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Simon Scarrow
Ape
Uruguay
1048 Posts |
 Posted - 14 September 2009 : 11:49:33 PM
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I read John Walsh’s three page puff (Indie, Friday 11th Sept) for the Independent Woodstock Festival with some interest. It looks like it is going to be a fun event. A shame, therefore, that Walsh betrayed himself as suffering from the familiar malady of selective elitism that seems to be blight the senses of so many ‘literary’ journalists. All was going well until Walsh turned his attention to fiction contributors with the following telling comment: “Giles Foden and D.J. Taylor are distinguished novelists of the past – not the over-researched cliché-strewn past of ‘historical fiction’, but the past of just-about-living memory.”
Ouch! So, if I get this right, Walsh thinks that there is good fiction about the past and then the rest is ‘historical fiction’. It is a desperately sad snipe at the vast majority of readers, and writers to assert such nonsense. The thing about genres, all genres, is that the texts which are ascribed to them are broadly populist or literary. The same goes for non-fiction. Andrew Roberts represents the populist wing of historical writing, as opposed to serious history. That’s all that really needs to be said, and not many people will carp at that. However, to pick on historical fiction and slap those knowing quote marks around the term smacks of the worst kind of snobbery and short-sightedness.
I do hope that when Walsh bumps into Harry Sidebottom or Tony Parsons at the Festival he has the guts to rubbish their work to their faces.
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Independent Idiot
