Age in year of publication: sixty-five.
Doris Lessing 1919–
1962 The Golden Notebook
This is one of the most powerful and influential novels of the late twentieth century. Through the experiences of a writer, Anna Wulf, Doris Lessing investigates the moral, intellectual and sexual crises of our age. Anna Wulf is a heroine as vividly imagined as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Anna keeps four notebooks: a black notebook for her writing; a red notebook for politics; a yellow notebook which tells stories; and a blue notebook, her diary and a record of breakdown and psychoanalysis. The golden notebook connects each and brings the story full circle. Set in London in the 1950s, the novel is a testament to that decade, with its political tensions and disillusionments, but its centre is Anna’s search for truths which are not simple, which match life itself.
The four notebooks describe the scattered quality of women’s experience: that time of life when a woman is absolutely wrapped up in lovers, husbands, men’s bodies, sex, with a mind always partially elsewhere — with children in particular, and with women friends, ideas, beliefs. And then there is work, usually killed by all the rest of it.
Lessing’s distinctive and original mind, tough and prickly, marches in step with her vigorous way of telling a story. The Golden Notebook, airing all our dilemmas, holds a mirror to our times.
Doris Lessing was born in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran), and moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) at the age of six. She left for England in 1949 where she has lived ever since. She has written thirty novels and ten works of non-fiction, including two volumes of her autobiography. She lives in London. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007.
Age in year of publication: forty-three.
David Lodge 1935–
1975 Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses
This is one of three very funny novels, all carefully crafted and plotted, which David Lodge has written about university life in England and the United States. The other two are Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1989), but there is a sort of symmetry coupled with a rage for disorder in Changing Places that makes it his best book.
Two professors change places: Philip Swallow from the University of Rummidge in darkest England does an exchange with Morris Zapp of Euphoric State in the land of opportunity. (Rummidge is a version of Birmingham, Euphoric State a version of San Francisco.) Swallow is ‘unconfident, eager to please, infinitely suggestible’; Zapp has ‘an apocalyptic imagination’. They leave their wives behind, but take with them their cultural differences. America, to Swallow, is open and glamorous — it is after all 1969 and anything can happen. England, to Zapp, is dank and cold. One of Swallow’s former students, a failure at Rummidge, has become a phone-in show host in Euphoric State, and he plays an important part in one of the funniest scenes of the novel. Both men take a serious interest in each other’s wives. The moral of the novel is that Americans, at least in the short term, awaken the sleeping sexuality of the English and are therefore a good thing. Another moral may be that people should stay in their own countries unless they want to be deeply unsettled and much misunderstood.
David Lodge was born in London. He has worked for many years as an academic. His comic gifts are apparent in early novels such as The British Museum is Falling Down (1965), and his later work includes How Far Can You Go? (1980), Therapy (1995), Home Truths (1999), Thinks (2001), Author, Author (2004) and Deaf Sentence (2008).
Age in year of publication: forty.
Bernard MacLaverty 1942–
1980 Lamb
Bernard MacLaverty’s three novels, Lamb, Cal (1983) and Grace Notes (1997), and his four volumes of short stories, deal with the dramatic possibilities of the conflict within the human character between the areas of darkness and brutality and the capacity for love and tenderness. His prose is clean and spare, combining a clear and easy tone with moments of pure poetry. He offers his characters a level of understanding and sympathy which is rare among contemporary male novelists; he is not afraid to create scenes of pure unadulterated emotion.
In Lamb, Brother Sebastian works in a Borstal in the west of Ireland. Using a legacy from his dead father, he escapes to England with a twelve-year-old boy, Owen Kane. The novel is the story of their misadventures; the boy’s vulnerability and his epilepsy make his minder more and more anxious to protect him and love him, and make the outside world of authority — brothers, lawyers, hotel keepers — seem harsh and cruel, and make the ending of this story of the failure of a dream of love inevitable and very moving. The novel is short — just over a hundred and fifty pages — and as tense as a thriller; the set scenes are perfect; the reader knows that this sojourn will be doomed and short-lived, and reads on in terror hoping that the two main characters will survive.
Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast but has lived in Scotland for many years. Lamb and Cal have been made into films. Grace Notes was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His later work includes The Anatomy School (2001) and a collection of stories Matters of Life and Death (2006).
Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.
Alistair MacLeod 1936–
1976 The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
The name Alistair MacLeod does not appear in many surveys of contemporary writing. He has written only two books, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986), and these contain seven stories each. His tone is old-fashioned, close to certain classic Irish writers, the James Joyce of Dubliners, the fiction of John McGahern or Mary Lavin; close also to the tone and timbre of certain Scottish and Irish ballads.
His stories are set in Cape Breton or Newfoundland, his characters are involved in fishing or mining, or, in some of the best work, come from fishing or mining communities but have abandoned them for cities, and are caught now between the two places. MacLeod is, like almost nobody else, able to deal with pure rawness of emotion in the relationship between parents and children, in the drama enacted around ties of blood. His landscapes can be savage and alien, but for those who inhabit them they are real and true, and haunting for those who try to abandon them. He writes simply and clearly; his openings often dry and factual, he uses the present tense with particular skill, some of his accounts of the rituals and sorrows of leavetaking almost unbearably poignant. In Canada his two books are considered classics; he deserves to be better known in the rest of the world.
Alistair MacLeod was born in Saskatchewan. When he was ten his parents moved back to the family farm on Cape Breton. He now lives in Windsor, Ontario. His novel No Great Mischief (1999) won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award.
Age in year of publication: forty.
Eugene McCabe 1930–
1992 Death and Nightingales