On the other hand, the way the novel has developed has not always been appreciated by the publishing industry. Publishers in London or New York, still the two centres of power in English language publishing, continue to display very little interest in the writers of, say, Australia or India. There are the Whites and Maloufs and the Mistrys and Desais, of course, but in Britain and the United States it is hard to find the books of Elizabeth Jolley or Jessica Anderson, and much of Narayan is out of print. With the continuing demise of the power of the editor within publishing, there is even less chance that the true richness of English-language fiction will be internationally known. We have used bookshops and scholars all over the world to help us track down hidden treasures, and it seems to us amazing, having done this work, that writers such as Eugene McCabe, Frank Sargeson, Alistair MacLeod and Bapsi Sidwha have not won the international fame that they deserve. They belong to an international secret canon which this book seeks to disclose.
What we have noticed and appreciated in these books is the sense of the individual voice at work and sometimes at play, the individual will, the individual choice, the individual talent, the direct relationship between the writer and the reader. (No wonder governments are suspicious of writers.) But there are fascinating national myths and mores, aspects of heritage and history, to which many writers subscribe.
It is, of course, not possible to talk about a National Style for novelists, but some themes have endured: from the Indian novels chosen here you will learn a great deal about Partition, the British Raj, the caste system, the influence of mass poverty and religion on India; there are a good number of novels in this list about racial tension in the United States (Morrison, Baldwin, Harper Lee, Styron, Pete Dexter, Doctorow); other Americans, men only, attempt a sweeping, ambitious history, as though no other version existed (Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy, Heller, Mailer); other Americans manage to dramatize the individual’s isolation, eccentricity and sense of not being part of the official version (Flannery O’Connor, Cheever, Marilynne Robinson, Salinger, Edmund White, Plath, Easton Ellis). In Africa, the conflict between colonized and colonizer remains a theme which no one can escape. In Ireland, the Troubles haunt some contemporary writing, but then other writers (Beckett, Roddy Doyle, John Banville) refuse to deal with them, and their work becomes all the richer and stranger for that. In Britain, the rise of Margaret Thatcher (Mrs Torture in Salman Rushdie’s phrase) has animated a number of novelists (Martin Amis, Angela Carter, Jonathan Coe, Alasdair Gray), and the class system has provided novelists with much material (Pat Barker, Elizabeth Jenkins, Agatha Christie, Maureen Duffy, Bruce Chatwin, L. P. Hartley). In England novelists have also played with a storytelling tradition, producing novels that have a solidity and beauty (Alan Hollinghurst, Julian Barnes, Anthony Powell, Sylvia Townsend Warner). In Australia, the creation of the new nation itself, the arrival of the whites and their efforts to make a society out of that vast country, and to come to terms with its original inhabitants, has been a large theme. It is impossible to make generalizations about Canada: the connection between Michael Ondaatje, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, Alistair MacLeod and Margaret Laurence is only that they are writers whom everyone should read.
This idea of a national inheritance is complicated by the great migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Was Brian Moore Irish or Canadian? Is Amy Tan American or Chinese? Is V. S. Naipaul Trinidadian or English? Is Oscar Hijuelos Cuban or American? The answer is all are both.
While we differ in our response to literary theory — one of us is hostile to it, the other cannot have enough of it — we were as one in our determination to ignore the distinction between so-called popular fiction and literary fiction (also so-called). This false distinction which is prevalent in literary prizes, in academia and in our educational mores, has been responsible for the treacherous suggestion that reading is a chore, and that the best writing is always difficult and obscure.
For us, the debate as to whether Interview with the Vampire is of greater intrinsic merit than Oscar and Lucinda is irrelevant, because any decision on the subject — and a decision can be made — alters not at all the fact that both are splendid feats of the human imagination, explains nothing of the pleasure experienced as the novelists’ words lock into the reader’s imagination, but simply reveals a great deal about those arguing. The critical dividing line between popular and literary also ignores the reader and the writer, who rarely contemplate the novel in this way.
There are novelists, of course, who are not interested in the reaction of their readers, who would write for a seagull if that bird praised such a novelist’s self-absorptions. We have, generally, avoided them effortlessly. Not altogether, of course, because some, albeit few, are great writers who have created complex and difficult novels, which require concentration but are worth it.
We chose these books together on the basis that the idea of two people disputing — hotly at times, not at all on other occasions — is always preferable to one person laying down the law. We come from different places. Both of us come from the Free World, i.e. neither of us is English or American, and we have not the slightest interest in political correctness. We have different prejudices and preferences. Any list such as this is entirely personal, but in every choice we’ve looked for the same quality — a certain (or sometimes even an uncertain) genius in the work, a certain (always certain) excitement in the reading, and a feeling that you would love to hand this book to someone else to read. Most of us, these days, are almost imprisoned by choice, as anyone examining the fiction shelves of a large bookshop will notice. We have used our prejudices and preferences to cut a path through this rich jungle, using as our final point of judgement that touch of genius and sense of excitement which connect Patrick White with Ruth Rendell, Georgette Heyer with Don DeLillo, Daphne du Maurier with Katherine Anne Porter, J. D. Salinger with Irvine Welsh.
A large part of the list is common to both of us; some choices, while admired by both, more passionately belong to one or the other. In only two cases we could not agree: V. S. Naipaul and Saul Bellow have two entries, not because we consider them greater than any of the other novelists we have chosen, but because one of us considered A Bend in the River and Herzog to be the masterworks of Naipaul and Bellow, while the other disliked Herzog but argued passionately for Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March and could not feel A Bend in the River to be the equal of A House for Mr Biswas. For the rest, and for arguably greater writers, only one entry was necessary. It was often difficult to decide which work by a single writer to include: in the case of Nabokov, for example, between Ada, Pnin, Pale Fire or Lolita; in the case of Nadine Gordimer between The Conservationist, July’s People and Burgher’s Daughter. We also chose to ignore the ghetto into which short stories are often placed.
Only books published in 1950 or afterwards and only books written in English qualified. We have included some collections of stories but mainly novels. We have included trilogies and single books from trilogies. There are no translations except those done by the author. We did not consider novels which were written in the earlier half of the century, but not published, for various reasons, until the second half. (These include E. M. Forster’s Maurice, Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden and Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.) Many of the novelists we have chosen flourished also in the earlier half of the century — Faulkner, Waugh, Lehmann, du Maurier, Welty, Hemingway, Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, Patrick Hamilton, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen: we hope to send readers back to earlier years and so trace an enduring tradition.