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.
