This is a familiar England, where emphysemic pigeons land hacking on window sills and keel over dead, and where babies munch razor blades and happily burble blood. In this pungent Swiftian attack, using as many nasty images as possible, Self cuts to the gut and watches his subject bleed, usually to death. His writing is always elegant, his invention lurid and his mind a whirlpool of ideas.
Will Self was born and lives in London. His acclaimed short story collections are The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), Grey Area (1994) and Tough, Tough Toys for Tough, Tough Boys (1998). His other novels include Great Apes (1997), How the Dead Live (2000), The Book of Dave (2006) and The Butt (2008).
Age in year of publication: thirty-two.
Vikram Seth 1952–
1993 A Suitable Boy
At almost fifteen hundred pages long, A Suitable Boy is a sprawling, engaging and supremely confident novel set in the early years of independent India. It is essentially an old-fashioned tale of manners with a political background, as though Anthony Trollope had applied his skills to modern India. Its power and its extraordinary popularity derive from its array of characters and the real aura of warmth and glow and even love which surrounds their creation.
The main story is that of Mrs Rupa Mehra’s efforts to find a suitable husband for her daughter Lata. Mrs Mehra is bossy, emotional and ambitious, and Lata is intelligent, wilful and also ambitious, but in a different way. The novel dramatizes the clash between traditional morals and manners and the vagaries of the young. Seth loves playing off the haughty against the humble, the feckless and charming against the conservative and staid. There is an infinite number of minor characters, and long, fascinating digressions about land reforms and other aspects of political life in India. The light tone, the delight in the detail, the eye for pure comedy and drama, and the fearless use of nineteenth-century literary devices make the book easy to read, and justify its astonishing length.
Vikram Seth was born in Calcutta. His other books include An Equal Music (1999), The Golden Gate: A Novel In Verse (1986), From Heaven’s Lake: Travels Through Sinkiang and Tibet (1983) and Two Lives (2005).
Age in year of publication: forty-one.
Bapsi Sidhwa 1938–
1988 Ice-Candy-Man
(US: Cracking India)
From the lap of her beautiful Ayah, or clutching her skirts as Ayah is pursued by her suitors through the fountains, cypresses and marble terraces of the Shalimar Gardens, little Lenny observes the clamorous horrors of Partition. It is 1947. Lenny lives in Lahore, in the bosom of her extended Parsee family — Mother, Father, brother Adi, Cousin, Electric-Aunt, Godmother and Slavesister. Working for them, or panting after Ayah, are Butcher, the puny Sikh zoo attendant, the Government House gardener, the favoured Masseur, the restaurant-owning wrestler and the shady Ice-Candy-Man — Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, friends and neighbours — until their ribald, everyday world disintegrates before the violence of religious hatred.
No other novel catches as this one does India’s centuries-old ways of living with religious difference before Partition. Lenny is inquisitive and notices everything: clothes, smells, colour, the patina of skin, sex everywhere, and eyes — olive oil coloured, sly eyes, fearful eyes. In writing which is often lyrical, always tender and clever, with a nuance here, a touch there, Sidhwa shows us the seedbed of the Partition massacres — an abused Untouchable, the ritual disembowelling of a goat, a priest shuddering over the hand of a menstruating woman. This laughing, gentle tale, told through the eyes of innocence, is a testament to savage loss, and a brilliant evocation of the prowling roots of religious intolerance.
Bapsi Sidhwa was born in Karachi, grew up in Lahore and lives in Pakistan and the USA where she teaches. Other novels are The Crow Eaters (1978) and The Bride (1983).
Age in year of publication: fifty.
Alan Sillitoe 1928–2010
1958 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
If this novel were written in French, it is possible that its protagonist, Arthur Seaton, would be an existentialist hero and the book an essential modern text; instead, it was written in English and it is known as a story about the antics and highjinks of the northern English working class.
In the first chapter our Arthur gets drunk, falls down the stairs, vomits all over a man and then takes a woman not his wife back to her house to bed while her husband is away. All of this is good fun, clearly written and well paced. But the novel then becomes darker and stranger.
Arthur lives at a considerable distance from his own experience. He prefers other men’s wives, and feels only slightly uneasy when he meets the husband. He barely exists during his time in the factory. He has no religion, and the idea of England for him and his family, especially his cousins, is a sour joke. Even the idea of family and community has broken down. Arthur is unusual in modern fiction: he does not use his intelligence, it is not important for him, and yet he is never stupid — his instincts and his appetites dictate his behaviour, and this gives the novel great integrity and originality.
Alan Sillitoe was born in Nottingham and lived in both London and France. He wrote many novels including The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959). His Collected Stories were published in 1995.
Age in year of publication: thirty.
Iain Sinclair 1943–
1991 Downriver (or the Vessels of Wrath):
A Narrative in Twelve Tales
This novel reads like an Old Testament for the east side of London. The tone is sombre and sinister, at times bitter and satirical, at times unsparing in its venom and hatred for England under Margaret Thatcher, who appears here as The Widow, and for ad-men, TV people and property speculators, not to speak of wine bars. The stories are loosely connected: there is a long interview; there are letters; characters appear, disappear, reappear, but Sinclair is at his most content when they disappear mysteriously, leaving strange traces. Downriver is a big Ulysses of a book which can contain anything and everything including echoes of and references to Conrad, Eliot (there is a newspaper-seller called Tiresias), William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Hawksmoor and many others living and dead, including the ‘author’ himself. There is an extraordinary rhythmic energy in Sinclair’s prose; he loves big, long snaky sentences; huge lists; apocalyptic moments; quotations; arcane references; titles of obscure books; newcharacters; pubs; the Irish in London; place names. For him, capitalism is a form of terrorism, with money moving across London like napalm. Sinclair is interested in layers of narrative and layers of time and experience: he allows the past to haunt the book, allows whole sections to become quests for something half-lost, half-forgotten and misunderstood. His London is a dark ghostly placewhose spirit is available only to the few; his book is one of the several enduring, playful — dare one say Modernist? — monuments to Thatcher produced by British novelists.