no better than communist brutality, Cornwall, himself a young veteran of ‘intelli-
gence’, wrote of ‘moral equivalence’. Darkness has its glamour, but Le Carré’s is an
ultra-dark and intricate version of the spy world, one which has none of the moral,
or amoral, simplicity of Ian Fleming’s post-imperial romances of masculine fantasy,
known to half the world through James Bond films.
Literary history reacts only slowly to the rise and fall in the popularity of genres.
Charles Dickens wrote genre fiction: his Barnaby Rudgebegan as an historical novel,
set in the London of the Gordon Riots. And the novel he was working on at his
death,Edwin Drood, is one of the new murder mysteries pioneered by his friend
Wilkie Collins, and, despite some stagy Gothic, a very promising one. Today the old-
fashioned broadly realistic novel dominates the field of fiction less than it used to.
More ambitious literary fiction has for some time now included wilder elements of
fantasy than Dickens at his most theatrical, though this fashion seems to be passing.
In its more popular forms, the realist novel seems increasingly to overlap with neigh-
bouring genres, such as the old historical novel, often sensationalized. It strays also,
as we have seen, into the international empire of the mystery story: crime fiction, spy
fiction, detective fiction, which, whether genteel, hard-boiled or noir, takes place
elsewhere, somewhere more exotic or nastier than the reader’s home address.
Genre and literary standards
Detective fiction has had literary practitioners from the days of Edgar Allan Poe and
Wilkie Collins. It became very popular with Conan Doyle, and can be done in a
‘literary’ way, as it was by Dorothy Sayers. But Doyle and Sayers, like Chesterton,
Knox, Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie, knew that they were writing enter-
tainments, puzzles,pot-boilers.
The genre has recently been promoted, in both senses of the word. The murder-
story writer Dame P. D. James is treated not as a skilful and humane entertainer but
as a leading liter ary figure, and Alexander McCall Smith, author of charming detec-
tive stories, in much the same way. Within the limits of genre, with its standardized
characters and plot-patterns, mystery writers can write very well, as for example
does the American Donna Leon. But there is little popular respect for the traditional
hierarchy of literary genres: success trumps all. If there is a difference between
English as understood at university, and intelligent journalism, there should also be
some connection and respect for each other’s purposes and standards. Scholarship
is slow, reviewing is quick, both are necessary, neither is easy. Unfortunately, univer-
sity English began to fragment into specialisms at the same time as the media
became more populist. The difference between English at the university and what is
now wanted in a newspaper or on television has become very wide; badly paid
academics try to jump the gap. This gap is narrower in History than in English,
although the passing of the fashion for literary theory is reducing it. In the absence
of a widespread and well-informed literary culture, the triumph of middlebrow and
lower-middlebrow values in the third quarter of the 20th century began to give way
rather suddenly in the 1980s to the prevalence of more populist values.
Fiction and fantasy
Fantasy, a form of genre fiction once held to be sub-literary, escapist, infantile and
unworthy of study, has achieved a genuine popularity. Popularity matters:
GENRE 431