Yesterday’s post had a list of MPs who abstained in this week’s Commons vote on airstrikes in Syria. Today’s post is another list. I’m becoming an obsessive-compulsive list-maker. It’s not a new complaint; much of The Old Testament is lists of who begat whom and Burke’s and Debrett are keeping up the good work.
I wrote a few days ago (Hatchard Job) about a short list of the six best novels published in the last 200 years. The original post contained a howler, now corrected; I conflated Philip and Joseph Roth. Here is another list of novels, with at least two things in common. The first is that I have read them all and I’ll come onto the second later.
Stella Gibbons; Cold Comfort Farm. Graham Greene; Stamboul Train. Aldous Huxley; Brave New World. Nancy Mitford; Christmas Pudding. Joseph Roth; Radetsky March. Damon Runyan; Guys and Dolls. Evelyn Waugh; Black Mischief. P G Wodehouse; Hot Water. Novels by John Buchan, Agatha Christie, Hermann Hesse, Somerset Maugham, Anthony Powell, Arthur Ransome, Dorothy Sayers and John Steinbeck could be included but I haven’t read them.
Go on, admit that it’s quite a starry list. What do they all have in common? They were all published in 1932. A single year produced enough fiction to (almost) satisfy me for a lifetime. I would not be happy to be condemned to read only fiction published in a single year of this century. Why should this be so? I don’t know but I suggest that potential novelists now are script writers for film, video and TV. Again, it might be our fault – we just don’t buy enough fiction. When we do, we buy the trashy stuff, so there is no longer the diversity of authors that wrote in the 1930s. We will turn to this again in 83 years and see how many 2015 novels are still in print.