After British Islamists bombed London in July 2005, attitudes changed. Trevor
Phillips, author ofWindrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain(1998), later
headed the Commission for Racial Equality. He was one of many liberal commenta-
tors who after July 2005 began to resist the multi-culturalist policy, and to say that
immigrants should assimilate further, should learn English and learn to be British
citizens. The government watchword is now not ‘multi-culturalism’ but ‘diversity’.
In analogy to these issues of diversity, cultural difference and minority rights,
there has been a long-standing opening up towards women’s writing and to feminist
writing. There has since been a push towards giving minorities protection, by legal-
izing various new sexual, reproductive, and familial arrangements, and the legal
rights of homosexuals have been extended. This too has had its effects on literature,
seen in one or two of the writers already mentioned.
Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library(1988) met with critical success
and a frisson, reactions repeated with his later books. Its narrator–protagonist is a
handsome young man, rich, spoiled, privileged, who exploits his looks to make
casual conquests in the world of gay sex. The book is set in a time before the impact
of AIDS. Written with notable skill in a sober version of the manner of Ronald
Firbank (whom it explicitly invokes), it suppresses authorial comment to an
inscrutable point, and successfully outrages traditional morality, though the story
widens its focus when its protagonist begins to help someone else.
It was not clear whether this was an instance of ‘unreliable narration’ – a method
of telling a story in which the narrator does not fully understand what he reports,
and the reader is supposed not to share the narrator’s take on events. This method
is found in medieval dream visions, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, in Swift’s Gulliver’s
Trav e l s, in Browning’s dramatic monologues and the tales which Joseph Conrad
re lates through Marlow.In an age, however, in which traditional morality is not so
commonly held, an ‘unreliable reader’ may simply identify with such a narrator
and his implied viewpoint, and not allow for any authorial distance from the
narration.
Thus,in Browning’s poem, ‘My Last Duchess’, the ruler of an Italian state in the
Renaissance tells a visiting diplomat, come to negotiate a marriage alliance, that he,
as a Duke,had found his previous wife’s smiles were too freely dispensed; leading
him to give orders, so that ‘all smiles stopped together’. The Duke means his hearer
to gather that his previous spouse was quietly murdered. A female student of mine
strongly agreed with the Duke’s point of view. If an unreliable narration can be
misread, a ‘reliable’ narration can be misread as unreliable. Since irony means
saying one thing while meaning to convey another, all forms of irony rely on writer
and reader sharing essential assumptions; the irony can be in the ear of the hearer.
Allegory runs the same risks. The author of this History, when a boy, read The
Plague,a translated novel by Albert Camus, seemingly an account of how a town
in French North Africa was hit by the plague. He was later told that the book was
an allegory of the German occupation of Paris. A more serious instance of
misreading is that both Conrad’s Heart of Darknessand Forster’s A Passage to India,
which present the Belgian Congo and British India with a strong anti-imperial
irony, have been read in ex-colonial countries as pro-imperial, quite against the
authors’ intentions.
In the case of Hollinghurst, subsequent novels clarify the situation. The narrator
ofThe Line of Beautyis a man not unlike the protagonist ofThe Swimming-Pool
Library,educated, intelligent, sophisticated, and arrogant, if somewhat wary. He426 15 · CONTEMPORARIES