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

Reviewing Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder in last month’s Literary Review, the Rev. Fergus Butler-Gallie struck what to most observers of the modern literary scene will seem a rather familiar note. The quality that distinguished Rushdie’s memoir, he alleged, was “its slight twilight-of-the-gods feel”. 

During the months of its composition, a clutch of high-profile contemporaries had been struck down: Bill Buford of Granta and New Yorker fame had suffered a heart attack, Hanif Kureishi was felled by paralysis and Martin Amis was dead. According to Rushdie, “an entire generation was nearing the exits”.

All this was enough for Butler-Gallie to mark Knife down as “a eulogy for the generation of literary figures to which Rushdie belongs”. He was also able elegiacally to conclude that “the world they sought to make seems distant”. 

Now, from his vantage point on one of the subsidiary crags of literature’s Mount Olympus, the Secret Author would maintain that to talk about bands of writers “seeking to make a world” is far too grand a description for the ad hoc existence of sordid bargaining and keeping one’s head above water of which most literary life — even the elevated kind — consists. All the same, the “twilight of the gods” argument is a plausible one and worth examining in detail.

The generation whose passing Sir Salman laments started making its presence felt in the early 1980s. Largely white and predominantly male, its ornaments included Rushdie himself, Amis Jr, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift and Peter Ackroyd, and its symbolic high points extended to Midnight’s Children’s triumph in the 1981 Booker Prize and the 1983 Granta “Best of Young British Novelists” promotion. 

Most of those involved in the latter became household names, trousered advances for their books that would have modern publishers rubbing their eyes in disbelief — £250,000 a throw, anyone? — and, with one or two regrettable exceptions, are still going strong 40 years later.

two other points ought to be made about the Rushdie generation. The first is that the forces which propelled it to stardom were not wholly literary, which is to say that though the early work of Amis, Swift and Barnes undoubtedly had merit, they had the good fortune to be writing at a time when UK publishing was busy reconfiguring itself with American money and refining its marketing techniques to suit a more combative age. 

The second, almost certainly connected to the first, is that, post Rushdie & Co., it became impossible to define home-grown literature in generational terms. The writers who appeared in the 1990s — Jonathan Coe, say, or Will Self and Helen Simpson — had nothing much to connect them except their talent. 

They didn’t (like Barnes and Amis) play snooker together, or (like Amis and Rushdie) go on cinema trips or hang out in a way that suggested confraternity and communal aims.

The final thing to be said about the Eighties gang is the terrific air of privilege that accompanied their march through the literary world. As a young shaver looking on from the margins, the Secret Author was sometimes at gatherings where one of these great figures would be ushered into the circle of talking heads, and the scent of entitlement hung in the air like patchouli at a hippy wedding. 

They were famous for round-robin letters to newspapers commenting on world affairs, for clogging up prize shortlists and, as their books declined in quality — which nearly always happens — taking up review space which could profitably have been distributed elsewhere.

In case this should sound like a bad case of sour grapes, the Secret Author would like to point out that plenty of people from the generations that followed, including himself, are guilty of exactly the same failings. 

Only the other day, for example, there arrived from a literary agent with whom he stopped doing business 13 years ago a bundle of sales figures relating to a series of books published in the 2000s. The Secret Author read through these documents with mounting horror. 

Was it really possible that all these darling novels and scintillating works of non-fiction should have sold so badly and so conspicuously failed to earn out the advances paid for them in the glorious days when publishers still had money to spend and didn’t seem to mind when something they liked and were prepared to back unaccountably stiffed?

And so, however much one may sympathise with Sir Salman’s disquiet as all the bright, sparkling figures of his salad days start to slip away, it is possible to argue that the twilight of the gods will do us all good. What attitudes should a writer cultivate here in 2024? Well, humility to begin with, followed by gratitude for the limited exposure available to us. There are worse things in professional life than to know that you are here on sufferance.