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‘Insiders’ from ‘outside’
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(1982) and Talking It Over (1991) – which play with time and point of view
in the search for elusive truths of the heart. Cross Channel (1996) returns to
France; it is a collection of stories which show Barnes extending his range
with humour, simplicity, and gentle cross-cultural perception.
Graham Swift and Nigel Williams are more concerned with English
settings, but their subjects are no less wide-ranging. Swift’s Waterland
(1983) is set in the Fens of East Anglia and is a saga of family and
growing up which involves history, and even the life cycle of the eel, in
a rich and complex novel that is at the same time regional and universal.
Last Orders (1996), which won the 1996 Booker Prize, is similarly complex
and rewarding. It is again a study of a family, this time in London and
Kent, preparing for a funeral. Swift plays with time, class, success and
failure, in an ambitious novel which, like much of Peter Ackroyd’s writing,
uses careful local description to give a solid basis to his examination of
changing values. Williams is a comic novelist, and his visions of suburban
life are highly satirical manipulations of genre with social comedy and
high farce, combining to give a highly pointed view of twentieth-century
life, only equalled by the similarly irreverent Fay Weldon. East of Wimbledon
(1993) is a neatly comic mystery and Star Turn (1985) a comic view of
Britain before and during the Second World War, seen through the eyes
of two boys from the East End of London.
Sebastian Faulks’s fourth novel, Birdsong (1993), achieved great acclaim,
being called ‘quite simply one of the best novels written about war, and
about the First World War in particular’. He recalls the poetry of Edward
Thomas in his evocation of the local suffering caused by widescale events.
Some eighty years after the First World War, and more than fifty years
after the Second World War, both wars remain favoured subjects and
settings for contemporary writers. Pat Barker’s trilogy – Regeneration
(1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995) – uses
the First World War to explore the disrupting effects of the conflict on
the individual soldier: class, identity and personal responsibility are key
questions. The third novel in the trilogy won the Booker Prize in 1995.
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994) by Louis de Bernières is a novel about
the German occupation of a Greek island. As with de Bernières’s other
novels, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin combines ‘magic realism’ – both fantastic
and eerily comic – with a deep concern for the pain inflicted by politics
and politicians on innocent victims. Louis de Bernières is one of the few
British writers to take South America on, in its own magic realist setting, in