Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2003 and Hilary Mantel on the Novel

 Best of Young British Novelists 2003: Introduction may not seem to an exciting read today, but I found interesting the quotations from Hilary Mantel:

What were we looking for? In the context of Monica Ali’s still-to-be-published first novel, Brick Lane, about a Muslim housewife in east London, I’d mentioned to Hilary something that V. S. Naipaul wrote or said: that one of the points of a novel was to bring the reader ‘news’. Ali’s novel was pertinent to now; she’d imagined what such a woman’s life might be like. Hilary returned to this in an email:

This process has made me think what I want from a novel, and I realize that one of the things I want is ‘news’—in the sense that you mentioned earlier. It seems to me a reader should expect a novel to take her outside the tight circle of her own knowledge and concerns. News may be from alien places or other eras, properly realized on the page. Or it may be from places and people very familiar, reappraised and reinterpreted, or made strange so that the reader has to think about their meaning. It may be news from the inarticulate, who have not spoken for themselves (or who we can’t hear). Or it may be news from the writer’s psyche. What it mustn’t be, for me, is false news, where tricks of style dress up lack of content, or where inauthenticity creeps through a text—that is what happens when a writer is either insufficiently observant about day-to-day life, or has not imagined their fictional world thoroughly enough. It is not only facts that need rigour; fiction needs it badly.

Many writers lived up to this standard; three of those who did and who nearly made the final list—Nick Barlay, Andrew Crumey and Claire Messud—turned out to have been wrongly submitted by their publishers (they were either too old, or not British). But many more didn’t. At our last meeting, one judge mentioned the sense of ‘entitlement’ that rose from the page, as if knocking off a novel was an easy thing to do. Hilary again:

Many of the books we have read have left me perplexed. I understand about those books which are shallow ‘instant’ books, catering to a perceived market. What I don’t understand is novels that aim to last a bit longer, but which are ragged, confused and under-realized… For as long as I’ve been publishing people have been moaning ‘no one does any editing any more’. It’s become a commonplace—so much so that you wonder if there ever was a golden age that reviewers are nostalgic for. But if that is so, if there are fewer good editors, or fewer editors with time to spare, writers have an even stronger obligation [on themselves] to give their public something that hangs together… It’s as if publishers are leaving their young authors to sink or swim, to get their advice from adverse reviews or a disdainful public. Can that be good business? My private hate are those books with a fulsome acknowledgement to the editor, where it is obvious that the editor has done no more than leave the author’s complacency unbruised.

I have read two of Mantel's three historical novels, which I highly recommend to everyone, and see some of what she put in those books, and some ideas of what a writer should put into their own.

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