1984 Money
John Self is one of those young men who sprang up in Thatcher’s England in the 1980s, savouring money and using it like tomato sauce. A thirty-five-year-old director of TV commercials, Self is about to make his first real movie. With his devotion to alcohol and nicotine, pornography and video nasties, and sufficient fast food to ensure his hideous pot belly a life of its own, it’s only money keeping the wolves of excess from Self’s door. He jets between New York and London encountering a misbegotten collection of narcissistic and exquisitely named stars — Butch Beausoleil, Caduta Massi, Spunk Davis — panting alternately after his English girlfriend Selina Street and his American muse Martina Twain.
Self’s story is a corrosive moral tale about England’s recent past — ‘The skies are so ashamed. The trees in the squares hang their heads, the evening paper in its cage is ashamed.’ With the mordant thud and rhythm of his startling prose, Martin Amis beats the greed and venality of that decade into submission. The verbal rainstorm that Amis pours through Self’s repellent mouth — the dialogue acid, perfectly pitched — is a rousing example of the Amis style which has made his work in general and Money in particular so important to his contemporaries, and so splenetic a mirror of late twentieth-century England.
Martin Amis was born in Oxford and lives in London. Amongst his most influential novels are the West London trio beginning with Money, and followed by London Fields (1989) and The Information (1996).
Age in year of publication: thirty-five.
Mulk Raj Anand 1905–2004
1953 Private Life of an Indian Prince
In 1947, the year of Indian independence from Britain, there were five hundred and sixty-two Indian princedoms. These princes were gradually stripped of their power and Anand, the great Indian chronicler of the humble poor, turned his attention to these ‘poor rich’. Anand’s fictional prince, the Maharaja Ashok Kumar, is one of those who preferred to believe Queen Victoria’s pledge — reaffirmed by subsequent British governments — that their rights would be protected in an independent India. Foolish man. Scion of a long line of equally foolish Maharajas of Sham Fur, Ashok is a charmer, but decadent, spoilt and politically incompetent. Having rid himself of two Maharanees, he is ruled by the whims and hysterics of his mistress, the spellbinding Ganga Dasi. He lives in disintegrating times: his greed and improvidence have led his subjects towards revolt; his assertion of independence is anachronistic and useless. There remains only his sexual obsession, and this survives betrayal and madness to take on an integrity of its own. Anand is a master of character and circumstance, and he recounts his prince’s story with a powerful mixture of psychological understanding, perverse humour and political insight. This is one of the best descriptions of sexual obsession: it is rare to find a portrait of a man bewitched, which is at once so ironic and lyrical, so profoundly affecting.
Mulk Raj Anand was born in Peshawar and after many years in England, returned to India at the end of the Second World War. Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936) are amongst his famous novels.
Age in year of publication: forty-eight.
Jessica Anderson 1916–2010
1978 Tirra Lirra by the River
‘Tirra Lirra’ was the song Sir Lancelot sang as he rode by the river on his way to Camelot. Nora Porteous discovers this in a book of her father’s, who died when she was six. Camelot becomes a region of her mind, a retreat for her artist’s imagination from the dismal gentility of Australian suburbia. Seventy years later, after adult life in Sydney and London, Nora returns to the now empty family home and stretches her memory not only to recall, but to understand the past. In seven flashbacks she contemplates her marriage to the repulsive Colin — ‘Look, just lie still, will you? That’s all you have to do’; her artistic life as a skilled dressmaker and embroiderer; her female life — love, the lack of it, the presence of it in unexpected places, the trauma of an illegal abortion, acutely rendered. Jessica Anderson transforms this superficially simple story of an eighty-year-old woman’s quest for a sense of self into a fine novel. Often laconic, and very often funny, her intuitive understanding of the reek of futility that seeps through most people’s lives produces a telling account of the nobility of the everyday. Nora, ‘a woman of no consequence’, becomes a heroine in one of the very few novels in which an old woman is such a memorable character.
Jessica Anderson was born in Queensland and lived in Sydney. She also wrote short stories, and her novel The Impersonators (1980) was highly praised. Tirra Lirra by the River won the 1978 Miles Franklin Award.
Age in year of publication: sixty-two.
Margaret Atwood 1939–
1996 Alias Grace
Grace Marks was imprisoned in 1843 as an accomplice to the murder of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his mistress, the housekeeper Nancy. Grace is a mysterious person, young, defenceless, not at all stupid, given to the odd remark that keeps her watchers guessing. Her sentence of death is commuted to life imprisonment, at which point she becomes fair game for the doctors and do-gooders who wish to analyse good and evil and women in general, and Grace in particular.
Muffled ambivalences surround Grace, her life, her minders and her betters. The medical absurdities the professionals perpetrate, and the potent contribution of sex, greed and ambition, illuminate the manners of those times, and contrast piteously with the wretched condition of the lower orders in eighteenth-century Canada — as everywhere else.
Alias Grace has the sharp flavour of Margaret Atwood’s formidable intelligence; her ability to control form and structure is always remarkable. Within her easy mastery of social realism she accommodates serious matters, crucial ideas. The battle for power represented by enigmatic sexual encounters shows men manipulating women, and vice versa, in all the ways that flourished then and linger now. Reading this novel is both a gleeful and an exciting experience, because Grace herself is the perfect subject for Margaret Atwood’s talents, embroidering intricate patterns of mystery, wit and paradox on the rough fabric of her story.
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa and lives in Toronto. Among her internationally successful novels are Surfacing (1972), The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), Cat’s Eye (1989) and The Blind Assassin which won the Man Booker Prize in 2000. She is also a poet and critic.
Age in year of publication: fifty-seven.
Beryl Bainbridge 1934–2010
1977 Injury Time
Simpson thought ‘how unfair it was that the nicer moments of life — a few drinks under the belt, good food, a pretty woman seated opposite — were invariably spent in the company of one’s wife’. This selflessness sets the scene for Injury Time, in which Simpson and his wife Muriel trot off to have dinner with Binny, Simpson’s mistress of several years, and with Edward, Simpson’s accountant. This is Binny’s first public dinner party; Edward has a wife, Helen, whose presence is always felt. All of them are in the injury time of life; little do they know that they are also about to enter the last chance saloon. Into Binny’s party, a dinner party from hell, erupts a gaggle of gunmen. Marriages and affairs, topsy-turvy before, disintegrate in the chaos that follows. One of Bainbridge’s specialities is her close inspection of women who are in love with useless men, generally also of dubious physical attraction. Binny is one of Bainbridge’s happiest creations, and Edward a prince of poltroons. There is a wonderful boldness about the works of Beryl Bainbridge, ably assisted by her conjuror’s timing and an enviable ear for the way people talk. Sentimentality withers under her ironic, detached gaze, but canniness and black comedy flourish, as does laughter in this wily account of the ungovernable precariousness of love.