Perhaps the most revealingly successful of the ‘newly emergent’ novelists of the 1990s has been Louis de Burners (b. 1954). His three vivid, cruelly witty, and imaginatively titled novels set in a fictional South American country.

The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (1990), Senor Vivo and the Coca Lord (1991), and The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992), all suggest a debt to the ‘magic realism’ associated with the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (Regeneration (1991).

The Eye in the Door (1993), and The Ghost Road (1995) suggests a return to the ‘classic’ mode of historical fiction, intermixing real historical figures (Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and their sympatric doctor W.H.R. Rivers) with invented ones.

In January 1997 a chain of British booksellers and an independent television channel announced the result of a survey in which some 25,000 people had been asked to assist in drawing up a list of the 100 best books of the century. Of the ‘top ten’ books four were North American and one South American in origin; two were by George Orwell, and one, (Ulysses) was by James Joyce. Nevertheless, Ulysses in fourth place was ranked lower than Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and were only five places above Irvine Welsh’s recently published Train spotting.

ADVERTISEMENTS:

In 1998 the BBC bravely, but again arbitrarily, selected 100 ‘seminal artistic works’ for a radio series called The Centurions. Only ten of the international 100 works of art were by women and of these three were novelists (Woolf’s The Waves, Murdoch’s Under the Net, and Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.