HISTORY OF ENGLISH NOVEL
(series 05)

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY NOVEL

The 20^th century is regarded as an age of fiction with novels on varied subjects by a multitude of writers and a simultaneous growth of the short story. It is actually in this century that English novel came of age and turned truly international. Its scope increased and its canvas became wide with the introduction of multifarious issues and divergent themes.

H G WELLS

Across the entire gamut of the 20^th century fiction the works of H G Wells (1866-1946) are scattered. He has written short stories and novels based on modern science. From biology and applied mechanics he passed on to the problems of the future of man. A socialist and sociologist, Wells has lived for nearly half a century in a daily intercourse of the mind with the efforts, the disappointments, the hopes, of the search for a better life extended to all. This energy of social reflection becomes the soul of his novel. The novel thus becomes a confession of evil in all its forms and an ample discussion of its remedies. It develops at the same time towards international politics and religious philosophy. During and after the 2^nd World War the thought of H G Wells has taken a definite bent in this direction. He figures as a spiritual guide of suffering humanity, the advisor of nations blinded by hostilities, of individuals whom their selfishness is making unconscious. While science has not vanished from the background of his mind he has taken his stand with Carlyle and Ruskin in the exercise of a half mystical apostolate.

In his first scientific romance THE TIME MACHINE (1895) he invented science fiction. His deep knowledge gave an authenticity to his narratives. In quick succession appeared THE INVISIBLE MAN (1897), THE WAR OF THE WORLDS (1898), WHEN THE SLEEPER WAKES (1899) and THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON (1901). In these early novels Wells appeared to have accepted the world without much criticism and delighted in working out an invention with some regard for scientific possibility. But the novels which followed, THE FOOD OF THE GODS (1904) and IN THE DAYS OF THE COMET (1906) ideas began to intrude. Already a self announced socialist Wells wished to bring some of the precision of science and the order of the laboratory into human life.

In 1905 Wells published A MODERN UTOPIA in which he portrayed a vision of a reasonable world. In his three joyous novels THE WHEELS OF CHANCE (1896), LOVE AND MR. LEWISHAM (1900) and KIPPS (1906) he exploited his almost Dickensian gift for comedy. It is pertinent to note that Wells always asserted that he was a journalist rather than an artist and that he was always satisfied if a novel could be a portmanteau for ideas. ANN VERONICA (1906) portrayed the emancipated woman and THE NEW MACHIAVELLI (1911) interpreted a number of political movements of his times.

In TONO BUNGAY (1909) Wells seems to have mastered this form and exposed the evils of commercial publicity in a novel rich in comedy. In THE HISTORY OF MR. POLLY (1910) he returned to the early joyous manner of KIPPS. In MR. BRITTING SEES IT THROUGH (1916) he recorded the reactions of a sensitive mind to the First World War. Though he continued with fiction in his later career he seems to have made his novels the vehicle of his ideas. In THE WORLD OF WILLIAM CLISSOLD (1926) he seems to have disguised a series of essays in the form of a novel. No one can well understand the 20^th century, in its hope and disillusionments, without studying Wells.

JOSEPH CONRAD

The practice of English fiction in the 20^th century showed great variety. By common consent one of the most original of these early 20^th century novelist was Jozef Korzeniowski, a Pole, born in Ukraine, a captain in the English merchant marine and ultimately a naturalised British citizen known to English readers as Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). Born at Berdiczew, in one of the Ukrainian provinces of Poland long under Tsarist rule, he became a French sailor at seventeen, an English master mariner at twenty nine and one of the greatest of English novelist at forty five. He learned French before English and began his first novel ALMAYER’S FOLLY (1895) on the end papers of Madame Bovary. Then came AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS (1896), THE NIGGER OF THE NARCISSUS (18970, YOUTH (1902), TYPHOON (1903), NOSTROMO (1904), LORD JIM (1906) and THE ARROW OF GOLD (1919). The basis of Conrad’s fiction was the adventure story told with a complex evocation of mood and a constant psychological interest in character. He was so self conscious in his art that his self consciousness intruded. Like Flaubert he sought for perfection. Often he wrote of violence and danger.

While the surface reactions of life were obvious in his novels he sought, like some of the Russian novelists, for the more mysterious moods of consciousness. We may emphasise the profound influence of the French masters and the Russian novelist Turgenev on his literary career. It was his third novel THE NIGGER OF THE NARCISSUS that gave him his first indisputable claim to classic rank. His deeply moving novellas HEART OF DARKNESS and THE END OF THE TETHER were published in collected form titled YOUTH. HEART OF DARKNESS is perhaps the finest short novel in the language.

Conrad has been regarded as the best writer about sea and seamen but he himself disclaimed the classification. Some of his best works are not at all about sea. His most ambitious work NOSTROMO is a political novel, highly organised in Henry James’ manner and set in an imaginary South American republic. THE SECRET AGENT (1907) is a Dickensian study of an anarchist plot in London. UNDER WESTERN EYES (1911) is located in Russia and Switzerland. The combination of Dickensian quality with the intensely serious idea of the novel as a work of art produced his unique fiction.

E M FORSTER

Forster (1879-1970) can be regarded as the finest survival in English literature as Bertrand Russell was in philosophy of a liberal humanist tradition of the early 20^th tradition. Born in London and educated at Tonbridge School and King’s College, Cambridge Forster came under the influence of the philosopher G E Moore and formed friendship with the scholar and humanist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson. After leaving Cambridge he lived for sometimes in Italy which formed the background of his first and third novel, WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD (1905) and A ROOM WITH A VIEW (1908). Between these two novels of Italian life Forster published THE LONGEST JOURNEY (1907), a novel of English life and the most autobiographical.

HOWARDS END (1910), one of his two masterpieces, once again presents the theme of contrast, this time between two families, the half German Schlegals, who are interested in music and literature and stand for the spiritual values of the author, and the Wilcoxes, the practical, unimaginative business people who have one member in the family, the first Mrs. Wilcox, a woman instinctively respected by the Schlegals. ‘Only connect’ is the key phrase.

In 1912 Forster visited India for the first time and in 1914 he began working on an Indian novel which was to become his second masterpiece. The novel was delayed by the First World War which took him to Alexandria and he paid a second visit to India in 1921 before resuming it. The Hill of Devi (1953) is valuable both as history and as a source book for Forster’s biggest masterpiece A PASSAGE TO INDIA (1924). The novel portrays the post Kipling but pre partition India, a country at a transitional stage in her existence. Full of Forster’s characteristic ironic humour, the novel is fundamentally a tragedy in which the failure to connect and the related failure to establish human relationships between the British and the Indians leads to momentous results.

The Modern English novelist, with two world wars in the background, feels a sense of breakdown. The novelist seems to have no assurance that outward action reveals any significant fact about his characters, nor is he convinced that public gestures provided by society can ever achieve any real communication between individuals. The problem of communication becomes a startling challenge to the novelists sensitive to this sense of breakdown.

The meaningless destruction of the First World War proved to be a shattering experience for the English public and a challenge to the sensitive novelists of the period. To this sense of general breakdown, the major modern English novelists reacted with their distinctive, divided sensibilities. James Joyce (1882-1941) put forth the multiple consciousness projected on the axes of past and present and sought for technical devices which enabled him to present all the possible points of view simultaneously, showing the same person and events at once heroic and trivial, splendid and silly. D H Lawrence (1885- 1930) expressed his firm belief in the instincts and the fantasia of the unconscious and constructed his plots to use social institutions as devices for probing into the difficulties which lay in the way of proper human relationships. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) explored the human psyche and constructed the colour glass by which the magic of the unconscious world is revealed in her novels. Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) reviewed the modern human beings with a primacy of intellect over emotions as such and achieved a musicalisation of fiction by putting together different strands of human experience.

Joyce Cary (1888-1957) succeeded in eliminating himself in his novels so that it became nowhere possible to feel sure what his own opinions were. Graham Greene (1904-91) relied on spiritualism as the link between man and man and between man and God.

There is a tone of passion underlying all these preoccupations of the major modern English novelists. They seem to be out for new narrative styles. The philosophical idea of Bergson regarding time as a continuous flow rather than a series of different points appears to have made suspect the 18^th & 19^th century narrative fictional styles of carrying themes and characters forward chronologically. The psychological view of human psyche derived generally from the works of Freud and Jung emphasising the multiplicity of human consciousness seems to have made the concerns of the modern English novelists quite unconventional. Individual personality becomes the sum of the individual’s memories. Every man becomes a prisoner of his own private consciousness, his unique train of association resulting in turn from his own unique past. Loneliness is seen as a necessary condition of man and the desire to communicate becomes a deeply embedded human instinct and the desire to escape from loneliness is one of the chief preoccupations.

JAMES JOYCE

James Joyce was born in Dublin on 2nd February 1882 and in his later life regarded his birth day as a lucky day in his own scheme of superstitions. The Joyces were respectable middle class Dubliners of nationalist persuasion who kept several servants and a governess. This social nuance of Joyce’s childhood is important for his Anglo- Irish manners. James was the eldest in a family of ten children and the father John Joyce lived well and lived beyond his means. The birth of each child resulted in the mortgage of some property in Cork until there was nothing left. Through his political connections John Joyce secured a position as a Collector of Rents in Dublin. The job made him and his son James Joyce privy to many of the city’s secrets.

James Joyce began his formal education with Jesuit fathers at Clongowes Wood College in 1888 and remained there until 1902. He left Ireland and studied medicine for sometimes in Paris where he met Synge and was the first person to read Riders to the Sea which he later translated into Italian. From 1904 to 1915 he was a teacher of languages in Trieste, later living in Zurich and again in Paris.

He began his literary career with Chamber Music (1907), a collection of songs. Then came DUBLINERS (1914), a book of realistic stories. In 1916 he published his masterpiece A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN (1914-15). This novel forms, in point of style, a transitional stage between the realism of DUBLINERS and the symbolism of ULYSSES.

ULYSSES published in Paris in 1922 and remained banned for many years in America and England for obscenity. Ezra Pound wrote in Le Mercure de France that Joyce had succeeded in ULYSSES where Flaubert had failed in Bowara et Pecuchet, that is in presenting the average man. The scene of the novel is Dublin and if Joyce had wanted to make his Ulysses the average Dubliner he would have made him a Catholic Irishman but Leopold Bloom (whose father come from Hungary) was a Jew. And a Jew in Ireland is the most unaverage man.

Fundamentally ULYSSES is a comic work using the term comic in its widest sense. There is something to be said for calling ULYSSES a comic epic in prose, like TOM JONES; there is also something to be said for describing it as a tragedy, a tragedy of loneliness. The style of ULYSSES has been subject matter of numerous learned theses in England, France and United States. The novel came out with a wide variety of styles. This is perhaps most obvious in the scene where Stephen and Bloom await the birth of a baby. The conception and growth of the child are reflected in Joyce’s imitations of English prose from Anglo Saxon times to the end of the 19^th century. Joyce’s most extreme linguistic experimentation is in FINNEGANS WAKE (1939), a book of intense verbal coinage and word play. The novel was completed when Joyce was almost more than half blind. To understand FINNEGANS WAKE the readers need a mental equipment, an extensive knowledge of Dublin and of Irish history, legend, slang and folk lore, some little acquaintance with French, German, Italian, English and the language of dream psychology.

Joyce is supposed to have advised his readers to devote their whole life to the understanding of his works. This reminds us that he was born in the same city as Bernard Shaw, who once recommended his readers to read all his plays at least twice over every year for ten years. Joyce employed allusions and symbols which enriched his meanings once they were interpreted. Stephen Daedalus, the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is the fictional equivalent of Joyce. Thus Joyce can be described as the most original English novelist of the 20^th century. He attempted to make a fiction that should image the whole of life, conscious and unconscious, without making any concessions to the ordinary conventions of speech. He broke the ordinary structure of language until it could image these fluctuating impressions. He came to feel that time and space was actually artificial, and that all was related, and that art should be the symbol of that relationship. He had Dublin and the Catholic Church as his background, and from them both he revolted. Both were highly organised unities and to leave them, particularly to leave the church, were emotionally to enter into chaos. Psychologically Joyce was forever attempting to re seek unity in a world that is so disorganised. The greater his attempts to define unity the more do the broken fragments fall in minute pieces through his hands. However his genius is a sincere one and his boldness in invention influenced a number of young writers.

D H LAWRENCE

David Herbert Lawrence, born at Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the son of a miner, was educated at Nottingham University College, where he qualified as a teacher. He taught at Croydon till 1913, when he had to resign because of illness, and thenceforward devoted his life to literature. Much of his poetry is autobiographical and some of his novels also have personal undertones. At the age of twenty he began his first novel THE WHITE PEACOCK (1911). His first masterpiece SONS AND LOVERS (1913) is much more autobiographical and realistic. His next novel THE RAINBOW (1915) is one of his most impressive novels. WOMEN IN LOVE (1921) has been regarded as one of his supreme masterpieces and his most ambitious undertaking in which he portrays a wider variety of English life.

The post war Lawrence has been generally found to be less impressive than the pre war. For the first time his novels, with the exception of the comparatively light hearted THE LOST GIRL (1921), become difficult. AARON’S ROD (1922), KANGAROO (1923), THE PLUMED SERPENT (1926), LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER (1928): all contain admirable things amid a mass of windy rhetoric. The greatest work of this period is the very moving nouvelle THE MAN WHO DIED not published in England till 1931, after his own death.

Lawrence’s first published fiction was in the form of short stories contributed in 1909 to Ford Madox Ford’s English Review and he continued to produce stories of varying length, from mere sketches to nouvelles, during the rest of his life. If his post war novels seemed to be verbose no criticism can be made of such nouvelles as THE FOX (1923) and ST. MAWR (1925) or the best stories in England, My England (1924), The Woman Who Rode Away (1928) and The Lovely Lady (1932). Lawrence was a prolific writer for publication and his works includes poems, plays, travel books, essays, criticism, novels, nouvelles, stories and letters.

Lawrence’s life was an unending and courageous struggle against his own ill health and the prudery of the public. A pioneer in the serious treatment of sexual themes, he inevitably came up against the self appointed guardians of public morals. THE RAINBOW was the first to incur their wrath and was withdrawn soon after its publication. LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER was described as the landmark of evil and Lawrence was portrayed as one who has prostituted art to pornography.

As a novelist Lawrence considered himself superior to the saint, the scientist, the philosopher and the poet since in his opinion novel deals with the complete human being instead of a particular aspect. His main theme is the tensions, joys and sorrows that exist in personal relationships. Blood and instinct for him were the dominating forces of life, superior in strength to the dictates of reason. The result is that his novels lack conventional form. What matters is the internal lives of the characters and not their external actions. His writing has a great emotional impact and gives the feeling of complete fidelity to life. Lawrence’s descriptions of the physical appearance of his characters and their surroundings are direct and sensuous, his prose rhythms and choice of words remind us that he was a poet.

His settings are inspired by the places Lawrence lived in: the Midlands country side in THE WHITE PEACOCK, Australia in KANGAROO, and Mexico in THE PLUMED SERPENT. His imagery is typically drawn from natural and religious sources. Some critics argue that he was not always in touch with reality because the intense level at which his characters live lacks credibility. However it has to be observed that his criticism is justified only if the criterion of naturalism is applied too rigorously. His background was different from that of any other novelist of his time. He knew the miners, their wives, the cramped houses, the huddled life, the cruelties and debasements and the smell of the slag heaps. Modern life thwarted his spirit and he could find no consolation, as Wells had done, in making blue prints for a new world. The disease was one which admitted no intellectual cure, for the modern world seemed to Lawrence to have corrupted man’s emotional life. Even passion had become some niggling by product of intelligence. To discover again a free flow of the passionate life became for him almost a mystical ideal, for there was fulfilment and there was power. He rejected tradition partly because he had never known it, and instead of struggling to remake civilisation, he turned upon it a loathing that culminated in despair. He despised intellect, one of the major instruments allowed to man to seek the reasonable life. His plea that civilisation has degraded man’s life was a pertinent one. He invented a language in which sexual experience could be described and he had a rare eye for every movement in nature.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Beginning with comparatively conventional novels like THE VOYAGE OUT (1915), and NIGHT AND DAY (1919) Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) progressed in accordance with her own theories through the only partially successful JACOB’S ROOM (1922) and MRS. DALLOWAY (1925) to the much more satisfying TO THE LIGHT HOUSE (1927), the novel in which theory is at last successfully wedded to practice to create an impressive work of art. “Examine for a moment,” she had said, “in ordinary mind on an ordinary day receiving a myriad impressions…let us trace the pattern…which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness.” This may appear to be a poet’s task rather than a novelist’s. But Virginia Woolf’s later novels like THE WAVES (1931) and BETWEEN THE ACTS (1941) are more consciously poetic. Most of her novels are on a small scale. This is perhaps because the theory of stream of consciousness and the reaction against the overblown productions of H G Wells demand a small canvas. Her method is to take a plot which has a simple outline but to exploit it with impressionism which seizes upon every detail and to order these details not in a rational arrangement but as they stream through the mind of one of the character. The novel in her hands becomes an interior soliloquy and diffuseness is avoided by the retention of the central theme.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), a younger contemporary of D H Lawrence, came out with a similar boldness of expression. Some of his essays in Do What You Will was inspired by his conversation with Lawrence. His early novels CROME YELLOW (1921), ANTIC HAY (1923), THOSE BARREN LEAVES (1925) owe something to Norman Douglas’ SOUTH WIND (1917) and Wyndham Lewis’ TARR (1918).

In Huxley, the great influences of Victorian art and science met: on his father’s side, he was descended from Thomas Huxley who had been Charles Darwin’s champion in the discussions on evolution, and, on his mother’s side, from Matthew Arnold. Heredity played an important role than education for he brought to the English novel the knowledge and analysis of a scientist and curiosity in the form of an artist. Perhaps no other novelist images more clearly the changing temperament of intellectual England since the First World War. His early novels were comic and satiric narratives, prefiguring the complete disillusionment of young Englishmen in the years after the World War. In CROME YELLOW and ANTIC HAY he seemed to revel in the comic exposure of the deceit of life. He gave to a more serious enquiry in THOSE BARREN LEAVES.

However Huxley is not seeking any easy solution to his dilemma and like Lawrence he is tormented by the strange phenomenon of man. Unlike Lawrence he cannot regard sexual experience with any sense of pleasure and certainly not as a medium of illumination. The theme fascinates him but also fills him with disgust. Like Swift he appears to be angered at the jest that makes life thus, but unlike Swift he is aware that this strange beast, man, has also created symphonies, painted pictures and had moments of vision.

These preoccupations lead to the most brilliant and original of his novels POINT COUNTER POINT (1928). He can find no consolations in the brittle illusion of a well ordered mechanical world and satirises such beliefs in BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932). In EYELESS IN GAZA (1936) he expounds his deepened vision and one feels that he has reached at certain impatience with fiction as a medium.

GRAHAM GREENE

Graham Greene (1904-91) wrote novels as well as short stories, plays, autobiography, essays and criticism for almost sixty years. He was accepted into the Catholic Church in 1926 and thus he impinged upon the literary scene as an English Catholic whose attitudes were moulded by a protestant childhood. He began with THE MAN WITHIN (1929) and his subsequent novels are STAMBOUL TRAIN (1932), IT’S A BATTLEFIELD (1934), ENGLAND MADE ME (1935), A GUN FOR SALE (1936), BRIGHTON ROCK (1938), THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT (1939), THE POWER AND THE GLORY (1940), THE MINISTRY OF FEAR (1943), THE HEART OF THE MATTER (1948), THE THIRD MAN (1950), THE END OF AFFAIR(1951), LOSER TAKES ALL (1955), THE QUIET AMERICAN (1955), OUR MAN IN HAVANA (1958), A BURNT OUT CASE (1961), THE COMEDIANS (1966), TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT (1969), THE HONORARY CONSUL (1973), THE HUMAN FACTOR (1978), DOCTOR FISCHER OF GENEVA (1980), MONSIGNOR QUIXOTE (1982) and THE TENTH MAN (1985).

Greene’s is a single body of work, in thought and in theme. Each of his novels is definitely indebted to the philosophic trend predominant in post war English literature. All his works expresses a grieving awareness of man’s unmitigated loneliness. His novels are popular and exciting because they contain the basic features of such popular fiction as thrillers, adventure stories and spy stories. Their settings are dangerous or exotic places such as Mexico, West Africa, Congo, Haiti and Argentina. His vivid descriptions of places and people and his fast moving pace are cinematic and most of his novels are turned into movies.

Greene’s settings, characters and themes are fused into complete statements about the springs of human conduct. A great many of his themes--- alienation, desolation, despair--- derive from a neurotic state bordering on classic melancholia. The secondary themes of persecution, the hunter and the fugitive are inspired by his experience in British Secret Service. Because of the quantity and quality of his achievement Graham Greene is widely considered to be the most outstanding novelist of the 20^th Century.

In the 1950s emerged a group of novelists called the Angry Young Men (of whom one was a woman Iris Murdoch) comprising William Cooper, Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, Stan Barstow and Stanley Middleton protesting against a hollow welfare state and an intolerably cruel society. The bitter experiences during the Second World War and the agony at the explosion of the first nuclear bomb seem to have made these rebels believe that all the standards set for them by their elders were misleading and had to be rejected. A general repudiation of the traditional values becomes an immediate necessity and their new ideal world is not of commitment but of a grim social neutrality. In this morally neutral world psychology and religion become objects to be ridiculed.

The economic programmes brought out by the Labour government of the post Second World War England proclaiming to help the working class particularly were not being fulfilled in practice. The spread of education had promoted a belief in the full range of opportunities opening to all. But when these young men coming from a low income group, left their colleges, they found frustration awaiting them. General industrialisation, unemployment, persistence of class distinction and cultural snobberies--- all made the post- second- world-war society a distracted and diseased one. So the angry young rebels found it to be their duty to point fingers at these bewildering wrongs of the society.

The main preoccupations for the rebels were no longer psychological explorations and religious devotions. These post 1950 English novelists were out to expose the destructive effect of class distinction, cultural snobberies, unearned richness and religious orthodoxies. They sought to formulate a new kind of humanism as replacement for the old and decadent values. The generation gap, hypergamy, the primacy of the provincial background, and the general selection of the protagonist from the lower income group became the dominant features of the English rebels. They created the new idea of an anti hero, opposing everything that can be cried over. They created the small, good hearted rebel protesting against his society with clownish gestures.

WILLIAM COOPER

The novels of William Cooper present the social ambition of individuals who begin low in the social hierarchy. In his first novel SCENES FROM PROVINCIAL LIFE (1950) he presents job conscious people of a modest income group, struggling to assert their personal supremacies in a provincial background. The story of his next novel THE STRUGGLES OF ALBERT WOODS (1952) centres around a gifted youth of great promise who, early in his boyhood, had fixed on becoming a scientist. In THE EVER INTERESTING TOPIC (1953) Cooper presents the problem of human struggles against the expansive background of a violently driven provincial school of Monteagle. In DISQUIET AND PEACE (1956) he presents the internal struggle of a sentimental Arnold Brown, who gradually finds that nearly all the family units he is passionately attached to, break away from him one by one. His novel YOUNG PEOPLE (1958) unfolds the struggles of four young men in a predominantly provincial setting. SCENES FROM MARRIED LIFE (1961) communicates a new vision of the contemporary society and London with its fog flavoured with sulphur dioxide forms the new dramatic setting.

KINGSLEY AMIS

The novels of Kingsley Amis present protagonists of modest backgrounds playing merry hell with the pretensions of the upper reaches of their society. In LUCKY JIM (1953), Jim Dixon, a lower middle class young man rebels against the snobbery, the hypocrisy, the pseudo culture and the affectation of the culturally elegant people like Professor Welch. In THAT UNCERTAIN FEELING (1955), Amis presents the leisurely narrated story of John Lewis, a man working on a modest post. I LIKE IT HERE (1958) unfolds the entertaining account of the holiday trip of a struggling creative artist. In I WANT IT NOW (1968), Amis presents a pleasant satire on the rich. His other novels are TAKE A GIRL LIKE YOU (1960), ONE FAT ENGLISH MAN (1963), THE ANTI DEATH LEAGUE (1966), THE GREEN MAN (1969), GIRL, 20 (1971), THE RIVERSIDE VILLAS MURDER (1973), ENDING UP (1974), THE ALTERATION (1976), JAKE’S THING (1978), RUSSIAN HIDE AND SEEK (1980), STANLEY AND THE WOMEN (1984) and THE OLD DEVILS (1986).

JOHN WAIN and JOHN BRAINE

The predominantly light and farcical tone of Amis gathers an intensity in John Wain whose HURRY ON DOWN (1953) achieved the same kind of status and popularity as LUCKY JIM. His other novels include LIVING IN THE PRESENT (1955), THE CONTENDERS (1958), A TRAVELLING WOMAN (1959), STRIKE THE FATHER DEAD (1962), THE YOUNG VISITORS (1965), A WINTER IN THE HILLS (1974) and YOUNG SHOULDERS (1982). His most famous novel STRIKE THE FATHER DEAD deals with generation gap, a topic that troubles the modern youths.

John Braine presents a still different kind of intensity of tone in his novels. His lower class protagonist Joe Lampton in ROOM AT THE TOP (1957) does not ask for little from life. He is a go getting man who wants the very best for himself and marries above himself by going in for a rich girl Susan Brown, the daughter of a rich business magnate although Mrs. Alice Awgill, a quiet lady dissatisfied with her husband, passionately loves him. His subsequent novels are THE VODI (1959), LIFE AT THE TOP (1962), THE CRYING GAME (1964), STAY WITH ME TILL MORNING (1970), THE QUEEN OF A DISTANT COUNTRY (1972), WAITING FOR SHIELA (1976), ONE AND LAST LOVE (1981), THE TWO OF US (1984) and THESE GOLDEN DAYS (1985).

IRIS MURDOCH

Iris Murdoch deals with the same human dilemma presented by the other English rebels but with a predominantly psychological point of view. With twenty one novels, few plays, some poems, a number of influential articles, a book on Sartre, a book on her own moral philosophy and a book on Plato’s theory of art to her credit Iris Murdoch has indeed become a writer of international repute. Her novels are UNDER THE NET (1954), THE FLIGHT FROM THE ENCHANTER (1956), THE SANDCASTLE (1957), THE BELL (1958), A SEVERED HEAD (1961), AN UNOFFICIAL ROSE (1962), THE UNICORN (1963), THE ITALIAN GIRL (1964), THE RED AND THE GREEN (1965), THE TIME OF THE ANGELS (1966), THE NICE AND THE GOOD (1968), BRUNO’S DREAM (1969), A FAIRLY HONOURABLE DEFEAT (1970), AN ACCIDENTAL MAN (1971), THE BLACK PRINCE (1973), THE SACRED AND PROFANE LOVE MACHINE (1974), A WORLD CHILD (1975), HENRY AND CATO (1976), THE SEA, THE SEA (1978), NUNS AND SOLDIERS (1980), THE PHILOSOPHER’S PUPIL (1983), THE GOOD APPRENTICE (1985) and THE BOOK AND THE BROTHERHOOD (1987). She raises philosophical issues in her fiction by implication although she maintains that she writes primarily to entertain her readers. The surface attractions of her novels are considerable: narrative pace, lively descriptions of people and places, striking episodes and realistic, entertaining dialogues. She uses symbols and stimulates thought about such problems as intentions, appearance and reality, truth and falsity and the part played in life by contingency and chance.

ALLAN SILLITOE, STAN BARSTOW and STANLEY MIDDLETON

Allan Sillitoe made his reputation with SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING (1958) and went on to write novels like THE GENERAL (1960), KEY TO THE DOOR (1961), THE DEATH OF WILLIAM POSTERS (1965), A START IN LIFE (1970), TRAVELS IN NIHILON (1971), RAW MATERIAL (1972), A FLAME OF LIFE (1974), THE WIDOWER’S SON (1976), THE STORYTELLER (1979), THE SECOND CHANCE (1981), HER VICTORY (1982), DOWN FROM THE HILL (1984) and LIFE GOES ON (1985).

Stan Barstow wrote A KIND OF LOVING (1960); the best of his other novels is A RAGING CALM (1968). His JOBY (1960) deals with the gradually increasing complexities of growing children. Stanley Middleton wrote A SHORT ANSWER (1958),HARRIS’S REQUIEM (1960), A SERIOUS WOMAN (1961), THE JUST EXCHANGE (1962), TWO’S COMPANY (1963), HIM THEY COMPELLED (1964), TERMS OF REFERENCE (1966), THE GOLDEN EVENING (1968), WAGES OF VIRTUE (1969), APPLE OF THE EYE (1970), BRAZEN PRISON (1971), COLD GRADATIONS (1972), A MAN MADE OF SMOKE (1973), HOLIDAY (1974), DISTRACTIONS (1975), STILL WATERS (1976), ENDS AND MEANS (1977), TWO BROTHERS (1978), IN A STRANGE LAND (1979), THE OTHER SIDE (1980), BLIND UNDERSTANDING (1982), ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM (1983), THE DAYSMAN (1984), VALLEY OF DECISION (1985), AN AFTER DINNER’S SLEEP (1986), AFTER A FASHION (1987), RECOVERY (1988) and VACANT PLACES (1989).

Thus it is evident that these post 1950 English novelists come out with the new concept of an anti hero, opposing everything that can be cried over. This small good hearted rebel protests against his society sometimes with clownish gestures. Yet through all these apparently comical gestures runs a thought provoking criticism of the modern welfare state. These protagonists though not fierce revolutionaries represent the hopes and frustrations of the 20^th century man. These writers were seriously concerned with the urgent themes and evolve a new ethics of human living. In this new code of conduct there is no place for spurious idealism. There is a subtly projected liberation of human spirit. These writers break the spell of the interior monologues and the spiritual crisis under which the English novel seemed to have lived for such a long period of time in the first half of the 20^th century. They turn the novel into the direction of its concern with social reality and common humanity.