Just as the Sex Pistols invigorated a hidebound rock establishment, so contemporary noir could wake up literary novels to a wider world
It's pretty obvious that British fiction has been moribund for decades. The blame is usually levelled at a distracted public who, it is said, have better things to do with their time than read novels.
The problem, I think, isn't with the readers but the writers. With a few notable exceptions literary fiction in the UK is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension. The casual reader picks up the latest Booker prize winner and, in the words of Morrissey and Marr, discovers that "it says nothing to me about my life".
Because of England's lack of social mobility, unless they make truly heroic efforts, writers who are privately educated and then go onto Oxbridge or an institution like the BBC will generally embarrass themselves when they attempt to have a go at a working or lower middle-class characters. The fashions and the situations never ring true and the dialogue always sounds like something cribbed from EastEnders. Martin Amis's Lionel Asbo is only the most recent and notorious blunder in a long, ignoble tradition of posh boys trying to talk chav.
Maybe the time has come to jettison the whole literary fiction cadre and seek another way. In 1976 punk did its best to kill the bloated dinosaurs of progressive rock – and although that revolution was largely a failure, for a few years it did tilt the centre of gravity away from soulless upper-class music made by the likes of Genesis, towards energetic working-class bands like Joy Division, the Sex Pistols, the Undertones and the Specials, and towards cities like Manchester, Derry and Coventry. Crime writing could have a similar effect on publishing.
Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat. This tradition began in America with writers like Jim Thompson and James M Cain, who wrote about grifters, losers, petty crooks and bums. These were struggling working stiffs barely making it, and only a wrong decision away from falling between the cracks or pushing someone else into one. The hardboiled school took off in the UK after the second world war and contemporary writers in this tradition articulate the voice of today's underclasses in a way that is accessible for mainstream audiences. People like David Peace, Ian Rankin, Ruth Rendell, Declan Burke, PD James and Eoin McNamee are able to take a genre novel and use it to explore class, race, gender, sexuality and other ripe issues in a way that literary fiction writers often cannot.
An intricate dissection of the boundary between working and lower-middle class Yorkshire life is a running theme throughout David Peace's 1974 and is as well observed as anything from the pen of Alan Bennett.
"Having a nice time?"
"You know Barry. Gets a bit obtuse," I whispered.
"Obtuse? That's a big word for you."
Throughout Peace's Red Riding Quartet working-class detectives, journalists and other professionals find themselves trapped in that awkward world of class unease, pushed and pulled, mocked and abused, from above and below. In the latest Ian Rankin Inspector Rebus novel, Standing In Another Man's Grave, class war manifests itself in the choice between a prawn Marie Rose sandwich or bacon flavoured crisps.
Perhaps because of their crowd-pleasing origins, crime novels have an unjustified reputation for literary shoddiness. Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe weren't the first or the last authors to beg posterity to ignore their crime fiction and concentrate on their "more serious" works. Julian Barnes and John Banville, to name but two, have taken the precaution of assuming pen-names when publishing in the mystery genre. But it's unfair to tar all mystery novelists with the James Patterson brush – there are good books and bad ones, well-drawn charcters and shoddily-written ones. In Declan Burke's brilliant metafictional Absolute Zero Cool, the protagonist is so enraged by his portrayal in Burke's crime novel that he starts stalking the author.
Crime fiction also has its problems with the demotic, of course, though it is remarkable how flexible, responsive and resilient it is as a genre. In 1946 George Orwell was writing about The Decline of the English Murder but a quick scan of the shelves of WH Smith's demonstrates that the English murder has not only survived but thrived. The crime fiction novel (and the occasional football novel) is about the only place where you'll read about Birmingham or Manchester – or Reykjavik or Botswana, come to that. And it's in the English murder, not the English literary novel, that you are much more likely to hear authentic blue collar voices and dialogue. In the crime fiction section you may just find a novel that talks about the place where you're from, and speaks to you about your life – or the life yours could have become if a little misfortune had come your way.
via Books: Fiction | guardian.co.uk
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