Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall has, as expected, won this year’s Booker Prize. The novel, which was described by Adam Roberts as being like an epic fantasy without any actual dragons and the like in it, is a 600-page saga of ambition and double-dealing set in Tudor England. Rather as I expected, the book is already being decried as “genre”. In The Independent, Chris Schuler says:
Novelists should be engaging with the issues of the day – like Balzac, Dickens and George Eliot did – not indulging in high-class escapism.
The irony is, of course, that much speculative fiction deals very much with the issues of the day, and often does so far more effectively because it is set in an alternate world, allowing the author to concentrate on the actual issues without getting sidetracked by people’s entrenched views of the rights and wrongs of the individuals, countries, etc. involved. But speculative fiction is also “genre” so I doubt that Schuler is likely to ever try reading it, or to understand what the author is doing if he did.
Funnily enough, most of George Eliot’s novels are historical fiction. And Balzac, of course, occasionally indulged in scientific romance.
The irony is that Balzac, Dickens and Eliot engaged with the issues of the day by writing historical fictions that were dismissed at the time as high class escapism. The more it changes, the more it stays the same.
Thanks guys. I rather suspected that might have been the case, but I didn’t know enough about the authors involved to say so with confidence.
Of course, the ‘issues of the day’ that the likes of the commentator wish to see addressed are their own sub-academic metropolitan obsessions. They are exactly the people who would have poured scorn on Dickens for being too populist, too escapist.