Noir As The New Punk

British fiction has been moribund for decades. Since at least the 70's it has been dominated by an upper class clique whose mannered, trivial novels represent nothing more than the triumph of marketing over content. Julian Barnes winning last year's Booker Prize was a little like Martin Scorsese winning the Oscar for The Departed (easily his worst film). Both men were overdue and both peaked creatively 20 years ago. The difference is that Scorsese has generally been good for American cinema whereas the damage done by the likes of Barnes, Amis, McEwan etc. has been immense. Generations of readers have been turned off as they discover that the most celebrated novels of our culture do nothing but talk down to them and present parodic portrayals of their lives. It takes a writer of genius to transcend a background of privilege and of that generation only Rushdie seems to have genius in his makeup. 
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The time has come to jettison the whole lot of them. In 1976 punk did its best to kill the bloated dinosaurs of progressive rock and although that revolution was largely a failure, for a brief time it did tilt the centre of gravity away from soulless upper class music made by the likes of Genesis, towards energetic working class bands like Joy Division, The Sex Pistols, The Undertones and The Specials and towards cities like Manchester, Derry and Coventry. 
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I think crime fiction can help too. Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat. Jim Thompson, one of my own fiction role models, wrote about grifters, losers, petty crooks and bums. These were struggling working stiffs barely making it and only a wrong decision away from falling between the cracks or pushing someone else into one. Good contemporary crime fiction articulates the voice of today's underclasses in a way that is accessible for mainstream audiences. People like David Peace, Ian Rankin and Eoin McNamee can take a genre novel and use it to explore class and other ripe issues in a way that literary fiction writers often cannot. British and Irish crime fiction of course is remarkably diverse and for every David Peace or Declan Burke writing elliptical and challenging books there is a PD James churning out crowd pleasing fare like Death Comes To Pemberley. That's fine. Its a big tent. But if this is 1976 do you want to be on the side of Wings, Genesis and Yes or do you want to be at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester where only 40 people showed up but everyone of them formed a band...