Patrick Parrinder

David Craig has an unfashionable concern with truth-telling in fiction. In his earlier role as a literary critic, he wrote a book called The Real Foundations in which he showed how some of the most respected 19th and 20th-century novelists and poets had blatantly falsified social reality. If a work of realistic fiction is to be convincing in general, according to Craig, it ought to convince us in particulars. Now he has written a historical novel which opens with the solemn affirmation that ‘many of the people, incidents and other items in this story are real. Where a fact existed, I have never knowingly substituted an invented item for it.’

‘The rich are different from us.’ ‘Yes – they have more money.’ Though it is Hemingway’s riposte that sticks in the memory, Scott Fitzgerald’s belief in the difference of the rich has one thing to be said for it: it makes far more sense of the history of the novel. The rich and their doings are clearly over-represented in the house of fiction, and access to wealth almost invariably affects or confirms a fictional character’s identity. It may do so for the better or worse, and either way it tends to act as an enticement to readers.’

‘Brush up your Shakespeare,’ instructed Cole Porter. Is Shakespeare part of popular culture, and if so, whose popular culture? Does the Bard’s writ extend to the wrong side of the tracks – say, to 49 Bard Road, Brixton, where Wise Children begins? Is he still in any sense the poet of the groundlings, and not merely of the powerful and the chattering classes whose legitimation-anxieties he so searchingly addresses? (There is no one so anxious nor so devoted to Shakespeare as a legitimate prince, to judge by the current heir to the throne.) We have heard all too many earnest pronouncements, including a correspondence in the London Review, in recent months, as if these alone could determine the future place of Shakespeare in the educational and cultural life of the nation. What a relief then, to come upon Angela Carter’s new novel, an uproarious Bottom’s-eye view of Bardolatry and Bardbiz, full of cardboard crowns, asses’ heads, and actors strutting, fretting, singing and dancing! Wise Children will give pleasure to thousands of readers, and it may even have the added merit of conveying without tears a hard-fought slice of the National Curriculum.’

In 1830 the prophet John Wroe asked his congregation of Christian Israelites in Ashton-under-Lyne for seven virgins to serve in his household. The Israelites had already built a Sanctuary and four gatehouses at Ashton, in the belief that the Lancashire cotton town was to be the site of the New Jerusalem. Mr Wroe got his virgins, but less than a year later he was almost lynched by his flock after the church elders had acquitted him on charges of indecency. His later career was pursued as a missionary, notably in Australia where the Christian Israelite sect still survives. He died at Melbourne in 1863. Who the seven virgins were, and what happened to them, is not recorded.

‘Our lives teach us who we are,’ Salman Rushdie observed in one of three widely-read and somewhat contradictory statements of faith that he published last year. These are now reprinted at the end of Imaginary Homelands, a compendious collection of book reviews, cultural critiques and political essays written over the last ten years and, for the most part, in much less fraught circumstances. Inevitably one’s reading of the volume is dominated by the fact that it is by the author of The Satanic Verses, a book which has brought down more vilification on its author’s head than any other text in the history of the novel. In February 1990, after a year spent in hiding under the protection of the British Security forces, Rushdie’s essay ‘In Good Faith’ reiterated his stance as a secular man, a man without religion, and one who was ‘not a Muslim’. Then last December he published a three-page declaration: ‘Why I have embraced Islam’.’