The controversy surrounding the publication of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses (1988) brought the public function of the contemporary British novel as a form of mass communication and the cultural values it represented into sharp focus. Champions of The Satanic Verses typically defended the publication of the novel as a sign of British democratic values, particularly the author’s right to free speech, even if that speech was felt to be offensive or blasphemous. Critics of the novel typically pointed to the ways in which it denigrates Islam by rehearsing Orientalist stereotypes of the Prophet and the Qur’an. The public burning of copies of Rushdie’s novel and the injunction issued by the religious leader of Iran, Ayotollah Khomeini, on 14 February 1989 called on Muslims around the world to kill the author of The Satanic Verses and his associates. Such an injunction clearly exemplifies the strength of feeling which the novel generated. This response may seem surprising when one considers that The Satanic Verses seemed to exemplify the postmodern turn in contemporary fiction, a move which celebrated the crisis of representation, the so-called waning of affect or feeling, and made a virtue out of blurring the boundaries between fiction and the real. Yet the Rushdie affair clearly demonstrates how the printed form of the contemporary novel and its mass circulation in the global public sphere produces strong and powerful feelings among different reception cultures.

In a widely cited 2008 review entitled ‘Two Paths for the Novel’, Zadie Smith tackled the perennial question of the death of the Anglophone novel as a viable literary form for articulating contemporary experience. Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008) and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005), Smith wrote, represent divergent trajectories for novelistic style in the twenty-first century. On the one hand, O’Neill’s complacent lyrical realism in the tradition of Balzac and Flaubert perpetuates the foundational myth that ‘the self is a bottomless pool’ and wields this anachronism into a new era of ontological and technological entanglement. On the other, McCarthy’s deconstructive ‘anti-novel’ unceremoniously dismantles bourgeois depth psychology to reveal the chaos beneath – that indivisible remainder, which cannot be processed or made to cohere. Smith’s critique draws sustenance from the opposition in theories of the novel between realism and experimentation: a dichotomy that, as Dominic Head notes, has unhelpfully persisted in British literary criticism. The drawing-up of boundaries in the post-war period between writers like Kingsley Amis and Margaret Drabble on the side of realism, and figures such as B. S. Johnson and Christine Brooke-Rose on the side of experimentation, has thus simplified novelistic practices that might more productively be read as occupying some messy middle ground.

In a eulogising essay following the death of John Updike in 2009, Ian McEwan wrote: ‘American letters, deprived in recent years of its giants, Bellow and Mailer [and now Updike], is a levelled plain, with one solitary peak guarded by Roth.’ Philip Roth would go on to announce his retirement from writing in 2012 and passed away in 2018, thus eradicating the final face from McEwan’s literary Mount Rushmore. McEwan’s friends and peers, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, similarly wrote eulogies for Updike; just as McEwan and Christopher Hitchens (another member of their literary set) had done for Saul Bellow in 2005 (‘What other American novelist’, asked Hitchens, ‘has had such a direct and startling influence on non-Americans young enough to be his children?’), while Amis and McEwan both spoke at Bellow’s memorial in New York. Amis also wrote an account of Roth’s oeuvre the year after his retirement, and followed this with an appreciation after his death, while McEwan remembered Roth on BBC Radio.

In Sexual Dissidence (1991), Jonathan Dollimore traces the history of the word and the concept of perversion to show how what has become a predominantly sexual term started out as a term signifying deviance more broadly, literally ‘straying from the path’. Perversion is, in Dollimore’s words, ‘a concept bound up with insurrection’, it is about the challenging of authority, and hence political. He argues that ‘perversion is a concept that takes us to the heart of a fierce dialectic between domination and deviation, law and desire, transgression and conformity’. Perversion, while sexualised in modernity, has its roots in political dissidence. It is this politics that Dollimore is interested in recuperating from what he sees as the dominant narrative of perversion as pathology, predicated on Freud’s theories. For Freud, perversion in the broadest sense is ‘the abandonment of the reproductive function’. This refusal of reproduction renders perversion in its more limited, sexual understanding interesting for cultural materialist approaches, which want to critique social reproduction. Here, the sexual is clearly political.

In 1924, Virginia Woolf wrote memorably of the birth pangs of a new literary era: ‘we hear all round us, in poems and novels and biographies, even in newspaper articles and essays, the sound of breaking and falling, crashing and destruction. It is the prevailing sound of the Georgian age.’ Debates have raged on whether the period around 1980 should be seen as a comparable moment of epochal transition for the novel. In his introduction to the third issue of the newly (re-)launched Granta magazine in 1980, the issue in which the first extract of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children appeared, Bill Buford famously announced that we were seeing ‘at last, the end of the English novel and the beginning of the British one’. The narrative of a moribund English novel, transformed in the 1980s as the empire ‘wrote back’ (in Rushdie’s phrase), has shaped the teaching of modern and contemporary fiction. For Robert Eaglestone, the publication of Midnight’s Children is a ‘literary event’ that marks the ‘beginning [of] the contemporary’ for two reasons: it represents the flourishing of postmodernism, while opening up a wholly new thematic landscape for the novel, and it achieved huge international publishing success as the first truly ‘global’ novel. It is the second of Eaglestone’s reasons for considering Midnight’s Children to be a transitional literary event that is central to this chapter: the unprecedented international publishing success of a groundbreaking literary novel, the context for that success and its effects. Rushdie’s novel was published in spring 1981 with very modest advance orders of 639 copies. Its Booker Prize success, in the first year that the prize announcement was televised, boosted hardback sales by 17,000 copies in three months. Since then, Midnight’s Children has been garlanded with the accolade of ‘Booker of Bookers’ not once, but twice: for the best book in twenty-five years in 1993 and for the best book in forty years in 2008. It was chosen for the BBC’s Big Read in 2003, and it has now sold over a million copies.

It could be argued that the British historical novel is the most important, influential and enduring literary genre of the last thirty-five years. A brief sketch of those books considered to be key since 1980 might consist solely of novels engaged in meditations upon the past and its relationship to the present: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981); Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus (1984); Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion (1987); Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day (1989); Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (1991–95); Caryl Phillips’s The Nature of Blood (1997); Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet (1998); Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001); Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist (2002); David Peace’s GB84 (2004); Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004); Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (2009); and Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2011). A number of other novels could be added as historical-esque, insofar as they have significant moments of flashback, pastiche or recollected narrative: A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990); Gordon Burn’s Alma Cogan (1991); Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow (1991); Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up (1994); Jackie Kaye’s Trumpet (1998); David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004); Nicola Barker’s Darkmans (2007); Doris Lessing’s The Cleft (2007); and Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014). Indeed, from a relatively marginal position in the early 1980s, the literary historical form has become increasingly ‘respectable’ and decidedly popular. The critical and popular importance of the form was institutionalised in 2010 with the inauguration of the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction, one of the most valuable awards in the United Kingdom. It is increasingly institutionally supported, as Creative Writing courses include modules on historical writing, societies of authors form and prizes multiply.

When does the present begin?

An immediate answer to this curiously vexing question might be to suggest that the present does not begin. The present, one might argue, has no duration. It is the now, the passing moment, and as such cannot be truly said to have a beginning or an end, and cannot be measured, or regarded in any sense as having passed, or being to come. The present does not unfold or occur, but is the vanishing, fleeting medium of our immediate becoming.