No violins please, but I don’t think the day belongs to a literary critic who would dare to imagine their work between hard covers. Because – bluntly – who the hell buys a book of book reviews? True, publishers still find it worth their while to collect the odds and sods of a Zadie or Salman-tier novelist for £20 a pop. And, yes, enough writers manage to house review-adjacent output under the sexed-up rubric of memoir (think of Joanna Biggs’s recent A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again or Rob Doyle’s Autobibliography). Yet for entirely sensible reasons there’s no great clamour to immortalise the rough and ready ephemera of the week in, week out yay or nay; otherwise DJ Taylor, a longstanding reviewer for Private Eye, probably wouldn’t have brought out his recent collection Critic at Large: Essays and Reviews 2010-2022 (no sexing that up) with tiny Nottinghamshire outfit Shoestring Press, which unwary readers might well mistake for an invention of one of Taylor’s Bookworm columns.
All of which makes Retroland, a pell-mell survey of the past half-century of British fiction from veteran Sunday Times critic Peter Kemp, land as something of an intriguing oddity. Styled as honest-to-goodness lit crit for a mainstream audience (academic criticism being another game altogether), it sets out to argue that modern novels are overwhelmingly preoccupied by the past; a thesis that’s persuasive enough, and one that possibly goes some way to explaining why, come Booker time, writers who buck the trend by staying in the here and now – Gwendoline Riley, Sarah Moss, Ross Raisin – seldom get a look in.
Kemp’s tantalising introduction sketches the extent of what his subtitle dubs the “dazzling diversity” of fiction in the period at hand, taking in “a novel that uses only the 483 words spoken by Ophelia in Hamlet” (Let Me Tell You by Paul Griffiths), another “narrated by the first edition of Joseph Roth’s 1924 novel Rebellion” (Hugo Hamilton’s The Pages), and another “that excludes the verb ‘to have’” (Next by Christine Brooke-Rose). Yet you won’t find any of them in Retroland proper, home, instead, to discussions of Midnight’s Children, Atonement, Possession, et al – not so much off the beaten track as stuck on the M25.
But no matter; you read on eagerly, keen to know Kemp’s explanation for the patterns he justly identifies: the “pervasive[ness of] the dual-narrative, double time-scheme novel which juxtaposes a contemporary story with one set in an earlier era” (yes! What’s with that?); the ubiquity of the “trauma plot” (ditto); and the enduring 90s revival of historical fiction, which the late Helen Dunmore attributed to pre-millennial anxiety about what lay ahead in “the blank, silent sheet of years around the corner”.
Kemp agrees that uncertainty seems a factor, “but... only one”, as if there’s some other killer analysis up his sleeve; there isn’t. Despite the setup, Retroland is really a pretext for a whistlestop tour of dozens of novels loosely bunched into four groups –novels of empire, novels of “buried trauma”, novels about history and novels built on older novels (such as Smith’s On Beauty, pegged to EM Forster’s Howards End, or Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein), all of which rush by in a largely contextless blizzard of titles, names and plots, with next to nothing by way of logical signposting (“It’s to fiction about personal trauma... that we should now move”, declares Kemp, and that’s that).
Any sense of reading as feeling – of joy, desire, fun, fear and rage – goes grievously astray in his account of whatever the novel in English has been up to over the past 50 years. When Kemp invokes Mark Haddon’s scintillating Shakespeare reboot The Porpoise, all he has to say about it is that it’s a novel featuring “sexual abuse of a daughter... a situation numerous modern authors have broached”, before speeding off into a 400-word blitz through other examples from Ian McEwan, Deborah Moggach, Alexander Stuart, Edna O’Brien, Beryl Bainbridge, Alice Thomas Ellis, Elizabeth Jane Howard, PD James, Ruth Rendell, Simon Brett, Buchi Emecheta, Alice Walker and Graham Swift.
About his subject, Kemp knows all there is to know – that’s clear – yet as a tour guide he left me muttering at the back of the group, itching to sneak away to the dodgier locales we’re warned off. In the face of so much tasteful commendation (writers who are “keenly intelligent” or “superlatively acute” or – Christ – “an affecting chronicler of human forlornness”), my ears pricked up to hear him pooh-pooh the multi-millennia saga People of the Black Mountains by “Welsh Marxist writer” Raymond Williams as “daunting” and “disorientating”. Bring it!
Sometimes Retroland reads less like a literary-critical survey than the minutes of a 50-year colloquy between every author who ever put pen to paper: “The most remarkable portrayal of the consequences of paternal abuse of a son came from Edward St Aubyn...” After a quick trot through Melrose (“a jamboree of jet-black satiric farce”), we go again: “Trauma inflicted on a son by his father is also at the root of fiction by David Vann”. That’s how Retroland rolls, one heroic bridging sentence after another, but when Kemp tells us “the CAT scan of Vann’s imagination... would probably resemble a bruise”, I finally twigged (via Google) why the book reads like stitched together reviews; it is. When Kemp segues from Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch to The Little Stranger to The Paying Guests to Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child and The Sparsholt Affair, or from John Lanchester to Zadie Smith and Sathnam Sanghera, or from Francis Spufford to Carys Davies and George Saunders, he’s just pasting his old Sunday Times reviews right in. Those examples account for about 10% of the text and there’s a lot more where they came from – he’s been reviewing for 40 years.
Sure, the text isn’t always exactly verbatim; Kemp will switch “venerates” for “loves”, say, or “grim” for “ghastly”, or “engrossing” for “gripping” (every working reviewer will get a twinge of fellow feeling there). And where his 2011 take on Julian Barnes’s Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending plausibly suggested that Barnes “teasingly... borrows” the novel’s title from Frank Kermode’s 1967 book about “the play of consciousness over history” – a theme that’s also Barnes’s – the review text that Kemp reuses in Retroland now says only that Barnes “coincidentally... shares” the title, a change presumably made in view of the novelist’s subsequent (and frankly unbelievable) claim that he had never heard of Kermode’s book, let alone read it.
Did Kemp think no one would notice that Retroland is substantially an elaborate patchwork of self-plagiarism? Or does it not matter? They’re his reviews, after all; but then why not be upfront and republish them as a collection? It’s not as if much has been added by way of overarching analysis. Yet in the end these aren’t even the most pressing of Retroland’s unanswered questions. Essentially the book gives us too much and not enough: witness the treatment of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, “the bleakest modern novel set in the future”, which needlessly blurts out the ending while having not a word to say about the novel’s most striking feature, its language. Did Kemp (or his editor) even figure out who Retroland was for? Either way, it’s a runaway train – and the carriages are full of recycled plot summary.
• Retroland: A Reader’s Guide to the Dazzling Diversity of Modern Fiction by Peter Kemp is published by Yale University Press (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
