Daily Archives: July 11, 2022

Britains bestseller lists are usually dominated by rural parish murder mysteries, John Grisham thrillers, and historical fiction set in every age other than our own. Novels that detail contemporary life in unflinching, unsparing detail are missing. The song of our country, as it is now, is not being sung.

Their absence is perhaps understandable. In our age of mass-strikes, cost of living crises, and political turmoil, escapism even of the murderous kind seems like an appealing option.

This wasnt the case in the 19th century, when everyone from Anthony Trollope and Elizabeth Gaskell to Benjamin Disraeli, turned their hand to writing novels which described the way we live now: itself the title of Trollopes 1875 satire of financial scandals. Gaskells North and South (1855) is an emotionally febrile exploration of the horrors of industrial England, as the initially nave and snobbish Margaret Hale is forced to leave the idyllic Helston a village like in one of Tennysons poems and move north. A few mill workers riots, some tasteless northern wallpaper and one naval mutiny later, Margaret is morally improved and, perhaps more importantly, engaged.

Disraelis novel, Sybil or The Two Nations (1845) is a similar exploration of the Condition of England. The poverty of those living in Englands industrial cities is so extreme as to seem to belong to another country. Many of Charles Dickenss works contain an element of reportage on the same places. Amidst the unstintingly ridiculous character names, putrid fog, and marauding donkeys, Hard Times (1854), David Copperfield (1850), Oliver Twist (1839), and Bleak House (1853) all attempted to reflect Britain back at the British.

Middlemarch(1872), George Eliots study of provincial life, is the undisputed masterwork of this genre. Through granular examination of the lives of the inhabitants of a middle-England town, Eliot explores everything from medical developments to the status of women in the early 19th century. But its regular appearance on lists of the best state of the nation novels leaves me queasy. Is the book intended to be about national change and the passing of the 1832 Reform Act, or is it a universal examination of human psychology?

State of the nation novelshave been definedas those that address social and political changes. This seems simplistic, even trite: by its nature, a work of fiction inevitably addresses social questions. By that reckoning,Middlemarchis certainly a state of the nation novel, but then so is Douglas AdamssThe Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy(1979). Eliot, like Adams, toys with the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. She gives us a tangled web of human interconnectedness, heartbreak, and failure. The number 42 is conspicuously absent.

Yet some contemporary novelists have taken up the challenge. Amanda Craig has written a sequence of nine interconnected novels all set in contemporary Britain, including 2020s The Golden Rule. For her, contemporary state of the nation novels are those which, like Middlemarch or any of Dickenss or Trollopes offerings, help us get a grasp of the way we live now. She acknowledges a scarceness of modern equivalents to the likes of Gaskell and Disraeli, and attributes it to being bombarded with current affairs by the media.

The author William Boyd similarly blames the news cycle. The basic problem is, it seems to me, that time moves on so much more quickly than in the 19th century. There is a risk for novelists that a on-the-nail, crucial novel will be irrelevant in three years time. He uses the example of Justin Cartwrights 1995 novel In Every Face I Meet. The central epiphanic metaphor is a try scored by the former England rugby union captain Will Carling. As Boyd says, that novel will now require footnotes to make any sense to someone who doesnt remember the occasion.

Looming obsolescence was less of an issue for Dickens and Trollope: their works were often serialised prior to publication, in magazines and newspapers which carried news as well as fiction. Rather than writing about the news cycle of politics and contemporary issues, they were practically a part of it.

Thackeray biographer, D. J. Taylor, identifies another issue that faces the would-be state of the nation writer: in the age Thackeray created Vanity Fair (1848), it was possible for a writer to understand his or her society in a way that isnt possible now. They could grasp the political, financial, and class structure of society. Now, no modern novelist really understands how money works. It is far harder to describe class signifiers and differences in an age where someone earning a six-figure salary can still call themselves culturally working class.

And, many novelists are out of touch with the class-based issues which are at the heart of state of the nation fiction. There are, of course, exceptions Luan Goldies brilliant new novel These Streets is about gentrification and the cost of living in East London; an area the author knows well. But it would be hard for a West London-dwelling, Remainer, Lib Dem-voting novelist to write convincingly about disillusionment and anti-EU sentiment in a former mining town.

The lack of literary fiction that deals with contemporary life is not a recent development. Out of the books which met with acclaim last year, it would be hard to find many which take, as their primary subject matter, the intricacies and relentlessness of modern life.

But it would be facetious to claim there have been no blockbuster state of the nation novels in living memory. In 2012, John Lanchester published Capital: a precisely observed chronicle of London life as the 2008 financial crisis shook the world. The lives of the inhabitants of one road in London from Polish builders to Senegalese footballers and rich Bankers are fastidiously explored, and a true portrait of Britain in the 21st century emerges.

Most recently, Ali Smith wrote her Seasonal Quartet in the years following the Brexit referendum. Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer and this years Companion Piece offer a commentary on British lives as they are lived now. While 19th century novelists recorded railway timetables, the price of stamps, and contemporary legal battles, Smith instead revels in descriptions of disembodied heads and an almost ekphrastic dedication to describing art. Her books are about contemporary life Summer managed to touch on Covid-19 despite only being published a few months after the pandemic began but, in their radical form and style, they are not so much state of the nation novels as they are markers of the state of literary fiction.

Neither Lanchester nor Smiths achievements alter the fact that this is a genre where the tide is going out. What could be the cause of this reluctance to fictionalise the day-to-day lives of normal people?

For Boyd, there is a pragmatic reason: it is risky, and potentially unrewarding, for writers to write about the present. Many novelists himself included write about the recent or semi-distant past because everything is fixed and known. From The Blue Afternoon (1993) to The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth (2017), Boyd has written contemporary novels and short stories, but he would defy any reader to determine what year theyre set in. He takes great pains not to make any topical reference so that its contemporary feel can last a decade or maybe two and is generic rather than precise.

But Craig takes a different approach. The protagonist of her most recent novel, The Golden Rule, is a single mother who cleans homes for a living and continually struggles to make ends meet. But Craig believes that readers are put off by the potential Left-of-centre moralising of a novel which deals with poverty and financial inequality. A state of the nation novel has to be able to hold a mirror up to some of the big social and personal problems of the day and ask readers what they sympathise with, but a strong moral compass hasnt been fashionable for the past 75 years.

This difference in opinion marks a subtly different approach from the purpose of contemporary details in fiction. Are they intended to provide a contemporary feel a modern backdrop to the storys action or are they a part of the storys direction, and the reason for it having been written?

With Boyds fiction, the answer is clearly the former and for Craig, as for her Victorian counterparts, the answer is the latter. But for Smith, the answer lies somewhere in the middle of the two: contemporary resonances give her stories momentum and purpose, but her Seasonal Quartet is less fiction that mirrors contemporary life than fiction which mentions contemporary life but retains an element of detachment from it.

This is why these novels have fallen out of fashion. For Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and Thackeray, literary culture was inextricably linked to everyday life: novels appeared, quite literally, next to news in the pages of periodicals and often used events from current affairs as potential plot lines. In our day and age, authors, novelists, and the rarefied book world are separate from normal life. (Unsurprisinglypublishing statisticsreveal a dearth of working-class employees in the industry.) We dont want to read novels about the housing crisis, corrupt politicians, and global turmoil when we can watch it on our television screens. In response, fiction has found a home for itself ever further from day-to-day reality.

But we should not be content with this division of literary culture from everyday existence. Lets bring back serialised novels in newspapers, books with thinly veiled real-life politicians, and fiction about the minutiae of normal life. It isnt the issues or politics that readers remember about Victorian state of the nation novels, but the characters.

The Britain they lived in, with its financial scandals and venal celebrities, is not so different from ours. The stories are all still there: a modern day Becky Sharpe in a train strike; a scheming, corrupt Obadiah Slope in the contemporary Church of England; an updated Oliver Twist as a look at the woeful state of children in care; or even Dorothea Brooke as a certain feckless MPs wife. All we are doing is waiting for talents to tell them.

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Why fiction is failing Britain - UnHerd

Forensics expert Laughton Rees hunts an unusually clever killer who appears to be staging murder scenes just for her in this twisty new psychological thriller by the bestselling author of the Sanctus trilogy.

We chat with author Simon Toyne about his latest novelDark Objects, which is out this week!

Hi Simon, were excited to hear about your new book, DARK OBJECTS.

DARK OBJECTS is a twisty, fast-paced, psychological suspense thriller set in present-day London. It starts with a glamorous woman found brutally murdered in her sleek, architect-designed mansion. She has no formal identity so officially doesnt exist, no alarms were tripped, no forensics were left behind, and the only clues are four strange objects arranged around the body: a unicorn toy, some old war medals, a set of keys that dont fit any lock in the house, and a book on forensics and police procedure written by Dr. Laughton Rees.

Laughton, a brilliant but troubled and reclusive academic struggling to raise her teenage daughter alone, finds herself dragged onto the front pages by the media storm that whips up around the bizarre murder and the belief that her book helped the killer cover their tracks.

Realizing that the fastest way to return her life to normal is to solve the mystery, Laughton breaks her own golden rule to never work live cases and agrees to share her considerable expertise with the investigation.But as the objects gradually begin to reveal the identity of both killer and victim, Laughton realizes they also contain specific messages about the childhood trauma that shattered her life and eventually turned her into a recluse. Her childhood was stolen away by one killer, now she must catch another before her daughters is destroyed too.

Youve mentioned youre a fan of Charles Dickens. How has his work influenced your writing?

I dont know a single writer who isnt a fan or hasnt been influenced by Dickens in some way. Hes so influential that when you think about Victorian London what youre picturing isDickensianLondon, the one he described so vividly in books as varied asOliver Twist,A Tale of Two Cities, andGreat Expectations.

Hes also brilliant at taking complex ideas, particularly ones of social and economic problems, and dramatizing them in a way that makes them understandable and compelling and has this incredible ability to tell a story that incorporates the whole of society, from Lords to street sweepers and everybody in between. This is something I tried to emulate inDARK OBJECTS. I take the story all over Londonfrom the Home Secretary and Chief Police Commissioner to a teenage runaway, living on the streetsguiding the reader on a journey through a darker and more unfamiliar London.

Why set DARK OBJECTS in London?

DARK OBJECTSis the first novel Ive set in my native England. All the locations in the book are real places: the Murder Mansion, Suicide Bridge, New Scotland Yard, the Old Chelsea Nick, the offices of The Dailyall genuine parts of a very real, modern London.

The mansion where the murder takes place is called the Eldridge House which sits on the edge of Highgate Cemetery. Highgate Cemetery is a fantastically opulent and overgrown Victorian cemetery that looks like an enchanted wood filled with lop-sided tombs and gravestones and has quite a few famous people buried thereKarl Marx, author George Eliot, George Michael, the actress Jean Simmons.

I used to live in Archway, which is at the bottom of Highgate Hill. I know the area well and had always been intrigued by this striking, modern, steel and glass house overlooking the graveyard. I was inspired to set the murder there.

Many writers spend much of their writing time in isolation. How did Covid affect you and your work life?

Covid and lockdown meant having to share the house with my wife and three kids instead of being on my own between the hours of 8 and 4. Being a writer means you have no real structure so you either need to create some or cleave to a pre-existing one. Lockdown shattered my structure entirely. I had to create a new one in order to keep working, which mostly involved getting up a few hours earlier than the rest of our household.

I wrote a lot of DARK OBJECTS sitting up in bed, which was not ideal for my back and may have partly inspired the scene in the middle of the book where someone else is trapped in a bedroom against their will.

How do true crime stories fit into your work? Is DARK OBJECTS based on a particular case?

I think true crimes fascinate all of us, and crime writers are no exception. As I was prepping DARK OBJECTS, I was filming a true crime TV show called Written in Blood where I interviewed various bestselling crime writers such as Tess Gerritsen and Karin Slaughter about the real crimes that had inspired their work. One of the stories involved a double murder in Glasgow in the early eighties, where two women were killed in separate attacks. In each case the killer emptied the contents of their handbags and laid them out in a neat line. There was something very macabre and disturbing about that detail and it stuck with me and ended up being one of the hallmarks of my killer in DARK OBJECTS. I was reminded of the adage, Truth is stranger than fiction. Its another reason why people love true crime I think; an editor would probably make me take out half the things I encountered when making this show because they would say it was implausible or unbelievable. Alas.

DARK OBJECTS is your seventh novel. Do you view this novel as an evolution? What can we expect next?

My first three novels were compared to Dan Brown and my next two to Stephen King and Lee Child. DARK OBJECTS has been compared by early readers to Thomas Harris. I think the stories Im telling have shifted in tone and subject over the years. Having said that, I think all of my books are fundamentally still the same at their core. All of them have a big mystery at their heart, which complex characters attempt to solve through the course of the story. All of them have multiple twists and are carefully put together in a way that hopefully makes the reader get to the end of one page and turn another, get to the end of one chapter and say just one more until they close the book at three in the morning still wondering whats going to happen to the characters next. And so, as to whats next, Ive already written a first draft of a follow up to DARK OBJECTS.

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Q&A: Simon Toyne, Author of 'Dark Objects' - The Nerd Daily

A costly, time-consuming dispute over a security gate between a homeowner and the body corporate of his Cape Town complex highlights the importance of clear rules and compromise for harmonious community living, says specialist sectional title attorney Marina Constas.

Cape Town homeowner and the complex trustees wasted time, energy, and a huge amount of money fighting each other for nine years about a security gate that did not comply with the rules, said Constas, who is a director of BBM Law.

Constas contends that it could all have been avoided if the owner had a clear understanding of all the rules before installing the gate and if, when the disagreement started, there had been an effort to resolve it amicably through an internal dispute resolution process in the complex, rather than in court.

The case

The body corporate imposed a monthly fine for the gate and the owner then decided to stop paying his levies. Over the years, the parties have been to court several times. The owner owed R155,000 in arrear levies in the end and the body corporate was granted an application to attach his unit.

However, they decided not to do so and instead applied for a sequestration order which was granted and then overturned because there was no evidence that the owner was bankrupt.

The outcome was that the body corporate was slapped with a costs order because they should never have gone the sequestration route and a judge found that it was an abuse of court process. Having to pay legal fees ultimately impacts all owners in that complex.

To avoid a situation like this, Constas urges all sectional title owners to go to their annual general meetings and ensure that restrictions and directions are on the agenda.

Under this agenda item, owners can restrict the trustees from going to court for more than a specified amount of money. The expense of a nine-year court wrangle with an owner over a security gate could have been avoided in this way.

She said that trustees should not be dragging owners into litigation when a dispute can be solved if people are more conciliatory and willing to compromise.

If internal dispute resolution measures fail, the next step should be the Community Schemes Ombud Service, Constas said. Our courts are increasingly demanding that sectional title and community schemes disputes go to CSOS first.

Recent cases in which owners have approached the High Court before approaching CSOS have been dismissed with costs because the judges contended that CSOS was established for this purpose.

Going to court is not always the answer

Constas said that she does not fully agree with this due to concurrent jurisdiction, and the fact that people should be able to approach the High Court if they can afford to and the cases value is sufficient.

However, she said that going straight to litigation is not usually ideal in a community living dispute.

There are more amicable and reasonable means to resolve a dispute. The main thing is that there must be an internal dispute resolution process within the complex. Everyone should be able to air their views not just the trustees, but all members of the body corporate.

While CSOS has faced some criticism, including reports that they are slow, it is certainly worth approaching the Ombud, especially to mediate a matter. CSOS has successfully mediated thousands of cases, she said.

The golden rule in any complex in terms of the Sectional Titles Schemes Management Act is that all rules must be reasonable and applied consistently for all owners. The body corporate cannot make an exception for one owner.

Constas said that complexes may want to review their rules, to ensure that they are fair and reasonable.

In my experience, many rules are actually illegal, unenforceable, unconstitutional and ill-considered. Unreasonable rules must be dealt with by owners because disputes that end up in court will mean that everyone must cough up for legal fees.

Read: 10 things you can do to your home that will actually lower its value

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A warning for South Africans living in complexes and estates and the rules you should know - BusinessTech