Granta: When Albion fades to grey

SINCE it reached its hundredth issue, Granta magazine has exhibited a new sense of direction and flourish, particularly under the editorships of Alex Clark and John Freeman.

The recent editions have all done what a good literary magazine should: showcase the newest by the best authors and the best by the newest authors. The latest instalment looks at Britain, with a cracked tea-cup as the cover image. Is this the break-up of Britain, or Broken Britain?

The most striking thing about the magazine is that with the exceptions of Gary Younge’s wonderful piece of memoir and John Burnside’s response to the artistic material, very little of it is about Britain. There are excellent evocations of rural Wales (in Cynan Jones’ The Dig), of Scotland in 1964 in Robin Robertson’s poem named after that year, of Ireland under British rule – a disappointing, tonally uneven, extract from Mario Vargas Llosa’s forthcoming The Dream Of Celt – and of England. Of which, more anon.

But Britain is curiously absent; it is always already a conglomeration of competing identities. Younge’s piece asserts the experience of immigration against a backdrop of post-war utopianism: his mother came from Barbados to Britain to work in the NHS, and live in the new town of Stevenage. His own life will later encompass Edinburgh and America and a social mobility which was considered natural. Stevenage, at the same time, is an unlikely barometer: in every British election, it has returned the party to take power, so it cycles through the social planning of the 1950s, the council house sell-off under Thatcher, the Blair years – and is now considered like “the South Bronx”. All this for a town which initially had – and Younge’s phrase is telling – no “no-go” areas.

The two most disappointing pieces come from Mark Haddon and Rachel Seiffert. Haddon’s story, The Gun, is so slight that it requires copious authorial ornamentation to disguise its mundanity. Seiffert looks at a phenomenon – West of Scotland affiliation with Ulster Unionism – which has been more precisely and paradoxically described by writers like Alan Spence, Bernard MacLaverty and Liam McIlvanney. It is prosaic, and its twist manages to exemplify the rather heavy-handed moral: “closer to the dark heart, but not close enough to harm”.

I’d single out the work by Robert Macfarlane and Don Paterson as among the most exciting pieces, but both are only tangentially about the volume’s ostensible theme.

What is fascinating is seeing how the writers here describe England. The Hindu wrestlers in Tania James’s Lion And Panther In London look at “raindrops wriggling down the windowpane” in the opening paragraph and are warned against the “mushy potatoes, dense pies, gloomy puddings – the sort of fare that would render them leaden in body and mind”.

In Some Other Katherine, an extract from an archly narrated novel by Sam Byers, my eye was snagged at first on “defeatist”, “lacked the pizzazz”, then “gloom”, “drab”, “grim”, then “pasty-white; muffin-bellied; Rorschached with quasi-Celtic tattoos”, then “dirty” and “sad-eyed”.

Ross Raisin’s story – about homosexual self-loathing – takes place in a world of multiplexes, superstore-lined arterial roads, and “soft exhausted food”. In Andrea Stuart’s piece of memoir, we have the most clear-cut definition: “the English palette, which was permanently tinged with grey”.

What should we make of this? Having been to England, I can confirm that the sun does shine there. I immediately re-read some G K Chesterton to remind me that England can be beautiful and that acknowledging that does not mean one has a pit bull in the back garden. To be fair, these writers are the inheritors of a century of cliché about the vanished and tarnished England,.

Scottish literature has been accused of miserabilism. It seems as if close contact might be infectious, as far as these versions of England are concerned. Being serious does not mean being joyless. Nor does it mean not being angry at the effects of capitalism on our cities and country. In the writing of authors like Nick Harkaway, Michael Moorcock and even Nicola Barker, there is a sense of the vibrantly coloured and chaotically energetic England that Chesterton found in Falstaff and Fielding and Dickens.

It will be interesting to see how Granta follows up this issue – particularly in the next Best of British Young Writers, due next year, if they keep to the structure of revisiting the idea each decade. Meanwhile, it would be interesting to have an issue on England rather than Britain. On the basis of this, it seems as if the former coloniser is suffering from the disease of the colonised: cultural cringe.