Jonathan Coe

There comes a time in the lives of most public figures, it seems, when the exhortation of agents and publishers becomes too much to resist and there is nothing for it but to start writing books about themselves. In the case of Robin Day (Sir Robin, I suppose, if one is not to repeat Mrs Thatcher’s famous gaffe) that time has come at the age of 68; in the case of Kenneth Branagh, at the age of 28. Make of that what you will.

Bloomsbury have again brought out their hefty collection of contemporary writing just in time for Christmas, and indeed the enterprise is suffused with a sort of Christmas spirit. This ‘feast of new writing’ conjures up images of a lavish get-together where the nation’s literati – that quarrelsome but essentially close-knit family – bury their differences and gather noisily around the dinner table. Crusty old patriarchs and rebellious daughters sit in amicable adjacency, Candia McWilliam pulls crackers with Harold Pinter, and the whole atmosphere (though no one would like to admit it) is rather jolly.’

In the first place, let’s try to forget the word ‘experimental’, which has always been one of criticism’s more useless bits of terminology. There is really only one distinction to be made: between those novelists who think carefully about form, and those who do not. If there is anything new to be said, after all, the chances are that there will have to be found new ways of saying it, and yet nothing seems to send readers running for cover more quickly than the suggestion that they are to be thrown in at the deep end of the novel’s liquid possibilities. Perhaps this explains why one of this country’s more ambitious fictional enterprises has, for the last 11 years, been taking shape more or less under cover of secrecy. Nicholas Mosley’s Catastrophe Practice, published in 1979, was the first of a series of five highly intelligent novels, ostensibly concerned with the shifting relationships of a small group of characters, and linked less by narrative than by a patchwork of recurring images and thematic obsessions. The first book introduced the protagonists by the roundabout means of three plays and a short novel: it also included some polemical essays which took pains to set out the rationale behind the project very clearly. They stressed the need to devise new structures of thinking and language which would ‘provide for both art and science an encompassing covenant’: the need for a new literature of self-consciousness (‘the theatre has been accustomed to observe how people behave; what might now be observed is people’s observing’); and the need for new literary forms which jettison the dishonesties of tragedy and comedy in favour of a more explicitly liberal, optimistic and humanist position (this in the wearied knowledge that ‘to suggest working optimism in a sophisticated world is to be thought presumptuous’). The second novel, Imago Bird, followed the London-based adventures of Bert, a mixed-up 18-year-old who – like Mosley himself – happened to be related to a famous politician and afflicted with a nasty stammer. Serpent, the third in the series, was set almost entirely on an aeroplane carrying Bert’s sister Lilia and her husband Jason to a film location in Israel. The eponymous heroine of Judith was a young actress who became, at various points, the lover of each of the male protagonists. And now we have the concluding volume, Hopeful Monsters, which surprises both in the density of its intellectual lumber and in its comparatively straightforward way of unloading it onto the reader. In tracing the love affair of Max Ackerman (previously referred to as ‘the Professor’) and Eleanor Anders (often identified in the earlier novels by her pudding-basin haircut) it manages to take in most of the scientific and political highlights of the Twenties and Thirties: unrest in Berlin, the rise of the Nazis, the Spanish Civil War, the splitting of the atom – it’s all here.’

The terms ‘Catholic writers’ and ‘women writers’ were invented by critics to make their own lives easier, at the cost, no doubt, of making the lives of certain authors more exasperating. They are dangerous terms because they tempt us to lump writers like Muriel Spark and Alice Thomas Ellis together, especially when there are other alluring points of comparison, such as a characteristic tone which at first can seem no more than coolly ironic, and even – in these latest books – some clear similarities of plot (both novels touch on the predicaments of women who know they are about to be murdered). As it turns out, though, just about the only thing which Symposium and The Inn at the Edge of the World have in common is a readiness to be ceaselessly entertaining even when absorbed in the treatment of issues which are, for both authors, of the most deadly seriousness. If the contrasts in temperament and narrative method are what strike us first, it seems likely that these will finally boil down to a fundamental difference in the sense of what it means to be a Catholic: so this has to be addressed, however much we may feel – in Muriel Spark’s case, anyway – that the field has already been ploughed pretty thoroughly.’

Amos Oz and David Grossman are both political writers. This might seem an obvious statement, given that they are well-known for being politically vocal and have both written political (non-fiction) books consisting of interviews with their Palestinian and Israeli countrymen. But the main thing is that they also write intensely and truthfully political novels of the sort which tend to he thin on the ground in Britain. Partly, no doubt, this is a question of Israel’s history, and of the urgency of the material which it offers, hut there’s also the possibility that when a writer decides to leap boldly into the area where ideology leaves off and action begins, significant analogies between political and literary activity start to emerge. One of them has to do with the nature of lies, because the fundamentalist Platonic position that ‘telling stories is telling lies’ has haunted the conscience of the imaginative writer for centuries. Even Sidney’s attempt to brush it off by claiming that the poet ‘nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth’ seems more than a little shifty: a real politician’s manoeuvre, in fact. It doesn’t deflect attention from the central link between politics and literature, which is that they both boil down to the art of lying in the name (supposedly) of a higher truth.