there is a female group of migrants that Emily’s friend June joins. The conclusion to Memoirs of a Survivor has been problematic for many readers. For reasons that are not clear, the narrator and Emily do not join any of the migrating groups, and as the city becomes depopulated Gerald remains with a group of very young but totally uncivilized children who kill people and practise cannibalism.

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But as things are about to become very dire, they all walk through the wall of the flat to the other world where the narrator has been spending much of her time, and as the boundary between the two worlds collapses there is a vision of a female deity. The whole idea of a world beyond the wall is reminiscent of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, and the conclusion to Memoirs has parallels in the ending of The Last Battle, the last volume of The Chronicles of Narnia, where the characters leave the Shadowlands of ordinary existence by going through the stable door into “Aslan’s real world” (Last Battle, 211–12).21 It is not surprising that this conclusion was objectionable to politically minded critics of Lessing, who did not accept her move from socialism to Sufism. Mona Knapp expresses this frustration cogently when she writes “This solution does not plausibly reverse the historical and psychological inevitability built up in the preceding pages. The dilemma of persons caught between the jaws of a merciless late-capitalist metropolis (a dilemma real enough for millions, after all) cannot be resolved by a step into Nirvana” (Doris Lessing, 127). Betsy Draine makes a similar point, arguing that “there is no resolution for the tensions developed in the ‘real world’” (“Changing Frames,” 60). Essentially such critics are making the Marxist criticism that Lessing is providing a false solution to real problems, the classic definition of ideology. One can evade this critique by regarding the whole novel as an allegory about psychological integration, but that seems an even more unsatisfactory reading, as Knapp is right to emphasize the way that Memoirs vividly expresses what many felt was the real state of Western society. Lessing clearly had little faith in politics as generally understood by those on the right or the left. Her experience with the Communist Party had disillusioned her about radical parties, but she did not have any expectations from the mainstream Western parties, whom she viewed as committed to militarism and consumerism. This comes out in the dismissive references to the “Talkers,” who continue ineffectively to discuss the problems of a collapsing society while continuing to enjoy their elite privileges. Lessing might have been making a critique before the fact of neo-liberalism in the second decade of the twenty-first century. On the other hand, she did not regard herself as someone without hope, and she looked

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to a transformation of consciousness, which was the point of her commitment to Sufism, and presumably also the point of her commitment to writing fiction. Apocalyptic thought is produced when a this-worldly solution to social and political problems is unimaginable, so that the end of history and a renewal of all things is the only conclusion that can be hoped for. In that sense, the miraculous ending of Memoirs of a Survivor is apocalyptic, complete with a theophany and the collapsing of the boundaries between two realms of existence. However, it takes place in a novel rather than a religious text, and therefore it should be read in literary terms. Frank Kermode’s use of apocalyptic thought in The Sense of an Ending (1967), a book about the theory of fiction that originated in lectures at Bryn Mawr College in 1965, is helpful in thinking about Lessing’s conclusion. In his epilogue to a reissue of the book in 2000, Kermode writes that when he gave the lectures, shortly after the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and at the height of American anxiety about nuclear war, “no one could ignore the imminence of events that could without too much exaggeration be characterized as apocalyptic … It seemed more than merely possible that there was a bad time coming, possibly a terminally bad time” (181–2). In the lectures themselves, Kermode questioned the common assumption that the advent of nuclear weapons made the current situation “uniquely terrible” (95), and he recalls in the epilogue that he was challenged about this by a Bryn Mawr faculty member, who argued that the nuclear threat was different because it was verifiably real, unlike the fears of the medieval prognosticators of the last days. However, from the perspective of one who has immersed himself in the history of apocalyptic thought and millennial prognostications, Kermode maintains that the fears of the medieval people must have been “real enough, incontrovertible even, not a bit less certain than the fate we believed to be threatening us” (183). Doris Lessing would seem to have inclined more to the position of the Bryn Mawr faculty member than that of Frank Kermode. In “The Small Personal Voice” she describes the splitting of the atom as “one of the great turning-points of history” (190). Her personal sense of the apocalyptic is captured in another of Jenny Diski’s stories: “One hilarious day, Doris turned up with a sagging plastic bag of silver

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ingots. About eight of them, which she handed to me … ‘These are for when it gets really bad. People will always want silver, and you can exchange it for food’” (In Gratitude, 233). The Sense of an Ending is suffused with the influence of Wallace Stevens, and at the beginning of the last chapter Kermode says, in a tone of humanist agnosticism, that “None of our fictions is a supreme fiction” (155). This raises the question of how Lessing would have reacted to such a statement. In “The Small Personal Voice” she affirms the humanism of the nineteenth-century realist tradition, while distancing herself from its moral outlook: “I was not looking for a firm re-affirmation of old ethical values, many of which I don’t accept” (189). She came to think that human knowledge, especially that of the social sciences, offered “the most valuable thing we have in the fight against our own savagery,” namely a “detached, curious, patient, investigative attitude” (Prisons, 25). But this faith in the possibilities of human knowledge went hand in hand with an essentially religious view of life derived from Sufism. In the preface to Shikasta, she maintains that “The sacred literatures of all races and nations have many things in common. Almost as if they can be regarded as the products of a single mind … There are even those who have come to believe that there has never been more than one Book in the Middle East” (x–xi). Kermode suggested that true or naive apocalypticism assumes “that the End is pretty near” (8), which corresponds more to Lessing’s view of the state of things than his own. He further identifies this naive apocalypticism with the formulaic conventions of popular fiction. Kermode’s own position corresponds to the skeptical view of end times that he calls “clerkly skepticism,” because it represented the attitude of the educated elite in the church towards popular prophecies of the end (10), and he further associates this skepticism with the indirect strategies of modernism. This helps to explain the resemblances between C.S. Lewis and Doris Lessing. In their different versions of fabulation, neither of these writers disavowed the conventions of popular fiction. Even if Lessing was not an orthodox Christian, her view of reality shares certain basic assumptions about human nature and the possibilities of human redemption with that position. Kermode writes that “In apocalypse there are two orders of time, and the earthly

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runs to a stop; the cry of woe to the inhabitants of the earth means the end of their time; henceforth ‘time shall be no more’” (89). In a discussion that refers to Kermode, Bernard Duyfhuizen usefully relates this atemporal world of apocalypse both to the world beyond the wall in Memoirs and to the literary text constructed by a narrator or author (“Future-History,” 156). He furthermore draws attention to the novel’s use of narrative disruptions that serve to give a problematic status to the telling of the story and to the story that is told. It is unclear where the narrator is during the writing of her memoirs, and who is the implied reader of them. She also shifts back and forth in time in a way that Duyfhuizen describes as “the proleptic analepse of future-history” (151; italics in original). For example, she several times alludes to the feral children before she reaches the point of their arrival in the story (e.g., Memoirs, 82, 107), but in a way that suggests she cannot bring herself to tell the story, so that we imagine the end from the beginning. This is reinforced by her cryptic references to “it,” beginning in her opening pages, where she tells us “I shall begin this account at a time before we were talking about ‘it’” (9). “It” seems to be the catastrophe, but things were already getting worse before “it” took place, and as she tells us in an important self-referential passage two-thirds of the way through the book, “Perhaps I would have done better to have begun this chronicle with an attempt to write a full description of ‘it’” (130). But she then suggests that “it” is the main theme of anything one writes, “the secret theme of all literature and history … a force, a power, taking the form of an earthquake, a visiting comet whose balefulness hangs closer night by night distorting all thought by fear – ‘it’ can be, has been, pestilence, a war, the alteration of climate, a tyranny that twists men’s minds, the savagery of a religion” (130). “It” thus becomes associated with endings, whether the end of an individual’s life or the end of a civilization, the end of all things due to catastrophic disaster: “‘It,’ perhaps – on this occasion in history – was above all a consciousness of something ending” (130). If the novel is thus a retrospective future narration, what Duyfhuizen calls “the chronicle of a vision, the recounting of a dream of future decay” (156), it is a message to the reader, to urge him or her to do whatever possible to ensure that this future does not become a reality.

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In her inner-space novels Lessing rejects the idea that either the political system or revolutionary politics from outside the system can effect significant change, putting her hopes instead in transformation through psychological integration, thereby making whole vision possible. Of all the authors discussed in this book, Lessing’s is the bleakest form of liberalism, though tempered by moments of religious utopianism. In spite of her negative critique of Memoirs of a Survivor, Mona Knapp concludes her study of Lessing by referring to the way that her books have a “regenerative effect” on her readers, affirming “that human beings are not trapped, boxed, and filed inside immutable boundaries” (Doris Lessing, 184). The Memoirs of a Survivor resonates with this affirmation, although at times it is difficult to perceive within the darkly apocalyptic tone of the survivor’s narrative. That tone is especially noticeable at the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, a decade that began with a global pandemic that seemed to be the fulfillment of the prophecy contained in the apocalyptic visions that had been so central to popular culture for decades, including The Walking Dead, which at its peak was the most popular television show in the world. We are more likely to read Memoirs for its pessimism than for its hope, though both are very much products of the time in which the novel was written. It is possible that literary history will eventually consider Doris Lessing as above all a writer of short stories, given the remarkable range of her extensive corpus of short fiction, and the fact that a number of the stories – “To Room Nineteen,” “Our Friend Judith,” and “An Old Woman and Her Cat” come to mind as examples – are by any standard extraordinary achievements.22 Her novels will continue to be read as documents of cultural history, for they are exceptional chronicles of their times, though it is less certain which of them will continue to have a wide readership as works of literary art. Even the most impressive have their longueurs, but I would hazard a guess that the rich texture and complex structure of The Golden Notebook, the tight focus and brilliant detail of Memoirs of a Survivor, and the humanistic vision of The Diaries of Jane Somers and The Good Terrorist will give those works a chance at enduring.

6 Camels on the Embankment: v.S. Naipaul and the Globalization of the Novel there is a new kind of coming and going in the world these days. v.S. NAIPAUL, inDiA: A WounDeD CivilizATion

Doris Lessing’s early fiction is set in Africa, and issues of colonialism and imperialism are present all through her fiction, although much less critical attention has been paid to them than to questions of gender.1 Looking further back in literary history, the British empire and the colonies had often been a subject for fiction, as in the examples of Forster’s Passage to India and the New Zealand stories of Katherine Mansfield. And from the 1930s the English-language novels of the Indian novelist R.K. Narayan were available in Britain, thanks to the assistance of Graham Greene (see R. Greene, Life, xiii, xxiv). Beginning in the 1970s, one can observe a more fundamental shift towards a global English literature, prompted by several different causes. The immigrant community was sufficiently established in Britain to have found its voice, and multiculturalism appeared on the political and cultural agenda. Many works explored the topic of migration, whether historical or contemporary. According to Bruce King, decolonization was “overtaken by a larger historical movement of which it was a part, the globalization of

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the world’s economy, communications, transportation, education, and the internationalization of modern technology” (Internationalization, 322). Changes in the publication and distribution of books meant that the literary world was more international in outlook, a trend that was encouraged by the prestige of the Booker and other literary prizes. In literary studies, post-colonial theory established itself and opened up new ways of reading the canon as well as new authors to be studied. The idea of the Empire writing back became almost a cliché; originally a phrase from Salman Rushdie, alluding to a movie in the Star Wars trilogy, it was adopted as the title of an influential overview of post-colonial literatures by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989). The 1971 Booker Prize shortlist included Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell and V.S. Naipaul’s In a Free State, as well as a third book by a writer from a former colony, Mordecai Richler’s St Urbain’s Horseman. There was also an unusually impressive panel of judges, including Saul Bellow, John Fowles, and Antonia Fraser. Fowles’s diaries give a vivid glimpse of the horse-trading that resulted in Naipaul’s win, even though there was some argument about whether In a Free State was in fact a novel, or whether, as a collection of stories linked thematically, it should have been declared ineligible (Journals, 2:110–14). The Booker Prize raised Naipaul’s profile significantly and anticipated the shift to a more global and post-colonial perspective that we can see during the 1980s. In the first stage of the Golden Booker contest in 2018, Robert McCrum chose In a Free State to represent the 1970s in the second stage, where the public chose from among five books representing each decade of the prize’s existence.

v.S. Naipaul in the 1970s V.S. Naipaul is an important figure in the globalization of English literature. In a recent major study of his work, Sanjay Krishnan describes Naipaul as “the first writer to focus on the experience of decolonization as an interconnected, global phenomenon” (Naipaul’s Journeys, 123). Peter J. Kalliney puts Naipaul in the context

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of a generation of post-war writers of colonial background who were part of a “commonwealth of letters” centred in London, and who asserted modernist principles such as the autonomy and impersonality of art. For such writers “measuring the distance between art and politics could be a way to insist that the world of the imagination – and more importantly, the institutions that helped produce, manage, circulate, and conserve the products of cultural workers – should not be diminished by the types of racial discrimination so prevalent elsewhere” (Commonwealth, 10). By the 1970s, however, Kalliney argues that this late version of modernist aesthetics was replaced by a more polarized literary world, where post-colonial writing was seen as a distinct category. Naipaul’s work figured prominently in the critical controversies that helped to define post-colonial theory. In Modernism in a Global Context, Kalliney examines a wide variety of theorists of global literature, some of whom see the world as increasingly a single entity defined by structured inequality, while others focus more on “the play of cultural differences across many contexts” (159). For the latter group of thinkers, who include Homi Bhabha and Paul Gilroy, although imperialism established influential cultural pathways, “texts travel in all sorts of unpredictable ways, with all sorts of unpredictable results” (4). This is illustrated by Bhabha’s comments on his own relationship to Naipaul’s work in the preface to the 2004 edition of The Location of Culture: My search for a subject of my own did not emerge directly from the English authors that I avidly read, nor from the Indian writers with whom I deeply identified. It was the IndoCaribbean world of V.S. Naipaul’s fiction that was to become the diversionary, exilic route that led me to the historical themes and theoretical questions that were to form the core of my thinking. For reasons still obscure to me, the detour through Naipaul’s milieu brought back the world, and the words, of my Bombay life, even as Naipaul’s journey from Trinidad to his ancestral home in India passed through his English experiences. (xii)

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Naipaul came to England to study at Oxford in 1950, at the same time that Caribbean immigrants of the Windrush generation were arriving in response to a labour shortage in Britain. At different states of his career, Naipaul has been viewed in very different ways by reviewers, other writers, and academic literary critics. Early on, he was seen as one of a group of West Indian authors living in England, part of what was then called “Commonwealth literature.” As he became more famous and developed an American following, he was increasingly seen as the cosmopolitan chronicler of the post-colonial condition, bleakly and unsparingly presented in works like In a Free State. His reputation in the United States was bolstered by regular appearances in the New York Review of Books, one of the principal venues for liberal intellectuals in the United States.2 But as he published his travel books and seemed to move to the right politically he was frequently depicted as a defender of Western imperialism, and was judged harshly by critics and writers such as Edward Said, Linton Kwesi Johnson, and Derek Walcott. He has, at the same time, often been described as one of the greatest living masters of English prose, and perhaps surprisingly in view of his controversial status he won the Nobel Prize in 2001, though it should be noted that even his harshest critics have acknowledged his literary genius. When Naipaul died on 11 August 2018, Salman Rushdie tweeted, “We disagreed all our lives, about politics, about literature, and I feel as sad as if I just lost a beloved older brother. RIP Vidia.” Naipaul left Trinidad with the intention of being a writer, following the example set by his father, who by great effort had become a journalist and had written, and published locally, some short stories about the Indian community of which he was part. As he has explained in several places, most notably in the autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival (1988), Naipaul first tried to imitate the sophisticated social comedy of British authors he was familiar with, and it took him a long time to discover his true subject. His ambition was always complicated by the fact of his colonial origin, and the particular complication of being part of the Indian minority within the colonial society of Trinidad. Looking back many years

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later, he recalled that “I wished to be a writer. But together with the wish there had come the knowledge that the literature that had given me the wish came from another world, far away from our own” (Literary Occasions, 6). After leaving university, Naipaul worked at a variety of jobs with some connection to literature or journalism, including as an editor and presenter for the BBC World Service program Caribbean Voices. This weekly literary radio show played an important role in West Indian literary culture. As Kalliney explains, “Caribbean Voices eventually served as a kind of gateway to the rest of the BBC and London’s cultural establishment, facilitating connections between regular contributors (many of whom lived in London) and powerful writers, agents, editors, and critics” (Commonwealth, 117). Eventually Naipaul found his own voice, and his early fiction focuses on the community in which he grew up, which he renders with a striking immediacy in the stories comprising Miguel Street (1959). This phase of his writing culminates in one of the greatest of postwar British novels, A House for Mr Biswas (1961). In his last contribution to the New York Review of Books in 1999, explaining how he came to be a travel writer, Naipaul said that “Nearly all my adult life had been spent in countries where I was a stranger” (Literary Occasions, 16), while in one of his very first published essays, “London,” originally published in the Times Literary Supplement, he writes about the difficulty of being a Trinidadian writer.3 Naipaul explains that he lives in London, and is dependent on an English audience, but he feels that he is too much of an outsider to write about England. His subject matter is of necessity the Indian community in Trinidad. He finds life in London opaque, because unlike a tropical country, “In England everything goes on behind closed doors” and “there are no communal pleasures” (Overcrowded, 14, 15). Naipaul observes sardonically, near the end of the essay, “after eight years here I find I have, without effort, achieved the Buddhist ideal of non-attachment. I am never disturbed by national or international issues. I do not sign petitions. I do not vote. I do not march. And I never cease to feel that this lack of interest is all wrong. I want to be involved, to be touched even by some of the prevailing anger” (16).

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Looking back on the period in which he wrote “London,” Naipaul elaborates on his lack of interest in politics: I didn’t understand Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, which was a hit in 1955. It was set in Indo-China and was about the war to come; it established his reputation as a man who saw things that were about to happen. I didn’t understand the book partly because I didn’t read the newspapers, or read them in a selective way. I didn’t read American news; I read nothing about the presidential campaigns, and pitied journalists who had to follow them. I didn’t read about English politics; I had never voted. (Writer’s People, 50–1) He links this lack of political curiosity to his historical and cultural background, both in the Gangetic plain, where his ancestors were “a powerless people … ruled by tyrants” and in his own childhood as a member of a racial and religious minority in colonial Trinidad that consisted mostly of agricultural workers (52). A decade later, a more political side of Naipaul was apparent. It was in a sense forced on him by an increasing hostility to immigration in Britain. In the late 1960s, he seriously thought of permanently leaving England, where he had lived since 1950, and he and his wife spent some time in Canada. Naipaul was troubled by Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and by what he saw as the inadequate response of the British government to what amounted to the expulsion of Asians from Kenya,4 and he wrote to a friend, “I thought the Lord Chancellor’s speech in the Lords one of the most shocking things I had ever read. And I felt … that a very special chaos was coming to England” (qtd in French, World, 276; ellipsis French’s). In November of 1968, Naipaul appeared on the BBC Radio program The World at One, where he spoke on behalf of immigrants and minority communities, who, he said, “have been subjected to an unparalleled vilification from Members of Parliament and the press” (French, World, 278). When Naipaul died in August 2018, the many obituaries and tributes acknowledged him as one of the greatest novelists of his generation, but all, in varying degrees, qualified their praise by reference

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to his controversial status, whether for his views on global politics, his treatment of his first wife, or his tendency to make provocative remarks when interviewed. The case against Naipaul is made forcefully in Rob Nixon’s book London Calling (1992), which begins with a declaration of indebtedness to Edward Said. According to Nixon, “in those border regions where British and American belles-lettres meet popularized political thought” – which must mean among other things the New York Review of Books – Naipaul “is treated as a mandarin possessing a penetrating, analytic understanding of Third World societies” (4). Nixon adds that Naipaul and his supporters have used “his ethnic marginality … to deflect attention away from the traditional affiliations that permeate his idiom” (6). So strong are the reactions Naipaul’s writing provoked that at a West Indian literary conference one delegate “offered to shoot him.”5 In terms of his treatment of colonial and post-colonial societies and his attitudes to politics, Naipaul has affinities with another controversial author, Joseph Conrad.6 In “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine,”7 Naipaul explores these affinities in a revealing way: To be a colonial was to know a kind of security; it was to inhabit a fixed world. And I suppose that in my fantasy I had seen myself coming to England as to some purely literary region, where, untrammelled by the accidents of history or background, I could make a romantic career for myself as a writer. But in the new world I felt that ground move below me. The new politics, the curious reliance of men on institutions they were yet working to undermine, the simplicity of beliefs and the hideous simplicity of actions, the corruption of causes, half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made: these were the things that began to preoccupy me. They were not things from which I could detach myself. And I found that Conrad – sixty years before, in the time of a great peace – had been everywhere before me. (Literary Occasions, 170) When Irving Howe reviewed A Bend in the River in the New York Times, he emphasized the themes it has in common with Conrad: “Reading his novels, one finds oneself driven to discomfiting reflections

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on how precarious is the very ideal of civilization – reflections that jolt intellectual biases and political preconceptions. But that is one of the things literature should do” (“Dark Vision”). One of the most contentious issues in the dispute about Naipaul’s representation of post-colonial politics is whether he is a dispassionate teller of uncomfortable truths or whether he flatters Western intellectuals and readers by telling them what they want to hear about people of other cultures. Certainly Naipaul himself regards fidelity of reportage as an important virtue, and he writes of Conrad: “Conrad’s value to me is that he is someone who sixty to seventy years ago meditated on my world, a world I recognize today. I feel this about no other writer of the century. His achievement derives from the honesty which is part of his difficulty, that ‘scrupulous fidelity to the truth of my own sensations’” (Literary Occasions, 173). In relation to Naipaul’s novels from the 1970s, the period in which he really emerged internationally as a major writer, this statement is an important point of reference. As Naipaul became more famous, positions towards his work hardened. His travel books provoked much hostility, especially Among the Believers (1981), his account of a journey through Iran and other Muslim countries in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Recently, there has been a tendency to see more nuance in his writing, if not in his political utterances in interviews, and critics have become more willing to follow the lead of the Nobel Lecture, where Naipaul declared that “everything of value about me is in my books … I am the sum of my books” (Literary Occasions, 182–3). In this context, Hilary Mantel made some valuable comments while reviewing The Writer and the World in 2002: “One reason to welcome the present volume is that a gap has opened, over the years, between what Naipaul has written, what people think he has written, and what they feel he ought to have written. His asides are often more pessimistic than the body of his work, and his dogmatic pronouncements in interviews – “Africa has no future” – contrast with the subtlety of thought and expression in his written pieces” (“Naipaul’s Book”). Writing soon after Naipaul’s death, Krishnan seeks to initiate a new phase in the discussion of his work, and he argues that it is “time to look beyond the ‘programmatic’ Naipaul

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conjured by postcolonialist evaluations, in order to examine how a reading of his works may offer fresh insights into the social and cultural challenges of the twenty-first century” (Naipaul’s Journeys, 18). To what extent is Naipaul a political writer? The politics of postcolonialism have certainly come to dominate the interpretation of his novels, and yet those novels often seem to despair of politics as a solution to the problems of post-colonial states, and this is especially true of the novels written in the 1970s.8 These works seem equally disillusioned with Western liberalism and with newly independent former colonies. But it would certainly not be right to see Naipaul as having “achieved the Buddhist ideal of nonattachment,” as he ironically suggested he had in the 1958 tLs essay. A Bend in the River begins with some of the best-known words that Naipaul ever wrote: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it” (3). Even if those are the words of the narrator Salim, they seem to be expressed in an impersonal voice that is partly that of the author. And if one is to become something, to have a place in the world, one is of necessity a political being. In an interview with Ian Hamilton, Naipaul explains the effect of colonialism on the colonial subject, and the kind of “total security” that it produced, a point he also makes in his essay on Conrad. To be a colonial, he says, “is to have all decisions about major issues taken out of one’s hands” (Hamner, ed., Critical Perspectives, 39). The end of colonialism was the end of such security; Naipaul sees himself as being thrown into a post-colonial condition that makes any idea of belonging problematic. As a writer he is caught between an ideal of detachment – which may be a displaced version of colonial security – and certain instinctive loyalties, arising from the community in which he was born. Then there is an ideal of civilization, which is often not present in the places he expects to find it. Sara Suleri, reading Naipaul against the grain of influential post-colonial readings, argues that he “makes the canon of western literature an implicated witness to his mapping of the moment of postcolonial arrival” (“Naipaul’s Arrival,” 31). Michael Neill, in an attentive reading of the political dimension of Naipaul’s fiction, traces the parallels between his writing and that of Frantz Fanon, and argues

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that in his own idiosyncratic way, Naipaul considered himself to be a “political animal” (“Guerrillas,” 21). According to Neill, Naipaul’s fiction focuses on the impossibility of true politics in certain postcolonial settings not as a means of demonstrating the inferiority of those settings, but as part of a comprehensive analysis: “the problems of individual colonies could not be understood in isolation from those of the whole post-imperial world. It meant exploring the disorders of the old metropolitan cultures as well as those of the former outposts of empire: the two were ‘congruent’” (48). Robert Greenberg’s reading of Naipaul’s The Mimic Men argues that his fiction moves towards “understanding and compassion, even for those he begins by disliking” (“Anger and Alchemy,” 231). Greenberg sees a dialectic of “particularism and cosmopolitanism” in Naipaul’s fiction: “he is an individual of color with a particular set of formative experiences, and he is a displaced Western cultural conservative with a hierarchical and transnational sense of standards and social order, including the value of empire” (218). In many of Naipaul’s novels, Britain – which in practice often means London – is not the primary setting, and is generally present only as an absence, a place of remembered origin or contemplated refuge, the distant location of security, wealth, or culture in the minds of the characters. However, we soon realize that these characters have been damaged by their hopes or experience of the “home country,” and their dreams are at least to some extent delusions. This is notably true of Guerrillas (1975), where the British literary tradition is ironically used to counterpoint a sordid story that highlights as much the emptiness of British liberalism and radical politics as it does the problems on the unnamed tropical island (which seems to comprise elements of Trinidad and of Jamaica). Two episodes in A Bend in the River (1979) are set in London, and as in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness the Thames is paralleled with the Congo River. Naipaul’s representation of London as a city of migrants is even more true now than when the novel was written, giving it a strongly prophetic quality. Migration is one of the central and most visible manifestations of the post-colonial condition and features strongly as a theme in Naipaul’s work. Migration is often the quest for a home, and Naipaul

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is, like Doris Lessing, fascinated by the house itself as a key image. It is interesting that early in his career as a writer he worked on the magazine of the Cement and Concrete Association. Jagdish Sondhi, an engineer he met at this time, told Naipaul’s biographer, “I noticed later, in his writing, that he is quite knowledgeable about houses and how they are constructed” (French, World, 187). This preoccupation is apparent even in the title of A House for Mr Biswas, where the protagonist’s desire for a house of his own is an expression of his desire for autonomy and self-definition. At the beginning of the 1970s, after his unsuccessful experiment of moving to Canada, Naipaul and his wife were “homeless” (French, World, 284), and it was only through the intervention of friends that he eventually secured a secluded cottage in rural Wiltshire that provided him with a base for the next decade. That decade began with In a Free State (1971), a collection of stories framed by extracts from a travel journal, all exploring the theme of displacement. Guerrillas shows a preoccupation with physical structures, as all of the accommodations that feature in the novel are described in detail, and are further juxtaposed with references to houses in works of literature. A Bend in the River begins and ends with scenes of Salim’s dispossession, as he seeks to find a place for himself in the world, and significantly he spends most of the novel living in a flat that was abandoned by a Belgian settler in the town in central Africa where he settles. In the 1980s, Naipaul would return to the theme in a more personal way, as the protagonist of the autobiographical The Enigma of Arrival finds himself, as a Trinidadian Indian, exploring his new home in one of the most ancient and historical parts of England, within walking distance of Stonehenge. As Bruce King expresses it, “The Enigma of Arrival indicated that Mr Biswas’s children, after much hard work and learning to adapt, had a house in the very heart of the English literary tradition, which has been reconverted and redesigned to tell and celebrate their story” (Internationalization, 58). Although the primary setting of Naipaul’s early fiction is the West Indies, whether Trinidad or a fictional island, Britain and other colonial powers have a strong presence. In a key passage in The Mimic Men (1967), he writes “We pretended to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World”

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(146). Among the memorable images of the colonial presence in Naipaul’s novels, there are the detailed descriptions of the educational system and the references to British-style picnic hampers in A House for Mr Biswas, along with the postage stamps which mysteriously confer a sense of identity or place in the east African country on the Indian Ocean where Salim lives at the beginning of A Bend in the River: Small things can start us off in new ways of thinking, and I was started off by the postage stamps of our area. The British administration gave us beautiful stamps. These stamps depicted local scenes and local things; there was one called “Arab Dhow.” It was as though, in those stamps, a foreigner had said, “This is what is most striking about this place.” Without that stamp of the dhow I might have taken the dhows for granted. As it was, I learned to look at them. (15) Colonialism provided a way of seeing, but as the colonies are transformed by independence, and as the metropolitan centre is equally transformed by the end of empire and an influx of migrants, that way of seeing is no longer adequate. Salim, and Naipaul, must learn to look anew. Naipaul’s three novels of the 1970s represent characters who are living “in a free state,” where no one is making decisions for them, but where they are not sure that they have the power to determine their own destiny. The harsh situation in which they exist is defined by the opening of A Bend already quoted: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it” (Bend, 3). In considering these novels, I will focus on their treatment of the problematic questions of identity and politics in the post-colonial era. In a Free State marks a breakthrough in several ways. It won the Booker Prize, and it coincided with several other developments that helped to establish a new phase in Naipaul’s career. His reputation in the United States grew significantly, and he managed to find a relatively secure place to live in England. At the same time, his subject matter shifted from the unique situation of his own community in Trinidad to the post-colonial condition in general, with

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its worldwide movement of people and uncertainties of identity both legal and emotional. Ian Hamilton perceptively identified this shift in his review of the book for the tLs : “In this new book, the placelessness is global. In other words, Mr Naipaul’s essential perception is that no one belongs to the place he belongs to, that we are all both owned and disowned by our origins, that, imprisoned as we are by where we come from, we are yet perpetually drifting, ‘in a free state,’ and in fear” (“Nowhere”). In a Free State was also highly praised for its portrayal of displacement by Alfred Kazin in the New York Review of Books; Kazin declared that “Naipaul has become one of the few living writers of fiction in English wholly incommensurable with anybody else” (“Displaced”). Like a number of Naipaul’s later works, In a Free State is idiosyncratic in form, consisting of a prologue and epilogue that are presented as entries “from a Journal,” along with two substantial short stories and a novella. These elements are interconnected thematically and structurally, but the characters and settings are different in each one. The book is populated with exiles, immigrants, tourists, foreign workers, colonials, and refugees. One story involves an Indian servant who accompanies his employer to Washington, where he observes the Black community rioting. The second is about a West Indian Indian who goes to England to support his younger brother’s studies but ends up enduring violence and going mad. In the novella, also called “In a Free State,” two white people, a government official and the wife of another official, drive across a newly independent African country that is embroiled in civil strife between supporters of the king and the president. The title phrase contains multiple ironies: the independent country in the novella is full of threats to personal freedom, and the characters in all the various parts of the book are in a state of freedom from belonging that might be said to resemble free fall. In the novella, Naipaul uses the device of a two-day drive across the face of a country as a means of exploring the state of that country at a moment of crisis. We have seen the device of the modern-day “rural ride” in several works, going back to Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. “In a Free State” begins with Bobby, a former colonial administrator who still works for the government of the new country.

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He has just attended a seminar on community development in the capital city, which is described as “an English-Indian creation in the African wilderness … It was still a colonial city, with a colonial glamour. Everyone in it was far from home” (103–4). Bobby is accompanied by Linda, the wife of another official, who is known for her sexual adventures, and who seems to be from a somewhat more privileged background than Bobby. He is liberal in his social and political attitudes, especially concerning race, and is homosexual; the novella opens with his humiliating attempt to pick up a young Zulu, who spits in his face in the hotel bar. Bobby has escaped to Africa from an England where his sexual identity seems to have been the main reason for a mental breakdown, and he thinks that coming to Africa saved his life (116). The conversations between the two stress the un-English and indeed un-European nature of the country and the people through which they are taking their damaged English selves. There are some eloquent descriptions of the landscape, and the shifting feelings of the two principal characters are conveyed in a very convincing manner. Bobby doesn’t like Linda’s conventional racist attitude to Africa and Africans, and he is proud of his own liberal views, though in the end they seem rather superficial. However unpleasant Linda may be, she has a more realistic perception of the dangers posed by the current political situation, and in general she seems more of a survivor than Bobby is. Bobby’s “sentimental idealism and theoretical liberalism” (McSweeney, Four, 185) are exposed as hollow shams, glib responses based on a false reading of the situations they encounter, and a justification for his sexual adventures with young black males. Linda sums up her attitude in one of their arguments en route: “It’s their country. But it’s your life. In the end you don’t know what you feel about anything. All you know is that you want to be safe in the compound” (Free State, 218). The reader sees the crisis in the affairs of the country only from the outside, through the conversation and perceptions of the protagonists, and it is further distanced in the opening paragraph by the use of a storybook tone and a more omniscient perspective than is employed in the rest of the narrative: “In this country in Africa there was a president and there was also a king. They belonged

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to different tribes. The enmity of the tribes was old, and with independence their anxieties about one another became acute” (103). We move very quickly from this introduction to the scene between Bobby and the young Zulu in the bar of the “New Shropshire.” In all three of Naipaul’s novels of the 1970s, there is a strong emphasis on sexual power struggles, sexual humiliation, and sexual violence, all of which are present or implicit in this opening scene. In terms of power politics, the novel also reveals the involvement of external (white) forces in the conflict: the president’s soldiers are being trained by Israelis, while it is white men who fly the helicopter that is hunting for the fugitive king. Foreign troops or mercenaries suppress rebellions in both Guerrillas and A Bend in the River, while hapless white liberals, and in A Bend Asians, are caught in the middle. Like le Carré, Naipaul is a sharp observer of geopolitical networks. Naipaul notes that the African politicians currently in power wear English-made suits, and part their hair “in the style known to city Africans as the English style,” while Bobby wears a “‘native shirt’ … designed and woven in Holland” (104). As Anthony Boxill points out, the only really free people in the book are the Africans who have not adopted any European styles of dress or behaviour, and are insulated from the politics of the newly independent state (“Paradox,” 88). These characters are glimpsed only briefly, for example the two figures, men or boys, naked and chalked white, who for a few seconds run along the edge of the road (Free State, 210). However, they too are potentially vulnerable, and the contrast of their nakedness with the uniforms, weapons, trucks, and helicopter of the president’s army is striking. The novella ends with Bobby and Linda returning to the colonial compound, whose apparent safety is probably illusory. Bobby has been beaten by the president’s soldiers, and he seems at some level to realize that he will have to leave the country, though it is not clear whether that means going back to England or to the South Africa that he has been mocking all through the drive with Linda. In any case, his attention turns to the fact that he will have to dismiss his houseboy Luke, which will perhaps restore his sense of self despite the humiliations and injuries he has received. The future does not

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look very good for any of the characters we have seen through the narrative, whether settlers or Africans. A number of the same issues are explored at greater length in Guerrillas, a novel whose plot derives from the Black Power killings in Trinidad, about which both Naipaul and his wife Patricia Hale wrote articles.9 According to Gillian Dooley, Guerrillas is not a novel about politics; rather it “is about the impossibility of politics” in the kind of newly independent former colony that it represents (V.S. Naipaul, 76). Dooley’s point is valid, though I think Guerrillas is more of a political novel than In a Free State, because it has scenes where different points of view are debated, even though the conclusion is similarly bleak. It is also about the false politics of fashionable radicalism, the “radical chic” pose that was often apparent in the entertainment industry and the place where the upper classes overlap with the professional and media world in London. In this way, it is more concerned with England than is In a Free State, and it presents a jaundiced, satirical view of life in England as well as in the former colonies. Naipaul’s analysis in Guerrillas has much in common with Doris Lessing, whose novels also increasingly represented the impossibility of genuine politics, though she places hope in spirituality and psychic reintegration in a way that Naipaul does not. Naipaul was critical of the Black Power movement in Britain, regarding it as “a bogus sort of television revolution. I don’t see what it has to do with people over here” (Hamner, ed., Critical Perspectives, 41). He suggested that “West Indian Blacks” in Britain are worse off than Black people in America, and furthermore they “are people without any representation in the world whatsoever” (41). These statements, from his interview with Ian Hamilton, are explored at length both in the essay on the Black Power killings and in Guerrillas. Michael X, originally Michael de Freitas, later Michael Abdul Malik, was a Black Power leader in London, whose cause was taken up by John Lennon, among other celebrities and public figures. He returned to his native Trinidad in 1971 and was eventually charged with murder after the bodies of two members of his commune were discovered. He was executed in 1975. Naipaul’s

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essay about Michael X and the killings includes an analysis of the role of “England” in the story: [Michael X] failed to understand that section of the middle class that knows only that it is secure, has no views, only reflexes and scattered irritations, and sometimes indulges in play: the people who keep up with “revolution” as with the theatre, the revolutionaries who visit centres of revolution, but with return air tickets, the people for whom Malik’s kind of Black Power was an exotic but safe brothel. (“Michael X,” 35) The three major characters in Guerrillas have connections with England. Jimmy Ahmed, the character based on Michael X, has been a celebrity there and has now returned to the island to start an agricultural commune and foment revolution. His commune is assisted by Peter Roche, a white South African liberal who was tortured and whose book made him too well-known a figure in England, where he met Jane, an aimless young woman who was working for his publisher. The names Jane and Roche allude to Jane Eyre, while Jimmy calls his commune Thrushcross Grange. These allusions to the English literary tradition reinforce the satirical treatment of England in Guerrillas, and it is this aspect of the novel that I will focus on, because it casts doubt on the lazy reading of Naipaul as more English than the English, someone who tells his masters what they want to hear. As Anne Zahlan suggests, “Undermining character, point of view, language, and form, Guerrillas rebels against the English novel” (“Literary Murder,” 103). There are some interesting parallels with Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, and it is significant that Rhys is one of the few writers whom Naipaul has praised highly. In his essay on her, his brief discussion of Wide Sargasso Sea is remarkably applicable to Guerrillas: a world that appeared simple is now seen to be diseased, and is no longer habitable. Across the sea there is England, no longer home: an attic, imprisonment, flames. Wide Sargasso Sea remains in the mind as a brilliant idea for a nightmare; and it completes Jean Rhys’s world. (“Without”)10

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Guerrillas appeared in the same year as Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, and like Bradbury, Naipaul is scathing in his treatment of the fashionable pose of radicalism, which seems to be all that is left of a once-vigorous liberal tradition. The opening scene describes Roche and Jane driving out to Jimmy’s commune across a desolate landscape of abandoned fields, factories, and vehicles, with patches where brush fires have burned. The first words that Jane says foreshadow her death at the hands of Jimmy and his male lover: “Jimmy’s frightened a lot of people” (10); we then get her comment on the landscape, which also reveals her view of her home: “I used to think that England was in a state of decay” (11). Jane’s nihilistic view of her nation and her sense of class entitlement are the keys to her character, and the reason for her lack of selfdefinition and her self-destructiveness. In the words of the narrator of the novel, but voicing what her lover Roche has come to realize about her, Jane “was without consistency or even coherence. She knew only what she was and what she had been born to; to this knowledge she was tethered; it was her stability, enabling her to adventure in security” (25). Jane came to the island with Roche because she thought he was a person of action, unlike the people she knew in London, who are like the “talkers” in Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor: They grumbled, journalists, politicians, businessmen, responding week by week to the latest newspaper crisis and television issue; they echoed one another; they could become hysterical with visions of the country’s decay. But the little crises always passed, the whispered political plots and business schemes evaporated; everything that was said was stale, and people no longer believed what they said. (47–8) Jane is also presented as someone who is still trying to live in the assumptions of an imperial age, in which “England was of paramount importance in the world” (95). It is interesting that she was born in Canada during the war, and Naipaul pointedly notes that her passport “was endorsed Holder has right of abode in the United Kingdom” (174). She had been living a kind of zombie existence in London,

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and expected to find herself involved in something more vital and real by accompanying Roche to the former colony. But when she realizes that coming to the island has not resolved anything for her, she recognizes that she will have to return home, and her thoughts of London reveal the truth about the city, that it is no longer naturally for her and people of her kind: She saw great squares that were no longer residential, houses that no one was ever rich enough now to live in. She saw spaces getting smaller; she saw buildings everywhere being put to meaner uses than those they were originally intended for. The sight of an LCC plaque on a house reminded her that the people around her were no longer great, that no house of today would deserve a plaque in the years to come. (55–6) This sense of belatedness, of the absence of any good, brave causes, is obviously related to the post-imperial condition, and to the sense that the significant British history has already happened and is recorded on blue plaques on the walls around London. Naipaul will explore this theme again from a somewhat different perspective in A Bend in the River. Roche had initially thought that Jane shared his liberal horror of injustice, but he comes to realize that what she really expresses is a form of nihilism: The truth was simpler: the world was to go up in flames because it wasn’t what it had been, or what she thought it had been. At the back of that vision lay the certainties, of class and money, of which, in London, she had seemed so innocent. (100) One of the major ironies of the novel is that the world of the island is literally going up in flames, both because of the brush fires caused by a drought and because of the attempted revolution, which is halted by the intervention of the American military, who arrive in helicopters to protect the American bauxite-mining interests. This naked display of power shows why the politics of the island do not really matter, but neither, according to Naipaul, do the politics of

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London. They are only a form of theatre. As Jacqueline Brice-Finch says, “Guerrillas is truly a dystopian novel” (“Dystopic Vision,” 36). If politics are not possible, the alternatives are only enduring hardship or apocalypse, and it is not surprising that the political and religious visions that are present in Guerrillas are strongly tinged with the apocalyptic, whether it is Jane’s vision of a world in flames or the religion and politics of the island. Jimmy’s commune is a pathetic failure as far as any form of productive activity, but he has a vision of recasting society through destruction. In one of the many pieces of his writing that are reproduced in the text, he says “No one here who is in charge seems to know how close the crisis is, how this whole world is about to blow up” (41; italics in original). Naipaul represents political violence in all three of his novels of the 1970s, and in no case does it achieve anything other than exacerbating a state of chaos or anarchy or terror. In opposition to the apocalypticism of revolutionary politics, which seeks to abolish history and start over, Naipaul offers what Michael Neill calls the role of “the novelist as historian” (“Guerrillas,” 47), suggesting that one has to understand a situation in all its historical complexity in order to progress at all. But the understanding Naipaul offers in Guerrillas is not of a very encouraging sort; all of the characters are victims, and none of them is very likeable or admirable. The story he tells in his next novel is not quite as hopeless, and involves a larger historical perspective, a longer time span (“In a Free State” takes place on two days; Guerrillas in a few weeks), and a more complex cast of characters. A Bend in the River was published in 1979, at the end of the period with which I am concerned and in the year of Margaret Thatcher’s election. It was nominated for the Booker Prize, but lost out to Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, though there is general agreement that it is one of Naipaul’s most accomplished novels. Sanjay Krishnan describes it as “one of the greatest works of postcolonial literary realism (Naipaul’s Journeys, 154). As in Guerrillas, there is a significant strand of intertextual reference, this time to Virgil and to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (which is also mentioned in In a Free State). It is an interesting coincidence that Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, likewise freely adapted from Heart of Darkness, was released in the same year that A Bend was published.

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Like the two novels I have just discussed, A Bend in the River is a novel about migration and post-colonial identity, the problems involved with being in a world in motion. It is a kind of Bildungsroman, dealing with the experiences of the protagonist Salim in his twenties, as he sets up a business in a country far from his home, and is eventually forced to leave and start over again. Salim is from a Muslim family, who originally came from northwestern India, and he grew up on the east coast of Africa, in an unnamed country that he describes as “an Arab-Indian-Persian-Portuguese place” (10). He is aware that his Asian community are not preparing themselves for the changes that will come with decolonization, and he decides to leave, purchasing a business in another country from Nazruddin, a family friend. This takes him inland, to a town that is closely based on Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville) in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Zaire from 1971–97). Salim was born in 1940, and he arrives in the town in 1963 (A Bend, 65). Eventually, at some point in the 1970s, he leaves Africa to join Nazruddin in London. Dooley suggests that A Bend is closer to what is thought of as a political novel than its predecessor: “It is about the effect of politics on lives, the violence that arises from political actions, and the victims of political power, whether they be racial minorities, discarded advisers, or even anxious, overstressed government officials” (V.S. Naipaul, 76). It effectively and economically evokes the long and complex histories of colonialism that have shaped each of its settings, and there is recurrent reference to the fragility of memories of the past, to the fear that they can be “washed away, like the scuff marks of fishermen on the beach outside our town” (12). The novel also raises the question of how far one can hang onto the past if one is to survive in a world where, Naipaul repeatedly asserts, there is no going back, no going home. Salim uses one of Naipaul’s most characteristic images to express his sense of what has changed in the world since his childhood: “I thought: Nothing stands still. Everything changes. I will inherit no house, and no house that I build will now pass to my children. That way of life has gone” (107). Two substantial scenes in A Bend in the River are set in London. One is narrated to Salim, five years after it took place, by his friend Indar, who has returned to Africa as a facilitator of international

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exchanges. It focuses on Indar’s perception of the city after a humiliating self-realization while looking for a job following his university studies. The second episode is Salim’s own visit to London, preparatory to his final escape from a deteriorating situation for European and Asian business owners in the town on the river in Africa. I will concentrate on these scenes in the rest of my analysis, for I think their significance has not been sufficiently recognized, and they counterbalance Naipaul’s presentation of Africa with a vivid portrayal of the post-imperial capital. Conrad is Naipaul’s master here too, for London itself “has been one of the dark places of the earth” in Heart of Darkness (7), a perception that is enlarged on in The Secret Agent. Indar tells Salim his story one evening by the river, and as a prologue to the story he draws attention to the parallel of his realization taking place by another river, in London – which of course is also situated on a bend in a river (A Bend, 141). Indar’s resolve is to break free of his past, or, as he repeatedly says, to “trample” on it and become an autonomous individual, something he sees for himself as being possible only in London. What is most interesting about his narrative is that at the centre of it there is a detailed description of the lamp standards and benches on the Embankment. Indar has just been to India House, where he was investigating the possibility of joining the Indian diplomatic service, but he soon realizes that this was a futile hope. He walks down to the river and suddenly starts noticing what is around him, including cast iron representations of camels: On the Embankment wall there are green metal lamp standards. I had been examining the dolphins on the standards, dolphin by dolphin, standard by standard. I was far from where I had started, and I had momentarily left the dolphins to examine the metal supports of the pavement benches. These supports, as I saw with amazement, were in the shape of camels. Camels and their sacks! Strange city: the romance of India in that building, and the romance of the desert here. (151) Earlier in the novel, Salim has looked at the partly destroyed monuments and buildings by means of which Europeans had once

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asserted their dominance over the African town. Only foundations and partly legible inscriptions remain of most of these. Meanwhile, in London the signs of Britain’s former global dominance are still in good condition, fully legible for the former colonial visitor. Seeing these signs of the now-defunct empire inscribed on the face of the city, Indar realizes that belonging is not a simple matter of where you originate. The city is a human construct, and there is a place for him, as evidenced by the camels, naturalized as supports for the benches along the edge of the river. Indar’s story is closer to that of V.S. Naipaul than is Salim’s; however, Indar does not have the force of character or the luck to stick to his resolve, and when we last hear of him he is languishing in lowly jobs and dreaming of going home. As Nazruddin’s daughter explains to Salim, “There is some dream village in his head” (244). He has failed in his attempt to become a citizen of the world. For Salim, London is a cosmopolitan city of refuge, and he goes to see it for himself after Nazruddin settles there. He pays attention to the story of Indar as a cautionary tale, realizing that for him, too, the idea of going home is a powerful dream, even if an impossibility. While in London, he observes carefully, but unlike Indar he focuses on the human element of what is becoming more and more of a global city. During the visit, Salim becomes engaged to Nazruddin’s daughter Kareisha, fulfilling an old understanding from the days before he left the east coast. Nazruddin has had some ups and downs since Salim last saw him, including losing money in business deals in Canada (one wonders if this detail was influenced by Naipaul’s unsuccessful attempt to settle there). Although he now owns rental property in London, Nazruddin is shocked by the volatility of the economy, with interest rates having gone as high as 24 per cent. “I feel I no longer understand money,” he says (237). Thus he has lost his faith in the power of business interests and real estate to provide security, and he has encouraged his children to acquire “skills that could be turned to account anywhere” (231). Kareisha has trained as a pharmacist, which Salim suspects may be one source of the serenity she possesses. Nazruddin’s predictions about the global economy are gloomy, and he tells Salim a series of horror stories about tenants who have taken advantage of him, but he has found himself a place in the

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world, in a small section of the Gloucester Road, where he is happy. What surprises Salim is the influx of people in London, from all over the globe, all hoping to achieve something similar on a small or large scale, whether through shopkeeping, modelling, business dealings, or investment. One day he sees “an Arab lady with her slave” walking back “from the Waitrose supermarket on the Gloucester Road” (233). A way of life which was vanishing on the east coast of Africa when he was a child has shown itself forth in the heart of London, amid all the other signs of cultural blending and mobility, such as the people in their cramped shops, who remind him of himself, trading just as he did in central Africa (230). This part of the novel looks forward to the contemporary novels of multicultural London by Zadie Smith and others, just as Nazruddin’s musings on the movement of money and the quest for safe havens look forward to the real estate crisis of the twenty-first century, as London became a place where the rich of the world stashed some of their money, investing in a place of refuge. At the end of the novel, Salim is back in Africa, and trying to escape from a deteriorating political situation. In a scene that echoes Conrad, the river steamer that he has managed to board is attacked, but it just manages to escape. The reader assumes that he will reach refuge in London, since the book ends with the image of the steamer recommencing its journey down the river. Salim is luckier than the protagonists of the two previous novels, in that he has a patron and a fiancée waiting for him in London. At the end of his discussion of Naipaul in Four Contemporary Novelists, Kerry McSweeney expressed the hope that Naipaul’s future work would be “informed by a sense of human possibility and of the constructive power of the creative activity of the mind” (195). It is certainly true that Naipaul’s novels of the 1970s had reached both a political impasse and a terminus of bleakness. But McSweeney then praises him for what we might term an exemplary response to the “situation of the novel,” one that reaffirms the tradition of realistic representation of the human world: Naipaul makes no appeal to simplifying abstractions and has no ideology, belief, or partisan viewpoint from which to derive support. Nor has his sense of the excruciations of

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contemporary life made him turn from social inquiry to futuristic visions or “inner space” explorations, as a similar sense has made Doris Lessing. Nor does he fantasticate or attempt to escape into aesthetics as did the deraciné Nabokov. Nor does he luxuriate in the creative conundrums of the crise de roman. (195) In the next decade, Naipaul wrote another of his major books, The Enigma of Arrival (1987), whose ruminative autobiographical form again was ahead of its time. It is in many ways a melancholy book, but in its patient descriptions of rural Wiltshire and in its record of the writerly life, it might be said to have provided what McSweeney was looking for. The Enigma describes a writer, to all intents and purposes Naipaul, who moves to the country and works on a book about Africa, filled with violent emotions – In a Free State, though as usual Naipaul does not name it. He starts to explore his new home, and he finishes the book: “In that unlikely setting, in the ancient heart of England, a place where I was truly an alien, I found I was given a second chance, a new life, richer and fuller than any I had had anywhere else” (Enigma, 103). The quest for a home is successful after all, though Naipaul learns, and memorably demonstrates to the reader, that what initially seemed a timeless rural landscape is in constant flux. The book is among other things an astute commentary on the politics and social changes of the Thatcher years as well as a post-colonial account of English rural life.11

A Revolution in Literary fiction As I noted in the introduction, British publishing underwent dramatic changes as a result of the energy crisis of 1973 and the global economic downturn that it triggered. The 1970s was thus a period of ferment in the material circumstances of literary production, as well as in approaches to writing fiction and in thinking about politics and society. Writers such as David Lodge, Doris Lessing, and V.S. Naipaul continued to produce some of their best work in the 1980s, and they were joined by a new generation of impressively talented novelists, all of whom benefited from the new developments

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in the publishing and marketing of books. While it is probably wrong to see the literature of the 1980s as constituting an opposition to Thatcherism, as is sometimes asserted, it nevertheless has a significantly different feel.12 The pervasive rhetoric of crisis and decline comes to an end, to be replaced by a new sense of confidence in the literary imagination, as it revisits and reimagines the history of Britain and elsewhere, and interrogates the meaning of Englishness. Circumstances dictated and sometimes rewarded a more entrepreneurial approach on the part of literary authors, and literary agents assumed a much larger role in the publishing process. Some authors became celebrities, and contemporary British literature was suddenly more prominent internationally. Indeed, it might not be inappropriate to characterize these developments as a form of “literary Thatcherism”; that is, I think it is as plausible to see a parallel development in the literary history of the 1980s to Thatcherism in the politics of the time as it is to see literature as constituting an opposition. Similarly, Richard Todd suggests that literary prizes, especially the Booker, were “associated in the public mind with the entrepreneurship that characterized the Thatcher decade” (Consuming Fictions, 61). Writing fiction had not been a very lucrative profession in Britain for most writers in the post-war period, due to a combination of low sales and high rates of taxation. Even well-established novelists usually had to publish a book every year or to depend on income from editing and literary journalism. Following the crisis of 1973, and in keeping with the spirit of the times, there was what Lodge refers to in his memoir Writer’s Luck as “a revolution in the promotion, circulation and reception of literary fiction” (105). This led to a quite different climate, one where successful writers had a new level of cultural visibility.13 Reflecting on his own career, which really took off with the publication of Changing Places in 1975, Lodge writes: “I happened to hit my stride as a novelist when the going was good for literary fiction in Britain, energised by a new generation of novelists younger than me, and by an entrepreneurial spirit in publishing and the book trade which extended the audience for new writing and made freelance authorship a viable profession. This eventually overreached itself in the abolition of the Net Book

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Agreement in 1997, which most people in the literary world now regard as a grave mistake” (Writer’s Luck, 377). The disruption of the conservative world of publishing thus had, in the short term at least, positive effects for some writers. Literary fiction was seen as a highly marketable commodity, and publishers with a long history were swallowed up by media conglomerates with deep pockets, who for a time paid large advances, culminating in the rumoured nearly half a million pounds for Martin Amis’s The Information. Literary agents took on an increasing importance, at the expense of editors. These developments in the literary sphere can be paralleled to the transformations that were taking place in finance and industry, and whatever writers thought of Margaret Thatcher, the new state of affairs in publishing encouraged them to behave in a more entrepreneurial way. One writer even claims that her career was inspired by the example of Mrs Thatcher’s election. Jeanette Winterson writes in her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? “If a grocer’s daughter could be prime minister, then a girl like me could write a book that would be on the shelves of English Literature in Prose A–Z” (138). Malcolm Bradbury comments on the changing literary scene in a late essay, “Do We Have Great Novels Any More?” From the perspective of the end of the twentieth century, he presents a more negative view of the post-war British novel than he had done in his introduction to The Novel Today. He writes that in 1969, “literary fiction in Britain was in the doldrums … things looked gloomy for the novel, and for the book as well. In the global village, said Marshall McLuhan, the screen would replace the printed page. To make matters worse, British fiction seemed to have grown hideously provincial, preoccupied with working-class life in Northern cities or dull questions of class. Readers were disappearing, and publishers showing signs of despair” (Liar’s Landscape, 137–9). Among the reasons for the resurgence of the novel, Bradbury credits the founding of the Booker Prize and the growth of creative writing programs, beginning with the one that he helped to found at the University of East Anglia in 1969 (coincidentally the year the Booker was first awarded). It helped that two of the early students in the East Anglia program were Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro.14

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The generation of writers who came to fruition in the 1980s, and who are celebrated in Bradbury’s essay, were for the most part included in a remarkably discerning piece of marketing, when Granta magazine, in its seventh issue under the entrepreneurial editor Bill Buford, published excerpts from twenty writers under the title Best of Young British Novelists. The list was the creation of Desmond Clarke, head of the Book Marketing Council, and the writers were chosen by a panel he had commissioned (“Then and Now”). The panel, which included the biographer Michael Holroyd and the novelist Beryl Bainbridge, were very good at picking winning horses; the list is famous for including many of the writers who would dominate British fiction for the next decade and beyond: Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Graham Swift, and Rose Tremain. The Booker Prize was therefore just one high-profile manifestation of a broad shift in the culture of publishing. One reason that the Booker attracted so much attention is that it evolved into a live media event. The shortlist was first announced a number of weeks before the prize itself, and that announcement, since 1981, was made on live television, so that the event took on some of the characteristics of a sports match or the Academy Awards (see Todd, Consuming Fictions, 73–5). Another reason for the increasing profile of literary fiction was the proliferation of television and film adaptations of both classic and contemporary novels, especially, as has often been observed, those that involve aristocratic life in country houses or pageants of imperial majesty, such as the celebrated television version of Brideshead Revisited in 1981, or David Lean’s controversial but visually splendid adaptation of E.M. Forster’s Passage to India (1984). The film of Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party was released in 1985 and that of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day in 1993. (Not surprisingly, there is not a film of The Enigma of Arrival.) These films gave a strong boost to sales of the novels on which they were based, as evidenced by movie tie-in editions, and they also promoted contemporary British literature in the large market of the United States. It is worth pointing out that this trend too began in the 1970s, and of the novels I have discussed in this book, A Married Man, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley’s People, Watership Down,

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The History Man, Porterhouse Blue, A Dance to the Music of Time, and Memoirs of a Survivor were adapted, with the television dramatizations of le Carré and the animated film of Watership Down proving exceptionally popular. Surveying the fiction of the 1970s, I think what one sees is a remarkably fruitful period, when a lively politics and literature fed into each other. It also saw some publishing ventures that were to prove very successful, notably the founding of Virago, whose paperback reprints of women’s writing were vitally important in the rethinking of the literary canon under the influence of feminism. The novelists I have discussed have had a major influence on subsequent writing. John Fowles was a key influence on the literature of the 1980s, with its self-conscious or postmodern elements, while Margaret Drabble inspired many other novelists who chronicled women’s lives. John le Carré found a new audience in the climate created by the “war on terror” in the twenty-first century. Richard Adams preceded a lively outpouring of nature writing and rural fiction, while campus novels have proliferated, under the influence of Amis, Lodge, and Bradbury. Doris Lessing’s dystopian fiction inspired the work of Margaret Atwood, and V.S. Naipaul was the precursor for many migrant and post-colonial authors.15 The originating inspiration for this book was probably somewhere in a re-reading of Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age, a novel that ambitiously sought to capture the state of the nation in a manner inspired by a long tradition of political writing. This is a reminder of one of the most distinctive things about the literature of the 1970s, as seen from the perspective of fifty years later, which is that the novelists of the decade wrote imaginatively and intelligently about their own time and place. The turn to historical fiction and autobiographical fiction in more recent decades may have obscured their achievement in this challenging task. I will conclude with some words from the second edition of Bernard Bergonzi’s Situation of the Novel (1979) that are more upbeat than almost anything that Bergonzi wrote in the first edition of that book. He added a chapter to discuss developments in the nearly ten years between the two editions, and the following quotation comes from his discussion of

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a group of novels, including The Ice Age and The History Man, that deal with present-day Britain: The times, for a contemporary Englishman, are neither secure nor cheerful, but for a novelist with a sufficient historical sense and the right combination of concern and detachment they could be remarkably interesting and rewarding. And some of the most talented English novelists have indeed found them so. (224) Bergonzi’s comment serves as an excellent summary of the case I have sought to make in this study of the fiction of the 1970s.

Notes

Introduction 1 Daniel Immerwahr of Northwestern University has compiled a very useful website of bestsellers and Book of the Month Club selections for each decade of the twentieth century (“The Books of the Century”). The bestseller was in origin an American phenomenon (see Sutherland, Bestsellers, 10–30). Some British authors benefited from it, and my list includes both British and American examples. To keep much of their royalties, bestselling British authors had to become tax exiles, e.g., Frederick Forsyth. 2 Although the term “literary novel” seems to have become widespread only in the last twenty-five years, John Sutherland was using it in the 1970s (e.g., Fiction, xiii; Bestsellers, 11). The oed defines a number of compounds including the adjective “literary” (e.g., “literary agent,” “literary circle,” “literary translator”) but not, at the time of writing, “literary novel.” 3 Sandbrook, Seasons, 87. Jenkins’s three-part series analyzed “the nation on the skids” (28 Sept. 1978). 4 Dominic Head suggests that Bergonzi’s appraisal set the tone for critical discussion throughout the 1970s (Cambridge Introduction, 7). See also the references to Bergonzi’s The Situation of the Novel in Gąsiorek, Post-War British Fiction, 7; Hubble, McLeod, and Tew, eds., The 1970s, 188; James, ed., British Fiction, 3; Boxall and Cheyette, eds., British and Irish Fiction, 2, 4, 8. 5 A second edition of The Situation of the Novel in 1979 took account of developments since 1970. Bergonzi is quite negative in his appraisal of John Fowles’s The Magus in 1970, but in a chapter added in 1979 he is much more positive about The French Lieutenant’s Woman.

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6 Andrew Nash makes this point in his contribution to Boxall and Cheyette, eds., British and Irish Fiction, 415. See also Todd, Consuming Fictions, 77–83. 7 The Way We Live Now is the title of Trollope’s great social novel of 1875. 8 Butler discusses the reception of her book in a new introduction to the 1987 edition, xvii–xx. 9 The essay was originally Berlin’s inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford University, 31 Oct. 1958. 10 Ferdinand Mount used the term “decaditis” in 2006, in a review of a book about the 1950s (“Doctrine”). For a thoughtful and amusing discussion of “packaging up the past into handy 10-year slices” see Sandbrook, “Why We Love History.” Hans Robert Jauss’s focus on the year 1857 in French literature shows the value of highly focused literary history. See his “Literary History” and “La douceur du foyer.” 11 See Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton for an account of his meeting with Thatcher at a party organized by the Special Branch protection squad (370). 12 See also Andrew Nash’s chapter, “The Material History of the Novel II: 1973–Present” in Boxall and Cheyette, British and Irish Fiction, 401–16. 13 For more on the concept of the horizon, see Hans Robert Jauss, “Literary History.”

Chapter one 1 In his analysis of Kingsley Amis’s Jake’s Thing, Keith Wilson discusses The Ice Age at some length and Daniel Martin briefly as examples of “a mood of defeat and confusion” dominating the fiction of the 1970s (“Jim,” 82). Malcolm Bradbury’s The Modern British Novel has a chapter entitled “The Ice Age – Fiction in the Seventies: 1969–1979.” 2 Kenneth O. Morgan cites an EEC poll of 1977 that found that 82 per cent of British people were satisfied with life, significantly more than in France or Italy, at 68 per cent and 59 per cent (Britain since 1945, 432). 3 See Shepherd, Crisis?, and Martin López, Winter, for book-length accounts of the Winter of Discontent. 4 Kenneth O. Morgan records that a Labour briefing paper in 1963 was entitled “The Tory Winter of Discontent” (Callaghan, 175). Andy Beckett notes that the phrase was used by at least one commentator during the three-day work week in the winter of 1973–74, at the end of Edward Heath’s Conservative government (When the Lights, 140). Roy Jenkins

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also referred to a “winter of discontent” in a speech of 1973, as did a headline in the Evening Standard in February 1974 (Turner, Crisis?, 265–6). For the Winter of Discontent in the election campaigns of 1983, 1987, and 1992, see Shepherd, Crisis?, 164–5; for the way in which New Labour dealt with the memory of it, see Martin López, Winter, 23, 186, and Shepherd, Crisis?, 166–7. In the interests of historical accuracy, it should be noted that the gravediggers’ strike was confined to Liverpool, and that they were extremely poorly paid (see Shepherd, Crisis?, 90–2). Some accounts have exaggerated the extent of the gravediggers’ strike (Shepherd, Crisis?, 149). See Sandbrook, Seasons, 732; Morgan, Callaghan, 662. Turner suggests sources for this phrase in dialogue in the 1973 film version of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal and in the title of the fourth album of the progressive rock band Supertramp, Crisis? What Crisis?, released in 1975 (Crisis?, 265). The album cover depicts a man in a bathing suit sunning himself under an orange beach umbrella, against the monochrome background of an industrial landscape. Morgan has a very thorough account of Callaghan’s decision to defer the election (Callaghan, 626–44); see also Shepherd, Crisis?, 18–30. For an account of Callaghan’s opposition to Castle’s union reform proposals, contained in the white paper In Place of Strife, see Morgan, Callaghan, 329–45, and for Callaghan’s handling of the Winter of Discontent see Morgan, Callaghan, 653–76. All quotations from The Ice Age are from the Penguin edition unless otherwise noted. See my “Margaret Drabble’s Wordsworth” for a discussion of the importance of Wordsworth to Drabble throughout her career. Blake is alluded to when Drabble describes Sheffield after a thunderstorm: “The dark satanic smoke had gone forever, and Sheffield lay purified by the apocalyptic flames of a new Jerusalem” (Ice Age, 164). The chapters in Daniel Martin are not numbered, so I frequently refer to their titles in addition to providing page references to the Vintage edition, the most recent British edition at the time of writing. See Goss, “Housing,” and Greene, “Bleak Houses.” Robert O’Kell’s comprehensive Disraeli: The Romance of Politics explores “the imaginative relation between Disraeli’s fiction and his political career,” suggesting that both are “enactments of the same urgencies and purposes” (7, 8).

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17 T.A. Jackson’s Charles Dickens: The Progress of a Radical (1937) is a significant work of Marxist criticism on Dickens. 18 An edited transcript of the trial was published by Penguin Books (Trial of Lady Chatterley). 19 The editors of the Cambridge edition of Lawrence’s works have pointed out that he never used the title John Thomas and Lady Jane for the second version, although he sometimes applied it to the third before publication (see First and Second, xxx). 20 The introduction was for a limited edition; it is reprinted in Wormholes, 271–85. 21 See Gilmour, Idea of the Gentleman, for an excellent account of the importance of the concept of the gentleman for a number of Victorian novelists. 22 Steven Connor discusses allusions to Bleak House in Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and David Lodge’s Nice Work in addition to The Ice Age (English Novel, 57–61, 77). Christine Corton’s London Fog: The Biography is a fascinating cultural history of London’s fogs, and includes a chapter on Dickens with a number of pages devoted to Bleak House (51–63). 23 See Drabble, Pattern, 229–31. Sheils’s Among Friends tells the fascinating story of the history of the Mount School. It has educated a number of women who became eminent in literature and the arts, including the literary scholar Kathleen Tillotson (see “Obituary”), the actresses Mary Ure and Judi Dench (Sheils, Among Friends, 111), and both Margaret Drabble and her sister A.S. Byatt. In 1953, Drabble and her sister appeared in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream along with Judi Dench (113–14). I am indebted to Gillian Thomas for assistance in researching Drabble’s Quaker background. 24 See Edel and Ray, Henry James and H.G. Wells, for the principal documents in the quarrel between the two writers. Wells argued that the novel should directly address the issues of contemporary society; for him, the modern novel “is the only medium through which we can discuss the great majority of the problems which are being raised in such bristling multitude by our contemporary social development” (Edel and Ray, James and Wells, 148). 25 In a study of Christianity and secularism in Drabble’s fiction, Joseph Quinn concurs with my reading of her work, suggesting that The Ice Age may have been “not so much a re-affirmation of the possibility of religious faith, as simply a temporary aberration” (“Christianity,” 74).

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26 It is a curious coincidence that The Ice Age and Daniel Martin both include among their characters an Anthony and a Jane. (There is also a Jane in V.S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas, discussed in chapter 6.) 27 Marjorie Goss, commenting on the first edition of The Ice Age, notes that Drabble mistakenly refers to the bird as a “tree creeper” (“Birds”). The ornithology is corrected in the Penguin paperback. 28 A few days after the speech, the Russian newspaper Red Star referred to Thatcher as the “Iron Lady,” a nickname she embraced in a subsequent speech (editor’s note to Thatcher, “Britain Awake”). 29 Fowles later applies the phrase “bonne vaux” to sites in New Mexico (363) and to Kitchener’s Island in the Nile (599). Thomas M. Wilson discusses the “sacred combe” motif in Fowles’s work (Green Universe, 23–41). 30 Krishan Kumar describes Enoch Powell as an English nationalist whose “obsession with immigrants and immigration drove him to the sidelines of British politics and destroyed his political career” (Making, 267). 31 See Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black,” 44–51. The history of restriction of black immigration is also analyzed in A. Sivanandan, A Different Hunger. See especially part 3, “The Black Experience,” 99–140. 32 For conspiracy fiction and fears of authoritarian government see Turner, Crisis?, 26–8, 101, and the more detailed treatment of the topic in Sandbrook, Seasons, 124–49. 33 Patricia Boomsma effectively analyzes Fowles’s linking of existentialist and Marxist analysis in the theme of “whole sight” in Daniel Martin (“Whole Sight”).

Chapter two 1 John le Carré is the pen name of David Cornwell. Since my concern is primarily with the published fiction, I will refer to him as “le Carré” throughout this chapter, even when discussing his personal life. 2 Buckton’s book gives a comprehensive overview of twentieth-century British spy fiction. 3 The films and adaptations include Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011), A Most Wanted Man (2014), The Night Manager (2016), Our Kind of Traitor (2016), and The Little Drummer Girl (2018). 4 References to the three novels comprising the Karla trilogy make use of the following abbreviations: ttss = Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, hs = The Honourable Schoolboy, and sp = Smiley’s People.

274

Notes to pages 81–101

5 See also Monaghan, “John le Carré and England,” for le Carré’s relationship to a patriotic tradition of writing. 6 See Boyle, “Fourth Man”; Stuart, “Fourth Man.” 7 A useful overview of the role of espionage in British fiction of the Cold War period can be found in Hammond, British Fiction and the Cold War, 82–115. 8 For Greene’s influence on Lodge, see my David Lodge, 35–61. 9 See Brennan, Graham Greene, 168–9; see also Richard Greene’s introduction to Graham Greene: A Life in Letters (xxv–xxvi) and his “Owning Graham Greene” (959). 10 The Pigeon Tunnel, 256. Le Carré also uses this Greene quotation in a number of interviews (Bruccoli, Conversations, 139, 165, 175), and in “England Made Me.” Neil Sinyard quotes it as a habitual saying of Greene, citing a 1993 BBC Arena documentary as his source (Graham Greene, 88, 133n13). Greene is mentioned in hs , 105, in the context of a discussion of “the Eastern novel.” 11 England Made Me is the title of a Graham Greene novel of 1935 featuring an Old Harrovian and a feckless character down on his luck who pretends to have been at Harrow. Le Carré’s article was originally commissioned for an American audience by the New York Times, where it appeared under the title “In England Now,” 23 Oct. 1977. 12 Sisman’s biography of le Carré includes a lively account of the author’s early studies at the University of Bern (John le Carré, 70–80). During his year in Bern he attended a lecture by Thomas Mann, after which he made his way to Mann’s dressing room to shake his hand (78–9). 13 David Monaghan explores this aspect of le Carré by means of Friedrich Schiller’s opposition between the naive and the sentimental. He writes: “Impossible though it may be ever to achieve a synthesis of the naïve and sentimental aspects of the self, for both Schiller and le Carré this is precisely what the individual who aspires to complete humanity must seek” (Novels, 2–3). 14 The embassy in Saigon was evacuated on 29 April 1975. This does not quite fit into the internal chronology of hs : see Monaghan, Smiley’s Circus, 36. 15 In a discussion of the Blair–Bush relationship, Alex Danchev quotes satirical comments about it in le Carré’s Absolute Friends (“Blair’s Vietnam,” 195). 16 Monaghan quotes this passage at some length, as the last of a series of three quotations to illustrate le Carré’s practice of symbolic description (Novels, 45–6).

Notes to pages 101–31

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17 See the discussion of Smiley’s People in Barley, Taking Sides, 127–45. 18 See, for example, Peter Lewis, John le Carré, 176–8. Barley uses the references to Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” to interpret Smiley’s People psychologically, with Karla and Smiley as double figures. While the other members of the Circus see Karla’s defection as Smiley’s triumph, Barley suggests that “it actually evaporates in a second his raison d’être” (Taking Sides, 144).

Chapter three 1 For a discussion of Lanchester in relation to the condition-of-England tradition, see my “John Lanchester’s Capital.” 2 Pawling, “Watership,” and Watkins, “Reconstructing,” both discuss the countercultural appeal of Watership Down. 3 There was a controversy when the film of Watership Down was shown on Channel 5 on British television on Easter Sunday in 2016. See “Bunny Fury.” 4 There are many editions of Watership Down. Quotations are from the Penguin 40th Anniversary Edition of 2012, except that I use the 2005 Scribner edition for Adams’s introduction, which is not included in the Penguin text. 5 For Adams and Potter, see Pennington, “Peter Rabbit.” In chapter 5 of Watership Down, Adams acknowledges that “some of El-ahrairah’s adventures are those of Brer Rabbit” (23). 6 For the epic dimensions of Watership Down, see Celia Anderson, “Troy,” and Kitchell, “Shrinking.” 7 Edgar Chapman invokes Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade in a sympathetic reading of Shardik, while conceding that it “will never be as popular with the general reader” as Watership Down (“Shaman,” 10). 8 See Adams, Day Gone By, 99–105; “Bunny Fury”; Flood, “Watership.” 9 Hauerwas, Community, 14. Hauerwas discusses the problem of authority in Cowslip’s warren with reference to John Rawls’s Theory of Justice in a long endnote (231n10). 10 The first recorded use of the word “aestheticism” in English is in an 1855 essay on Tennyson that suggests that “‘The Lotos-Eaters’ carries Tennyson’s tendency to pure aestheticism to an extreme point” (Leighton, “Touching Forms,” 58). 11 Hauerwas refers to Stalin in relation to General Woundwort (Community, 31).

276

Notes to pages 142–56

12 The cover of Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside features a drawing of a pylon in front of a steep hill; it is somewhat reminiscent of the depiction of the “iron tree” in the film of Watership Down. 13 “Going, Going” was originally published in a government report and is included in High Windows. Larkin shared the English fascination with rabbits that links A.A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, and Richard Adams. His letters to Monica Jones are punctuated with rabbit sketches, and he referred to their private language of rabbit references as “rabbitry” (Letters, 259). His collection The Less Deceived also features the poem “Myxomatosis,” which memorably imagines the plight of a rabbit infected with the disease. 14 Jean-François Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge appeared in French in 1979 and was translated into English in 1984. 15 “It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us” (Darwin, Origin, 395).

Chapter four 1 The epigraph to Mill’s On Liberty is from Wilhelm von Humboldt: “The grand, leading principle, towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges, is the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity” (3). In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold defined culture as “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all matters which most concern us, the best that has been thought and said in the world” (Complete Prose 5:233). 2 As an example of a memoir, see Christopher Hollis, Oxford in the Twenties. 3 Dougill cites Mortimer Proctor’s calculation that 85 per cent of university novels are about Oxford (Oxford, 87). 4 See Lodge’s introduction to Lucky Jim (vii) and Bradbury’s essay “Campus Fictions” for the distinction between the university or “Varsity” novel and the campus novel. 5 Stan Cohen’s trenchant review of The History Man rejects the idea of the campus as microcosm, comparing Bradbury with Doris Lessing to

Notes to pages 157–63

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

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the advantage of the latter, and suggesting that focus on the university as the theatre for investigating the nature of liberalism “can lead to a massive and fateful restriction of vision” (“Sociologists,” 544). The figures quoted are from “Participation Rates.” For a skeptical view of the claim of 50 per cent, see Ball, “Most People.” See also Richard Adams, “Number of Students.” Proctor’s survey of university fiction, published in 1957, includes a brief discussion of Lucky Jim, which Proctor sees as “one of the most grotesquely remarkable of the recent books about English universities” (University Novel, 175). Bradbury discusses Coming from Behind in “Campus Fictions,” quoting the passage about “Bradbury Lodge” (330). In his novel Rates of Exchange, a female professor in an eastern European country asks the visiting Englishman Angus Petworth, “Do you know also a campus writer Brodge? … Who writes Changing Westward? I think he is very funny but sometimes his ideological position is not clear” (294). For a variety of perspectives on the Holocaust in British memory culture, see the essays in Sharples and Jensen, eds., Britain and the Holocaust. The British reception of the American television series Holocaust is discussed in Cole, “Marvellous Raisins.” For the Holocaust in British poetry see Harris, “An Elegy,” and Strangeways, “The Boot.” Lodge writes about his childhood and his Catholic upbringing in several essays, while some of Bradbury’s analogous reflections can be found in the personal pieces collected in Liar’s Landscape. See Lodge, “Memories of a Catholic Childhood” and “My Joyce” (Write On, 28–31, 57–69) and the afterword to Out of the Shelter (273–82); see Bradbury, “Macclesfield, 1940,” “Royal Train,” “Dracula Country,” “Sons and Mothers,” and “In Praise of Grammar Schools” (Liar’s Landscape, 1–25, 47–52). In spring 2017, a play by Steve Waters dramatized the founding of the SDP , and commentators noted parallels with the contemporary political situation. See Billington, “Limehouse Review” and Toynbee, “Today’s Labour Party.” In the 1983 general election, the Conservatives won 397 seats with 42.4 per cent of the vote; Labour 209 seats with 27.6 per cent of the vote; and the SDP 23 seats with 25.4 per cent (“UK Election Statistics”). While conceding the right of satire to exaggerate, Stan Cohen’s review, which does not read the novel in literary terms, nevertheless applies a kind of reality test (“Sociologists”).

278

Notes to pages 165–89

14 See the interview with Jerzy Jarniewicz and Craig Raine, 48. 15 See especially Criticism and Ideology, 21–42. 16 See Haffenden, Novelists, 46. Bradbury’s novella Cuts makes clear his disdain for what government policy was doing to higher education. 17 See Veitch, “Old History,” and Clive James, “Mass.” 18 Lodge also admired Spark and was influenced by her (see my David Lodge, 25–7). In his essay on Spark, Bradbury says that she is “a writer’s writer, someone who … commands the attention as few writers can” (“Muriel Spark’s,” 277). See also Haffenden, Novelists, 45–6. Bradbury wrote a parody of Spark, “Last Things,” which is introduced by a revealing note: “It has been widely noted that the recent fiction of Miss Muriel Spark has been concerned with those two crucial enterprises, fiction and death, and that somehow this has been making her novels shorter and shorter. The following, then, is not an excerpt from, but the entirety of, her newest, shortest, and most deathly work, The Nuns of Terminus” (20). 19 For an analysis of Jameson’s own style see Eagleton, “Fredric Jameson.” 20 See Bradbury, The History Man, 71, 91, 93, 97, 108, 214, 241. 21 The first Habitat store opened in 1964, but the brand really took off in the 1970s, and it introduced flat-pack furniture in 1971, well before the IkEa brand expanded to Britain. See “Our Heritage.” 22 There is an interesting discussion of this by Bradbury’s fellow Leicester graduate John Sutherland. See “The Hitchcock Hallmark.” 23 The term “eolipilic” defeated Elaine Showalter’s researches (Faculty Towers, 128n1). Google must have become more efficient since she wrote, as it seems to be an adjective derived from “aeolipile | eolipile, n., An experimental or educational device comprising a container which can be filled with steam or other heated vapour which escapes through one or more narrow apertures with sufficient force to cause the container to rotate” (oed) . 24 See Johnson’s “An Open Letter to Tony Benn” and “Farewell to the Labour Party.” 25 Lodge discusses the comedy of errors that afflicted Out of the Shelter in his 1985 afterword (273–82). 26 See a longer discussion of Lodge and the Jamesian international theme in my David Lodge, 132–4. Reviews by C.J. Driver (“Some Englands”), Neil Hepburn (“Fathering”), and Anthony Thwaite (“Games People Play”) praise Lodge’s exploration of the “special relationship” between Britain and the United States.

Notes to pages 192–207

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27 For the impact of a year in the United States on David Lodge, see his essay “The Bowling Alley and the Sun.” 28 Lodge discusses anti-Semitism in relation to modern literature, and especially G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, in “The Chesterbelloc and the Jews.” 29 Dominic Head has a brief analysis of this aspect of A Dance to the Music of Time (Cambridge Introduction, 22–4).

Chapter five 1 Anyone writing about Lessing is indebted to Jan Hanford’s website “Doris Lessing: A Retrospective.” It is billed as an “unofficially official” website, and Lessing assisted Hanford, a fan of her writing who became a friend, in compiling the bibliographies of her work. The site is of great assistance to a scholar who wants to maintain a grasp on the vast corpus of Lessing’s writing, especially given the differences between the American and British editions of the collections of stories. 2 The phrase “infantile disorders” alludes to the subtitle of V.I. Lenin’s 1920 book “Left-Wing” Communism. 3 The Preface was reprinted in Malcolm Bradbury’s The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction (169–85). 4 Lara Feigel’s Free Woman, a composite of memoir and critical response to Doris Lessing, shows the persistent power of The Golden Notebook’s exploration of women’s lives. 5 Lessing discusses Sufism in two of her essays, “An Ancient Way to New Freedom” and “In the World, Not of It.” 6 Lessing describes the impact of Lawrence on her as a young reader in “‘The Fox’ of D.H. Lawrence.” There have been several discussions of Lawrence’s influence on Lessing (see Sarvan, “Lawrence and Lessing”; Einersen, “Language of Sexuality”). Lessing also wrote an introduction to the 2006 Penguin Classics edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. 7 Gayle Greene, writing in 1992, described The Four-Gated City as “the fullest novelistic exploration of the condition of England in this century” (“Bleak Houses,” 304). 8 In The Tree outside the Window, Ellen Cronan Rose analyzes the dialectic of nature and culture in Lessing’s Children of Violence novels, focusing on the recurrent images of the house and the tree. 9 In The Story of a Non-Marrying Man, see the stories “A Year in Regent’s Park” (39–57), “Lions, Leaves, Roses …” (107–12), and “The Other Garden” (191–6).

280

Notes to pages 209–21

10 The novella-length story “The Temptation of Jack Orkney” in The Story of a Non-Marrying Man explores similar themes regarding the obsolescence of Marxism, mental crisis, and the need for a more spiritual perspective on experience. 11 With the advantage of hindsight, it is easier to see that Look Back in Anger, which Lessing discusses briefly, has a strong connection to the loss of empire. Colonel Redfern reminisces about his days in India, while Jimmy Porter is nostalgic about “the old Edwardian brigade,” which he contrasts to “the American Age” (17). 12 See the discussion of the diverse range of responses to the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Doris Lessing in Ridout and Watkins, “Introduction,” 1–2. Although Lessing is mentioned in a number of the chapters in Peter Boxall and Bryan Cheyette’s British and Irish Fiction since 1940, there is no substantial discussion of any of her works other than The Golden Notebook, and she is not mentioned at all in Sherryl Vint’s chapter “Dystopian Science Fiction and the Return of the Gothic.” 13 Jenny Diski writes of Lessing, “In a way, she reminded me of Margaret Thatcher, who was hailed by many feminists as a blow struck for feminism and turned out to be nothing of the sort” (195). 14 In the film adaptation of Memoirs of a Survivor, it is interesting to note that shortly after Emily arrives in the flat (at about 16:50 in the DvD ), there is a shot of several books on a table, including Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and C.S. Lewis’s Voyage to Venus, an alternative title used in some editions of Perelandra. Lessing’s novel only specifies that Emily’s luggage includes “some science fiction paperbacks” (23; quotations from Memoirs are from the 1995 Flamingo edition unless otherwise specified). 15 “To Room Nineteen” was first published in A Man and Two Women (1963). 16 I quote from Cornelius Collins’s “Reading Guide” to The Summer before the Dark on the website of the Doris Lessing Society, and I am indebted to his lucid discussion of the importance of setting in the novel. 17 In terms of the second wave of the feminist movement, I am thinking of texts such as Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963), Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (1970), Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (1970), Phyllis Chesler, Women and Madness (1972), and Marilyn French, The Women’s Room (1977). For a discussion of The Summer before the Dark and the “beauty myth” see Aghazadeh, “Ageism and Gender Performativity,” 22–3.

Notes to pages 222–44

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18 Nancy Joyner documents connections between To the Lighthouse and The Golden Notebook, in spite of the fact that Lessing distanced herself from Woolf, both in terms of their very different social backgrounds, and in terms of what Lessing saw as the limited world of Woolf’s writing (“Underside of the Butterfly”). Barbara Lefcowitz briefly compares Kate Brown to Clarissa Dalloway (“Dream and Action,” 115). 19 Betsy Draine identifies the dystopian world of what she calls the Catastrophe novel with Scholes’s notion of fabulation, but not the mental world beyond the wall; she sees the two worlds of the novel as dominated by the thought of Marx and of Jung respectively (“Changing Frames,” 56). 20 Martin Danahay provides an excellent, brief account of invasion narratives in the introduction to his edition of The War of the Worlds (21–3). 21 Rebecca Rubenstein compares the wall between worlds in Memoirs to the wardrobe in Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (“Fantastic Children,” 65). 22 “Our Friend Judith” was first published in A Man and Two Women (1963).

Chapter Six 1 For commentary on Lessing’s reception, and Lessing in relation to post-colonial theory and cosmopolitanism, see Ridout and Watkins, “Introduction.” 2 Naipaul contributed about forty articles and reviews to the New York Review of Books between 1963 and 1999. 3 The essay was published in the tLs , 15 August 1958, under the title “The Regional Barrier” and is reprinted in the collection The Overcrowded Baracoon as “London.” The tLs reprinted an edited version in its “From the Archives” section following Naipaul’s death (“I Need No Gimmicks,” 24 and 31 August 2018). 4 See the BBC news story “More Kenyan Asians Flee to Britain.” 5 Lindfors, “West Indian,” 10. Nixon cites this incident (London Calling, 4). Patrick French identifies the delegate who uttered the threat as a Jamaican librarian, Cliff Lashley (World, 298). 6 The central text in the debate about Conrad is Chinua Achebe’s critique of Heart of Darkness, “Image of Africa”; see also Said, Culture and Imperialism, 22–31. 7 The essay was first published as “Conrad’s Darkness” in the New York Review of Books 17 October 1974.

282

Notes to pages 246–66

8 The nearest Naipaul came to writing about politics in the narrow sense is “Among the Republicans,” his report on the 1984 Republican Convention in Dallas. He found it more like a religious occasion than a forum for genuine “political debate.” 9 Naipaul’s “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad” was first published as “The Killings in Trinidad” in the Sunday Times Magazine, 12 and 19 May 1974; see also Hale, “A Trial in Trinidad.” 10 Zahlan also quotes this passage from Naipaul’s essay on Rhys (“Literary Murder,” 101). 11 See Lucienne Loh, “Rural Heritage,” for an interesting analysis of The Enigma of Arrival as a critique of Thatcherism. She argues that Naipaul resists the racism that would exclude him from the nation by “claim[ing] the rural landscape for himself” (97). 12 Boxall and Cheyette argue that claims that Salman Rushdie and other authors were “the equivalent of a political opposition to the Thatcher government” are “overstated” (British and Irish, 10). 13 Lodge’s novella Home Truths is a fascinating commentary on celebrity culture. In an afterword, he notes that “When I began writing novels in the late 1950s, literary novelists were seldom interviewed unless they were very famous indeed, and nobody showed any interest in interviewing me until about 1980. Nowadays the interview – not only in newspapers and magazines, but also on radio, Tv and even the Internet – is a routine part of the promotion of almost any kind of artistic production” (138). 14 It is worth noting that Joseph North does not mention creative writing in his “Concise Political History” of literary criticism. In North’s narrative, “bad” literary scholarship wins a virtually complete victory over “good” literary criticism. However, the same aesthetic impetus that fuelled criticism can be found in creative writing programs, which foster a very practical kind of criticism of students’ work in workshops as well as the critical reading of literary texts. 15 This was acknowledged after Naipaul’s death by a number of writers, for example, Salman Rushdie and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who have been critical of his views or his representations of particular places or people. See Rushdie’s tweet of 11 August 2018 and Ngugi’s “V.S. Naipaul.”

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Index

academic novel. See campus novel Achebe, Chinua, 281n6 Adams, Richard, 18, 27, 48, 219, 266; The Day Gone By, 122–4, 135–7, 148, 151; The Girl in a Swing, 119, 129; Nature Diary, 129, 137, 145, 148; The Plague Dogs, 121–2, 129, 210; Shardik, 119, 121, 275n7; Tales from Watership Down, 135, 139, 141; Watership Down, 3, 8, 22–3, 26, 116–52, 210, 265, 275n2, 275nn4–7 Adorno, Theodor W.: “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 18–19, 173 airplane hijackings, 5, 191 Alvarez, A.: Hers, 157; The Savage God, 184, 217 Ambler, Eric, 79 Amis, Kingsley, 8, 12, 58, 135, 158, 186, 190, 266; Jake’s Thing, 158, 196–7, 270n1; “Lone Voices,” 158, 197; Lucky Jim, 154–5, 157–8, 187, 197, 276n4, 277n7; Socialism and the Intellectuals, 158; “Why Lucky Jim Turned Right,” 158, 185 Amis, Martin: The Information, 264 Anderson, Amanda: Bleak Liberalism, 19–21, 111, 130, 184, 199–200 Anglican church, 38, 50–4, 57–8, 129, 194 Angry Young Men, 10, 202, 214 animals in literature, 36, 57, 116–18, 139, 217–18, 223, 231; birds, 37, 61, 207, 273n27; cats, 213–14, 231–2; in children’s books, 119–20, 123–4; dogs, 57, 76–7; hybrid animals, 120, 218, 231–2; rabbits, 36, 116, 151. See also Adams: The Plague Dogs; Watership Down Apocalypse Now (film), 257 Arnold, Matthew, 21, 153–4, 158, 163, 166, 168, 181–2; Culture and Anarchy, 276n1; “Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse,” 35, 53, 72; “Thyrsis,” 154

314

Index

Arthurian romance, 81–2, 91–2, 105 Atwood, Margaret, 201, 215–16, 266; The Handmaid’s Tale, 22; Oryx and Crake, 232 Auden, W.H., 86, 88, 94; “September 1, 1939,” 86 Austen, Jane, 16, 41, 65; Mansfield Park, 65 Bainbridge, Beryl, 265 Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 49–50, 168, 170; The Dialogic Imagination, 50; Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 50 Ballard, J.G., 12 Balzac, Honoré de, 89 Barker, Pat, 265 Barnes, Julian, 265 Barstow, Stan, 10 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), 37, 43, 71, 87, 117–18, 211, 230, 242–3, 274n10 Beatles, The: Please Please Me, 40 Beauvoir, Simone de, 183, 195 Beckett, Samuel, 62, 66, 95, 177 Bellow, Saul, 239 Benchley, Peter: Jaws, 3 Benn, Tony, 6, 185, 198, 278n24 Bennett, Arnold, 44 Bergonzi, Bernard, 21; Reading the Thirties, 86; Situation of the Novel, 8–9, 24, 37, 188, 266–7, 269nn4–5 Berlin, Isaiah: “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 20–1, 270n9 Best of Young British Novelists, 265 bestsellers, 3, 14–15, 22, 26, 47, 64, 80, 117–18, 149, 269n1 Bhabha, Homi, 240 Birmingham University, 157, 159, 193

Blair, Tony, 32, 52, 99–100, 157, 162, 185, 274n15 Blake, William, 34, 181, 271n13 Blunt, Anthony, 82, 98 Boethius, 60 Bond, James, 104–5, 115, 132, 134, 139 Booker Prize, 13–15, 24, 27, 239, 249, 257, 263–5 Bradbury, Malcolm, 4, 10, 12, 21, 155–65, 266, 270n1, 277n10; Cuts, 162, 278n16; “Do We Have Great Novels Any More?,” 264–5; Eating People Is Wrong, 155, 163, 176; on E.M. Forster, 163–4; on F.R. Leavis, 164–5; The History Man, 8, 27, 160, 163–5, 167–87, 189, 193–6, 198–200, 217, 255, 266–7, 276n5, 278n22; “Last Things,” 278n18; The Novel Today, 11, 264, 279n3; Rates of Exchange, 277n8; review of Changing Places, 189; Stepping Westward, 184, 277n8 Braine, John, 10, 158 Brenton, Howard: The Churchill Play, 7 Brexit, 70, 109 Brideshead Revisited (Tv miniseries), 74, 265 British empire, 5, 28, 48, 59–60, 68–70, 76, 79, 201, 205, 238–9, 247–9, 260, 280n11; and John le Carré, 82, 88–9, 92–7, 103–4, 115 Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre, 37, 254 Brown, Gordon, 99 Buchan, John, 79, 92 Buford, Bill, 265

Index

Burgess, Anthony: A Clockwork Orange, 215, 227–8; 1985, 221 Burgess, Guy, 82 Bush, George W., 99, 274n15 Butler Education Act (1944), 52, 154, 156 Butler, Marilyn: Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 16, 18, 270n8 Butler, R.A., 72 Byatt, A.S., 51, 172, 272n23 Callaghan, James, 4, 32–4, 64, 271nn9–10 Cambridge spies, 82 Cambridge University, 42–3, 154–5, 165 Cameron, David, 52 campus novel, 22, 27, 42, 153–98; conservative examples, 170, 196–8; literary ancestry of, 162–3; university novel, contrasted with, 153–5, 276n4 Caribbean Voices (BBC radio program), 242 Carlyle, Thomas, 38–40, 90; Chartism, 38; Past and Present, 38 Carroll, Lewis: Alice in Wonderland, 280n14 Carson, Rachel, 205 Castaneda, Carlos, 219 Castle, Barbara, 33, 271n10 Catholic church. See Roman Catholic church Chamberlain, Neville, 126 Chesler, Phyllis: Women and Madness, 280n17 Chesterton, G.K., 160, 279n28 Childers, Erskine, The Riddle of the Sands, 79

315

Christianity, 35, 61, 114, 125, 128– 30, 147, 174, 183, 235, 272n25. See also Anglican church; Nonconformity; Roman Catholic church Churchill, Caryl, 7 Churchill, Winston, 99 Church of England. See Anglican church citizenship, 22, 70–1, 83–4, 90, 92, 109, 130–4, 255, 260 Clare, John, 142, 144 Clinton, Bill, 99 Clockwork Orange, A (film), 228 Cobbett, William, 39, 121, 144; Rural Rides, 90 Coetzee, J.M., 13 Cold War, 14, 21, 25, 28, 130–5, 139, 194, 199, 202, 205, 274n7; in The Ice Age, 50–1, 55–6, 58–61; and John le Carré, 7, 15, 26, 79–80, 82–3, 87, 94–5, 100, 106–8 Colegate, Isabel, 12; The Shooting Party, 265 Collini, Stefan, 17, 19 Communism 42, 64, 83, 186, 199–202, 233, 279n2 Compton, Spencer, Earl of Wilmington, 86 condition-of-England novel, 15, 25, 30, 34–5, 37–48, 77–8, 84, 117, 125, 205, 209, 266, 279n7 Connelly, Michael, 134 Conrad, Joseph, 87, 89, 115, 140, 244–6, 261; Heart of Darkness, 247, 257, 259, 281n6; The Secret Agent, 79, 259 Conservative Party, 6, 24, 32–3, 51–2, 66, 75, 105, 161–2, 185, 277n12

316

Index

Cooper, William: Scenes from Provincial Life, 157, 176 Craig, Amanda: The Lie of the Land, 3–4, 149–51 Darwin, Charles: Origin of Species, 146–7, 276n15 Davie, Donald, 47–8 Declaration, 9, 202, 214 de la Mare, Walter, 122–3; The Three Mulla-Mulgars, 123 Delaney, Shelagh, 10 Dickens, Charles, 38–41, 45, 47, 78; Bleak House, 37, 45, 272n22; David Copperfield, 37; Dombey and Son, 45; Little Dorrit, 45; Martin Chuzzlewit, 65; The Pickwick Papers, 60 Didion, Joan, 218, 226 Diski, Jenny, 201, 231, 234–5, 280n13 Disraeli, Benjamin, 18, 38, 271n16; Young England trilogy, 8, 21, 38 Donoghue, Denis, 49, 62 Dos Passos, John: U.S.A., 190 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 50–1, 62, 215; Crime and Punishment, 60 Downton Abbey (Tv program), 74 Drabble, Margaret, 15, 80, 119, 171, 198, 223, 266, 271n12, 272n23; and D.H. Lawrence, 43–4; The Garrick Year, 43; The Ice Age, 26, 30–1, 34–7, 44–5, 50–62, 64, 66, 71–2, 77–8, 82, 90–92, 121, 192, 206, 217–18, 221, 226–8, 266–7, 270n1, 271n13, 272n25, 273nn26– 7; naming of characters, 37, 43, 273n26; The Needle’s Eye, 221; “novelist of maternity,” 44; The Radiant Way, 60; The Realms of

Gold, 184, 217, 221; reception of The Ice Age, 46–8; A Summer BirdCage, 44; The Waterfall, 37, 44; A Writer’s Britain, 43–4, 68 dystopian fiction, 152, 203, 205, 215–16, 226–30, 257, 266, 280n12, 281n19 Eagleton, Terry, 166–9, 278n19; Literary Theory, 166 East Anglia, University of, 159, 264 Eden, Anthony, 72 Edgar, David: Destiny, 7 Eliot, George, 205; Adam Bede, 77; Daniel Deronda, 65; Felix Holt, the Radical, 62; The Mill on the Floss, 37, 202 Eliot, T.S., 71, 130, 179; After Strange Gods, 194; The Waste Land, 128 Ellison, Ralph: Invisible Man, 200 Englishness, 37, 44, 46, 67–71, 82, 87–8, 92, 107, 141–3, 178, 209, 263 environmental imagination, 147–52 environmentalism, 5, 26–8, 120–1, 134, 142–5, 151–2, 205, 210, 230 espionage novel, 26, 55, 58–60, 79–115, 131–5, 273n2, 274n7 Eton College, 59–60, 86–7, 89–91 European Union, 5–6, 28, 109 fabulation, 9–11, 119, 188, 209, 216, 226, 235, 281n19 Fanon, Frantz, 246 Farrell, J.G., 15; The Siege of Krishnapur, 15; Troubles, 15 Fawlty Towers (Tv program), 160, 192 feminism, 5, 16–17, 139–41, 155–6, 170, 181, 184–5, 193, 195–6, 198,

Index

266,; and Doris Lessing, 27, 200, 202, 216–7, 221–2, 226, 280n13, 280n17 Figes, Eva, 12 Fitzgerald, Penelope: Offshore, 207–8, 257 Fleming, Ian, 79, 83, 104–5, 132–3, 139 Forster, E.M., 21, 85, 163–5, 180; Howards End, 38, 142, 164–5, 209; Maurice, 68; Passage to India, 73, 164, 238, 265 Forsyth, Frederick, 269n1; The Day of the Jackal, 271n8 Fowles, John, 15, 21, 23, 80, 119, 143, 198, 239, 266; and D.H. Lawrence, 42–4; Daniel Martin, 8, 18, 26, 30–1, 34–6, 42–6, 51, 53, 62–78, 151, 209, 217, 270n1, 271n14, 273n26, 273n33; The Ebony Tower, 73; “The Enigma,” 73; The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 10, 15, 49–50, 63–4, 74, 269n5; The Magus, 269n5; “On Being English but Not British,” 67–9, 71; reception of Daniel Martin, 46, 48–50; “Weeds, Bugs, Americans,” 151–2 Fraser, Antonia, 239 French, Marilyn: The Women’s Room, 280n17 Friedan, Betty: The Feminine Mystique, 280n17 Friedman, Milton, 52 Gardner, John, 48 Garner, Alan: Red Shift, 149 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 38 generation gap, 137–8, 175, 189 Gilroy, Paul, 240, 273n31

317

globalization, 24, 27–8, 238–40 Golding, William: Lord of the Flies, 131, 137, 215, 227 Good Life, The (Tv program), 230 Gordimer, Nadine, 13 Grahame, Kenneth: The Wind in the Willows, 122, 124–5, 146 grammar schools, 52, 159 Gramsci, Antonio, 35–6, 49, 63, 66, 72 Grass, Günter: From the Diary of a Snail, 176 Greenblatt, Stephen, 17, 19, 29 Greene, Graham, 65, 79, 83–9, 115, 238, 274nn8–10; England Made Me, 274n11; The Human Factor, 83; The Old School, 88; The Quiet American, 191, 243 Greer, Germaine: The Female Eunuch, 202, 280n17 Habitat (furniture store), 178, 278n21 Hailey, Arthur, 47 Hailsham, Lord, 5 Hale, Patricia, 253 Hamilton, Ian, 246, 250, 253 Hardy, Thomas, 36, 65 Harris, Joel Chandler, 120, 147 Harrison, Melissa, 149–51; Clay, 149–50; At Hawthorn Time, 26, 151 Hauerwas, Stanley, 125–6, 128, 130–1, 142–3, 275n9, 275n11 Hayek, Friedrich, 52 Heaney, Seamus, 48, 149 Heath, Edward, 4–6, 99, 106, 221, 270n4 Hegel, G.W.F., 173, 176, 183 Hemingway, Ernest, 177

318

Index

Hill, Geoffrey, 48, 160; Mercian Hymns, 149 historical novel, 4, 15, 67, 106, 174, 185, 266 historiographic metafiction, 24, 50 History Man, The (Tv miniseries), 172, 181, 185, 266 Hoffmann, E.T.A.: The Sandman, 101–2, 275n18 Hoggart, Richard: The Uses of Literacy, 175 Holocaust, the, 160, 277n9 Holroyd, Michael, 265 Homer, 127, 140 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 123–4, 148 Housman, A.E., 122 Howe, Irving, 244–5; Politics and the Novel, 15–17 Hughes, Ted, 48; Remains of Elmet, 149 Hughes, Thomas, 154, 224 Hulme, Keri, 13 Hutcheon, Linda, 24, 50 immigration, 5, 57, 69–71, 241–3, 273nn30–1 imperialism, 27–8, 55, 67–70, 179–80, 207, 238–41, 255, 265. See also British empire Institute of Economic Affairs, 52 Ireland, 15, 29, 70, 136, 180 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 13–14, 215, 264–5; The Remains of the Day, 74, 265 Jacobson, Howard, 159, 165 James, Clive, 221, 278n17 James, Henry, 47–8, 189, 215, 272n24 James, P.D., 93, 134

Jameson, Fredric, 16–18, 173; Marxism and Form, 173–4, 278n19 Jauss, Hans Robert, 29, 270n10, 270n13 Jefferies, Richard: Wood Magic, 117 Jenkins, Roy, 6, 20, 161–2, 270n4 Johnson, Boris, 52, 86 Johnson, Linton Kwesi, 241 Johnson, Paul, 185–6 Joyce, James: Ulysses, 47 Kafka, Franz, 66 Kazin, Alfred, 250 Kermode, Frank: The Sense of an Ending, 234–6 Kingsley, Charles, 38 Kipling, Rudyard, 79, 96 Koestler, Arthur, 132 Kureishi, Hanif: The Buddha of Suburbia, 4 Labour Party, 6, 20, 32–4, 44, 52, 63–4, 115, 156, 158, 161–2, 185, 205, 208, 277n12 Laing, R.D., 209, 218 Lanchester, John: Capital, 116–17, 206, 275n1 Larkin, Philip, 48, 135, 175; “Annus Mirabilis,” 40; “Going, Going,” 142, 276n13; “Myxomatosis,” 276n13 Lawrence, D.H., 56, 65, 143, 157; and Doris Lessing, 203, 279n6; influence on Drabble and Fowles, 42–4; Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 39–43, 56, 68, 90, 203, 250, 272n19, 279n6; The Man Who Died, 42; The Rainbow, 203; Women in Love, 203

Index

Leavis, F.R., 40, 42–3, 46, 71–2, 164–8 le Carré, John, 7, 15, 26–7, 48, 55, 60, 64, 79–115, 119, 132, 139, 142, 156, 191, 252, 266, 273n1, 274n5, 274nn11–13; Absolute Friends, 80, 274n15; Call for the Dead, 110; The Constant Gardener, 80; “England Made Me,” 86–8, 274nn10–11; The Honourable Schoolboy, 80–2, 86, 89, 94–100, 104–8; A Legacy of Spies, 108–9; The Mission Song, 80; A Most Wanted Man, 80; The Pigeon Tunnel, 80; The Quest for Karla, 80; Smiley’s People, 80, 82–3, 90, 94, 100–7, 110–14, 265, 275nn17–18; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, 80, 108; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, 58, 80, 83, 85, 87–94, 96, 100, 102–4, 106, 108–10, 113–15, 265 Leicester, University College of, 155, 159, 278n22 Lenin, V.I., 279n2 Lessing, Doris, 7–8, 15, 18, 21, 27, 152, 184, 186, 198–238, 248, 253, 262, 266, 276n5, 279n1, 280n13, 281n1; Briefing for a Descent into Hell, 120, 205, 212–13, 217–9, 223, 239; Canopus in Argos novels, 202, 213; Children of Violence novels, 199, 201–2, 204, 209, 212–13, 226, 279n8; The Diaries of Jane Somers, 223, 237; The Four-Gated City, 23, 134, 201–13, 215–16, 224, 228–9, 279n7; The Golden Notebook, 199–200, 204, 210, 215, 237, 279n4, 280n12, 281n18,; The Good Terrorist, 186, 199–200, 229, 237; Martha Quest, 201, 204; Massey

319

Lectures, 217, 227; The Memoirs of a Survivor, 57, 101, 201, 205, 207, 212, 214–18, 221, 226–37, 255, 266, 281n21; “An Old Woman and Her Cat,” 213–14, 229, 231, 237; “Our Friend Judith,” 237, 281n22; preface to The Golden Notebook, 200, 209–10, 215, 217, 222; “Report on the Threatened City,” 213; Retreat to Innocence, 199; Shikasta, 202, 216, 231, 235; “The Small Personal Voice,” 9, 202, 214–15, 234–5; The Story of a Non-Marrying Man, 213, 279n9, 280n10; The Summer before the Dark, 205, 217, 219–26, 280nn16– 17; “The Temptation of Jack Orkney,” 280n10; “To Room Nineteen,” 219–20, 237, 280n15 Lewis, C.S.: Chronicles of Narnia, 118, 231, 235; The Last Battle, 233; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, 281n21; Perelandra, 218, 280n14 Lewis, Sinclair: It Can’t Happen Here, 22 liberal humanism, 21, 50, 111, 160–1, 163–5, 176, 179, 181–2, 194 liberalism, 6, 8–9, 17, 19–22, 125– 30, 132, 158–65, 200, 204–5, 212, 215, 224, 237, 241, 246–7, 251–2, 254–6, 276n5; and David Lodge, 9–10, 21, 158–62, 165, 167–71, 188–96; and John le Carré, 26, 80, 107–11, 114; and Malcolm Bradbury, 10, 21, 158–65, 167–71, 174–7, 179–82, 184, 196 Liberal Party, 86, 161–2 Limehouse Declaration, 161 literary novel, 4, 264, 269n2

320

Index

literary prizes, 13–15. See also Booker Prize; Nobel Prize for Literature Little Drummer Girl, The (Tv miniseries), 273n3 Lockley, R.M., 122; The Private Life of the Rabbit, 122, 140 Lodge, David, 21, 158–62, 167–72, 175, 177, 185, 202–3, 262–3, 266, 274n8, 277n10, 278n18, 278n26, 279nn27–8; The British Museum Is Falling Down, 155; Changing Places, 27, 154–6; 167, 170–1, 184, 186–96, 263; Home Truths, 282n13; How Far Can You Go?, 159, 186, 188; Language of Fiction, 39, 190; Nice Work, 27, 156, 162, 169, 186, 188, 272n22; “The Novelist at the Crossroads,” 9–10, 187–90, 198, 216, 226; Out of the Shelter, 82–3, 137, 160, 186–7, 189, 203, 277n10, 278n25; The Picturegoers, 155; “problematic novel,” 188, 190, 198, 216; on realism, 9–11, 21, 188–90, 198, 216; Small World, 156, 168, 187, 196; Thinks …, 188; Writer’s Luck, 263–4 Lofting, Hugh: Doctor Dolittle, 123 London, University College, 155, 159 Ludlum, Robert: The Bourne Identity, 112 Lukács, Georg, 9, 65–7, 76, 171, 174; The Historical Novel, 67; The Meaning of Contemporary Realism, 21, 66 Lurie, Alison, 222–3 Mabey, Richard, 148, 207; The Common Ground, 142; The

Unofficial Countryside, 145, 150, 276n12 MacInnes, Helen, 79 Mackenzie, Compton: Sinister Street, 154 Maclean, Donald, 82 Mailer, Norman, 10 Mann, Thomas, 66–7, 215, 274n12; The Magic Mountain, 67 Mansfield, Katherine, 238 Mantel, Hilary, 245 Marx, Karl, 49, 63, 176, 228, 281n19 Marxism, 17–19, 21, 29, 39, 124–5, 144, 166–9, 173–4, 176, 184, 272n17; in Daniel Martin, 35–6, 45, 49, 63–6, 71, 75, 273n33; and Doris Lessing, 9, 204–6, 209, 228, 233, 280n10, 281n19 Maschler, Tom, 9, 202 May, Theresa, 99–100 McEwan, Ian, 264–5 McGregor, Jon: Reservoir 13, 26, 149–50 McLuhan, Marshall, 189, 264 Memoirs of a Survivor (film), 227, 266, 280n14 migration, 70, 204, 229, 232, 238, 247, 249–50, 258 Mill, John Stuart, 153, 181; On Liberty, 20, 276n1 Millett, Kate: Sexual Politics, 42, 190, 280n17 Milne, A.A., 123, 276n13 Milton, John, 34, 66; Areopagitica, 34, 45; “Lycidas,” 46 Moore, Brian, 23 Moore, Thomas (“Captain Tom”), 28 Morrison, Blake, 159 Most Wanted Man, A (film), 273n3

Index

Murdoch, Iris, 65, 157, 186, 202 Musil, Robert: The Man without Qualities, 205 Nabokov, Vladimir, 262 Naipaul, Shiva, 12 Naipaul, V.S., 3, 13–15, 23, 27–8, 238–62, 266, 281n2; Among the Believers, 245; “Among the Republicans,” 282n8; A Bend in the River, 24, 27, 60, 71, 102, 244–9, 252, 256–61; “Conrad’s Darkness and Mine,” 244–6, 281n7; The Enigma of Arrival, 14, 38, 74, 103, 212, 241, 248, 262, 265, 282n11; Guerillas, 27, 247–8, 252–7, 273n26; A House for Mr Biswas, 242, 248–9; In a Free State, 27, 239, 241, 248–53, 257, 262; “London,” 242–3, 246, 281n3; “Michael X and the Black Power Killings in Trinidad,” 253–4, 282n9; Miguel Street, 242; The Mimic Men, 247–8; Nobel Lecture, 245; The Writer and the World, 245 Narayan, R.K., 238 National Front, 225 neo-liberalism, 20, 52–3, 162, 233 New Labour, 32, 156, 162, 271n5 Newman, John Henry, 154; Idea of a University, 161, 167 New Review symposium on the novel, 11–13 New York Review of Books, 47, 49, 226, 241–2, 244, 250, 281n2, 281n7 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 21, 130 Night Manager, The (Tv miniseries), 273n3

321

Nixon, Richard, 98, 175 Nobel Prize for Literature, 14–15, 241, 280n12 Nonconformity, 160, 164, 175, 183 non-fiction novel, 9, 188, 216 North, Joseph: Literary Criticism, 17, 19, 282n14 nouveau roman, 9, 173, 177–8, 198 Okri, Ben, 13 Ondaatje, Michael, 13–14 Orwell, George, 10, 132, 152, 158, 168, 203; Animal Farm, 119, 139; Coming Up for Air, 121, 142; Nineteen Eighty-Four, 22, 133, 139, 203, 215, 221; “Politics and the English Language,” 10; “Such, Such Were the Joys,” 88 Osborne, John, 158, 186; Look Back in Anger, 157, 280n11 Our Kind of Traitor (film), 273n3 Owen, David, 161 Oxford University, 42, 86, 122, 155, 165, 171, 197, 241, 270n9; in Daniel Martin, 49, 63–5, 71–3, 77; in The Ice Age, 51, 54, 77; in literature, 153–5, 157, 162, 276nn2–3 Passage to India (film), 265 Paulin, Tom, 49, 81, 94 Peacock, Thomas Love, 75, 162–3 People’s Park, Berkeley, 155, 190, 193 Philby, Kim, 82–5, 87 Piercy, Marge, 184, 226 Pierre, DBC, 14 Plath, Sylvia, 160, 184 political novel, 15–18, 21–2, 25–6, 38, 62, 71, 73, 83, 107, 125, 199, 246–7, 253, 258

322

Index

Potter, Beatrix, 120, 123, 139, 275n5, 276n13 Pound, Ezra, 73–4 Powell, Anthony, 8, 88; A Dance to the Music of Time, 74, 197–8, 266 Powell, Enoch, 71, 273n30; “Rivers of Blood” speech, 69, 75, 243 public schools, 51–2, 59, 82, 85–9, 123 radical Toryism, 115, 121, 129 Rawls, John: A Theory of Justice, 275n9 Read, Piers Paul, 8; A Married Man, 63–4, 265 Reagan, Ronald, 99 realism, 8–12, 21, 23, 64, 115, 176, 257, 261; and David Lodge, 9–11, 21, 188–190, 198, 216; and Doris Lessing, 201, 209, 213–16; and Marxist criticism, 21, 66, 171, 174 Remains of the Day, The (film), 265 Restif de la Bretonne: Monsieur Nicolas, 68 Rhys, Jean, 254, 282n10; Wide Sargasso Sea, 254 Richards, I.A., 17 Richler, Mordecai: St Urbain’s Horseman, 239 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 177, 217 Robbins, Harold, 64 Robin Hood, 67–9, 143 Rodgers, Bill, 161 Roman Catholic church, 63–4, 159–62, 165, 169–70, 173, 186, 188, 195, 277n10 Roosevelt, Franklin, 99 Roy, Arundhati, 13 Rubens, Bernice, 14

Rushdie, Salman, 13–14, 24, 239, 241, 265, 282n12; Midnight’s Children, 13, 24–5; Joseph Anton, 270n11 Ruskin, John, 39, 121 Rutherfurd, Edward: Sarum, 149 Said, Edward, 16, 241, 244; Culture and Imperialism, 281n6 Schiller, Friedrich, 101, 274n13 Schreiner, Olive: The Story of an African Farm, 202 Scott, Sir Walter, 67, 174 Second World War, 5, 27–8, 36, 53, 77, 79, 99, 154, 160, 192, 201–2, 213, 232; and Richard Adams, 27, 119–20, 122, 135–8, Sewell, William: Hawkstone, 38 Shah, Idries, 201, 205 Shakespeare, William, 13, 31–3, 41, 54 Sharpe, Tom, 8, 198; Porterhouse Blue, 156, 266; The Great Pursuit, 165–6, 179 Shooting Party, The (film), 265 Showalter, Elaine, 16, 155, 185, 193, 202 Sillitoe, Alan, 10 Sinclair, Iain, 148 Smiley’s People (Tv miniseries), 80, 101, 265–6 Smith, Zadie, 261; NW, 57–8 Snow, C.P., 65, 71 Social Democratic Party (SDP ), 143, 161–2, 169, 277nn11–12 socialism, 20, 107, 158, 162, 171, 205, 215, 224–5, 233; in Daniel Martin, 26, 62–4, 74–6 Socialist Workers Party, 225

Index

323

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 14–15, 21, 24, 60–1, 66, 132; August 1914, 3; Gulag Archipelago, 14, 66, 84, 119; Harvard Commencement Address, 51, 61; Templeton Lecture, 61 Sophocles: Antigone, 60; Oedipus the King, 132–3 Spark, Muriel, 177, 201, 278n18; The Abbess of Crewe, 15; The Driver’s Seat, 173; The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 173 “special relationship” (Britain and US), 94, 98–100, 278n26 Spender, Stephen: “The Pylons,” 142 Stalin, Joseph, 131, 275n11 Stalinism, 94, 137, 199, 202 Stendhal, 16 Stevens, Wallace, 235 Stonehouse, John, 73 Suez Crisis, 5, 99 Sufism, 201, 209, 218, 233–5, 279n5 Supertramp: Crisis? What Crisis?, 271n8 Survivors (Tv program), 152, 211, 230 Sutherland, John, 3, 12, 25, 269nn1–2, 278n22 Swift, Graham, 265; Waterland, 148; Wish You Were Here, 148 Swift, Jonathan: Gulliver’s Travels, 162–3

speech (“Britain Awake”), 6, 66, 105, 273n28; and Ronald Reagan, 99 Thatcherism, 20, 24, 28, 50, 52, 143, 156–7, 166–9, 186, 192, 262–4, 282nn11–12 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa, 282n15 Thomas, Dylan: “Fern Hill,” 122 Thorpe, Adam: Ulverton, 149 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (film), 273n3 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Tv miniseries), 80, 265–6 tLs (Times Literary Supplement), 46, 48, 71, 163, 222, 242, 246, 250, 281n3 Toffler, Alvin: Future Shock, 227 Tolkien, J.R.R., 118–20, 219; Lord of the Rings, 118, 125; The Silmarillion, 3, 118 Tolstoy, Leo, 48 Toynbee, Arnold, 130, 183 Tremain, Rose, 265 Trilling, Lionel, 200 Trollope, Anthony, 15, 18, 21, 52, 270n7 Trump, Donald, 22, 99

Tennyson, Alfred, 81, 127, 147, 154, 275n10 Thatcher, Margaret, 5–6, 13, 24–5, 27, 83, 161–2, 172, 185–6, 257, 264, 270n11, 280n13; Iron Lady

Walcott, Derek, 241 Walking Dead, The (Tv program), 237 Walpole, Sir Robert, 86 Watergate scandal, 15, 98, 106, 175

university education. See campus novel; and names of individual institutions Virgil, 257; Aeneid, 120, 142,

324

Index

Waterhouse, Keith, 10 Watership Down (animated film), 117–18, 133, 266, 275n3, 276n12 Watership Down (animated miniseries), 118 Waugh, Auberon, 12, 172 Waugh, Evelyn, 135–6, 157, 160, 175; Brideshead Revisited, 74, 136, 154, 265; Decline and Fall, 87; A Handful of Dust, 91; The Sword of Honour Trilogy, 136 Wells, H.G., 47, 272n24; Time Machine, 127–8, 204; Tono-Bungay, 38–9; The War of the Worlds, 204, 232, 281n20 White, Antonia, 88 Williams, Raymond, 16–17, 29, 38–41, 167; The Country and the City, 141, 144, 150; Border Country, 171; People of the Black Mountains, 149; Second Generation, 171 Williams, Shirley, 6, 161–2, 222 Wilson, Angus, 23, 272n22

Wilson, Harold, 6, 33, 64, 161, 172 Winter of Discontent, 4, 6, 31–4, 56, 270nn3–4, 271n5, 271n10 Winterson, Jeanette, 264 Woodforde, James: Diary of a Country Parson, 145 Woolf, Virginia, 165, 205, 222; Mrs Dalloway, 222; To the Lighthouse, 281n18 Wordsworth, William, 60, 62, 146, 212, 271n12; “I know an aged Man constrained to dwell,” 61; “London, 1802,” 34–5, 53, 56; preface to Lyrical Ballads, 215; “The Small Celandine,” 62 Wyndham, John: The Midwich Cuckoos, 210 xenogenetic children, 210 Yes Minister (Tv program), 194 zombies, 41, 73, 219, 255