BUT IT DOESN'T GET ANY BETTER...:

I can't imagine another elderly or dead white, public school-educated, heterosexual male writer whose stories would be deemed admissible for a BBC adaptation these days. Certainly not Orwell or Waugh or even Martin Amis. John le Carré makes the cut not because of the brilliance of his prose or his plots but because of his fashionable world viewpoint: a revulsion for the West and what it has, in its wickedness, done to other countries. Le Carré loathes the West -- and, of course, by extension, Israel.

The perception that each side is as morally bad as the other, except that the West (because of its wealth and hegemony) is even more cynical, accords entirely with current liberal sensibilities. No matter that it is palpably wrong and a kind of convenient and frankly cowardly evasion of the truth. The imprecation that we should not judge foreign cultures or governments or institutions -- and that in every case our own perfidies easily outweigh those that have been ranged against us -- is the dominant paradigm.

But to my mind there is a fairly simple morality in the Cold War, for example: an ossified and paranoid authoritarian regime responsible for the mass murder of its own citizens was eventually, mercifully, defeated by the contradictions in its own system and the resolve and determination (and wealth) of democratic countries. There are, I would suggest, few shades of grey in the falling of the Berlin Wall and the emptying of the gulags. It is pretty straightforward as to where the rectitude lay, no?

The literary world is fond of its revisionism, mind, even if in the past those cast out into the wilderness were handed their exit visas more because of the style of their writing than because of their political affiliations. Both John Steinbeck and (even more so) Sinclair Lewis were denuded of their fashionability very quickly after their deaths because, while both men were certainly left of centre, the rather journalistic style they deployed had ceased to please in the decade of the nouveau roman and the likes of Robbe-Grillet. You can still find Steinbeck on some GCSE English courses, but only the simple novellas, such as Of Mice and Men. Sinclair Lewis seems to be gone for good, which I think a bit of a shame.

Today the style of writing is less important than the political affiliations and politics of the writer. Few literary greats have been defenestrated quite as quickly as John Updike, for example, who was being hauled from his plinth even before his death from cancer in 2009. Updike's problem was to have written from deeply within his time and from the standpoint of a white male heterosexual: that don't cut no ice no more. He's a privileged sexist bigot now.

Much the same odium has fallen on Saul Bellow -- in my opinion almost Updike's equal as the greatest American novelist of the second half of the 20th century. And it is happening to Philip Roth too. They will be replaced by authors who have far less literary merit but look a little different and are more attuned to the political zeitgeist. Happy reading.

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