Literary criticism or brusque stridency?

CHRIS MOSS wrestles with an ambitious, occasionally entertaining and highly subjective survey of the British novel

Opinion / 10 November 2026 La Bola Negra: finishing Lorca’s unfinished work 10 November 2026 SANTIAGO FOUZ HERNANDEZ explores La Bola Negra, a thrilling historical survey of changing Spanish attitudes to homosexuality

RITA DI SANTO speaks to RASHID MASHARAWI, the producer of over 30 films from Gaza including this year's candidate for the Oscars, Citizen Osama

TONY BURKE recommends a history of US ‘struggle music’ that is detailed, breathtaking and worth checking out

BRENT CUTLER relishes a life that arose from Manchester’s underground scene to the highest peaks of TV fame

EVERY 20 years or so, someone writes a compendium on the English novel. I own a Malcolm Bradbury one from 1993 and a Water Allen one from 1954. The latter was a humble-looking Pelican and had 376 pages. This new one, by Philip Hensher, is from the same imprint and comes with 682 pages. It’s a chunky volume, with an English mustard-coloured jacket and a turquoise hard cover. It made me think of posh paints and is obviously intended to appeal as a desirable object as well (perhaps as much) as a thing to read and learn from.

“The story of the novel in Britain is a good story,” he writes in his introduction. “It has heroes and heroines, and villains, too. It has quests and adventures, marvellous inventions and hidden treasures. It discovers secret pathways and gardens, and conceals traps for the unwary. It has magicians, and it has careful, responsible scribes, too. It is a good story.” 

It’s a tricky one to tell, though, because of the sheer number of books, authors, scenes and themes, and the scale and complexity of the historical context that frames literary production. It is impossible, perhaps, to be other than episodic, but the challenge is to seem otherwise.

One of the book’s most salient strengths is its attention to the roles of economics, demographics, printing trends and libraries in popularising the novel, and, at times, directing its content. Hensher highlights the roles played by publishers and media, too – though he might have said more on gatekeeping and the enduring London-centric nature of the industry.

He notes that critics occasionally revive or recharacterise entire periods, as was the case with Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s 1979 work The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination.

When it comes to tackling specific authors and books, the approach is chronological. From Defoe and Richardson, through the Victorian boom period to the canonical figures of English Modernism, he devotes blocks of consecutive pages to major authors and their works. The sections on Gaskell, Eliot, Dickens and Thackeray, and then on Conrad, Forster and Woolf are instructive, with ample room for commentary and analysis.

By the time we get to Graham Greene, though, this system has loosened up and we have only odd lines scattered across eight pages that themselves are distributed between pages 425 and 560. Fewer novels are considered, too. No compiler of a book like this can read everything, and Hensher makes no bones about this. But the absence of a substantial Greene entry (three novels merit a paragraph; The Heart of the Matter is barely mentioned) is a shortcoming – and it is repeated for other 20th-century authors.

From the start, Hensher presents himself as less interested in being fair than firm. His book is no dictionary but a critical compilation based on the author’s considerable past reading as well as recent chance discoveries. Almost every other sentence aspires to be a miniature review – which is sometimes jarring, as many novels only get a single sentence and the approach allows no room for nuance, balance, open-endedness or self-doubt – qualities not only winning, but, I would argue, essential for appraising half a millennium of fiction writing.

There’s consequently a lot of brusque stridency. Dracula is “nonsensical,” Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is the “most stupid” novel he has read, and DM Thomas is “patently untalented.” But, about Margaret Oliphant, who Hensher seems to have recently discovered, he is assertively gushing: “Novelists like Oliphant understood everything,” he writes. He praises David Storey’s Saville (1976) as “a triumph of technical command;” to this reviewer it is one of the most tedious slabs of prose ever laid down.

Browsers of this book will quickly make up their own mind where their tastes converge with Hensher’s; he leaves little scope for meeting half-way.

I was unsurprised to find many absences in the index and text, though surely Ethel Carnie Holdsworth, arguably England’s first female working-class novelist, deserved a passing reference. But John Fowles’s The Magus is missing, as are Pat Barker and Jeanette Winterson; bestseller Hammond Innes doesn’t make the index, while Ferdinand Mount does.

This survey ends at 2000, ensuring Hensher avoids pre-judging unfinished careers and making too many enemies. A prudent move, but it means the book is already dated. My old Bradbury covered similar ground and seemed a less breathless and more generous retrospective when I read it decades ago.

In one of his acidulous footnotes, Hensher calls a critical work by QD Leavis “very informative but hopelessly misguided.” I wouldn’t be so damning about this ambitious, occasionally entertaining, fairly comprehensive little tome; but if you’ve almost 700 pages of free time, I’d probably suggest using it to read Ulysses or The Idiot or even The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists – summed up here in eight lines as “pseudo-philosophical” and demonstrative mainly of the limits of the novel.

Book Review / 25 September 2026 Camus: neither hero nor villain 25 September 2026 Can the celebrated humanism of Albert Camus be separated from the colonial world in which it was produced, asks ALAN MCGUIRE

Book Review / 22 September 2026 The problem of having artists for parents 22 September 2026 ANDY HEDGECOCK enjoys a novel for adults (by a writer of children’s fiction) that examines the fatal impact of a parent’s literary imaginings

Book Review / 19 April 2026 Gombrowicz: literary disruptor 19 April 2026 CHRIS MOSS joins the hunt in Argentina for the works of Poland’s most enigmatic exile

Books / 16 February 2026 What if 16 February 2026 SYLVIA HIKINS relishes Jeanette Winterson’s brilliant hijack of 1001 Nights to push aside the boundaries set by others