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Meanwhile back in British fiction it was nostalgia time. Nearly all six novels in the Booker shortlist were what, standing there glowing in the eye of the camera, I unwisely chose to call Gra
I’m older now. With the wisdom of hindsight I see I may have spoken a bit too freely, been a smidgen extreme, a mite extravagant, even laid it on a little. I was talking about books I had at best skim-read, at worst digested simply by reading the blurb (to tell the truth, I found time to read some of them properly later, and they pleasantly surprised me). No doubt, as their authors claimed, they were born of the deep wisdom of a full human experience from the red-hot fires of the imagination. I now know it is often the young who are most nostalgic for the past they’ve yet to acquire, and have a lively instinct for faking history. I have discovered through effort (how much effort you’ll see later, if you just read on) that even the lives of the old can be complicated, their response to existence wise, that there are things about history we ought to remember. But imagine the set-up, try to share it. I was still an i
I chattered. Words like sentimental, parochial, traditional freely passed my lips. After a few sentences the he
It took a while to realize I had seriously misjudged the whole occasion. The fact is, at the Booker, the glitterati are not the literati at all. The first person I spoke to said he was Neil Ki
At last, impatient, I stopped a passing penguin suit – he turned out to be John Major, though he probably did not know that himself then – and asked to be directed toward some writers. After a moment of thought, he smiled affably and pointed me in the direction of the far, portrait-hung wall. He proved (on this question certainly) entirely in the right. Up against the wall, in a terrified herd, I found the shortlisted six, the authors whose books were being weighed against each other for the prize. They were huddled together, drinking glasses of orange-juice’ and surrounded by sad-looking literary agents and publishers’ publicity girls, every one of them called Fiona. As I expected, they were mostly elderly ladies, though one was a very young girl just learning the gra
I summoned up my charm (maybe I should say that from time to time I do have some) and approached the Fionas, saying I wanted to interview their charges on the influence of Dirty Realism on their work. Speaking as one Fiona, they refused point-blank, explaining no interviews were allowed until the result had been a