Children of midnight of the post-World War II, seven learned British novelists born in the forties of Graham Greene's Cold War, the black and white of Italian neorealism and the narrative for snobs of the nouveau roman, were in their infancy, but they augured glory when, under Thatcherism, the cinema of Peter Greenaway and a world of yuppies, punks and perestroika, the clinical eye of Bill Buford, editor of the legendary London magazine Granta, brought them together forever in the pages of number 7, Best of Young British Novelists, that of the spring of 1983. Since then they have shone with their own light.
They are Martin Amis (1949), the wayward, the dissolute, the enfant terrible of the group, who has just left us and will already be visiting Mrs. Nabokov; Julian Barnes (1946), the intellectual, the Frenchified lover of art; William Boyd (born 1952), mystifier and screenwriter Kazuo Ishiguro (1954), postcolonial icon and conjurer of genres; Ian McEwan (1948), the master of the unusual in the everyday; Salman Rushdie (1947), magical traverser of East and West; and Graham Swift (1949), who will always be the author of The Land of Water.
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Requiem for Martin Amis, a stray dog, by Laura Fernández
In the legendary number 7 of Granta of the pop cover that seems to be the work of Roy Lichtenstein there are other authors, but these are the magnificent seven of the Granta Generation, the shortlist of heterogeneous and multifaceted authors for whom the magazine bet heavily and to whom it launched, in the words of its clairvoyant editor, with a special issue understood "as a marketing campaign, as a trick to get people to buy literary novels."
Along with great contemporary names such as John Banville (1945), Irvine Welsh (1958), Hanif Kureishi (1954) or Jonathan Coe (1961), they are the authors who succeed the generation of David Lodge or A. S. Byatt, with whom they coexist, and those who become the mainstream of British fiction marching together to the war against cliché, And they are good, incredibly good, and they brought glory back to British narrative because their works sell and because they win medals that are hung as admirals of a literary fleet always capable of offering commercial stories with narratives of an enormous quality. From the all-embracing talent of these prodigious boys has emerged a handful of masterpieces of contemporary fiction.
While publishing crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, Julian Barnes became a classic with Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters (1989), and England, England (1999) made it indispensable; his pool and drinking partner in a Soho pub until they broke up over a matter of betrayals and literary agents, Martin Amis, opened Game with Money (1984), a satire of our rarefied time in the hands of an unlikely and neurotic antihero. Two great books came later, The Arrow of Time (1991) and his sui generis memoirs, Experience (2000), and with Lionel Asbo: the state of England culminated his mastery of moral satire. Ian McEwan, a friend of both, consolidates with Children in Time (1987), a story of traumas arising from idyllic daily lives, as happens in Enduring Love (1997), and Atonement (2001), Saturday (2005) and Chesil Beach (2007) consecrate him as one of the greats.
Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses (1988) and was instantly demonized by the fatwa of Khomeini's fundamentalist regime, but his novel Midnight's Children (1981) had already been a prodigy of magical realism transferred to the Hindu imaginary. Shalimar the Clown (2005) or his juicy memoir Joseph Anton (2012) are the umpteenth proof that Buford was not wrong with him either. William Boyd has earned a reputation as a polemic by inventing an abstract expressionist in Nat Tate: an American artist (1998) and appropriating James Bond in Solo (2013). Kazuo Ishiguro will always be the author of The Remains of the Day (1989), but When We Were Orphans (2000) or Never Abandon Me (2005) contributed to his winning the Nobel Prize in 2017, the Nobel of the generation.
The critic Malcolm Bradbury complained in 1993 that serious literary fiction was being "exceedingly pressured by commercial fiction" (The Modern British Novel), and it is this generation that has solved the squaring of the circle that Bradbury seemed to be asking for, writing high-flying literary fiction with an innate commercial sense. They have never had qualms about using genre literature, they have rewritten and manipulated the models of the noir genre, the spy novel, the Victorian soap opera, science fiction or melodrama with the industry of the best impostor, x-raying the contemporary world, politics, sex, literature and ethics, always talking about the matter without scruples. They have been mischievous questioning the establishment and scribbling tradition, but they construct immense fictions about our deepest truths, because although the one who said it was our mourned Martin Amis in Experience (2000), surely everyone agrees that "every writer knows that the truth is in fiction".
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