The 'Englishness' of the English Novel

A true-born Englishman's a contradiction,In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.

Defoe

At a time when much literary criticism has retreated to specialist monographs and 'period' studies,¹ this is a refreshingly ambitious book, though its ambition might easily have been its downfall. To survey the entire sweep of the English novel in one book is to commit oneself to countless plot summaries and snap interpretations, and a bird's-eye view is often a simplified one. Parrinder averts this hazard by the clear, crisp readability of his descriptions of the novels he chooses to discuss. He has a gift for succinct synopsis and the ability to evoke not just the matter of a novel but also its artistic effect. Novels are not simply seen in thematic terms or in the context of literary history but for the literary issues they raise. The book is scholarly but it is not directed only at scholars; it always keeps the ordinary reader of novels in mind too. Time and again, what begins as another plot summary crystallises into an insight that sends us back to a book to look at it afresh. To take a few examples: 'Patriotism is a stronger emotion in Austen and Brontë than in most English women novelists before or since'; 'the happy endings of most of [Dickens's] novels combine prosperity with complete obscurity'; Jane Eyre 'enjoys her heart's desire . . . and remains somehow alienated in her enjoyment'; 'preaching is more important to [Clym Yeobright] than any message he might have for his hearers'. One may not agree with all of these remarks but they provide a welcome challenge to received ideas. The subject feels alive, not inert as literary history so often does. History, that is, turns into criticism. It is unusual to find a work of such scope that is so precise in its particular responses. There is little of the sort of lofty generalisation one might have expected. What makes Parinder's book pertinent is that he writes as a reader of novels rather than as a theorist of the novel as a form. He is more interested in how one novel led to another than in general reflections on 'the art of fiction'.

His conception of 'Englishness' is equally pragmatic. His preface quickly sets metaphysical speculation about what is 'English' to one side and fastens instead on the more tangible aspects of the subject: 'a novel . . . set within a fictionalised version of English society would qualify as an English novel'. What interests him is the perennial myths that English novelists have always used, a subject-matter that persists, in varying ways, over the centuries. English society, that is, rather than some phantom of quintessential 'Englishness'. This is a sensible bias, given the richness of the subject, and it heads off any temptation towards the nationalist and racial theorising that has sometimes disfigured it in the past. Novels 'speak to us from outside the ruling elite but from inside the nation'. This prepares us for the book's conclusion, that in our own day the most 'vital' growing point of the English novel has been 'the novel of immigration', a view I shall come back to later. Parrinder's underlying theme is that, from Nash and Aphra Behn on, through Bunyan and Defoe and on to Salman Rushdie, the English novel has always stood at a remove from England in the abstract, 'outside the ruling state and from inside the nation'. Ever since Fielding, its trajectory has been away from the certainties of 'national character' (such as Arbuthnot's John Bull) and towards the subtler issue of 'national identity'. A character like John Harmon in Our Mutual Friend may discover the true state of his society but he cannot be seen as a representative of it like Mr Podsnap: 'It is the just distribution of existing wealth and not the creation of new wealth that matters.' Similarly, Kipling remains an English novelist...