The way we were ... protester at a National Front march, Lewisham, 1977. Photograph: Homer Sykes/Getty
"Modern British fiction doesn't really do state-of-the-nation novels," wrote Andrew Holgate a year ago in the Sunday Times. If that was true then, it certainly isn't now. The past few months have seen a rush of novels that might fairly be described as "state-of-the-nation": Sebastian Faulks's Engleby, Richard T Kelly's Crusaders, Hanif Kureishi's Something to Tell You, Louis de Bernières's A Partisan's Daughter, and Helen Walsh's Once Upon a Time in England.
A state-of-the-nation novel, typically, is set in the recent past, although it takes place over an extended period (often a couple of decades). It deals with a range of characters and social settings, has a backdrop of public events and shared cultural references (general elections, the release of pop albums etc), and conveys a sense that the people and events described reflect larger social transformations and upheavals in the life of the country.
Why are so many of these novels appearing now? One possible answer is that we are poised at the end of a political epoch. The closing of the Blair era (which seemed imminent some years before it actually happened) has encouraged a kind of national stock-taking on the part of novelists. Even when their books don't specifically address the Blair years (and those by de Bernières and Walsh don't touch on them at all), one could plausibly argue that an awareness of epochal change encourages writers to go back and look at the recent past, in order to ask how we arrived at the present.
In an essay in the current issue of Prospect magazine, Philip Hensher (himself the author of a new state-of-the-nation novel, The Northern Clemency) argues along these lines, suggesting that in charting our country's not-very-distant past, novelists are responding to a gathering sense of crisis in national life. Many of these new novels deal with the violence, radical political protest, economic malaise and sense of societal breakdown that defined large chunks of the 1970s and 1980s - trends which, Hensher suggests, are resurfacing in our own time. "The sense of historical pressure in 2008 has led many English novelists to return to pressures of a similar nature, 30 years ago.... For Callaghan read Gordon Brown; for the Red Brigades and the Rote Armee Fraktion read al-Qaida; for the violence acted out in punk read the audacious violence acted out in dancehall and hip hop."
This is certainly an interesting argument. But is there perhaps a more straightforward explanation for the current fictional preoccupation with Britain's recent past? Works of cultural nostalgia, after all, are immensely popular at present. The baby boomer generation is one that likes to be constantly reminded of its childhood, whether in the form of remakes of 1970s Hollywood movies, pastiche TV shows such as Life on Mars, or memoirs about growing up in the 1970s and 1980s. In deciding to write state-of-the-nation novels, are novelists simply cashing in on the fashion for nostalgia?
This line of thought becomes more persuasive when one thinks of how the typical state-of-the-nation novel is constructed, with its span of several decades, its large cast of characters, and its interweaving of public and private life. Such qualities make it possible for these novels to include a wide range of cultural and political references, markers that connect them instantly with readers' lives, allowing them to say, "Oh yes, I remember that." Such referencing certainly abounds in the recent batch of state-of-the-nation novels. The chapters of de Bernières's A Partisan's Daughter begin, almost comically, with clunky chronological markers ("It was the winter of discontent"; "I remember that the Vietnamese had just invaded Cambodia"). Kureishi, Faulks, Walsh and Kelly are more subtle with their cultural referencing than this, but even so their books contain lots of mentions of Clash albums, youth fashions and modish drug-taking, as well as potted explanations of the political developments of the day.
In his Prospect essay, Hensher berates his fellow novelists for this kind of thing, arguing that it suggests an engagement with the past that is more journalistic than imaginative. And it is true that in his own novel, The Northern Clemency, he takes pains to avoid intruding "the times" too obviously; his is a state-of-the-nation novel in which the "nation" is very much in the background. Still, Hensher can't help but indulge in the odd clunking cultural reference himself. His novel begins with a house party at which the food consists of "pastry cases with mushroom filling...and assemblages of cheese-and-pineapple." I don't know of a more obvious (and clichéd) marker of 70s suburbia there than vol-au-vents and cheese and pineapple on sticks.
