routledge+history+of+literature+in+english

530 The twentieth century: 1945 to the present
talk, but he keep it quiet. Monkey know that if he talk in front of
man, man going to catch him and beat him and make him work.
Make him carry load in hot sun. Make him paddle boat. Citoyens!
Citoyennes! We will teach these people to be like monkey. We will
send them to the bush and let them work their arse off.’
Caryl Phillips is seen by some critics as a young Naipaul. His subject
matter is often identity and settlement, questioning state, culture, and even
the flow of time, in historical and geographical terms. Phillips is West
Indian by birth, British by upbringing, but universal in his concerns. Among
his novels are Crossing the River (1993) and A State of Independence (1986).
Ian McEwan came to prominence with two volumes of vivid stories –
First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Between the Sheets (1978) – involving
the kind of graphic revulsion that Martin Amis was also using in the mid-
1970s though McEwan’s prose is more detached than Amis’s. When he
moved on to the full-length novel he mined a vein which explores Europe’s
post-war heritage, and in The Innocent (1990) and Black Dogs (1992) he
has related the nightmare of the cold war to present-day realities, bringing
past and present together in an attempt to examine and assuage guilt
while exploring a new post-cold war identity. His The Child in Time
(1987) is also a novel of discovery after loss – about the kidnapping of a
child, and the ensuing re-establishment of a life and marriage.
William Boyd made his name as a comic novelist with A Good Man in
Africa (1981) and followed this by examining a marginal wartime episode
in An Ice-Cream War (1982), American and British cultural differences in
Stars and Bars (1984), the history of the twentieth century seen through
the eyes of a self-absorbed maniacal film director – The New Confessions
(1987) which is reminiscent of Burgess’s Earthly Powers – and anthropology
and truth, in Brazzaville Beach (1990). Boyd’s concerns are huge, and
his novels consequently run the risk of failure, but their narrative drive
and humour carry them forward with great readability.
Rewriting and reinterpreting the past have been a major concern of
recent novelists. Julian Barnes mockingly rewrites the history of the world
in The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989) and reinterprets the
life of the French novelist Flaubert in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984). Porcupine
(1992), published in Bulgaria a few weeks before it was published in
Britain, traces the fall of Communism in a fictional country not too far from
Bulgaria. Barnes has also written effective love stories – Before She Met Me