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Original poster

Was 80s literature as crap as 80s clothes?

85 replies

Nightynight · 17/03/2006 07:43

Remember all those worthy, Booker Prize winning authors in the 1980s? Was it just me, or were they all really (whisper) ?

And isnt there a whole load of more interesting fiction being published today?

VS Naipaul, Martin Amis, Anita Brookner, AS Byatt, Salman Rushdie, Roddy Doyle, Ben Okri....I really tried to read their stuff in the 80s but I couldnt usually get past the first few pages.

I have revisited some of it recently, and find it just as turgid, just as pseudo-intellectual, just as boooooooring.....

is it just me, were the rest of you in raptures over Hotel du Lac, The Famished Road and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha?

OP posts:
dinosaur · 17/03/2006 12:39

Buddha of Suburbia must be 80s

And what about Fay Weldon? Loved the books, and can remember at least one fab tv dramatisation...

foxinsocks · 17/03/2006 12:38

I can't think of a good recent dramatisation....apart from Rebus (but personally, I don't think that works very well anyway)

Marina · 17/03/2006 12:36

What I'm finding as we discuss all these books is that it really was a good period for TV dramatisations. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, The Crow Road, A Fatal Inversion, all of them done in such a way as to enhance their enjoyability still further.
Ooh, when did Hanif Kureishi write Buddha of Suburbia?
I have not felt tempted by Iain Banks in yonks either...

dinosaur · 17/03/2006 12:30

I haven't read that one. I did feel that the quality tailed off a lot - I thought The Business was very...formulaic, if that's the word.

foxinsocks · 17/03/2006 12:29

I'm reading Dead Air at the moment (a Banks novel). It's the first of his I've read in ages.

dinosaur · 17/03/2006 12:28

I loved Oranges are not the only fruit, by Jeanette Winterson.

Bink · 17/03/2006 12:26

Such a good question, nightynight - makes me want to go and find out what I was reading then - is there a web archive somewhere of Booker prizewinners/bestseller lists? I really did think Midnight's Children was wonderful but then there was that tiresome consequential global vogue for magical realism which I could really not be doing with.

It also strikes me as when the vogue for books with Ever Such A Shocking Predilection Denouement (eg Golding's Rites of Passage) began. Not very keen on that mode either, much as I love other Goldingses.

Oh, though, Slaves of New York has lasted rather well, I find.

foxinsocks · 17/03/2006 12:25

I love those early Vine books - it's almost as if they are unadulterated

Marina · 17/03/2006 12:24

dino...A Fatal Inversion. I think that stands as an excellent novel in its own right, outside its genre. She is very underrated, largely I think thanks to the proto-Midsummer Murders cuddly Wexford dramatisations.

dinosaur · 17/03/2006 12:23

Yes yes yes to the Crow Road. My favourite (Nineties, and I was going through a dark patch at the time) was Complicity however.

cod · 17/03/2006 12:23

likes that book

dinosaur · 17/03/2006 12:23

Marina, how spooky...

I had a very beautiful, unhinged friend who was nicola six...

Marina · 17/03/2006 12:22

The Crow Road - his loveliest novel IMO and exemplarily dramatised by the BBC...

dinosaur · 17/03/2006 12:22

Oh, seriously, if you like good thriller/detective noves you have to read the early Barbara Vine ones!

cod · 17/03/2006 12:22

i liked 80s clothes

Marina · 17/03/2006 12:21

me too dino.
The Murderee.
Marmaduke going supervoid, which seemed to my pre-children mind a ridiculous impossibility...
NN I am not remotely deterred by your dx's views Wink

foxinsocks · 17/03/2006 12:21

I loved the Rachel Papers. I also think you either love or loathe Martin Amis.

The secret history (was that 80s or 90s?) was good but if you are a connoisseur of good detective/thriller novels, I doubt it opened any new doors - it was beautifully written though.

dinosaur · 17/03/2006 12:21

Iain Banks - his eighties and early nineties stuff was excellent.

Original poster
Nightynight · 17/03/2006 12:19

thank you for those suggestions too.

I warn you, dx thinks that OP is a pseud, but I like him!

My choice here is dictated by the tastes of the majority of English speakers in Munich. The central library has a dire collection of classics, Booker Prize winners, thrillers and books with titles like "20 short stories by New Zealand women." There are four volumes of Sylvia Plath's poetry.
Hugendubel (the main bookseller) has a very American, male oriented selection.
sigh - how I miss Oxfam!

OP posts:
lahdeedah · 17/03/2006 12:18

Sorry slight hijack - but has anyone read the new Jay McInerney yet? I read a sniffy review of it the other week, saying it's not a patch on his early stuff. That would be a shame cos I'm really looking forward to it! Smile

suzywong · 17/03/2006 12:17

The Colour Purple

dinosaur · 17/03/2006 12:16

I was quite obsessed with London Fields for a while.

dinosaur · 17/03/2006 12:16

great minds Marina!

dinosaur · 17/03/2006 12:15

Waterlands - Graham Swift was excellent.

The first two Barbara Vine novels - A Dark-Adapted Eye and A Fatal Inversion - fantastic.

My favourite Jay McInerny - Brightness Falls - wasn't published until the 1990s I think.

Marina · 17/03/2006 12:14

No, NN I haven't. But thanks for the tip because I am always looking for new reads and will look out for him.

Martin Amis can be alternately gripping and loathesome IMO. Dead Babies was a horrible book with a repulsive title. His later stuff has been rubbish.

And there's Graham Swift as well...Waterland?
Jonathan Coe...What a Carve-up?

I think my favourite Marge Piercy novels (Vida, Woman on the Edge of Time) are seventies but I also like Fly Away Home, set in Boston, which is a very 80s novel.

And Eight Months in Ghazzah Street, for me Hilary Mantel's masterpiece, was also 80s I think.