This Guardian article by John Mullan, published in advance of Saturday’s Culture Show special on debut novelists, has attracted a fair amount of comment in my corner of the bookish internet; I’ll point you in particular towards posts by Maureen Kincaid Speller, Mike Harrison, and Sam Kelly (thanks to Martin Lewis and Paul Smith for highlighting those links). More from me after the programme has been broadcast, but there is one issue I’d like to address here, which is that all twelve of the novelists selected by Mullan’s panel are white. This has been remarked upon in the comments on the Guardian piece, and Mullan has replied that the judging panel were asked to select books solely on merit. Fair enough, but there is still an issue here.
We are talking about a field which can claim Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro as key figures of the last thirty years; by now, we should be at a stage where we could expect the results of a meritocratic process like this to show some ethnic diversity as a matter of course. The Culture Show‘s process has organically produced a selection which is respectably diverse in terms of gender and age; that it has not done the same in terms of ethnicity is a sign that there’s a problem somewhere. Whether the outcome is an artefact of this particular process or an indicator of something more systemic, I don’t know; either way, it is a cause for concern. I suggest that it would not have been considered acceptable if all the selected authors had been of the same gender; it shouldn’t be acceptable that they’re all white, either.
***
I blogged last year about an issue of Black Static in which all the stories were by men; having been critical then, it’s only right and proper that I should acknowledge the good work being done in the latest issue. As well as two of the five stories being written by women, the entire book review section has been given over to works by women, as has Peter Tennant’s Case Notes blog for the month of February. Here’s a fine example of a literary institution noticing an issue with its field, and doing something to address it.
Matthias Politycki’s Next World Novella (translated from the German by Anthea Bell) is the latest title from 
A brilliant fusion of biography, social history, and history of science, that tells a fascinating story. Henrietta Lacks was a poor African American woman who died of cervical cancer in 1951; as with other cancer patients at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital, a sample of the cells from Henrietta’s tumour was taken, without her knowledge, for research purposes. Those cells were the origin of the HeLa cell line, the first human one to be propagated successfully in the lab (‘immortal’ because they can divide indefinitely in culture). Henrietta’s cells facilitated many medical advances, but it was twenty years before her family even learnt that a sample had been taken.
Euan Armstrong takes his young family to Bahrain, ostensibly to undertake missionary work; but Euan’s wife Ruth begins to question all that she holds dear when she discovers the true nature of that work. Meanwhile, teenage Noor Hussain has returned to Bahrain from England to live with her father; she has struggled to fit in and is contemplating suicide. But then Noor finds new hope in the person of Ruth, just as Ruth is falling for Noor’s brother Farid.
Another fine novella from 
Both collections begin with a title story that more or less sets the tone for what is to come. Saki’s volume goes by the wonderful title of Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse That Helped. Its eponymous story, barely five pages in length, is a satire based around advertising; Filboid Studge is a vile breakfast food that nobody buys; the ‘mouse that helped’ is Mark Spayley, a poor artist who wishes to marry the daughter of Filboid Studge’s manufacturer, and may get his chance – if, that is, he can devise a successful campaign for the product. And Spayley’s campaign is successful: Filboid Studge flies off the shelves, and is eaten stoically, because the campaign makes people feel they should eat it, and ‘people will do things from a sense of duty which they would never attempt as a pleasure’ (p. 3). So, Spayley will have his wish… won’t he?
There are four stories in Frank O’Connor’s The Cornet-Player Who Betrayed Ireland, all of which, in their different ways, look at the effect of broader social forces on the lives of ordinary individuals. The cornet-player of the title story is Mick Twomey, the only supporter of William O’Brien in a brass band whose other members support O’Brien’s rival political leader, John Redmond; normally, they put their differences aside in the name of music – but now the band is due to play at a reception for a visit by Redmond, and relations between Mick and his bandmates change irrevocably. O’Connor’s focus here is firmly on his characters, with the politics more in the background (his narrator is Mick’s son, who understands little more than that his neighbourhood is in favour of O’Brien and against Redmond); there’s a gradual, grinding – and thoroughly believeable – inevitability to the way Mick and the band become estranged.
Recent Comments