Hari Kunzru / Dodging downpours for a Mayan miracle

Dodging downpours for a Mayan miracle

An unseasonal rainy spell dampens novelist Hari Kunzru's impressions of Honduras. But things brighten up when he discovers the dazzling jungle life and Mayan ruins

Hari Kunzru
Sunday 20 April 2003 19.23 BST

The picture I have of the island of Roatan is the type tour operators put on Underground posters to traumatise winter commuters. Azure sea, white sand, central casting palm tree. I am supposed to be there, swinging on a hammock in the sun.

Instead I am standing in a striplit hall at San Pedro Sula airport staring out of a window at the tropical storm chucking water on the other side of the plate glass. It seems Honduras, usually dry at this time of year, is experiencing a late rainy season. Roatan airstrip is closed.

The boys at the airline counter wear philosophical expressions and make mention of God. Maybe a plane will take off today, they say. I am getting a kind of long-term feeling from them.

Five hours later and we are all bored, including the security guy and the woman tending the bar. No plane today, not now.

Time to head off in search of San Pedro Sula. I get my case from behind the airline counter and hunt for a taxi. Thus, I become the sole evening patron of the Garden Court restaurant at the Hotel Princess, where the court itself seems to be under an inch of water. It is a place of starched tablecloths, formally dressed waiters, four-line menu items and gilt. Lots of gilt.

Pleased to have a customer, the maitre d' signs for the muzak to be turned up. I listen to 'Bright Eyes', 'I Will Always Love You', 'Cavatina' and 'The Lady In Red', and eat something that may be chicken.

The next morning, I get up sharpish to return to the airport. Juan Carlos, my taxi driver, speaks good English - he learnt it in Indiana where he worked in a carwash, and sold some coke and heroin on the side. He got caught and spent two years in jail. You do some crazy things when you're young, he says.

We stop at a toll booth, where we find out that last night someone shot dead the goalkeeper of the national football team. They take football seriously, the Hondurans. In 1969 they fought the so-called Soccer War with El Salvador, a four-day conflict which kicked off as the two national teams met in the World Cup qualifiers. However, it turns out that this latest incident was just a bungled robbery. No politics involved at all.

Honduras was, of course, the original banana republic, a country governed through much of the twentieth century for the benefit of three rival US fruit firms, who bankrolled political factions and ruthlessly put down union movements.

During the Eighties, with fighting in neighbouring Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador, Honduras was the key to US control over the region, and American aid and troops poured in, a period which came to an abrupt close when it emerged that the rebels were partly funded by weapon sales in Iran.

These days Honduras is back to fruit and coffee, and its fortunes are governed by the ups and downs of the international commodity markets. American visitors are more likely to be tourists than CIA staff training Contra guerrillas.

After a decade of more or less peaceful democracy, the government is looking enviously at the success of Costa Rica, now known as a destination for travellers seeking a taste of the extraordinary environmental riches of Central America but nervous of its reputation for political instability.

With its rich, green landscape of fruit plantations, Honduras does look like a lovely country to visit.

By midday, I am so well settled in the departure lounge it's beginning to remind me of the Sartre play where the characters sit around, and then realise that hell is other people. In my case the other people are mostly mid-Western tourists trying to get out to the Bay island of Utila for the diving. The islands have been a fixture on the diving circuit since the Seventies, and are widely known for having great reefs and cheap PADI courses.

At the moment, though, these tourists are passing the time, playing cards, drinking beer, laughing at their caps' humorous slogans, showing off small, covetable pieces of technology, and reading books with titles like God Is My CEO , and Jesus Inc: Your Share In The Lord. 

They are doing nothing to me, but somehow I hate them. Especially the guy playing a pinball game on his laptop.

There is a flurry of excitement when a plane is announced to Utila. The dive tourists cheer, high-five each other and depart. But 10 minutes later they are back: it turns out that the break in the weather has closed up again.

I find I have certain rather Old Testament feelings about this. But, miracle of miracles, I find myself, just a couple of hours later, taking off. We coast over the water in a 15-seater twin-prop plane.

So, I reach Roatan's West Bay and the promise of the Paradise Beach Villas resort - only to find that water is pouring in a torrent off the thatched roof of the bar. High winds have been sending big waves crashing up the beach, far up enough to fill the beach-bar's sink with sand.

Water visibility is zero, so Liz from the dive school is not at work. The wind has even brought the TV cables down. The barman mixes mojitos for me and Wayne and Glady, retirees from Saskatchewan who have been coming to Roatan's West Bay every winter for the past five years.

The couple tells me it's the same every year - the nice apartment with cable TV and all mod cons, the glassy water, the sun, the good shrimp place just down the beach.

That is, it had been so until this year, when the rain had come down for the past 18 days. Wayne and Glady are booked in for five weeks. They are having doubts.

The rain comes and goes for the next two days. Even when it isn't falling, it's still grey and cold. With the beach out of action there's not much to do in West Bay so I drive into Coxen Hole to run errands with Bob, the laconic Texan manager.

Bob knows those animal species which make a good boot; he's the proud owner of footwear assembled from the skins of boa constrictors, moray eels, elephants, sharks, alligators and unborn calves. Eel wins out for general use, he says.

Bob knows those animal species which make a good boot; he's the proud owner of footwear assembled from the skins of boa constrictors, moray eels, elephants, sharks, alligators and unborn calves. Eel wins out for general use, he says.

At its best, Coxen Hole would be an unlovely coagulation of tin-roofed houses. With the rain sweeping household rubbish off the hillside and its streets churned into muddy ruts, it presents a particularly unappealing face.

Most tourists hate the place for its stray dogs, loafing drunks and one-room family shacks built on stilts to escape inundation by the sea. But after 48 hours in holidayland I am happy to be back in a real place, a place where you can buy a plastic bucket at the Wordy Boutique or get your hair cut at Shear's Delight.

I watch the Coxen Hole cops parade outside the station and help Bob buy provisions at a supermarket owned by one of the local families who have made a killing out of the tourist boom.

Land here is shooting up in value, some of it being developed for hotels, but much of it for retirement homes. Several units at Paradise Beach are owned by elderly American couples, the wives with leathery tans and small dogs, the husbands with the grizzled look of men who may well have got to know this place by doing 'government work' in the Eighties.

The day I leave, Roatan shows its other side. The sky is cloudless, the water tauntingly still and blue. I snorkel out to the reef and swim with brightly coloured fish. Then I let the sun dry me off, drink a farewell beer and reluctantly head for the airport. A party of Italians has arrived. They are laughing, promenading on the sand. I leave the sunshine on the beach and head to the jungle - where it is raining.

But I now have an opportunity to compare and contrast various styles of rain. Jungle rain has a different character from island rain. In the national park of Pico Bonito it comes off the hills, rolling down as mist and then disgorging an unimaginable volume of water over the beautifully landscaped grounds of the Pico Bonito Lodge. I'm back on the mainland, near the town of La Ceiba, staying in a hideaway for affluent eco-tourists, 20-odd discreet cabanas that offer immense comfort while giving the illusion of roughing it; no television in your room, but the magazine left by your bed advertises Fabergé pen trays and $2,000 alligator golfing shoes.

There are five guests at the lodge. Two American honeymoon couples and me. As far as I know, we are the only tourists wandering around this particular zone of natural beauty. (So what are the statistical chances that if you hike out to a river, strip naked and dive in, by the time you get out to the middle, all the others will have arrived on the bank?)

The next day the sun comes out and my companion and guide Herman ('I am jungle man') leads me to the 'Unbelievable Falls'. We wade through rivers. We scram ble up steep banks. Covered in mud, I enjoy myself immensely. On the way we see toucans, woodpeckers and other bird species. Unlike many of Pico Bonito's guests, I feel I can't get very worked up about birdwatching, and even though some of the small brown ones are rare/sing/behave unusually/can get you on the guest list for parties and so on, they don't really float my boat like a good toucan.

We pick cardamom, coffee beans and wild coriander. Agouti flee into the bushes as we squelch and slide our way up the path. This is the real point of a visit to the Honduran forest. If you're a keen naturalist, it must be like Christmas.

The staff at the lodge are knowledgeable and disarmingly enthusiastic. Over breakfast I had a long discussion with Kent, the manager, about the exact definition of a bract, with reference to the banana family. It doesn't rain the next day, either, so I leave to hike up into the hills, to the ruined Mayan city of Copan. Along with Tikal in Guatemala and sites such as Chichén Itzá in south Mexico, this is one of the top archaeological treasures of Central America.

Every stone here seems to have been intricately worked, and in the main ritual zone, pyramids and a ball court are laid out according to spookily-precise cosmological principles. The symbolism of the carvings is complex - rulers representing themselves emerging from the jaws of serpents, surrounded by corn spirits, figures of ancestors, crocodiles.

The Mayans are thought to have bound boards to the heads of their infants, to give their young an appealingly receding brow. They are also thought to have viewed crossed-eyes as the height of attractiveness - although my guide does concede it possible that this was actually due to incest, not to aesthetics.

Even the names of the kings - Eighteen Rabbit, Smoke Shell - give a sense of distance, a feeling that this was a society with profoundly different values from the one now organising coach tours to view the ruins. At the same time, it is true, certain local phrases and traditions are directly traceable to the people who abandoned this place in 900AD.

It is with reluctance that I leave this wealth of culture to fly home. As I leave for the airport the rain is coming down again.

THE GUARDIAN

Ali Smith / A babel of voices

Ali Smith
Photo de Sara Wood

A babel of voices

Ali Smith is a generous kind of writer. It's open house in her books - everyone gets a turn at narrating, even a passing fly. She tells Melissa Denes about childhood gender-bending, a false-start career and the much-loved authors that helped her to develop such a liberal take on the world.

Saturday 19 April 2003

I

n her late 20s Ali Smith caught a mystery bug and was laid up in bed for months: the official verdict was chronic fatigue syndrome, which didn't exactly narrow it down. She was a lecturer in English at Strathclyde University, teaching hundreds of students she was encouraged to think of as clients (because they were paying for it), and suddenly one day she couldn't cross the road - the other side was too far away. She couldn't teach, couldn't read, couldn't think. Once she began to recover, her mind was made up: she was never going to make a decent academic, and she wasn't happy in Glasgow. She moved south, and started to write full-time. It was a miserable experience, no doubt about it, but Smith also thinks it saved her life. Virginia Woolf described being ill as a visionary state, she says, a reminder that all things are contingent - and so it was. She realised she'd been setting off in the wrong direction.

So I couldn't help but notice that there are a lot of germs in Smith's books, a whole cast of passersby who have the nerve to cough and sneeze and snivel in confined spaces. In Hotel World, the great riot of a novel that took her on to the Booker and Orange shortlists a couple of years ago, Lise, the receptionist, is sick with something undiagnosed and undiagnosable. People come to see her, but afterwards "they test themselves, listening for the press of glands and the slightest velvety creeping of the skin, the tenderness of throat, the small knock-knock of symptoms. Who's there? Vi. Vi who? Vi Russ, we met at your friend's house." And in Smith's latest collection of short stories, The Whole Story And Other Stories, the possibility of contagion is rife - a fly crawls across a secondhand book, leaving residue; a girl coughs into her mobile phone on the train ("A cold. Yeah, really bad. Yeah, awful actually"); the glass in front of the tellers at the bank is "saliva-specked". Is she still terrified of catching something?

"Oh no!" She laughs at the idea, and it's true she does look pretty well, sitting crosslegged on the sofa in a London pub. She is 40, but dresses like a boy - jeans, T-shirt, trainers, a leather jacket. Her eyes are very blue, slightly slanted, and there is a point to her chin - an intelligent, slightly mischievous face. The sneezing and the hay fever in her books don't stem from any trauma, she says, it's "just my Virgo paranoia, it's hypochondria really". Her own illness had as much to do with hating teaching and the increasingly corporate university environment as anything else. "I had it very lightly, I have to say - it glanced off me like the wing of a bird. I know people who've had it much worse."

When she first set about writing, nobody wanted to know. There were bad poems, hundreds of them ("maybe five good ones"). A collection of short stories, Free Love, was rejected by just about every publisher in the country over the course of a year, before finally being accepted by Virago. The rejection letters said Smith's stories read "like lifestyle descriptions", which she took to mean that they were too gay; at any rate, she was describing the wrong kind of lifestyle. It's an odd objection, whichever way you look at it: Smith's first collection, like the ones that have followed it, deals with first love and family and memory, the big universals; it's hard to see what might be considered "lifestyle" specific.

Now, of course, there's no better time to be a lesbian writer - it probably hasn't been this fashionable since Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West started corresponding in the 1920s. Last year, Sarah Waters succeeded Smith on to the Bookershortlist with Fingersmith, and the BBC adapted her Tipping The Velvet amid promises of lots of period lesbian saucery (which didn't quite transpire). There is a whole generation of lesbian women - Jackie Kay, Patricia Duncker, Carol Ann Duffy, Joanna Briscoe, Louise Welsh - producing good new work: all those publishers who worried about buying into a niche market must be kicking themselves. About time, too: while literary fiction by gay men is now an established part of the mainstream - no one would dream of describing Colm Tóibín, Philip Hensher or Alan Hollinghurst as marginal or "lifestyle" writers - books by gay women continue to languish on the smaller women-only lists and in the "specialist interest" sections of bookshops, whatever their subject matter; I found one of Smith's books filed between erotica and urban literature studies.

But she doesn't see herself as a lesbian writer - she says the label has everything to do with marketing, and nothing to do with the work itself. "It's just fashion, isn't it? Being a Scot and a lesbian are two big handy ticks next to my name right now. And I'm fashionable, but not that fashionable - I don't do historical bestsellers, I'm just a little bit too literary." She concedes that "the attention has created a space for good writing which wasn't there before, but it's not important to me personally - I might fall in love with a bear or a tree or a chair." In one of her new short stories - a story she also contributed to an anthology edited by Diva magazine - the narrator does just that, falls in love with a tree: "I couldn't not. It was in blossom."

In any case, she says she has always thought of herself as "intergender", as much a boy as a girl. She has been with her partner, Sarah Wood, a documentary film-maker, for 15 years, but before that went out with a few men, an experience she has described as "terrible and fine - terrible because it was a mistake, and fine because it was real". Before that, she was madly in love with a girl back home in Inverness, but they kept their relationship secret and pretended to fancy boys - so she spent a lot of her teens and half her 20s leading something of a double life, a useful, if unhappy, experience for a writer.

Smith was the youngest of five - her nearest sibling is seven years older - and she says that with two brothers and two sisters, she almost felt she could choose which sex she wanted to be; she went for boy. On the other hand, she has a natural tendency to want to even things up, or at least to look at life from the opposite perspective. (This is the theme of her two most recent collections of stories, that you have to keep trying out different perspectives, that your viewpoint should never settle.) She remembers reading as a child a boys' adventure story called Ginger Over The Wall and deciding to rewrite it with girls, because there weren't any. "It really wasn't very good. I'd change things like, 'It was so hot you could fry eggs on the pavement' to, 'It was so hot you could fry chips on the pavement.'"

Her childhood in Inverness was "happy, secure". She wrote poems for her sisters, and was too young to be drawn into any of the sibling rivalry. Her father, who is English, worked as an electrician on the hydroelectric dams; her mother was a bus conductor. Both parents were bright, but had had to leave school at 14 and so were adamant that all their children went to university. Even now that they are in their 40s and 50s, her father keeps his children's degree certificates framed and hung in the hallway.

After she graduated from Aberdeen University, Smith went to Cambridge to study for her doctorate. She had never been before; the only pictures she'd seen were in the prospectus. "I remember driving down with my dad in the van," she says, "and we went past King's and there were cows grazing in front of the college and we just looked at each other and laughed. It seemed like the most made-up place in the world." Her time there was "both wonderful and noxious" - wonderful because she made a lot of friends, noxious because it was so pretty and pleased with itself. One of the funniest scenes she's written - and she's a funny writer - takes place in a Cambridge literature seminar, in her first novel, Like:

"A girl with short orange hair opened the door... Hi! she said, is it for the Katherine Mansfield?... We're talking about celibacy tonight, anything to put off reading Clarissa, I've got an essay for tomorrow, I mean, it's brilliant, it's all about rape, but I just can't face it, do you know what I mean?"

Smith won't say that Like is in any way autobiographical, but the culture clash is nicely observed - a couple of pages later someone works out that the new arrival is "Scotch! - I love Scotland! I love the people." Still, it was at Cambridge that she met Sarah, her partner, as well as Abigail Morris (now director of Soho Theatre in London) and the actress Cara Seymour, who played Nicolas Cage's girlfriend in Adaptation. The four of them wrote political-polemical plays about Thatcherism and the poll tax, and took them to the Edinburgh Fringe, where they got good reviews.

Smith strikes you as a generous person - in the space of an hour she will have recommended at least five writers, and as a book critic (she is a fiction reviewer for the Guardian) she doesn't like to take on anything she instinctively knows she won't like. Each of her novels is prefaced by no less than five epigraphs - quotes from Blake, Angela Carter, Tennessee Williams - and the remarkable thing about her fiction is the sheer number of voices she manages to get in. There are two narrators in Like, a book about childhood friends and what happens when one of them falls in love with the other; and five in Hotel World, in which the ghost of a dead chambermaid comes back to haunt the people she left behind (and some she never knew). Hotel World begins and ends in a great rush of language - two long unpunctuated monologues, one belonging to the ghost, the other her grieving younger sister ("I am watching TV for you in case you are missing it I am keeping up with Brookside for you it is seriously crap").

Smith is the opposite of a solipsist, incapable of telling a story from a single point of view. In the first of her new stories, The Universal Story, the perspective shifts seven or eight times while always being about the same thing - the history of a secondhand copy of The Great Gatsby, which changes hands and ends up as part of a 7ft boat made entirely from copies of The Great Gatsby, which then sinks off Felixstowe. This we see through the eyes of the bookshop owner, a fly, the many people who have owned the book, the man who buys it, and his sister (a conceptual artist). As a writer, Smith is fascinated by the way in which experience gets shuffled and passed on, mislaid and forgotten, but never really goes away. At the end of Hotel World, the schoolgirl narrator is horrified to think that bits of her dead sister are still sifting through the house: "a lot of dust is made of human skin so if that is true then some of Sara is in the Hoover". There are ghosts in all her work - the ghosts of dead people, but also the phantom half-lives of television characters, film stars, pop stars, absent lovers, all competing for space.

Smith wrote her doctorate on William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens and James Joyce, and the influence of Joyce is particularly strong. The new book begins and ends with a yes, like Molly Bloom's monologue in Ulysses. And the wonderful scene in Hotel World where a ghost re-enters the body it has left - "I went in one ear and out the other. I sang songs from West End musicals... till complaints rolling in from the neighbouring graves made me stop" - is close to Stephen Dedalus's train of thought in Ulysses's graveyard scene. Smith describes Ulysses as "a great splay of energy and life", and she shares Joyce's affirmative energy, his love of wordplay and enforced misunderstandings, that sense of community between the living and the dead.

Smith has never seen a ghost, although her father, who comes from a long line of psychics, once woke up to see the ghost of a murdered child in his bedroom (Smith notes, by way of qualification, that he has also absolutely definitely seen the Loch Ness monster). But if she's never experienced an actual haunting, and has no obvious telekinetic powers, she says she spends a lot of time listening out for "different, quieter voices". "We live in a culture where we're so fixated on surfaces. The fastness that we now think life is about, that we think of as our due, covers this great absence. And maybe so-called extrasensory perceptions are the echo of what's there."

Recently, she edited an anthology of 20th-century women's writing for Virago, along with Sarah Wood and the academic Kasia Boddy, and was struck by the amount of writing that has been lost or neglected. "There is so much experiment in these writers, so much force of energy - [Gertrude] Stein, Mansfield, Miles Franklin, who had to publish under a man's name. Hilda Doolittle is very underrated." These are the voices or ghosts to whom she feels most indebted. In their introduction, the editors describe the book as a "huge and necessary act of positive discrimination"; they also managed to sneak in a photograph of each of their mothers - Smith's, dressed in her air force uniform, appears at the beginning of the 1940s.

Smith has now started on her third novel - her rhythm has always been stories-novel-stories. Of course, her publishers were desperate for a novel to capitalise on the huge success of Hotel World (novels sell, stories don't), but it just wasn't happening - she wasn't ready. "I tried, but novels don't go away, you can't sleep. You wake up and it's still there, this crevasse that goes on for miles, and it's dark but you have to go down there, and keep going down there." The attention and the prize-giving didn't help. "The good thing was that it was a little literary novel that would have got lost otherwise - lots of them do. But the terrible thing is it makes you self-conscious, and there is nothing worse for a writer. I remember being at the Orange prize party and Margaret Atwood looked around at us and said [she does a portentous Canadian voice], 'Ladies: we are all sacrifices'."

Anyway, for now she is back in her expansive phase - perhaps one of the reasons she is drawn to the short story between times is that it reins you in, gives you focus. She is naturally someone who thinks big, who likes to take risks with form and language, and to see where her characters take her. In the end, her examiners at Cambridge decided her thesis covered too big a subject, and didn't give her the doctorate - she is the first to admit that "modernism and joy in Irish and American literature" was stretching it. But you could say that even then she was thinking along the right lines. She had found her subject matter - energy and life and love, the whole damn thing - but she was looking at it as an academic, an analyst, and as she says, "It's just not my priesthood." Now she's writing her own, resurrecting Joyce's notion of literature as a lark, a head-rush, a love letter to the world.

THE GUARDIAN

BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS 2003: INTRODUCTION

Ian Jack

14th April 2003

This is the third issue of Granta devoted to the new work of a group of writers deemed the ‘Best of Young British Novelists’. The first appeared in 1983, and the second in 1993. The idea behind each has been to recognize twenty British writers under the age of forty who have showed exceptional promise or achievement, and to introduce the lesser-known among them to a wider audience.

It wasn’t originally Granta‘s idea. In January this year, when our twenty novelists were being assembled by the Sunday Times for the by now traditional group photograph, I remembered that I’d witnessed a similar scene in another London studio in the early 1980s. Not the first Best of Young British Novelists, which was still a year or two away, but a promotion called the Best of British Writers, organized by the Book Marketing Council and its chairman, Desmond Clarke. The idea then, quite radical in its day, was to say, ‘Look, Britain has all these jolly good writers, and for the getting of your pleasure and wisdom you should be buying more of their books.’ All kinds of people, none particularly young and many now dead, climbed up a few flights of stairs to have their picture taken by Lord Snowdon.

As a reporter, I went to write about it for the Sunday Times. We had a struggle with John Betjeman in his wheelchair. ‘Very kind of you, dear boy, very kind.’ V. S. Pritchett was there, and Laurie Lee and Beryl Bainbridge. Disparate kinds of writers: poets, children’s writers and essayists as well as novelists. It was odd to see them together; it looked like a piece of cultural nationalism that belonged to the Second World War—Writers Against Hitler. Odd, in fact, to see them at all; we were still in the time when writers were private figures, their public lives mainly confined to what was printed on the page. What they looked like, how they sounded, where they lived, what they believed: these things—always excepting the case of Betjeman—were mysterious to most people outside the narrow world of London publishing houses.

That quiet, and some would argue proper, state of affairs was transformed over the next decade. Literary festivals, bookshop readings, TV shows, marketing campaigns that stressed the writer’s persona as much as his or her book—all of these made writers visible and fashionable. The first Granta list of Best Young British Novelists—Amis, Rushdie, McEwan (see page 352 for the full list)—was a prominent milepost down that road. How writers performed in public began to be important. Even how they looked. Today you’ll hear it said, a popular grudge, that it’s easier for a writer to find a publisher if he, and perhaps particularly she, is young and good-looking.

Given the hype that now attaches itself to many young writers and their novels, the first question that arose in my mind when we were planning Best of Young British for a third time was: is it necessary? Times have changed since 1983, and even 1993. Slowly, dimly, I began to see that the hype that now often surrounds authorship made Best of Young British more necessary rather than less. What had been an exercise to publicize the literary novel, at a time when there were few spotlights on this particular branch of culture, might now have a new role as an independent consumer’s guide to novelists who deserved to be read in an era where ‘a thrilling debut by a young writer of enormous talent’ is the standard blurb, and where there are now so many spotlights directed by marketing money and the size of the writer’s advance.

We needed, I thought, judges who were wise to the ways of publishing, as well as being good readers, good critics and, where possible, good practitioners. There were five of us, with me in the chair. Robert McCrum, the literary editor of the Observer and working on the new authorized biography of P. G. Wodehouse, had a notable track record for finding promising writers, several of whom came good, during his earlier career as editorial director at Faber and Faber. Nicholas Clee, editor of the Bookseller,reads new novels constantly for work, and (perhaps surprisingly, given his reading load) for pleasure. Alex Clark reviews fiction for the Sunday Times (when the judging began she reviewed for the Guardian) and the London Review of Books. Finally, Hilary Mantel: not only an accomplished novelist, but also a reviewer of novels for the New York Review of Books and the New York Times, a great encourager of young writers—and (least, but not unimportant) a woman who lives in Woking, Surrey, where she maintains a sturdy independence from the currents of fashion in London’s literary life.

We asked for submissions from publishers and agents and eventually received the work of 139 writers (sixty-two women and seventy-seven men), sometimes still to be published and in typescript. The rules said that entrants had to be citizens of the United Kingdom born after December 31, 1963.

Last summer we began to read.

What were we looking for? Our business was to select the most interesting, original writers of the ‘literary novel’, though we would also consider shorter fiction, the story and novella, as allowable evidence of a writer’s intent in the novel’s direction, despite the fact that two writers on previous lists—Helen Simpson and Adam Mars-Jones—had dented this faith by sticking firmly to the short-story form in their careers since. The ‘literary novel’ isn’t an easy thing to define; you know it when you see it. One definition might be ‘an artistically ambitious work of fiction, more than 30,000 words long.’ Other definitions rely on negatives. It isn’t ‘commercial’ (Archer, Grisham, Harris) and it isn’t ‘genre’ (crime, suspense, sci-fi, fantasy, children). Yes, but on the other hand it might be. Only the brave and foolishly strict would argue that the main pleasure of reading Conan Doyle or Chandler is to find out what happened in the end. Writers can cross boundaries. J. K. Rowling wasn’t submitted, though we would have excluded her had she been because in our view, no matter how many adults you see reading her on the tube, she is definitely a children’s writer. Other writers were less easy to keep in their boxes. Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room is a fine crime novel set in Glasgow. China Miéville is an extraordinary writer of dark fantasy. In the end we rejected both. Personally, I was sorry to see Welsh go.

Emails began to go back and forward between us. Rereading them now I see a punitive streak, as though a restaurant reviewer had got into the wrong kind of restaurant. Of writer A: ‘Immense talent, deficient in craft. The punctuation doesn’t serve the rhythm, the structure doesn’t serve the plot. It has a pungent flavour, but a reader must be careful with a book like this not to confuse the preposterous with the original.’ Of writer B: ‘An excruciatingly self-conscious writer, but I believe if she could shake herself free of Eng Lit she could be very good.’ But sometimes we were in the right restaurant after all. ‘I am completely bowled over by Sarah Waters. I read the first 350 pages in one sitting, and only quit when I realized day was breaking.’

We tried to ignore the marketing fanfare which some books had received on publication—not because we were worried that it would persuade us in the book’s favour, but because it might encourage our prejudice in the opposite direction. Sometimes a book can live up to its hype.

Email from Hilary Mantel, August 9: ‘How did this book come to be the “most eagerly-awaited debut of 2002”? Awaited by whom and on what grounds? I am hoping that we discover some person who has been toiling in silence and obscurity, unawaited by anyone except his mum.’

What were we looking for, the Tome of the Unknown Toiler apart? A few critics urged us to find the state-of-England novel. Among books by young novelists Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is probably the closest England can come to that. We don’t, it seems, have young Roths, Updikes, Wolfes and De Lillos—though neither, Jonathan Franzen apart, are the younger Americans much given to the contemporary panoramic sweep. Our novelists like abroad and they like the past; only eight of the twenty we finally chose set their books in modern—i.e. post-Thatcher—Britain, and only five in modern England. Then again, when, since Dickens and Eliot died, have great state-of-England novels been rolling from the press? Instead, we had state-of-sex-and-drugs novels in which self-harming women were a common feature, state-of-marriage novels, state-of-Yorkshire novels.

We met three or four times and decided that one test for writers on the list was a very simple one. Would we have carried on reading their books—for pleasure—if we hadn’t been judging them? That seems an obvious criteria, and yet I think there may be one or two writers on the final list whom we admired rather than enjoyed, and one or two left off for the opposite reason. Most of us had been judges in other prizes, and, as Nick Clee remarked, something strange and not easily explained often happens in the judging process. You read a book and enjoy it, and then at the judges’ meeting you feel you have been seduced too easily. The reader at home in his armchair is replaced by the literary critic in his hard seat, who finds the book has not somehow been clever, or bold, or original enough. A flaw can be an entertaining thing to discuss, but it can also be a good way of forgetting pleasure.

Our trickiest problem was the weighing of the one-book author against the author with an established career. With a one-book author you are taking a large gamble—what will his second be like, or his third? On the other hand, a three-book author may be getting worse with each book, leaving the brilliance of the original behind. We tried to be reasoned and fair about this, but in the end we chose to back our hunches (and may be proved wrong). After four months of reading, emails and meetings, it was interesting to see how detailed argument about language and narrative strategy boiled down to the straightforward, ‘Sorry, but I just couldn’t stand it.’

What were we looking for? In the context of Monica Ali’s still-to-be-published first novel, Brick Lane, about a Muslim housewife in east London, I’d mentioned to Hilary something that V. S. Naipaul wrote or said: that one of the points of a novel was to bring the reader ‘news’. Ali’s novel was pertinent to now; she’d imagined what such a woman’s life might be like. Hilary returned to this in an email:

This process has made me think what I want from a novel, and I realize that one of the things I want is ‘news’—in the sense that you mentioned earlier. It seems to me a reader should expect a novel to take her outside the tight circle of her own knowledge and concerns. News may be from alien places or other eras, properly realized on the page. Or it may be from places and people very familiar, reappraised and reinterpreted, or made strange so that the reader has to think about their meaning. It may be news from the inarticulate, who have not spoken for themselves (or who we can’t hear). Or it may be news from the writer’s psyche. What it mustn’t be, for me, is false news, where tricks of style dress up lack of content, or where inauthenticity creeps through a text—that is what happens when a writer is either insufficiently observant about day-to-day life, or has not imagined their fictional world thoroughly enough. It is not only facts that need rigour; fiction needs it badly.

Many writers lived up to this standard; three of those who did and who nearly made the final list—Nick Barlay, Andrew Crumey and Claire Messud—turned out to have been wrongly submitted by their publishers (they were either too old, or not British). But many more didn’t. At our last meeting, one judge mentioned the sense of ‘entitlement’ that rose from the page, as if knocking off a novel was an easy thing to do. Hilary again:

Many of the books we have read have left me perplexed. I understand about those books which are shallow ‘instant’ books, catering to a perceived market. What I don’t understand is novels that aim to last a bit longer, but which are ragged, confused and under-realized… For as long as I’ve been publishing people have been moaning ‘no one does any editing any more’. It’s become a commonplace—so much so that you wonder if there ever was a golden age that reviewers are nostalgic for. But if that is so, if there are fewer good editors, or fewer editors with time to spare, writers have an even stronger obligation [on themselves] to give their public something that hangs together… It’s as if publishers are leaving their young authors to sink or swim, to get their advice from adverse reviews or a disdainful public. Can that be good business? My private hate are those books with a fulsome acknowledgement to the editor, where it is obvious that the editor has done no more than leave the author’s complacency unbruised.

What do our twenty chosen writers tell us about British fiction in this new generation? Perhaps mainly that the novels of young British writers—the good ones—show an energy, a liberty and variety (a spunk which may be the upside of ‘entitlement’) that many other countries would envy, even the US, where the craft is more professionalized and disciplined. As for the writers themselves, here are some crude demographics: forty per cent are women; twenty per cent have a parent of non-European ancestry; fifteen per cent are Scottish, 7.5 per cent Welsh (the 2.5 per cent is the Welsh half of Peter Ho Davies, a Granta author—I excluded myself from the vote in his case); five per cent Northern Irish.

All very fine and various, and broadly reflecting the country or countries that Britain has become. Less various, however, is the interesting majority (sixty per cent) whose education included the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. The Oxbridge proportion among writers in 1983 was fifty-five per cent, and in 1993, again sixty per cent. There may be a compelling thesis in this. All I can say here is that the most sinister explanation should be resisted: the proportion of Oxbridge-educated Granta judges has shrunk to forty per cent from seventy-five per cent in 1993.

There have been many comparisons with the famous list of 1983, and no doubt there will be more. They do no good at all. That was a special generation. This may be one as well. We have another ten years to find out.

GRANTA

BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS 2003: INTRODUCTION

Ian Jack