THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

appealed broadly to aficionados of the mystery story and to unreconstructed admirers of tidy and resolved plots. The
new historical novel, of which The Quincunx is a relatively conservative example, has also flourished in the hands of
Peter Ackroyd (b. 1949), the author of, amongst other novels, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), Hawksmoor
(1985), and Chatterton (1987), and of biographies of T. S. Eliot (1984) and Dickens (1990). Ackroyd has proved a
particularly impressive ventriloquist, echoing the inflexions of the dying Wilde in the earlier novel and imagining
confessional voices of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the two later ones. The finest of the three,
Hawksmoor, juxtaposes then and now, exploring the career of a murderously necromantic church architect of the
1690s (who is not called Hawksmoor, despite his passing resemblance to the real, and innocent, architect of that
name) and the latter-day detective work of a policeman (who is called Hawksmoor). A quite different blend of
ingenuity, literary detective work, and biographical reconstruction is evident in Julian Barnes’s wry search for an
elusive fellow-novelist in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984). Barnes (b. 1946) plays with his careful, but somewhat bemused,
narrator’s obsession with fact as much as he delightfully toys with the fictional form that evolves under Flaubert’s
indirect tutelage (‘I thought of writing books myself once. I had the ideas; I even made notes. But I was a doctor,
married with children. You can only do one thing well: Flaubert knew that ... The unwritten books? They aren’t a
cause for resentment. There are too many books already. Besides, I remember the end of L’Education sentimentale
...’). Graham Swift’s perspective in his subtle, thoughtful novel, Waterland (1983), is less drawn out but quite as
decidedly historical. Swift’s learnedly digressive narrator is a history teacher in a London school threatened with the
extinction of his subject by a ‘progressive’ headmaster. He is also the reassembler of an agonized private and familial
past, a past rooted in the East Anglian fens. There is no escaping existence, he writes, ‘even if we miss the grand
repertoire of history, we yet imitate it in miniature and endorse, in miniature, its longing for presence, for feature, for
purpose, for content’. For Swift (b. 1949) historic occasions conspire and combine just as surely as his ubiquitous
watercourses feed into one another and carry the flotsam of evidence down towards the sea.
The history of the fragmented, and still fragmenting, former British Empire has held a notable fascination for
other recent novelists. Victorian India has in particular attracted the restorer of the boys’ adventure story for adult
readers, George Macdonald Fraser (b. 1925). Three of the nine raffish volumes of the so-called ‘Flashman Papers’,
dealing with the supposed career of the ex-villain of Tom Brown’s Schooldays (the first of which appeared in 1969;
the latest in 1990), have dealt variously with the Afghan War of 1842, with the British
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acquisition of the Punjab, and with the Mutiny of 1857. Far less provocatively schoolboyish is J(ames) G(ordan)
Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), an account of British common sense, British eccentricity, and British
arrogance in a besieged and crumbling Residency during the Mutiny. Farrell (1935-79) offers a chronicle of events as
seen from the perspective of the rulers and not the rebels, but it allows the flickering debates of its characters to
illuminate the ‘perplexing’ question of the imperial mission and of British pretensions to cultural superiority. ‘Things
are not yet perfect, of course’, Farrell’s Collector sighs. ‘All the same, I should go so far as to say that in the long run
a superior civilization such as ours is irresistable. By combining our advances in science and in morality we have so
obviously found the best way of doing things. Truth cannot be resisted!’ But, as a round shot hits the roof, he is
obliged to add: ‘Er, that’s to say, not successfully.’ Farrell’s flailing description of a peculiarly Anglican religious
controversy in Victorian Simla in his unfinished The Hill Station (1981) has little of the verve of his earlier novel.
The ultimate failures of British rule in and, more significantly, of British attitudes to, India had earlier been yet more
impressively explored in Paul Scott’s four novels known collectively as the ‘Raj Quartet’ (The Jewel in the Crown of
1966, The Day of the Scorpion of 1968, The Towers of Silence of 1971, and A Division of the Spoils of 1975). Scott
(1920-78) deals broadly with India during the Second World War and with its uneasy progress towards independence
and partition, but his concentration on the complex, interconnecting careers of certain key characters also allows him
gradually to establish an elaborate jigsaw, whose logic is only fully revealed once the picture is completed in the
concluding volume. Scott’s last novel, Staying On (1977), deals with two ageing minor characters from the earlier
sequence, both of them social misfits, who have decided to eke out a living on an army pension and who are obliged to
adjust to the circumstances of the (to them) disconcertingly new, independent India.
Quite the most striking and inventive single novel to discuss India’s transition from Raj to Republic is Salman
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). Rushdie, born of a Muslim family in Bombay in 1947 and educated in
England, deals phantasmagorically with a rising generation of Indians, born as midnight on 15 August 1947 ushers in
independence and with it a new era of communal tension. Rushdie’s central character, Saleem Sinai, is ‘handcuffed to
history’, peculiarly endowed with a series of accentuated perceptions which allow him to explore his family’s and his
nation’s twentieth-century destiny. ‘Reality is a question of perspective’, he writes, ‘the further you get from the past,
the more concrete and plausible it seems-but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more
incredible.’ Rushdie’s own ‘handcuffing’ to history rendered him an especially effective, sensitive, and observant
commentator on India for non-Indian readers. As his subsequent fiction has shown, however, he has found himself