![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() There are no apolitical poems or novels no writing that isn’t a product of its time. To write nature poetry without the thrum of climate disaster in the background is in itself a form of denial and complicity. Nature writing is a case in point: you may say you want to write about the eternal-the rose, the lamb-but that is to pretend nature and the seasons are eternal and not shifting. Looking away from current events is political in itself. And now, waking from that state of numbness which was characteristic of us all, she quietly asked me (for everyone spoke in a whisper in those days):Īnd then something like a smile flickered across what was once her face.Īvoiding modern times can be an abdication of responsibility then. It was a woman who was standing near me in the queue, with lips of a bluish color, and who, of course, had never before heard my name. In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months queuing outside the prisons of Leningrad. Aren’t we glad that Fitzgerald bore witness to the Jazz Age, and Steinbeck to the Great Depression? I always remember Anna Akhmatova’s introduction to Requiem, in which she recalls (in the excellent translation by Stephen Capus) how: FUTURE DIARYX READER SERIESWe are living through extraordinary times, in which a series of huge global events are simultaneously occurring. Secondly, the impulse to bear witness drives many artists, meaning the pandemic felt like an occasion we had to rise to. Describing the current moment makes literature more likely to be first-hand, fresh, lacking cliches, and even utterly original-new forms and styles often arise to meet their time. And, relatedly, writers won’t have read lots of accounts of it already. Can clarity only come after the settling of dust?īut if those are the risks, are there also benefits to writing about now? The first and most obvious advantage is that no one has written about now before. FUTURE DIARYX READER FULLBut, once the immediate moment passed, Hannah felt that she needed to wait for the public inquiry before she could finish her own poem: for as much of the full truth as possible to emerge.Ĭertainly, the best second world war novels, from Waugh’s Sword of Honour series to The Tin Drum, weren’t published until the 1950s, (with my favorites, Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse 5 appearing in the 1960s), whilst, War and Peace was written 50 years after the French invasion of Russia. There were urgent, moving responses from poets at the time-such as Jay Bernard’s collection Surge (2019). How are we to end our story, or draw the correct conclusions? The poet Hannah Sullivan has been working on a poem about the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, and speaks interestingly about this. And is making a sellable text out of a wider tragedy inappropriate, or glib?Īnother concern in writing about now-very legitimate I think-is that in the middle of something it’s hard to see its true shape. It’s worth acknowledging that there has always been anxiety around the concept of writing about “now.” Writers’ block, during times of historical change, seems a recurring problem-it can be hard to be inspired by what you’re living through, with it feeling too real or unprocessed. How do you write contemporary fiction without acknowledging the force that reshaped all our social interactions over the past few years, from our working lives to our closest relationships? Any contemporary novel that doesn’t acknowledge the pandemic is just alt-history or fantasy. The suspicion that writing a novel during lockdown was a distraction for the underemployed middle-class also gives this subject a particular taint (Zadie Smith wrote in Imitations: Six Essays of there being “no great difference between novels and banana bread”).īut fiction is about society. As soon as I say that, I imagine your reaction-you can’t think of anything more tedious, given you just lived through it you turn to fiction for escape it’s too soon pandemic fiction is ubiquitous and “over” already. My debut novel, Delphi, is set during the pandemic. ![]()
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