Oxford, is not Oxford English but shopping English. As air-transport and electron-
ics shrink the world, usage and fashion come from all sides. The internet spreads
new varieties of English, a language which is itself a cross between Germanic and
Latin-derived languages. The double texture of English is flecked with terms and
idioms from many tongues. The French poet and mathematician Jacques Roubaud
has compared English to the mixed breakfast cereal, muesli. The German Swiss word
‘muesli’ is first recorded in English in 1939. English is a tongue full of such imports- veranda, bungalow, kiosk, kangaroo. English is a commercial mongrel, not aiming
at the pure standard which became a national policy for French at the French
Revolution, watched over by the French Academy. The daily deregulation of usage in
English makes its future literary status harder to imagine. Latin literature main-
tained for centuries a classical status. After the Fall of Rome, however, spoken Latin
eventually turned into a variety of romance languages, but Latin remained the
spoken and written language of learning and literature, in wide and active interna-
tional use until quite recent times.
A natural and idiomatic English is found from Chaucer onwards, not just in the
pure style of a George Herbert or a Jane Austen, an Evelyn Waugh or a Penelope
Fitzgerald. But clear usage and natural idiom go with a society more settled than that
of today. Attentiveness to the spoken idiom of others can be found in contempo-
raries, as in the prose of Kazuo Ishiguro or the dialogue of Alan Bennett. But as trade
and travel transport us from city to city reading airport novels, usage blurs and
idioms slip. Norms are now less normative. Human memory, the source of memo-
rable writing, is intimate, personal, familial, local; but locality, family, region, nation
now matter less. The defined scope of this History, however, remains national, for
reasons of principle and practice set out in the Introduction (pp. 4–6), to which the
reader of this final chapter is again referred.
Import–export
Readers and writers travel, reading books by authors from other places. Already in
the 1980s, on the import side of the national ledger, the Irish playwright Brian Friel,
the Indian/Trinidadian UK-dwelling V. S. Naipaul, the Americans Toni Morrison,
Ann Tyler and Paul Auster, the Russian Joseph Brodsky, the Canadian Margaret
Atwood and the Australian poet Les Murray might be read or studied in Britain,
alongside contemporary Britons, who could include Sir Tom Stoppard, born in a
Czechoslovakia which no longer exists; Kazuo Ishiguro of Nagasaki and Guildford;
Seamus Heaney from Ireland North and South; and Dame Muriel Spark, an Anglo-
Jewish Scot latterly resident in Italy.
Publishing statistics show the UK publishing three times as many titles per head
as the USA.It exports many books, but imports fewer translated titles than do other
European countries. Only a few translated books have had the welcome given by
English readers to Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivagoor to di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo,
translated as The Leopard; or by intellectuals to the translated fiction of the
Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges or the Italian Umberto Eco. These four writers were
well versed in the literature which has been one of England’s most significant
exports. Borges gave a course of lectures on the subject at Harvard, in English. On a
visit to St Andrews in Scotland, a blind man facing the North Sea, he recited from
memory passages of the Old English Beowulf. Boris Pasternak translated eight of
Shakespeare’s plays into Russian; and wrote postcards to English correspondents in402 15 · CONTEMPORARIES
Contents continued
Genre 427
Literary biography 427
Fictionalized biography 428
Historical fiction 429
Patrick O’Brian 429
Detective fiction 430
Spy fiction 430
John Le Carré 430
Genre and literary
standards 431
Fiction and fantasy 431
Philip Pullman 432
J. K. Rowling 432
Further reading 434