Some years ago, I bought a book by Eric Ambler in a secondhand bookshop in the Charing Cross Road. It was an American paperback and at the counter, the proprietor smiled approvingly and said “hard to get hold of these days, Ambler”. He seemed to be a forgotten figure then, out of print and out of favour.
How times change. In 2009, Penguin started to re-issue his novels, the 1930s ones on which his reputation rests. Ambler went on writing into the 1970s, but none of his later books really made the same impact as the earlier ones. The covers featured black and white photos at first, but these were soon replaced with images that resembled the colourful travel posters of the inter-war years.
Ambler’s stories of a troubled Europe on the brink of war seemed to resonate again in the world of mass migration, Putin and Trump. They felt strangely contemporary as the world started to look less secure and settled than it had done. The passage of time brought them back into circulation and today you can read many favourable comments online. If anything, he has gone from being underrated to slightly overrated.
Compare this with the case of Angus Wilson. Angus who, you may ask. He wrote basically realistic novels of English social life with a touch of mordant humour. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was a big figure in the world of serious fiction, up there with Kingsley Amis and William Golding. He taught at the then new University of East Anglia, setting up the creative writing course there. By the 1970s though, his reputation was in decline.
A TV adaption of Anglo Saxon Attitudes, perhaps his best book, got his novels back into print, but they soon disappeared again. If he was remembered at all, it was as an awful warning of the fragility of a seemingly secure literary reputation. There was an idea that his name had been erased in some way by the rising popularity of the younger novelist, A N Wilson.
Can this be true? J G Farrell had the same initials as J G Ballard, yet no-one ever seemed to confuse them. Farrell died in 1979, and his three major novels of the decline of the British Empire have never been out of print. His reputation has grown steadily and The Singapore Grip is due on TV soon.
Perhaps it’s to do with a kind of clarity about what sort of books a writer’s works are, what we might call marketability, I suppose, that feeling that we know what we are in for. For example, if you were recommending Ambler to a friend, you could say something along the lines of “Graham Greeneish, film noirish, early spy fiction, the English Dashiell Hammett” and your friend might have an idea what to expect.
It’s rather more difficult to sum up the fiction of Angus Wilson in this way. and also difficult to imagine what changes in the world could create new interest in his writing.
It’s a tricky business, trying to second guess the ruthless test of time. When the biography of William Golding came out in 2009, the publishers felt the need to subtitle it “the man who wrote Lord of the Flies”. I would have thought that was a fact known to anyone who went to school in the UK after the year 1960, but perhaps not.
The Good Reader 