James and le Carré (TLC, 3)

This is an entry in my “Twitter loci communes” series; read more here.

P. D. James and John le Carré are two of my favorite novelists. I’ve written about each of them before. A question occurred to me as I was reading le Carré’s Our Game this week, and that question reminded me of a question I asked on Twitter a couple years ago.

Here’s the first one, sincerely asked by one who lacks the expertise or breadth of reading to know a good answer:

If you wanted to chart the social, moral, and political changes wrought in England between the immediate postwar period and Brexit—not only the Cold War but the brave new world opened up by the fall of the Berlin Wall as well as by the fall of the Twin Towers—could you do better than reading every one of the novels written by James and le Carré?

Put differently: What would you be missing by using their novels as a window onto the successive societal revolutions that sprung up during the reign of Queen Elizabeth—or, say, between Winston Churchill’s final year in office and Theresa May’s first? I don’t mean to suggest that their work is comprehensive, much less to sound reductive. (For example, a writer like Zadie Smith comes to mind as adding something important they’re missing.) I more mean the question as a comment about the sheer expanse of James’s and le Carré’s respective powers of social observation, and the way in which the changing mores of the day reveal themselves in the little details strewn across the dialogue and narration of their stories.

That brings me to my second question, posed on Twitter in June 2019:

Of genre authors working in the second half of the twentieth century, who wrote the best English prose? On the Mount Rushmore, I think P. D. James and John le Carré are nonnegotiable. Who are the other two?

Addendum: By "genre" I mean the fictional sub-groups typically thought of as cheap paperbacks for thrills: crime, fantasy, SF. (Westerns are tough—I'll say no for now, though I'd allow a counter-argument.) Re time frame, I mean *flourished* in final 4-5 decades of 20th century.

In other words I'm framing the question this way because genre is often thought of as non-literary and thus not literature proper, and thus not deserving of literary analysis or praise. But some genre authors write gorgeous prose. Who are they?

While it’s still up, you should go check out the replies. There were a bunch, and some of the suggestions were fantastic. (Everyone seemed to agree with me about James; less so le Carré.) Some of the proposed names included le Guin, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Patrick O’Brian, Charles Portis, Shirley Jackson, Octavia E. Butler, Brian Jacques, Ishigiro, Ballard, Ligotti, Gene Wolfe, Samuel Delaney, and many more. The truth is that any Mount Rushmore is going to be subjective. But perhaps there could be loose agreement on (to switch metaphors) the bullpen from which one would call up this or that writer for the honor.