Rhapsody: Notes on Strange Fictions (35 page)

And unrealised, I’d note, is not the same as unrecognised. Whether it’s a matter of e
xplication, excuse or exploitation, tapping the trope-trove or adding to it, reinventing or replenishing, the power of the quirk is such that for all the gulf of propriety between the uptown district of Literature and the downtown district of Genre, the estrangement I’m dealing with here is far from being the sole province of the latter.

It had to happen, that turning of the tables in the Bistro de Critique. For years, the distinctly literary approach of many writers in the ghetto wasn’t just inviting compar
isons with their forebears and contemporaries in the uptown district of Literature; it was demanding it. A critic could hardly help but see the influence of Vladimir Nabokov in the work of Jeff VanderMeer, say, or of Franz Kafka in the work of Jeffrey Ford. The walls of the ghetto slowly weakened as writers like Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem tunnelled under them to pass freely back and forth; and eventually those walls came crashing down, a brave new world emerging from the ruins, a world foreshadowed by the placement of Kelly Link’s
Magic for Beginners
at #3 in
Time
magazine’s Top Five Books of 2005, alongside Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and E.L. Doctorow. In this new day and age, it was inevitable that deserving works of SF would finally catch the eyes of the literary establishment.

As far back as 2008, in fact, an article in the
Times Online
set out the fifty greatest British writers since 1945. It was the sort of utterly subjective list which says more about the people who put it together than anything else, but kind of interesting for that reason. If the
Times
doesn’t count as literary establishment, after all, what does? Whether we agree or disagree personally with the names on it, this is a list of the most laudable, not in the sense of the most objectively worthy, but in the sense of the most feasibly lauded, of those who the compilers feel secure in placing on their little pedestals.

In the Bistro de Critique that list might have passed without much notice, but I r
emember laying it out on the counter of the SF Café, and grinning to myself. Looking at this list, you see, you have a handful of poets:

1. Philip Larkin

4. Ted Hughes

23. Penelope Fitzgerald

31. Derek Walcott

36. Geoffrey Hill

39. George Mackay Brown

47. Alice Oswald

48. Benjamin Zephaniah

You also have a couple of non-fiction writers:

40. A. J. P. Taylor

41. Isaiah Berlin

You have a grand total of ten writers who have worked solely within the genre(s) of realism, contemporary or otherwise:

7. V. S. Naipaul

12. Iris Murdoch

20. Anthony Powell

21. Alan Sillitoe

25. Barbara Pym

30. John Fowles

33. Anita Brookner

37. Hanif Kureishi

45. Colin Thubron

46. Bruce Chatwin

You have two writers who’ve worked in the popular genre of the spy novel:

14. Ian Fleming

22. John le Carré

Of the rest, well, we’ll separate out the writers who’ve played around with historical and prehistorical fiction, because while these could be seen as artificially constructed elsewhens comparable to those of fantasy or alternate history, they’re more exotic than fantastic in its common usage (the incredible with implications of the chimeric and/or the marvellous), and we wouldn’t want to push a point. So:

3. William Golding

26. Beryl Bainbridge

49. Rosemary Sutcliff

Then, however, you have a whole bunch of fiction writers, all of whom have, at some point in their career, written works which utilise the strange in its strangest mode—nova or chimerae, disruptions of credibility, the alethic modality of could not happen. Some writers have worked with a sort of slipstream blend of naturalism and the unreal, some have only written one or two works utilising a strange conceit of some description, and some are best described as magic realists (or even
Magic Realists
, if we want to consider the approach a closely definable, marketable category.) But more than a few have written what we’d call
science fiction
,
fantasy
or
horror
—and in the outright
Genre
usages of those terms):

2. George Orwell

5. Doris Lessing

6. J.R.R. Tolkien

8. Muriel Spark

9. Kingsley Amis

10. Angela Carter

11. C. S. Lewis

13. Salman Rushdie

15. Jan Morris

16. Roald Dahl

17. Anthony Burgess

18. Mervyn Peake

19. Martin Amis

24. Philippa Pearce

27. J. G. Ballard

28. Alan Garner

29. Alasdair Gray

32. Kazuo Ishiguro

34. A. S. Byatt

35. Ian McEwan

38. Iain Banks

42. J. K. Rowling

43. Philip Pullman

44. Julian Barnes

50. Michael Moorcock

That’s twenty-five of the
Times Online
’s fifty greatest British writers since 1945. Which is to say fifty percent. As opposed to ten dyed-in-the-wool realists. Which is to say twenty percent, over that last half-century and a bit—where of all time periods we should expect to see the mimeticists privileged over purveyors of the strange, of the incredible and marvellous.

Ah, yes. I still remember thinking wryly of how this was at odds with the ghetto mentality of us genre kids: yeah, that damned mainstream with its lite
rary establishment, always pissing on our genre cause they’re, like, mundanes, so boring, so banal. All they’ll ever take seriously is that dreary, dull, depressing
Realism
stuff… Yeah!

Even as far back as 2008 the writing was on the wall, the names of twenty-five bona fide writers of strange fiction scribbled in black ink graffiti on a stall in the toilets of the Bistro de Critique. This was the shape of things to come.

—No SF novel ever won the Booker, they say in the SF Café, damn near every year, when that season comes around. In the SF Café, every year when that plaudit is about to be announced, we can expect more of the same old same old, mutterings about the absence of
genre fiction
from the shortlist. But this is what’s happening right now in the Bistro de Critique:

In the Bistro de Critique, the Last Realist comes staggering out of that toilet stall, dishevelled and haggard, eyes wild with visions of the future he’s a fug
itive from, visions of geeks and freaks lauded for writing tales of singularities and superheroes, visions of the
Untermenschen
pouring out of the ghetto of Genre, storming the Bistro de Critique.

—There’s a Reign of Terror coming! he cries. Well, a Reign of
Horror
, strictly speaking…and
Fantasy
, and that sodding freaking
Science Fiction
too. An Unholy Trinity of the Unreal. Oh, they don’t always call it that—they’re fucking sneaky that way—but it’s…it’s…
genre fiction!

He collapses into a chair, slumps forward, head in hands.

—We just didn’t see it coming, he moans. I mean, no SF novel ever won the Booker.

He looks down, kicks his heels.

—I mean, okay, sure, Rushdie got the Booker of Bookers with
Midnight’s Children
, and but that’s not SF, albeit you could maybe argue it’s a work of fantasy, I guess. And, okay, sure, we teach Spenser and Milton, Shakespeare and Blake in the Temple of Academia. And, okay, sure, we always had a lot of time for Kathy Acker, Mikhail Bulgakov, Angela Carter, and…well, too many to mention, really.

He coughs nervously.

—But that’s not the point. Thing is, the question was never whether any SF novel deserved to win the Booker, as much as it was whether any novel that deserved the Booker was really SF. Like,
Midnight’s Children
may be a work of fantasy, but it ain’t
Fantasy
, see? You and I know that; it’s
Literary Fiction
. Hell, even the genre bunnies got that; why else would they talk about
literary fantasy
or
literary SF
? As if those weren’t oxymorons!

He slumps further forward till his head rests on the table, buried in his arms, his words (and sobs) muffled.

—It used to be so simple. We had them in their place with the whole
literary/genre
thing. Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Blake—when they tried to co-opt the canon to their cause we just laughed, said they were appropriating ancestors for a spurious validation. And as for Acker, Bulgakov and Carter, they aren’t
genre
writers, we said. If they aren’t generic, how can they be
genre
?

—But everything changes, he tells the gathered literati.

In the Bistro de Critique of twenty years into tomorrow, he’s now the only one left still scorning the grand claims of all the genre kids, insisting that it was the realism in the magic realism that made these works great, that
Midnight’s Children
may be
fantastical
but it’s not really
fantasy
; that no SF novel will ever win the Booker, and for good reason; that
The Road
winning the Pulitzer doesn’t count. Oh, but he should have seen it coming.

—Am I too late? he says. What year is it? Have they given the fucking N
obel to Doris Lessing yet?