Always good for a bit of controversy

[chickenfeet]

The Thunderer has produced one of those lists.  This time it's the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.  Of course it's total pants and I could have done far better etc.

1. Philip Larkin

2. George Orwell

3. William Golding

4. Ted Hughes

5. Doris Lessing

6. J. R. R. Tolkien

7. V. S. Naipaul

8. Muriel Spark

9. Kingsley Amis

10. Angela Carter

11. C. S. Lewis

12. Iris Murdoch

13. Salman Rusdie

14. Ian Fleming

15. Jan Morris

16. Roald Dahl

17. Anthony Burgess

18. Mervyn Peake

19. Martin Amis

20. Anthony Powell

21. Alan Sillitoe

22. John Le Carré

23. Penelope Fitzgerald

24. Philippa Pearce

25. Barbara Pym

26. Beryl Bainbridge

27. J. G. Ballard

28. Alan Garner

29. Alasdair Gray

30. John Fowles

31. Derek Walcott

32. Kazuo Ishiguro

33. Anita Brookner

34. A. S. Byatt

35. Ian McEwan

36. Geoffrey Hill

37. Hanif Kureshi

38. Iain Banks

39. George Mackay Brown

40. A. J. P. Taylor

41. Isaiah Berlin

42. J. K. Rowling

43. Philip Pullman

44. Julian Barnes

45. Colin Thubron

46. Bruce Chatwin

47. Alice Oswald

48. Benjamin Zephaniah

49. Rosemary Sutcliff

50. Michael Moorcock


Most risible:  JK Rowling being there at all and Tolkien so high.  Ian Fleming in the top 20?  To my mind all three are popular bad writers.

Notable omissions:  Peter Ackroyd, Paddy Leigh-Fermor and Seamus Heaney.

Nice to see made the cut: Rosemary Sutcliffe, Bruce Chatwin, Jan Morris and John Le Carre

Oddest selections:  I don't really understand where Isiah Berlin and AJP Taylor fit in to the picture at all (unless AJP Taylor is regarded as a writer of fiction).  They are not particularly notable as stylists or really all that influential in or out of their specialist fields.  Among historians, for instance, I would rate EP Thompson, CV Wedgewood and Christopher Hill much higher as writers than Taylor (as historians there is no comparison).  It seems really odd to include just those two from the realm of serious ideas if that category is to be included at all.  If I were to include such people then, besides a considerable list of historians, I would want to include the likes of Roger Penrose and  Michael Foot.

Comments

[frankie-ecap.livejournal.com]

Does the article mention what criteria they are using?

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Only indirectly. It did rather imply it was designed to wind us up.

[frankie-ecap.livejournal.com]

*unsurprised*

What would your criteria be?

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I don't know that i would even attempt a group as wide and nebulous as writers. 50 top novelists I can get my head around. If I were to attempt the impossible;

1. Novelists and poets would be rated for technical skill (style, characterisation etc) and impact on literature.

2. 'Recreational' non fiction for style and ability to generate interest in chosen subject matter. F'rex I've enjoyed Mr/Ms Morris on subjects as diverse as Everest, The British Empire and Welsh Nationalism.

3. 'Serious' non fiction writers would be rated on prose style and ability to convey important ideas to a lay audience.

I've no idea how to compare between the classes or how to score someone who is notable in two or more of the classes (Orwell or Ackroyd for example) with someone who is/was only active in one domain (or whose ventures into another domain were pretty awful, eg Thompson who I rate highly as a historian and polemecist but whose novel "The Sykaos Papers" is pretty awful.)

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

It is a very interesting idea, but everyone's choice would be different - I for one find Ackroyd a really irritating writer - both in fiction (I hated "Hawksmoor") and non-fiction (his much lauded "biography" of London just annoyed me - it was much more about Ackroyd and his personal likes than London).

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

It succeeded there, then. Although I agree with a lot of the writers they've included - but many I haven't read, so don't feel I can comment.

[gillo]

It took me three goes to get a usable comment space. Oh LJ, how we love thee.

It took me a while to grasp that this was an order of priority.

Ian Fleming

at 14? Weird. Are they "most influential" or "best quality" or "most likely to last"?

Of children's writers I'd rate Diana Wynne Jones, Peter Dickinson and Susan Cooper well above Rowling and probably even above Garner, some of whose books are decidedly creaky on re-reading. But undoubtedly media hype is an important component of the list-making philosophy, and they have less than JKR. ::sigh::