This week's #FictionFriday is brought to you by David Fell.
If my social media feeds are anything to go by, reading fiction seems to be a very popular lockdown activity. Many are sharing their current reading lists.
But I find myself intrigued by the fiction that is yet-to-come. If stories are part of our coping strategies, what stories are currently evolving that will in the years ahead help us to understand what is happening to us now? It seems to me that some of the greatest literature emerges from circumstances of great stress, either personally or collectively: perhaps we might expect great works to emerge from the present crisis?
Two examples, separated by more than half a century, itch in my mind. The first is Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, published in 1961, often considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century and certainly one of the greatest about war. The second, Milkman, by Anna Burns, was published in 2018 and tells the story of young woman navigating the arrival in her life of a mysterious older man. It won several prizes, most notably the Man Booker.
Both novels adopt unconventional narrative styles. Catch-22 deploys a non-chronological, almost pointillist, at times even bewildering method, which actually works to enhance the dramatic intention of the work i.e. to make plain the terrifying absurdity of life during wartime. Milkman unfolds in a dream-like stream-of-consciousness in which few characters have actual names and where the fabric of relationships between those characters is bizarre and often opaque. The idiosyncrasy of the style does the same work as it does in Catch-22 - namely, it makes plain the terrifying absurdity of life during wartime.
In the former, the war is the Second World War; in the latter, it is the war in Belfast in the 1970s. In both cases, there is a perfect fit between form and function. The location is either imagined (Catch-22) or un-named (Milkman) enhancing the sense of the unreal. In both cases a substantial period of time elapsed before the art could emerge.
I was powerfully affected by Catch-22 when I read it as a callow youth; and I was stunned by Milkman when I read it last year. I intend reading them again. We are not in a war; but we are living through times of profound flux. Perhaps Catch-22 and Milkman will give me a helpful perspective on the surreal nature of our now. They may also give me a presentiment of what is to come.