Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception by David James

Abstract

MLR, 105.2, 2010 547 fifthchapter, which brings together Powers's Prisoners Dilemma (a book offering a counterfactual account ofWalt Disney's response to nuclear warfare) and Mc Ewan's Atonement. Here, the notion of 'trauma covers widely diverging historical, national, and gendered representations of the effectsofwar. A possible alternative to Crosthwaite's approach is Lyndsey Stonebridge's The Writing ofAnxiety: Ima gining Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), which supplements 'trauma with the narrower Freudian idea of 'anxiety'. Stonebridge's project of describing 'away of staying in relation to history without being consumed by it' (p. 4) is akin toCrosthwaite's, but arguably possesses greater explanatory force than some of his more generalizing claims. This is to say that trauma, despite its ability to cut across temporal levels, is itself subject to specific historical conditions. These criticisms notwithstanding, Crosthwaite's book offers a timely and ambitious intervention in the fieldof postmodernist studies. Its argu ment for the 'Return of the Real' (in Hal Foster's phrase) convincingly illustrates that the Real has been postmodernism's secret sharer, and one of its obscure origins, all along. Lincoln College, Oxford Benjamin Kohlmann Contemporary British Fiction and theArtistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Percep tion. By David James. London: Continuum. 2008. vii+195 pp. ?60. ISBN 978-1-8470-6494-3. Early in his study of style, landscape, and perception in contemporary British fictionDavid James approvingly quotes Edward Said's observation inCulture and Imperialism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1993) that after Lukacs and Proust, we have become so accustomed to thinking of the novel's plot and structure as con stituted mainly by temporality thatwe have overlooked the function of space, geography and location' (p. 4). James argues that despite a widespread 'spacial turn' in conceptual thinking across the humanities and social sciences in recent decades, there remains in literary studies a curious neglect of literature's spatial features and their formal and ideological implications' (p. 4). It is this neglect that James attempts to remedy in his book, providing a wide-ranging but by no means comprehensive inquiry into the formal role that landscapes play in contemporary British fiction' (p. 2). James's enquiry is divided into five thematic chapters. The first, 'Landscape and Narrative Aesthetics', addresses the conceptual and critical complexities raised by James's examination of the relationship between location and narration. Each of the remaining four chapters focuses on a specific aspect of this relationship. Chapter 2 examines the 'horizons' of the regional novel, with particular regard to Pat Barker and Adam Thorpe. The third chapter's 'Urban Visionaries' are Iain Sinclair and J. G. Ballard, with Sinclair's writings revealingly contrasted against Monica Ali's Brick Lane. Chapter 4 explores the relationship between landscape and memory, chiefly examining fiction by Graham Swift,A. L. Kennedy, and Trezza Azzopardi. The final chapter, 'Island Encounters', discusses landscape, migration, and images 548 Reviews of nationhood in the work of Caryl Phillips and Andrea Levy. Along the way, James also offers insightful complementary readings of texts by writers including Ian McEwan, Amit Chaudhuri, Rose Tremain, and Kazuo Ishiguro, among many others. James's interest in the formal and ideological implications of the literary land scapes he surveys ismarried to a fascination with the specific textual devices through which writers actualize these landscapes and how these devices 'inform the reader's emotional interaction with narrative textuality' (p. 5).Why, for ex ample, do readers find certain settingsmore affecting than others? For James, the reader is less an impassive witness than an active participant in the construction of literary place. It is therefore through close attention to the experience of reading these texts that James explores the formal and ideological issues at stake in them. James's detailed and sensitive remarks on perspective, rhythm, rhyme, and even typography bolster his assertion that literary space acts as a stylistic catalyst for some of themost innovative writers inBritain today' (p. 26). James repeatedly signals his determination to remain scrupulously attentive to the particularity of thewriters and texts under discussion, and to the specificity of their literary landscapes. His discussion is therefore as concerned to explore the differences between these writers' techniques, concerns, and...