This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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It’s that time of year when this column attempts to add flavour to your post-election holiday with a sprinkling of well-seasoned fiction — that is, when we look to those tried and tested novels that are occasionally overlooked in our neophilic rush to the new and wanting.

This summer we take inspiration from John Walsh’s very entertaining memoir of 1980s literary London, Circus of Dreams (2022). In it he suggested that 1984 was an annus mirabilis for modern British fiction, where promise burst into ambitious achievement, most strikingly in the form of Martin Amis and his masterpiece Money. The expansion of both the book chain Waterstones and newspaper weekend supplements meant more sales and more coverage for literary fiction.

The Booker Prize also seemed to be in its pomp in those days, with shortlists in the 1980s and early 90s typically including all wheat and no chaff. So what better wheeze than to revisit three of the Booker shortlistees from 1984, including the winner and the one that got away, and see how they stand up four decades on?

The prize that year was won by Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, a controversial choice. Malcolm Bradbury put his arm round unsuccessful shortlistee Julian Barnes’s shoulder and said, “Well I don’t think you should have won. But I don’t think you should have lost to that book.” That book was considered a mimsy, slight holiday romance by the press, and the view put about was that Brookner had robbed J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun of its rightful gong.

The naysayers were wrong, as naysayers often are. Brookner, who published her first novel at the age of 53 and wrote one slim book a year from 1981 until 2003, had a reputation as a quiet, provincial English writer. Yet you don’t have to read far into Hotel du Lac to find a rigorous, ambitious sensibility more often associated with European literature — coolness, psychological vacillations — than with local fare. 

Indeed the second sentence of the book, which stretches to half a page and includes the unmissable description of a lake as “spreading like an anaesthetic towards the invisible further shore” is prima facie evidence.

Technically, Hotel du Lac is indeed a holiday romance: Edith Hope, who writes romantic novels under the “more thrusting name” of Vanessa Wilde, has taken a break in Switzerland “out of season” to recover from an episode of public shame that we learn about only later: “It seemed to suit everyone that she should disappear.” She is, at first, alone: navigating the best way to take her first meal in public, allowing awkward exchanges with other solitary guests. 

But she has a lot of life under the surface, expressed in both letters home to her married lover David and in brutally crisp memories, including those of “her strange mother, Rosa, that harsh disappointed woman, that former beauty who raged so unsuccessfully against her fate, deliberately, wilfully letting herself go, slatternly and scornful … ” 

And when she meets another solitary traveller, Mr Neville — “an intellectual voluptuary of the highest order” who is “hopelessly well dressed” — then “the careful pretence of her days here” becomes deliciously complicated. The plot runs forwards and backwards at the same time, culminating in a final revelation that springs up literally on the penultimate page.

In a sense Hotel du Lac is a novel that has everything. The sinuous sentences are a dazzling delight and Brookner’s masterful control never slackens, even when the end of one chapter delivers a tour de force of emotional build and release yet retains her steely precision. There is wit, too, in Edith’s baffled responses to her literary agent’s demands for characters with a “lifestyle” (“I don’t know what it means”), or her withering response to the fable of the tortoise and the hare: “It is my contention that Aesop was writing for the tortoise market. Hares have no time to read. They are too busy winning the game.”

When Hotel du Lac won the Booker Prize, one of the judges, long-serving literary editor Anthony Curtis reminded us that the prize was “established … as an award to the best novel in absolute terms, not necessarily the one to give the greatest happiness to the greatest number”. I concur. It is a superlative example of the art of fiction, which is, as Edith reminds us, “the time-honoured resource of the ill-at-ease.

.And what of the novel that supposedly should have won? For J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun was a departure: a book inspired by his own life from an author known for his imaginative flights of fancy. The man who looked forward and outward — technology, modernity, depravity, best encapsulated in his novel Crash that blended the (to him) irresistibly-linked themes of car crashes and sexual arousal — instead looked backward and inward.

Inspired by his childhood growing up in Shanghai, “this electric and lurid city more exciting than any in the world”, when his “chauffeur-driven life” was rudely interrupted by the Japanese invasion of 1937, Empire of the Sun describes the misadventures of Jim as the Second World War breaks out. The story diverges from Ballard’s own childhood in one important respect: Jim’s parents go missing, which frees the character to survive on his own resources — and frees the author too. Jim believes his parents have been taken to a camp named Woosung, which gives the story a quest narrative as he tags along with Japanese soldiers in the company of other foreign residents to try to reach them.

Yet it is this quest form that, whilst giving the book a structure, is also a weakness. It provides moments of action, horror and occasional grandeur — even moments of poetry unexpected in Ballard-land, usually at the conclusion of a scene (“the light was a premonition of his death, the sight of his small soul joining the larger soul of the dying world”) — but it is by definition episodic, with characters coming and going with rapidity and little overall narrative force. This makes the book as frustrating as it is remarkable.

What makes Empire of the Sun significant nonetheless is that it gives us an insight into Ballard’s other works. There are the real-world inspirations for Ballardian motifs: the abandoned aerodrome, the drained swimming pool, the burnt-out aircraft. These symbols of the rot beneath civilisation which so preoccupied Ballard in his fiction (his last eight novels were variations on this theme) were baked in from his experiences of Shanghai’s abandonment under the onslaught of the Japanese.

It was this psychological equivalent of being dropped on the head as a child that drove Ballard to write such odd, genre-defining but also genre-defying novels, even as he raised his three children as a single parent in a semi-detached house in suburban Shepperton. He was the personification of Gustave Flaubert’s dictum that “you should be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be wild and original in your work”.

And it is Flaubert who comes centre stage in Julian Barnes’ Booker shortlistee of 1984, Flaubert’s Parrot. Barnes at this stage had been lagging behind his contemporaries Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, all of whom had established themselves with distinctive subject matters or styles, whilst Barnes had been turning out well-executed but less striking novels.

His solution was to play to his strengths of sheer cleverness and a then-innovative blend of the two forms he had mastered: fiction and essay. Flaubert’s Parrot is a hybrid novel, containing everything you ever wanted to know about the man who largely invented the realist psychological novel, held within a fictional framework. 

The framework is the story of Geoffrey Braithwaite, scholar and widower, who sets out to track down the stuffed parrot that Flaubert kept by his desk whilst writing his story Un coeur simple — only to find that there are two of them. Objective truth, he finds, is hard to locate. But it gives him an opportunity to distil the essence of the writer, who “died little more than a hundred years ago and all that remains of him is paper”.

We get an account of Flaubert of remarkable amplitude and appealing playfulness, including paired chronologies of the man, one positive (“1880: Full of honour, widely loved, still working hard to the end, Gustave Flaubert dies at Croisset”), one negative (“1880: Impoverished, lonely and exhausted, Gustave Flaubert dies”). 

Elsewhere we get Flaubert seen as various animals (and “we must record that in October 1842 he hosted an infestation of crab lice”), his lovers, his Dictionary of Received Ideas and his choicest quotes: “Whatever else happens,” Flaubert wrote when the Franco-Prussian war broke out, “we shall remain stupid.” There is even an examination paper at the end.

The fictional frame includes comedy, as Braithwaite tussles with a biographer who claims to have found unpublished letters by Flaubert, and psychological acuity as we see in his wife’s suicide the origins of our narrator’s need to bury himself in another man’s life and work. 

So Malcolm Bradbury was doubly wrong in his words to Barnes: Brookner was the right winner, yet Flaubert’s Parrot would have been no disgrace, too. But read them yourself and don’t take my word for it: after all, as Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet in 1853, “Critics! Eternal mediocrity living off genius by denigrating and exploiting it!” Who could argue with that?