Postwar British fiction

Late 1940s and early 1950s

GEORGE ORWELL was born in India and served in the imperial police of Burma, an experience reflected in the novel Burmese Days. During World War II, Orwell worked for the BBC, writing and monitoring propaganda. He participated in the Spanish civil war on the republican side which he reflected him Homage to Catalonia. In his book You and the Atomic Bombs he coined the term cold war. Surprisingly, even though he spoke against communism, he was a dedicated socialist who believed in just distribution of wealth but he was also aware of dangerous tendencies of twisted forms of socialism.

His famous prophetic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is targeting Cold War politics, which portrays the catastrophic excesses of the totalitarian state control over the individual and thinkcrime when you cannot even think about plotting against the regime. It is a vision of complete enslavement of human beings, a projection of future that developed ideas of fascism and communism.

Probably the best known of his work is Animal Farm, a dystopian political allegory, political fable and satire that only pretends to be about animals and reflects the Stalin era. Orwell alerted to be aware of politics taking things too far that could easily became totalitarian. Snowball – Trocky. Napoleon – Stalin. Moses – religion. Dogs – police. Squealer – propaganda. Mr Jones – aristocracy, maybe czar Nicholas II. Benjamin – old educated working class, maybe Orwell himself. Pilkington – western society. Frederick – Nazi Germany. Mollie – selfish working class thinking only about itself but not society. Piglets – first generation born under regime. Flag – hoof and horn, an allegory of hammer and scythe. Animal hunger – allegory to hunger in the Soviet Union.

Old Major, the old boar on the Manor Farm, compares the humans to parasites. When he dies, two young pigs Snowball and Napoleon take his dream and together with all animals revolt and drive the drunken Mr. Jones from the farm, renaming it Animal Farm. The Seven Commandments of Animalism are written, the most important is the seventh "All animals are equal." All the animals work but the workhorse Boxer does more than others. Snowball attempts to teach the animals reading and writing and pigs become leaders. Napoleon takes the pups and trains them privately as his own police force. When Snowball announces his idea for a windmill, Napoleon opposes it and uses his dogs to chase Snowball away.

Using a young pig named Squealer as a mouthpiece, Napoleon announces that Snowball stole the idea for the windmill from him. The animals work harder with the promise of easier lives with the windmill. After a violent storm, the animals find the windmill annihilated. Napoleon and Squealer convince the animals that Snowball destroyed the windmill. Napoleon begins to kill animals he accuses of consorting with Snowball. The pigs rewrite history, villainizing Snowball and glorifying Napoleon. Squealer justifies alteration of the Seven Commandments of Animalism. "No animal shall sleep in beds" is changed to "No animal shall sleep in beds with sheets" when the pigs are discovered to have been sleeping in the old farmhouse. "No animal shall drink alcohol" is changed to "No animal shall drink alcohol to excess" when the pigs discover the farmer's whisky.

Hymn "Beasts of England" is banned as inappropriate, and replaced by an anthem glorifying Napoleon, who appears to be adopting the lifestyle of a man. The animals, though cold, starving, and overworked, remain convinced that they are better than they were when ruled by Mr. Jones. Squealer abuses the animals' poor memories. Mr. Frederick, one of the neighbouring farmers, swindles Napoleon into buying old wood then attacks the farm to blow up the restored windmill. Boxer continues working harder and harder, until he collapses. Napoleon sends for a van to take Boxer to the veterinarian. Benjamin the donkey, who could read as well as, notices that the van belongs to the Horse Slaughterer.

Years pass and the pigs learn to walk upright and wear clothes. The Seven Commandments are reduced to a single phrase: "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." Napoleon announces an alliance with the humans and reverts the name of the farm to Manor Farm. The animals notice that the faces of the pigs have begun changing. During a poker match and the animals realize that the faces of the pigs look like the faces of humans and no one can tell the difference between them.

The pigs changes into the same oppressors as humans and created even more brutal totality. Napoleon re-wrote the history of the farm in the same way Soviet communism burnt books. Conclusion is that nothing has changed. Our memory is still weak and believes our leaders. Guard your freedom! The real totality is when we do not know we live in one. Boxer as a poor hard-working horse represents working class of fully obedient mindless everyman that does not even know he is living in totality. He is punished for his simple mind but can we blame him? How should common people know? Moses the Raven Moses represents aspect of society that communism wanted to suppress – religion. As a prophet who tells animals about heaven, he is considered as disturbing element.

GRAHAM GREENE was a Catholic writer of political moralistic novels who traced dark secrets of global politics but he focused on the individual moral choices in very difficult situations and he is at the same time very entertaining, showing life in many colours.

His famous novel The Power and the Glory is set in restless Mexico with a whisky-priest as a protagonist. He is pursued by the police but never abandons his faith. The Quiet American takes place in Vietnam, featuring the colonial war. Ministry of Fear is about Nazism.

J. R. R. TOLKIEN is considered to be a founder of classical fantasy genre for adults with very detailed mythological background and his own language based on Scandinavian myths and Anglo-Saxon tradition. The Lord of the Rings Saga consists of the prequel The Hobbit (1937), The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), The Return of the King (1955) and the book of mythological stories Silmarillion.

CLIVE STAPLEW LEWIS was a friend of Tolkien. His first significant work was a sci-fi The Space Trilogy (1938-1945), after the war he created a famous fantasy series for children The Chronicles of Narnia, set in a fictional fantasy realm of magic, mythical beasts and talking animals where four children from the real world are magically transported by the lion Aslan to protect Narnia from evil.

1950s

WILLIAM GOLDING was awarded with the Nobel Prize for literature and wrote allegorical symbolic works about problems of society.

The Inheritors is about the survival of the cruellest. Free Fall explores fundamental problems of existence, such as survival and human freedom. Darkness Visible shows had the view of the world darkness as the protagonist soon sees evil in all people.

Lord of the Flies is a parody of Robert Ballantyne’s Victorian writer The Coral Island where British boys succeed in civilizing natives of the island, proving the might of the British Empire. In Golding’s version a group of boys, stuck on an uninhabited island after being shipwrecked, try to govern themselves but with disastrous results as they divide into two camps and end up fighting each other instead of creating harmony. It provides an allegory, one goy is a rational group leader, the other a ruthless dictator. It shows fragile human morality and civilisation and reveals that the author seen the human soul as dark and corrupt, not essentially good.

IRIS MURDOCH was interested in themes of good and evil and the power of human unconsciousness, influenced be existentialism of Camus and Sartre. The novel Under the Net.

DORIS LESSING was influential as among the first authors who addressed postcolonialism. Her novel The Grass is Singing is about racial tensions in Zimbabwe.

Angry Young Men was an important movement in 1950s British literature when some young English writers from lower classes started promoting themselves in literature so literature stopped being domain of upper classes. This movement reflected into drama and poetry as well but fictions remains the most readable representation of their attitude.

There was also change in novel’s background and the protagonist. It introduced new type of protagonist who usually was a young disillusion individualist and very often selfish intellectual who was discontent with state of post-war society and with role which British society given him. The protagonist was from lower class but he could study at university thanks to changes in education system. The protagonist at the end of novel gets married with beautiful and sexy girl of upper class into order to rise into higher social status but his rebellious attitude he had at the beginning is sacrificed for that.

JOHN BRAINE is chiefly remembered today for his novel Room at the Top which tells the story of the rise of an ambitious young man of humble origins and the struggles he faces in post-war Britain to realise his ambitions. The protagonist is demobilised from the armed forces and is about to start a new job. He takes lodgings with a middle-class couple who live in the better part of town and meets a daughter of a very successful local businessman. When she reveals that she is pregnant, her father demands marriage which was protagonist's intent from the beginning. However, he has an affair with another woman who commits suicide. The novel closes with the protagonist getting drunk in attempt to deal with his guilt.

JOHN WAIN is famous for his novel Hurry on down which is a comic picaresque about an unsettled university graduate who turns his life against conventional society. Wain's use of lower-case letters in the titles of his novels shows his non-conventional manner.

ALAN SILLITOE was born into a working class family. His father worked, like the protagonist of his first novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and was abusive towards his children. It features a character who spends his weekends in a typical working class way - drinking, gambling, womanising - by which he captures the boredom and paralysis of this life with no possibility of escape.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner concerns the rebellion in a reformatory institution for young delinquent. The protagonist is a boy with a talent for running who lives in this reform school.

KINGSLEY AMIS achieved popular success with his first novel Lucky Jim, which is considered by many to be an exemplary novel of 1950s Britain. He is both a representative of Angry Young Men and campus novel genre. Lucky Jim is the first English novel featuring an ordinary man as anti-hero. Kingsley Amis was a vocal member of the Communist Party but he became disillusioned with Communism, breaking with it and discusses his political change in the essay Why Lucky Jim Turned Right.

In Lucky Jim, the protagonist Jim Dixon is not particularly dedicated to his job as a medieval history lecturer at a provincial university, unable to obtain work in any other field. Having made a particularly bad first impression in the history department, he is concerned about being fired at the end of his first semester, and seeks to hold his position by maintaining good relations with his superior, Professor Welch. He also attempts to get his article on medieval shipbuilding methods (written solely as a means of enhancing his standing in the department) published, without success.

Dixon meets Christine, a young Londoner who is dating Professor Welch's son. The two pursue a short-lived affair. The novel reaches its climax in Dixon's lecture which goes horribly wrong as Dixon, attempting to calm his nerves with a little too much alcohol, uncontrollably begins to mock Welch. Welch, of course, fires Dixon. However, a wealthy Scottish businessman who seems to have a respect for Dixon attitude gives Dixon a good job in London that pays much better than his lecturing position. Christine, having found out Welch’s son was also pursuing an affair, decides to resume her relationship with Jim in London. In the end, Christine is exploding in laughter at how ridiculous they truly are.

1960s

MURIEL SPARK is an experimental woman writer, remembered for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was made into a movie, tracing the decline of a teacher who tries to put her own controversial ideas into the minds of her students she chosen as the best.

JOHN FOWLES was interested in psychological experiments and reality vs fiction. The success of his first published novel The Collector made him to stop teaching and started a literary career. The protagonist is a lonely young man, who works as a clerk in a city hall and collects butterflies in his free time and kidnaps/collects young beautiful girl and keeps her in the cellar of his house. The French Lieutenant's Woman, is set in the Victorian era, tells a story of love affair between the gentleman and the mistress of a French lieutenant.

The novel is a traditional realist work but Fowles employs metafiction = the fiction in which the reader is constantly being assured that it is just a linguistic construct of fabulation. In this aspect, Fowles is considered a postmodernist writer. The Magus is about a teacher on small Greek island who finds himself in a psychological illusions of a master trickster.

ANTHRONY BURGESS /bržs/ is best known for A Clockwork Orange, later turned into a very successful artistic movie.  It is about a man in prison for killing his roommate. He is offered a place in an experiment curing his disease of violence. He is being showed movies with violence and being made sick at the same time. After the procedure, he is unable of violence and cannot resist even during beating. The motifs are free will and violence, examining ethics and morality in extreme conditions. He even created special type of language suitable for that kind of dystopian world, a linguistic experimentation.