Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (review)

Nick Bentley’s Radical Fictions will be of interest to students and teachers of British literature who wonder about the fate of experimental writing after World War II. One of the main objectives of the book “is to challenge the dominant critical reading of fifties literature as representing a period in which there was a broad rejection of experimentalism and a return to realist modes as the ‘traditional’ form of the English novel” (27). With a few notable exceptions, critics have read the younger generation of 1950s writers—those associated with the movement and the angry young men—as fierce defenders of an unimpeachably English realism against the vaguely continental affectations of experimental modernism. But Bentley persuasively suggests that formal experimentation hardly died in the war, finding it alive and well in the work of writers commonly depicted as the most committed of narrative realists, such as Kingsley Amis, John Wain, and Alan Sillitoe.

After identifying this largely unexamined presence of experimental techniques in 1950s English fiction, Bentley goes on to suggest that these formal innovations were closely tied to “radical” politics. In contrast to the interwar modernists, who were often represented in 1950s literary discourse as apolitical writers, postwar radical novelists used formal innovation “to produce a politically committed writing that challenges dominant power structures and dominant socio-cultural ideologies, and represents an alternative oppositional site to that offered in the committed novel, in traditional Marxist theoretical discourses and in those developed by the New Left” (16). More specifically, Bentley contends that writers from groups cut off from mainstream leftist politics—such as feminists and black Britons—used experimental forms to articulate political ideas precisely because new left thinkers, influenced by George Orwell, and orthodox communist critics alike were staunch advocates of realism and its attendant forms.

Radical Fictions thus aims to fill several gaps at once. By taking a fresh look at formal innovation in the century’s middle decades, Bentley proposes a model for mapping literary passages between experimental variants of modernism and postmodernism, reminding us that the literary landscape of the 1950s was far more varied than many literary histories admit. Additionally, it attempts to historicize this transitional period by explaining the political implications of literary experimentation. Novelists such as Muriel Spark, Colin MacInnes, and Sam Selvon carried on the modernist tradition of experimentation, not in order to dodge timely political debates—such as the subordination of women, black Britons, and working-class youth—but instead to challenge the prerogatives of Britain’s left-intelligentsia of the 1950s.

Bentley’s case studies form the strongest part of the book. A chapter on Amis and Wain leads to more provocative examinations of Spark, Sillitoe, MacInnes, and Selvon. These last four novelists have suffered at the hands of sympathetic but simplistic readers, as Bentley points out. More important, they have been brought into dialogue with one another only rarely, and almost never in discussions about experimental writing. The chapter on Spark, for instance, argues that her work was profoundly influenced by happenings in France: theories of the nouveau roman, and the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Alain Robbe-Grillet, figure prominently in her early work. Readings of MacInnes and Selvon alert readers to London’s vibrant youth subcultures and the increasingly multiracial environment in the 1950s, while a chapter on Sillitoe connects the novelist’s working-class politics to his anti-realist methods. Particularly suggestive is the implicit observation that the fate of experimental writing rested in the care of marginalized groups—women, the working class, colonial and ex-colonial writers, and youth subcultures. In arguing that technically innovative fiction of the 1950s was deeply embedded in minority politics, Bentley treats the decade as a notable exception to the general trends of the twentieth century. If the experimental variants of both modernism and postmodernism have been variously criticized for their lack of political engagement (or worse, for latent elitism), any direct linkage between literary experiment and progressive politics would make...