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‘The novel can’t just leave the war out’: Ali Smith on fiction in times of crisis
The Orwell Prize winning author looks at how the first world war forced writers Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf to rip up convention - and asks if today’s conflicts demand a similarly radical response
“After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” Last week I went to a reading by Claudia Durastanti from her shapeshifting memoir/novel/essay, Strangers I Know. She pointed out the notion of changing form in this quote from Emily Dickinson, her book’s epigraph, and listening to her I wondered what this time of massive shift and change, via Brexit, the spread of Trumpian demagoguery, Covid, and now Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, will ask of us when it comes to literary transfiguration.
Recently I’ve chanced to read what I reckon are three truly great novels of this time, and they’re novels completely unlike each other, back to back: Claire Keegan’s traditional-seeming but quietly radical Small Things Like These; Michelle de Kretser’s brilliant split-form past-and-future dual narrative, Scary Monsters; and Isabel Waidner’s piece of winged originality, Sterling Karat Gold. They’re all three about perilous times and societal and institutional forms of exclusion, what it does to the human spirit, and how that pressure reforms us – and about the way the story is told and the possibilities that arise from this. A formal feeling: I couldn’t help but be reminded of one of the most timely meetings of two writers in the history of literature and what came, exactly a century ago, of the great pain and the massive changes that made what they wrote possible.
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