Mark Lawson
Return to Kat Zet
Beryl Bainbridge claimed that she began to write biographical novels because she had exhausted the store of autobiography that had inspired earlier fiction. David Lodge has admitted to following Bainbridge’s example when he turned from campus stories to literary bio-novels. And now there’s further – possibly surprising – evidence to support the theory that a novelist who seeks longevity is likely to find his or her second wind in a different subject matter.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the prospect of Martin Amis becoming a historical novelist would have seemed as remote as John le Carré abandoning spy fiction for Tolkienesque fantasy. In action and language, the first decade of Amis – from 1973’s The Rachel Papers to Money in 1984 – was
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'Two things prevent [this book] from collapsing under the weight of its own wayward ambition. Colin Jones, one of the finest living scholars of early modern France, is no ordinary historian. And the day in question, 27 July 1794, was no ordinary day'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/night-of-the-guillotine
The Anatomy of Melancholy 'has never quite become a widely recognised, bona fide "classic". For long stretches, the bulk of its readership has been restricted to bibliophiles and scholars. It has had an air of murkiness and desuetude'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/phantoms-of-the-mind
'Don’t think of Watergate as being about a break-in, but about what the break-in exposed: dirty ops, dirty tricks, dirty money.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/all-the-presidents-mendacity