A.S. Byatt
London journalists paid much attention to the three young guns reviewed above. An
older novelist,A. S. Byatt(1936– ) continued to produce a series of books which
won her critical esteem from the 1960s onward, if not the large female readership for
the straightforward realist fiction of her sister, Margaret Drabble. The challenging
intelligence ofThe Virgin in the Garden (1978) shows Antonia Byatt’s gifts and ambi-
tion. There are sharply memorable episodes and scenes, and the concern with sexual
freedom and personal authenticity recalls Lawrence’s Rainbowand Women in Love,
as does its fascinated Northern distaste for classy intellectual sophisticates. In her
work as a whole, there is a sense of striving, of matching herself against other writ-
ing. The pull exercised upon A. S. Byatt by literary comparison reaches its fullest
expression in Possession (2002), her most admired recent novel.
Angela Carter
A wilder kind of storytelling is found in the sexual polemics ofAngela Carter
(1940–1992),whose Wise Childrenhas been a set book at A-Level. Carter’s Nights at
the Circus(1984) is so zestfully written that its narrative surprises keep its porno-
graphic affinities under control. The heroine, Fevvers, a gorgeous artiste of the flying
trapeze, spent her childhood in a Whitechapel brothel. After international erotic
adventures, it is confirmed that the plumage which enables her to fly is genuine, for
she is a bird as well as a woman. The gender-bending, species-blurring comedy is,
like that of Woolf’s Orlando,not all good fun.The frustration Fevvers causes to the
men she attracts is part of the point. Carter’s influence is seen in Jeannette
Winterson’s The Passion(1987),an unusual tale featuring a female transvestite with
webbed fee t who becomes a prostitute in Napoleon’s army. In Winterson’s Sexing the
Cherrythe narration erases male/female differences. The strangeness in her earlier
autobiographical novel,Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, 1985, is more natural, less
calculatedly freakish.The exploration of such rare variations on human experience
is naturally of curiosity value to the media.
The greatest literary fuss of the decade was made over Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children, 1981,a nove l to be discussed later. Rushdie, like Angela Carter,
makes use of what is known as ‘magic(al) realism’, a now common international
mode, in which a detailed realist narrative alternates with episodes of impossible
fantasy, usually symbolic. ‘Magic(al) realism’ was a term invented to describe
German expressionist painting in the 1920s. It came into English literary conscious-
ness in the 1960s, with the vogue for the magical realism of Latin American writers,
who had borrowed it from Spanish writing of the 1920s.
Kazuo Ishiguro
One of the two most talented novelists of this period was recognized on the publi-
cation ofThe Remains of the Day in 1989. His name is Kazuo Ishiguro, born in 1954
in Nagasaki, the most Christian city in Japan. His family had come to England when
he was eight, and stayed: his church-going Japanese parents live in Guildford.
Ishiguro, a British citizen, met his wife when both were working in a charity for the
homeless. He attended Woking Grammar School and the University of Kent and
(like some others mentioned) studied creative writing at East Anglia with Malcolm
Bradbury, and also Angela Carter.The Remains of the Dayis narrated by a retired
butler, a man rather similar to the old Japanese painter who narrates Ishiguro’s An
THE EMPIRE OF FICTION 415Kazuo Ishiguro(b.1954) A
Pale View of Hills(1982), An
Artist of the Floating World
(1986), The Remains of the
Day(1989), The Unconsoled
(1995), When We Were
Orphans(2000), Never Let
MeGo(2005), Nocturnes:
Five Stories of Music and
Nightfall(2009).