have thrived under surrogate care and on the margins. Unintellectual, overpainted, Rabelaisian, Dora is frank in narrating the sexual adventures that have enlivened her life. Yet no experience has ever threatened her closest bond, which is-and here Carter provides a narcissistic touch-with her own image, her identical twin. If sisterhood is competition in Drabble's first novel ('She taught me to want to outdo her,' complains Sarah of Louise), it is a mirror of self-esteem in Carter's last: to love a sister (a woman like oneself) is finally to love oneself. Carter's -963- final plot twist provides a concluding image that reconciles gender differences as well, when the old twins accept the role of foster mothers to two new infant Hazards. Fished casually out of the pockets of hundredyear-old Peregrine Hazard (Melchior's twin and Dora's uncle [father?]), the infant mixed-race twins (miraculous offspring of Gareth, a young Hazard supposedly celibate) are not identical but fraternal, 'boy and girl, a new thing in our family.'
The spirit of reconcilation so pronounced in Carter's final novel marks an affirmative point of departure for this discussion of women novelists between 1962 and 1992. To summarize and conclude, all these writers have emphasized their links to the literary past and specifically to the English literary canon; and all have examined the heroic capacities of solitary characters. All have assessed the contemporary state of the war between men and women, as well as the present state of the war 'down among the women' themselves, to steal a phrase from Weldon's early novel. All have suffered somewhat among reviewers and other canon-makers because they are generally agnostics on dogmas central to high modernism, especially any emphasis on innovations in technique and form. They have all focused instead on the portrayal of characters-not invariably or immediately likable characters- around whom some kind of plot gradually coalesces. Among these writers, Weldon, Carter, and Drabble have been notable for incorporating into their fiction, from their earliest novels, a clear recognition of the radical changes brought about since the 1970s by the emerging discourses of feminism. And yet it would be wrong to see any of these writers solely in terms of a commitment to social change, for even those committed to change are also eager to show what remains usable in tradition. Possibly because their own early lives were dominated by images of a world in ruins and an imperative to rebuild, social change is typically seen as a matter of improvement or renovation rather than a radical razing or demolition: this is true even of Angela Carter, who rewrote fairy tales instead of repudiating them. Though among these writers only Weldon and Carter are outright comediennes, all are playful in the sense that their allusive styles exhibit considerable intellectual play. And yet, like the predecessor they so often invoke (says Carter's Dora, parodying a primer, 'A. [is for] for Austen, Jane'), all instruct by pleasing. Their often dissimulating portraits encourage a reader's moral engagement, an assessment of the choices and values represented by the subject. In a review of
-965-
The Contemporary Novel
Kneel then and pray. The blade flashes a smile. This your new life. This murder is yours.
THEY have made an appalling mistake, in glee, in anguish, in innocence or heartlessness; convinced perhaps that there was no mistake, but only liberation or a form of fidelity. Years later, when the disasters have spoken, when murder or madness or suicide or incest or the withering of love has declared itself, the survivors face their half-focused regrets, reaching no conclusion. This story, in various versions, recurs so often in recent British fiction that it begins to look like a major contemporary myth: forgive us, for we know not what we have done. Yet the helplessness in this story intersects with a curious, extreme control of the story, whose language and narrative techniques offer fastidious and elegant evocations of the most desperate messes. The more desperate the mess, it seems, the more elegant the writing. A style from a despair, perhaps. Or a style from something less terminal and traditional than despair: disarray, uncertainty, a flight from guilt; something between ignorance and knowledge, too knowing for the one and too hapless for the other.
Two teenagers in Ian McEwan's
This stylish disarray is not the only story in recent British fiction, and it is not necessarily the most important one. There are also stories of less dandyish disaffections and less private-seeming preoccupations; stories of gender, of empire and independence, of AIDS, of the end of the world. But the story of the bewildering crime or calamity is the one that appears most frequently and affords the best introduction to what I take to be a new, or at least substantially altered, structure of literary form and feeling.
The new writing is more brittle, less easygoing, but also more experimental and less provincial, than its immediate (or even fairly remote) ancestors; than the work of Iris Murdoch and Anthony Powell, say, whose casual and capacious English styles assert rather than deny the mind's ability to cope with the word's surprises; or of William Golding, whose stark fables interrogate but do not abandon a severe theology. The older writers who seem closest to the new sensibility are Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, and Muriel Spark: Burgess because he has always, in the wake of his master, Joyce, made language the unruly hero of his novels, Fowles because he is not afraid of the unleashed intellect, whatever excesses it may commit, and Spark because the black brilliance of her macabre comedies matches the violence and enormity so common in later fiction. The hacked corpse of her
