Imagination

The annual Man Booker Prize offers an interesting chance to take a slice through fashion in novels – as well as, of course, showing the tastes and prejudices of a particular jury. This year, the shortlist of six divides in a particularly interesting way. Three of the books are written in the conventional past tense: three in the fashionable present tense.

The present-tense narration is at least as old as Bleak House. But the increase in the use of the present tense to narrate a novel has crept up on us, and is now unavoidable. Forty years ago, Muriel Spark in The Driver’s Seat and Malcolm Bradbury in The History Man used it for very particular purposes, and it was an unusual statement. This year, amazingly, an actual majority of novels on the Booker longlist were written in the present tense. It is everywhere in the English novel, like Japanese knotweed.

Where has it come from? In some cases, such as Helen Dunmore, from lyric poetry – English poetry has always been written in the present tense (“A drowsy numbness pains/ My sense…”). In others, perhaps from reading too many celebrity interviews. (“John Travolta opens the door of his Malibu home himself. He is really quite short.”) Probably the most prevalent influence is that of the film treatment, which is always written thus. Some novelists, evidently, like to meet Hollywood halfway.

Done well, it can be nervy and energetic – Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall used it to give Thomas Cromwell’s story an unpredictable edge. But one of the reasons it has spread so much is a thousand low-level creative writing tutors, clinging to the belief that you can “make your writing more vivid” by turning to the present tense. Writing is vivid if it is vivid. A shift of tense won’t do that for you.

Many professionals simply loathe it. Philip Pullman is on record with his distaste for the fashion. A London literary agent told me this week that she is seriously considering putting a note on her website for aspiring writers – “No novels about dead twins. No novels in the present tense.”

The routine use of present tense in the historical novel is quickly becoming a terrible cliché. There is, too, a spread of appallingly dull novels that run, “I go downstairs and make a cup of tea. On the television, the news is talking about a disaster in India. Got any drugs, I say to my flatmate Baz.”

The present tense is the voice of the very informal anecdote – “So I say to him, who do you think you’re talking to, and he looks at me and says…” It is the way we tell jokes – try to start a joke, “A man walked into a bar,” and see what a strain it quickly becomes. But in a literary context, it quickly takes on a weird, transfixed, glassy quality – the opposite of vividness.

Are we quite ready for the shift that seems to be upon us? What was once a rare, interesting effect is starting to become utterly conventional. Some of the novels on the Booker longlist just seemed to me to be following fashion blindly. And though the present-tense novels on the shortlist, by Emma Donoghue, Tom McCarthy and Damon Galgut, have their reasons for being written like this, they do have what sound nowadays like relatively conventional voices. It’s the past-tensers who start to sound bolder, more interested in the possibilities of language. The judges should take a stand, and prevent us from sleepwalking into a major aesthetic change.

(Source: youmightfindyourself)