In this Issue:
Let’s Get Lit
A request
Are we in for a new golden age of fiction?
Hi friends!
First, a quick note. Will Carver and I have started a podcast, Let’s Get Lit. Reading. Writing. Drinking. Give it a listen…!
Post-pandemic Fiction?
I’ve been reading a fair few books recently (especially this week, as I’ve taken myself off somewhere in the countryside, partly as I need a little break, but also because I want to read my fellow panellists’ books in preparation for my event at Capital Crime next week). And I’ve noticed something interesting.
Lots of books published in the last couple of years seemed to be grappling with the pandemic, and in many (but not all) cases I have to say the pandemic won. The wise few set their novels in the pre-Covid years, but many chose to tackle it in their fiction, with varying success. Some of those were great, but others weren’t. Many writing novels during the lockdown years either pretended it hadn’t happened, or was over, or else they fell foul of the the strange times we all suddenly found ourselves in and ended up writing books that were just… weird.
I include myself in that latter category. I wrote a whole book in 2020, and right up until the end of that lost year I thought it was pretty good. But then I read it, and realised it was just… bonkers. All over the place. As someone who enjoys time alone, and is quite self-contained, I’d thought I was coping pretty well with lockdown isolation, but clearly it’d messed with my head. In the cold light of day the book I’d written was… well a bit of a mess. I’m not going to go into what was wrong with it (I find it all too easy to feed the beast that tells me I’m not good enough without doing it on purpose!), and many people have read the draft of that book and told me it’s pretty good and could have been great. But to me? It wasn’t working. It will always be my pandemic novel (even though I didn’t mention Covid at all). The one that got away, but also the book I’m still glad I didn’t take to publication.
So the lockdown stage of the pandemic messed with people’s heads. Not surprising. And some less than stellar books were not only written but published (also not surprising). But we seem to have entered a new phase of post-(covid)-pandemic fiction. Let me explain.
After the escapism of the last year or so, many of the books I’m reading at the moment (mostly out recently or due to come out soon) have swung back round to dealing with the Covid Pandemic, but with one crucial difference. There’s a distance there now, a solidity to them. This is no shock. It’s difficult to have any kind of rational, considered thought about what’s happening while you’re in the middle of a crisis, and this is doubly true when the crisis is chronic and ongoing. But now that we’re (hopefully) over the worst, people are reflecting on the events of 2020-22 from ground that’s more solid. These books are written with an assuredness, and when Covid-19 is mentioned it is neither diminished nor given centre stage. Instead, authors seem to have found a way of talking around the pandemic, and examining it from different, more interesting, angles.
In some ways it’s similar to the books published immediately after the end of World War II. Back then, fiction was concerned not so much with the events of wartime, but instead with the profound effect the war had had on individuals, societies, and the world at large. Books sought to capture the human experiences and complex emotions that emerged from the conflict, and writers dealt with themes of loss, trauma, resilience, and the struggle to find normality in a world that had changed utterly.
Not surprisingly writers of fiction looked at the broader social and political implications of the war by looking through a dystopian lens. We had books like Slaughterhouse-Five, Ninteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. Stories that reflected on totalitarianism and the abuse of power, but didn’t necessarily mention the real war society had just lived through.
In some ways it was a golden age for fiction and I wonder if we’re in for the same, a slew of brilliant books that act both as catharsis and critical reflection on the events we’ve all lived through. In my more pessimistic days recently I’ve worried that it can’t happen now, the publishing world has become increasingly risk-averse and for now anyway it seems to have decided that readers only want jolly, feel-good, cosy books.
But on the strength of the last few books I‘ve read, the pendulum might just be swinging back the other way. I think maybe we’re in for exciting times.