Tugging the review copy of Granta 100 out of its jiffy bag, I decided to conduct a little experiment. I would write down the names of the writers whom I expected to find in it and award myself marks out of ten. Two minutes’ thought produced the following: Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Alan Hollinghurst, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jay McInerney, Jonathan Safran Foer and Zadie Smith. Two more minutes with the contents table, scrupulously ignoring Zadie Smith who doesn’t contribute a piece but takes part in one of the features, produced a score of six.
Successful literary magazines play to their strengths, of course: anyone who compiled an anthology of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon and left out Connolly, Waugh, Orwell and Angus Wilson would not be doing their job. On the other hand, there is a fine line between playing to your strengths and cliqueishness. Waugh once complained of the Auden-Isherwood-Spender axis of the 1930s that its members ‘ganged up and captured the decade’. The same could be said of the Granta crowd assembled by its founding editor Bill Buford in the 1980s, notably in the wake of the Best of British Young Novelists promotion of 1983, which helped to make the world safe for a certain kind of English writing not just for a decade but for the better part of 20 years.
Edited by William Boyd, its contents specially commissioned rather than ransacked from the vault, this 100th number duly welcomes the Granta stable to the paddock while keeping a rail or two spare for talented newcomers such as Tash Aw and Helen Oyeymi. Amis offers another of his fictional despatches from the post-9/ll bunker. Julian Barnes supplies a wry little tale in which a widower returns to the Scottish island where he and his late wife spent their holidays. Elsewhere, off-cuts from work-in-progress (Hanif Kureishi’s new novel, Ian McEwan’s libretto for a forthcoming collaboration with the composer Michael Berkeley) march alongside what Kingsley Amis used to call ‘chips from the novelist’s work bench’ and some excellent poems from, among others, Craig Raine, Oliver Reynolds and Don Paterson.
Searching for a theme, one finds it, oddly enough, in air travel. Kureishi’s couple fly in to Pakistan. Isabel Hilton’s Greenland travelogue starts with touchdown at Kangerlussuaq. Alan Hollinghurst contributes a sly account of a gay couple, one half old and staid, the other young and hedonistic, vacationing in Rome, full of neatly observed cultural and emotional oppositions. Helen Simpson’s ‘In-Flight Entertainment’, alternatively, has the odd effect of making the reader sympathise with the wrong character. Primed to dislike global-warming sceptic Alan in his exchanges with the retired climate change scientist seated nearby — the trip is interrupted by the death of a passenger — I ended up, such was the weight of authorial odds stacked against him, thinking that he was really rather hard done by and deserved the solace of his 4x4.
Granta has always enjoyed its vagaries. This issue’s highlight is Tobias Wenzel’s bright idea of getting someone else to do the work, in this case asking various literary grand eminences to think of a question to ask themselves and then answer it. The results, in which Zadie Smith wonders what her three novels have in common and Jonathan Franzen demands why he still consents to be photographed, are not always terribly illuminating. Ask, to adapt Zadie Smith’s enquiry, what the 30 or so pieces here have in common, the answer is that they represent a particular brand of fashionable Commonwealth-American literature that continues to carry all before it in the publicity and reputation stakes. To take a minor symbol of this slant, at least a third of those present, and practically all the poets, are published by Faber — a distinguished publishing house, admittedly, but there are others. At 350 pages and with half-a-dozen top-notch contributions — Hollinghurst, a characteristically icy story by A. M. Homes, Ian Jack’s memory of a visit to Serampur — Granta 100 is full of good stuff, while suggesting that the editorial address book could do with a comb-out.