Nyong’o is an educated woman, who holds a bachelor’s degree in film and theater studies from Hampshire College, Massachusetts. She is a very 2020s figure, and naturally, roaming around in search of something to say, wasn’t satisfied until she found a class of people who she might be able to present in the light of Victimhood. As for the lack of “the female perspective”, she might have forgotten for the moment that the Victorian writer Samuel Butler was so struck by the highly feminine character of the Odyssey that he wrote an entire book on the subject. It was dedicated to the proposition that if a man called Homer wrote the Iliad, it was quite a different writer from the one who set down the Odyssey. This author was familiar with the Iliad, but the approach, the psychological framework, the patches of intense knowledge and total ignorance led the very learned Butler to one conclusion. The Odyssey, far from being “told from a very masculine side of things”, was strongly suggestive of being written by a woman. Butler’s book was called The Authoress of the Odyssey and was published in 1896.

Butler was a wonderfully intelligent and puckish mind, quite indifferent to generally accepted conclusions — he was homosexual, and skeptical of conventional proprieties. In 1863, he published an essay entitled “Darwin Among The Machines”, wondering what would happen to the human race if machines acquired the ability to build themselves, and acquire the processes of intelligent self-improvement — a remarkable warning about AI from 160 years ago. His excellent short novel The Fair Haven is a grossly sarcastic religious treatise that first fooled everyone who read it, and then utterly enraged them. He withheld his outrageous novel The Way of All Flesh to be published after his death in 1902, one of the funniest eviscerations of religious hypocrisy ever written.

Unlike a Hollywood actress putting on the voice of a great thinker at work, he didn’t care what people thought. The Authoress of the Odyssey is a brilliant mounting up of evidence, and a compelling and complex set of ideas about what animates male and female writers. Whoever wrote the Odyssey, it argues, had very little idea about the construction of boats, putting rudders at both ends, about how sheep feed their young, about the sound of wind at sea, about hawks tearing prey apart, and evidently believed that “dry and well-seasoned timber can be cut from a growing tree”. On the other hand, though evidently barred from practical matters that men would have no difficulty with, the author realizes immediately what it would mean to kill a large number of suitors in a banqueting hall, and that the first thing that “Homer” thinks of after the bloodspilling is “the dining room carpet”.

Butler notices, too, that it is exclusively the men who are mocked in the poem. Excuses are constantly found in a sympathetic way for the women, and laughter never falls upon them. In other Greek tellings of the story, Odysseus’s wife, Penelope, has her scandalous behavior condemned. Butler notes how “Homer” “whitewashes” Penelope, and puts it down to sex-based fellow feeling. It is an ingenious and very learned book, which rests on the knowledge that, in fact, there were plenty much-admired women poets in the pre-Athenian age of Greek poets — not just Sappho, but Damophila, the Paphylian and Erinna of Telos among many others. Butler’s marshalling of evidence suggests that, even if his premise isn’t true, there is, at the very least, a “perspective of women” in the Odyssey. So why say something so evidently absurd as “it’s told from a very masculine side of things”?

In Kingsley Amis’s 1978 academic comedy Jake’s Thing, an angry English don reports an encounter with an undergraduate essay on Shakespeare. “Her case was roughly that since Hamlet is far too nice and intelligent to be a man, he must be a woman because there’s nothing else to be.” Things have moved on: that undergraduate would these days be hauled over the coals for ignorance of non-binariness and accused of transphobia. But the underlying sense that the attitudes of the past, and the quality of their writing too, were appallingly limited until some present-day enlightened figure came along to put things right has only sharpened in the last half century of increasing orthodoxy. Of course, we can improve on Homer, and Shakespeare too!

The duty of improvement is so imperative, moreover, that we no longer need to read the great epics we’re improving on, let alone books of commentary by someone as intelligent and well-informed as Samuel Butler. Butler foresaw ChatGPT in 1863. He had no difficulty whatsoever in telling us about the limits of people many decades in the future, talking confidently about one of the great classics of literature. “Every scholar has read a Book of two of the Odyssey here and there; some have read the whole; a few have read it through more than once; but no one that I have asked have so much as been able to tell me whether Ulysses had a sister or no — much less what her name was.” So, Lupita, did he have a sister? I mean, before you start ticking off one of the greatest poets in world literature about his interest in women, presumably you took so important a question into account?

The point is to get students to reflect on what is often immediately apparent about a person — such as sex, age, physical build, race — and what emerges with longer acquaintanceship. Students may bring up things like accents, levels of education or cultural knowledge — but almost always a little nervously, as if not quite sure if these are legitimate objects of interest. I’ve never had a student spontaneously suggest that one thing you might notice is somebody’s social class, and embarrassment always comes from my suggesting it. These days, it’s just not what the novelist should be thinking about.

Douglas Stuart’s debut novel Shuggie Bain, for instance — a coming-of-age story set in working-class Glasgow — was sufficiently out of fashion to lead 30 publishers to reject the manuscript. After its eventual release, it became a huge triumph. This week, Stuart publishes another novel set in the same world.

Young Mungo follows a boy whose mother is a hopeless alcoholic on the breadline; his elder brother is a thuggish criminal, living with his underage girlfriend and their baby. But his sister, Jodie, is intelligent, orderly, practical, full of possibilities: “She’s gonnae be a doctor, or an astronaut.” Mungo has ambitions, too, although he has never been outside the East End of Glasgow. He falls in love with Jamie, and together they dream of escape. But it’s not a geographical escape; there’s no doubt that it’s their social class they need to leave.

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Such frank investment in social improvement now seems unusual in a novel. Stuart knows better; in an interview he has remarked that the one positive consequence of the urban deprivation he observes is that it gave rise to masterpieces of the written word. But few novelists would be brave enough to write of Jodie’s future as a place where she “would round out her vowels and suppress her glottal stop; she would like her bread to be brown and her films to be foreign”. The urge to better oneself through education is not something novelists want to be seen praising. After all, it might look as if you thought some people were better than others, and even that some of the people left behind, like Mungo, who “would work where he could, and he would steal what he could,” might bear some responsibility for their own lives. If you’ve invented all of these cases, the misbehaviour starts to look fairly terrible to the contemporary eye. And so the subject of social advancement has largely been left to the memoirists, who can at least show that they are writing the truth, or at least “their” truth.

But social class — how people may be trapped in their circumstances, and struggle to escape them — has been at the core of the novel since the beginning. The form thrives on the differences between people, and the place people take in the world. They can be as vast as between Dickens’s Lady Dedlock and Jo the crossing sweeper, or as minute, but real, as those between Austen’s Emma and her vulgar enemy Mrs Elton. But we have to be able to tell characters apart for the novel to make sense; a story set in a society where social differences had been genuinely erased might be quite hard to follow.

Novels, too, are dynamic forms. They tell of changes in circumstances, and how characters end up in places they could not foresee. Very often, these journeys are social odysseys. Defoe’s Moll Flanders, rampaging through rich merchants and bankers as husbands before ending up as a common thief, starts it off. Proust’s Madame Verdurin, starting in obscure circumstances and ending as the Princesse de Guermantes, is an almost indecently frank example; Elizabeth Taylor’s Angelica Deverell shows that the habit of rising in society is not forbidden to artists and writers. All in all, it is not just class that has always driven the novel, but how it changes.

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But now, through a combination of nervousness, embarrassment, and an apparent concern by novelists that their observations on difference shouldn’t be mistaken for snobbishness, the subject is being cast aside. In part, I think, this is because social class seems much more complex and puzzling than it used to be. What to make of a Russian oligarch with his house in Belgrave Square? Or the Syrian professor and refugee, now driving an Uber to get by?

In part, too, it must be affected by a general squeamishness about making personal observations of a specific sort. Some readers have started to object when a novelist makes a factual note about a character’s physical nature, or their race. This style of objection might be making novelists nervous about plain statements of class. You can talk about a character’s wealth or poverty, but it is quite hard to imagine a serious novelist writing about a character’s relationship to money and status in the direct and contemptuous way Evelyn Waugh writes about John Beaver, or Rex Mottram.

What we call class is a complex but coherent association of culture, power, money, behaviour, speech and — more now than 50 years ago — education. It’s a compelling subject, but, strikingly, we seem only to be comfortable with it in fiction in the safely removed form of the historical novel or novels of different cultures: the Indian novel in English still talks bluntly about social status. Novelists who made their mark with exquisitely differentiated fiction about class, such as Martin Amis or William Trevor, are markedly dropping out of fashion.

What is taking the place of this traditionally central concern? The main interests of the novel now are such things as race, particularly racial injustice, sex and sexual preference, and (a surprisingly common interest) the world as seen by individuals who are somehow hindered by an external factor, such as a mental illness. Indeed, perhaps Stuart gets away with his analysis of class because both his novels are also concerned with one of these external factors, gay male sexuality. These factors will successfully distinguish characters; they will do a good job of showing how an individual is treated by society. They are all important and interesting subjects. But as motors of fiction they have one marked limitation — they are all unchangeable characteristics.

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In Great Expectations, Pip’s story of transforming himself into a gentleman powerfully drives the narrative through a minute attention to a shifting social standing. It’s hard to imagine how a novel focused on these other fictional concerns — even if it could reveal how essential and insurmountable differences between people often become apparent through crushing injustice — could reproduce such a journey.

Perhaps there is a larger pressure at work here, about a sort of social media-driven desire on the novelist to present themselves in as amiable a light as possible. A novelist who writes with their full attention on racial status in a post-imperial society is obviously commendably engaged; a novelist who writes about the different styles of speech of rich and poor is running the risk of being labelled the worst of men, a rampant snob. It might be easier to suppress those observations altogether, however conspicuous and interesting they are.

I walk my dog most mornings in Battersea Park. There, a huge range of society mixes; young professionals, retired working class families, those in social housing, and the seriously rich of Chelsea. You would have to be unusually slow not to register the dramatic differences between some of these people, and how they manifest themselves in behaviour, speech, the names of dogs, even the dogs themselves (Labradors and French bulldogs called Reggie are upper middle class; Alsatians and Staffordshire bull terriers called Killer or Sheba, probably working class). This is the sort of thing that novelists used to be very interested in. Now, it seems to me that there is a disinclination to talk about what is as plain as a pikestaff, because what sort of writer would even try to deduce anything from an Alsatian being called Sheba?

For this reason, Young Mungo, an excellent novel, nevertheless feels somewhat old-fashioned. But it’s very good to see a novelist entering with some of the old gusto into working class culture, exploring how its products might inhabit it, or want to get out of it at the first opportunity. Stuart is rare among contemporary novelists in saying, without the slightest apology, things like: “Clothes are often a signal for social class.” And so they are: and yet we are not expected to notice it, or remark upon it. What this sort of thing is starting to require is real nerve.

Until recently, legitimate reasons to suppress books had been diminishing: obscenity or blasphemy had disappeared. They appear to be increasing again, and expanding out of the realm of the law. I don’t think we should worry about books that are withdrawn because they cross, or prove to have crossed, some legal barrier. When, this year, Alice Sebold’s rape memoir Lucky was withdrawn, it was because the man she accused, and who was convicted on the testimony she then adapted for publication, was shown to have been innocent. That would always have happened, long before the phrase “cancel culture” was coined.

But a more ominous loss was Blake Bailey’s life of the novelist Philip Roth. The American moralising critics had been gunning for Roth himself for some time, on the grounds of supposed misogyny, both in his books and in his real-life relationships with women. Fortunately, the greatest American novelist of the last 60 years is, as yet, out of their reach. Bailey himself was an easier target. He was the author of magnificent lives of John Cheever and Richard Yates, and the Roth biography was magisterial — but too forgiving in tone. And so allegations of sexual harassment, assault and even rape against the biographer were hauled up. Although not yet proved, and apparently not the subject of legal proceedings, they were enough for Bailey to be dropped by his agent and American publisher.

Is it ever acceptable for a legally unobjectionable book to be cancelled, simply because an influential group dislikes its ideas or its author? This is a question that has plagued the publishing industry this year, and will continue to plague it.

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A temporarily successful cancellation was of the journalist Julie Burchill’s polemic on wokeness. It is fair to say that if you agree to publish Julie Burchill, you should know what you’re signing up to. The ride will be exhilarating, but sometimes bumpy. This apparently came as news to Little, Brown. Burchill got into an argument on Twitter with a younger, Muslim journalist. During the exchange, Burchill raised a historically verified fact about the age of one of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives, and made energetically tactless descriptions about the man the religion venerates. In March, she had to pay damages for defamation. Although this had no bearing on the contents of the book Little, Brown had signed up, they said that she had “crossed the line” and they would not publish it.

Like many writers, I’ve had to admit defamation in the past. 20 years ago, you would have been considered dangerously insane to have suggested that Harper Collins drop my next novel because I’d been rude about a lady artist in the Spectator. Fortunately, there are still some who think this way. Burchill’s book was picked up by a small press, and those who agree with her, or indeed those who, like me, very much enjoy disagreeing with her, can buy her book on the Woke Trials from Academica Press for £24.95.

If you can find a bookshop stocking it, that is — one underrated feature of cancel culture is that quite ordinary booksellers took to announcing in principled tones that they would not sell work they disagreed with. Two reasonable but sceptical books on trans issues by Helen Joyce and Kathleen Stock were, it was suggested, having difficulty being displayed or even stocked by shops. I doubt it did the authors any harm. Amazon was not to be budged.

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What is behind these attempts to remove individual books from circulation? And why does publishing, even for a moment, indulge the protesters who want to make the memoirs of, say, a senior member of a conservative US administration like Mike Pence unpublishable? Why are they, or the accusers of Blake Bailey, not told to go away or, if they are within the publishing industry, to find another area to work in?

Some of the scenes that have taken place are unarguably risible. The Canadian polemicist Jordan Peterson has a devoted following for his conservative hard-work-and-self-respect talks and essays. Robust prescriptions of Canadian Protestantism aren’t to everybody’s taste. The New York Times amusingly described him as the “custodian of the patriarchy”, not reflecting that the patriarchy might not need one. When Penguin Random House announced plans to publish his new book, protesters within the Canadian office forced them to hold what was described as an “emotional” meeting. One junior employee explained that publishing the book would “negatively affect their non-binary friend”. PRH went ahead, perhaps foreseeing the difficulties in consulting all the non-binary friends of junior employees about proposed signings and publications.

There are, then, reasons to be hopeful. There has been little attempt to cancel, rather than criticise, writers of the past. VS Naipaul, Joseph Conrad and Philip Roth are still in print; Dickens, widely arraigned for his treatment of his wife, remains a stalwart of the classics lists. The revelation that people who have voted for the Conservative Party have, in the past, written good novels is not yet the universal object of horror. Even the dropping of very controversial current day authors has created opportunities: the American publisher Skyhorse snapped up Bailey’s book, as it had the Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, and the hitherto blameless comic writers Garrison Keillor and Woody Allen, after similar campaigns against their supposed inappropriate behaviour.

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The direction of travel, however, is clear. We may be living in an age of transition, like the 1840s, when the liberal and relaxed means of expression of the previous age were snuffed out by a fervent and self-righteous rigidity. Mozart’s Così fan Tutte was dropped because it failed to draw an acceptable moral conclusion about marriage. Philip Roth’s novels may suffer the same fate. Will we who came to intellectual maturity in the Eighties and Nineties come to be stared at in the street, like the aged Thomas De Quincey, still off his face in staid 1850s Edinburgh? Well, we shall find out.

This is not a development proved or disproved by individual cases, and when campaigns of cancellation are waged against the million-selling Jordan Peterson, publishers have good reasons not to give way. Junior staff of publishers have been upset about working on J.K. Rowling’s books — she has committed the crime, among other things, of defending lesbians who have said that they don’t want to have sex with anyone with a penis. There are other junior staff to be hired, if that’s how they feel. For the moment.

Rather, we will know the truth of the development in years to come, when we can only guess at the careers that didn’t take place, and the opinions in society which, however widespread and ordinary, were deemed unpublishable. Even now, it is impossible to imagine that a novel, however brilliantly witty, could now be published by a good publisher if it made any jokes at the expense of a minority. And it may be that publishers, in a state of anxiety about offending, are pre-emptively walking away from very large parts of society.

I spoke to a couple of British editors recently who said, to their mild surprise, that they had no immediate plans to publish any novel by a man; to confirm this possible tendency, I am currently judging a new prize for novels of any sort, in which 49 out of the submitted 56 are by women. Whether publishers are turning away from half the human race, or that half of the human race is abandoning a way of life there’s no money in and nothing but disapproval to be expected, is arguable. The final result of an undeniable culture of cancellation is a terrible impoverishment of diversity, of fruitful debate, of the exploration and expression of different lives, different points of view, different ways of living in the world. That matters.

A lot of the kudos and awestruck response to the novel came from an awareness of Sebold’s previous memoir, Lucky. In it, she wrote in detail about a horrifying rape she suffered as a teenager. It was a violent rape by a stranger, without a doubt. In the memoir, Sebold explained that she had identified her rapist months later when a black man, Anthony Broadwater, greeted her in the street. Broadwater must have been a friendly man: he smiled at Sebold and, she claims, went as far as to say “Hey girl” to her. Although she identified a completely different man in a police line-up, Mr Broadwater was prosecuted and convicted on her evidence, backed up by some now discredited scientific analysis of hair types. The memoir, rather skating over some details, told a redemptive story of obtaining justice by finding the culprit and locking him up.

The years went by. Broadwater was released from prison the year before Lucky was published, after 17 years. Sebold, having told her true-life tale in a memoir, went on to publish The Lovely Bones. At the time, I was a book reviewer who sometimes worked for The Observer. They commissioned a review of it from me, and I panned it. I had a fundamental objection to it. I just didn’t believe it.

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Although a work of fiction is not true or false in the usual sense, there is no doubt that a novel can be entirely made-up, and yet fundamentally true. I didn’t believe a single word that The Lovely Bones said about human beings. I said, rather briskly, that 14-year-old girls were not like that; that Sebold thought people were defined by race (“Indian, and therefore mystic”) in absurd and damaging ways; that the novel went straight to courting emotion without troubling to be truthful.

It is bad manners to quote oneself, but I think my line that it was “a slick, overpoweringly saccharine and unfeeling exercise in sentiment and whimsy” is bang on. I wish I’d known what effects that unfeeling quality might have had in real life on an innocent man. In the review, I also suggested that this huge bestseller, in the usual way of these things, would be succeeded in five years by a difficult second novel that did zip business and then she would disappear.

That was more or less correct. She published a second novel, not much liked, in 2007, and then fell silent. All the same, The Lovely Bones sold an enormous number of copies and was made into a big-budget movie directed by Peter Jackson. I got a tremendous amount of angry flak from some people involved with the publication of the book, some rather personally homophobic in tone, some bringing up the horror of Ms Sebold’s rape as if to show she was the sort of person who could not write an untruthful word. In the meantime, Mr Broadwater tried to put his life together, working in menial jobs, and choosing, he says, not to have children so as not to inflict the shame of his conviction on them.

Time went on, and, it having become clear that Sebold didn’t have another novel in her to film, her memoir was taken up by the film industry. An executive producer of the adaptation, Tim Mucciante — rather a hero of this case, considering that he was acting with pure disinterest — started to wonder about the degree to which the script had changed Sebold’s book to sustain plausibility. He hired a private detective to look into the case. It didn’t take the detective long to establish that Broadwater had been wrongfully convicted on the basis of Sebold’s testimony. 40 years after the event, the racial attitudes that find it terrifying that a black man should have the effrontery to greet a white girl in the street, and that send him to prison for years because of it, are no longer quite as strong as they were, and Mr Broadwater’s conviction has been quashed. Sebold’s memoir will not be filmed, and has been withdrawn from circulation.

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Sebold herself has apologised, sort of. As literary criticism formed the basis of my not believing her in the first place, let me point out her reliance on the passive voice, robbed of agency, and how she can’t decide whether she’s talking to him (you) in a friendly way, or of him (he) in a safely remote way. Broadwater’s life “was unjustly robbed from you.” “I will forever be sorry for what was done to him.” It was “the system that sent an innocent man to jail.” Mr Broadwater was “brutalized by our flawed legal system.”

Reading Sebold’s apology — which goes on about what an honest writer she is, how driven by social justice she always was, and how she has always tried to “act with integrity” — I can only say that the opinion I formed in 2002 is still unchanged. I wouldn’t believe a word that Alice Sebold writes. From her books, and from this statement, one can only conclude that she has always felt a pressing need to present herself as well as possible, according to the drifting preferences of the American marketplace. For other people, the truth — or the truthfulness underlying the superficially invented — matter a lot more.

This case is not remotely difficult. Alice Sebold’s rape was appalling. Her initiating a process that ruined an innocent man’s life was also appalling. The culture that created the rapist is horrifying; the culture that created blame for a black man saying hello to a white stranger in the street is horrifying. There is nothing to take forward from this terrible series of events, however.

Men and women should be listened to by the criminal justice system with investigative purity; the truth or otherwise of their claims examined irrespective of whether they are black, or white, or Indian and therefore, it appears, mystically gifted. For myself I can only say that sometimes, the full forensic weight of the criminal justice system can establish a “truth” where a practised reader of literary prose on the page can see falsity, manipulation, deceit and a self-preservation that doesn’t care what it stamps on and destroys in the hungry pursuit of fame.

It had been announced that Freddie was HIV positive — a sombre moment. The next day, I was curled up with a blanket watching the television. The news came on; Freddie was dead. Bohemian Rhapsody started to play. I’ve never been quite certain whether I cried so much because I had a fever of 102 degrees, or whether the floods would have come anyway. It meant a lot.

In 1991, HIV/AIDS had been part of our lives for 10 years. There had been plenty of deaths. Many of those deaths had happened in groups of people less likely to make themselves known to us — it was cutting a terrible swathe through Africa, for instance. Haemophiliacs and intravenous drug users who contracted HIV remained, for the most part, as statistics. The public face of the disease in the West — the individual and conspicuous cases — were gay men, and in particular those gay men who were already in the public eye.

Denholm Elliott, Ian Charleson, Tony Richardson. Kenny Everett, Derek Jarman, Sylvester, John Curry, Bruce Chatwin — the list of British deaths alone is long and sobering. It was Freddie’s, though, that made the biggest impact. He seemed so embedded in British life, from the unprecedented impact of Bohemian Rhapsody in 1975 to the unforgettable turn at the first Live Aid in 1985.

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He had achieved this status, too, despite being very unusual: unmistakably gay, Parsi, with a musical persona marrying debauched lechery, sustained tragic grandeur (Barcelona!) and extreme silliness. Everyone loved him. To us as gay men, he might have indicated that you didn’t need to fit in. You could be whatever you were, and that would make perfect sense. Perhaps that was an illusion. After all, Freddie never exactly came out.

Thirty years on, I start to wonder just how much HIV/AIDS shaped the lives of people like me. I was relatively lucky; by the time I was becoming sexually active, we knew about safe sex. Lucky, too, to live in a country where the advice from quite early on was to use condoms, rather than to adjust your morality or to attempt monogamy. Gay men born five or 10 years before me saw most of their friends die; I lost perhaps a dozen, no more.

All the same, we lived in a world where a fundamental truth was influencing all our actions, and it was this: You might die soon. Not many generations of people live through their twenties and thirties with this somewhere near the front of their minds. It has an inevitable effect on what you do. In recent years, friends in their twenties and thirties have sometimes asked me whether I ever thought of having children. It never crossed my mind as a reasonable possibility. It wasn’t until the late Nineties that I even gave way to a long temptation, and got a dog — I mean, dogs can easily live 15 years. It might turn out not to be fair.

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Looking back, there might have been other consequences to this looming terror. One of them might have been a general state of mind that can only be summed up as “Fuck it”. You might as well do what you had in mind. Shame more or less disappeared as a state of mind. I knew a lot of straight literary people who anguished and writhed and wasted time over the question of whether they should or should not write a novel, taking it for granted that they’d live another 60 years. Fuck it. I wrote one, then another, then another. People younger than me were dying of the virus, after all.

There were other consequences of that fuck-it mentality. Gay society took on a dangerous and reckless flavour, with the first all-night clubs like Trade — there was one point in the Nineties where we worked out that you could go to one dance club after another without a break between 10pm on a Friday to lunchtime on Monday. Some queens really did it. The mood of outrageous bad taste was universal. One of Derek Jarman’s last paintings was called Arse-Injected Death Syndrome. “Bad news,” a dear friend said to me once. “I’ve got the fucking Death Clap.” And burst out laughing.

Maybe, too, the sense that you might be dead in five years brought people together, to disagree and argue and yell, but with a sense that your different opinions were all in the same bundle. A lot of my generation find it pretty weird that speakers for what is now called the LGBTQI community seem obsessed with determining who can be admitted to their ranks, or excluded. It wouldn’t have seemed a very pressing question in the Eighties and Nineties, and we haven’t forgotten how important the support of lesbians was to gay men during the crisis. It went a long way towards unifying a community.

By the turn of the century, things were changing. The new century went on; we started to hear the words “living with HIV” as an accurate description, and not as a hopeful euphemism. The habit of hedonism remained; the urgency of protest receded. Gay Pride renamed itself as Mardi Gras; it turned into a parade of LGBT-supporting businesses, anybody gay and lesbian without an official wristband confined behind barriers.

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We might, after all, live as long as anyone else, and people started to marry, to adopt children, to stay in boring jobs, to talk about pensions and property. I got married to my boyfriend; I paid off my mortgage; we got a small Schnauzer called Greta, who is still going to be here in 2035, as I hope to be. The friend of mine who told me he had “the fucking Death Clap” is, for all purposes, perfectly healthy.

Freddie goes on, not as a martyr, but as a marvellous, unique presence who did something never seen before and never really attempted since. Quite a lot of him has since been toned down; when the jukebox musical We Will Rock You opened, it was striking that it turned Freddie’s music into the backdrop to a straight romance between a couple of kids. Freddie was outrageous in a way that might not be permitted now; a six-minute pop song with casual incorporations of the Islamic imprecation “Bismillah”; the Tom of Finland image with moustache and crotch-clinging trousers; the Live Aid performance, including the borderline sexual harassment, live, of the onstage cameraman.

His outrageousness was extinguished by a disease, but the presence of that disease fed and spread something of the same outrageousness: that desire to say “Fuck it” from time to time. I think any gay person who lived through the ten years between the discovery of HIV/Aids and Freddie Mercury’s death — lived though it as a sexual being — will always have been shaped by it. Maybe always set slightly apart from what followed, too. If they lived.

A glorious Le Carré moment, this sly, clever, allusive joke, and insouciantly placed to flatter the reader who gets it. He knows that when an archaeologist extracts a mouldy old pot fragment from the mud, one of them is bound to say what Howard Carter said on entering the tomb of Tutankhamun: he also knows that this kind of sardonic insiders’ joke is going to be flaunted at outsiders, especially in a marriage in trouble. John le Carré knew this stuff. He was, like many of the best novelists, intensely knowledgeable — specifically, that strain of knowledge we call worldliness. There ought to be more of it about.

The classic advice to novelists, “Write about what you know” is pretty good if, like John le Carré, you know a hell of a lot. There are probably corners in the novels which have been filled in by specific, purposeful research. But no-one can doubt that the author of these novels knew his subjects, in detail, long before he set to work. The casual placing of individuals within very specific, even recherché social worlds hardly ever puts a foot wrong, and the range is awe-inspiring. An ordinary sentence in le Carré might run: “The village was one of those half-urbanised Georgian settlements on the edge of Bath where English Catholics of a certain standing have elected to gather in their exile.” This may all be made up; my God, we trust the circumstantial detail.

We’re quite in need of worldliness at the moment. Among novelists, it isn’t compulsory, and some novelists, like poets, are very unworldly indeed. But the decline in worldliness, and the fall in our esteem for it, is to be regretted. It’s something that needs to be defined. In part, it’s the fact of having seen a lot, and gone through all sorts of different experiences. Le Carré’s life before becoming a full-time novelist is a good example: his father was a confidence trickster; he taught in a school; he worked for the security services, first as a stringer and then full-time. He spoke excellent German, and knew all sorts of societies from the inside until he had to leave the Service, his cover blown by Kim Philby, in 1964.

Having done stuff is part of it, but not the whole thing. After all, a lot of people have had interesting jobs. The difference between Le Carré’s books and Stella Rimington’s, say, is not in the experience they could draw on, but on the powers of observation and understanding. Like another very worldly novelist, Anthony Powell, Le Carré was superb at discerning “types”; small but distinct groups of individuals, sharing an apparently miscellaneous range of qualities. When Jim Prideaux explains to Bill Roach at the beginning of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy that he must be a good “watcher” — “us loners always are” — there’s someone behind that who has looked at a lot of different men and women, and understood them. This knack for analysis and categorisation sometimes got Le Carré into a little trouble with those unwilling to be so coolly categorised. Once, the film director Mike Nichols was sitting next to Mrs Thatcher at an official dinner, and said to her “My friend John le Carré says you’re a very sexy woman.” “Well,” Mrs Thatcher said. “I’m not.”

More from this author

Why were we shocked by Afghanistan?

By Philip Henscher

Le Carré’s worldliness consisted of these fine distinctions, and his characters — even Smiley, even Rick Pym in A Perfect Spy — are excellent examples of types we feel we could glimpse elsewhere. In that, he resembles those other very worldly writers, Dickens, Anthony Powell, Waugh and Kingsley Amis. We feel that there are other Pecksniffs out there, other Widmerpools, Tony Lasts, other Jim Dixons on the make; it is just that these are unusually good examples.

Is this kind of worldliness on the decline? It’s certainly hard to think of many novelists now who have had the kind of large-scale experience Le Carré had. Ferdinand Mount is one, having worked very close to a Prime Minister and having lived close to the great from childhood. But there’s no doubt that his novels, excellent as they are, are a little out of tune with current taste. For the most part, if a lot of current novelists want to write about public life, or a range of social settings, they are obliged to undertake research, to look at something unfamiliar from the outside. Often, it shows.

And the predominant spirit of our times might be a certain unworldliness. One of the characteristics of worldliness is taking an interest in the idiosyncrasies of very small, and perhaps very unsympathetic groups and milieu. (It’s worth remembering that Le Carré’s politics were very remote from Mrs Thatcher’s, who he found so alluring). There isn’t a lot of that sort of interest around. Recently, Sam Leith, talking about the response to David Amess’s murder, very convincingly argued that those we disagree with have melded into an “amorphous enemy mass”, not interesting individuals and small groupings, but “they’re just them: the ‘wall of gammon’, the ‘wokies’, ‘the blue-hair-and-pronouns’, the ‘Terfs’”. Reading some popular commentators, it’s striking how readily they reach for the word “we”, sometimes conflating some extraordinarily distinct groups. One such wrote a column explaining that fundamentalist Muslims and “the LGBTQ community” were basically exactly the same in the way they looked at society.

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Sally Rooney needs to be famous

By Sarah Ditum

This level of astonishing unworldliness is not, perhaps, on the increase, but rarely before has it received such prominent circulation. Nor, perhaps, has it been at the expense of writers who are interested, in inconclusive ways, not in “diversity”, but in the diverse; the way that people are very different to each other, that they act very differently in different settings, and that sometimes we needn’t agree with an individual to find them fascinating, and worth spending some time with.

Some time ago, I met a middle-aged writer who declared, as a matter of pride, that she thought she could enter into any character’s mind imaginatively “except,” she went on, “a Tory MP”. Having spent time with a fair number of Tory MPs, who seemed to me to cover a fair stretch of possible human types, I thought this was a curious admission of failure. No: that kind of willed unworldliness was, in the view of the writer, a confirmation of her authenticity and even literary quality. That sort of thing is on the increase: a novelist who wrote about political actors with understanding and sympathy, whatever his or her subject’s views, would quickly find some sharp critics emerging from the unworldly grottoes of social media groupuscules.

I hope Le Carré isn’t the last of his type. The inner resources which allowed him to walk his plots from the leisurely outskirts towards the terrifying kernel, accounting convincingly for every step and milieu, never failed him — Smiley’s People, for me his masterpiece, starts from the furthest possible point. This last novel is both intricate and trimmed down, and makes a graceful gesture of farewell at the end, as the mole is hunted down, cornered, and vanishes into thin air, leaving an empty stage with no-one to take a bow. Will worldliness come back, and that will to understand, to describe, to know stuff? Sooner or later, and when it does, the readers will be waiting.

That was some time ago. More recently, the last time the Taliban took power in Afghanistan, in 1996, they found a previous president, Mohammed Najibullah, at the UN compound in Kabul. He, too, had been a puppet leader, supported by the Soviets. The Taliban seized him and tortured him and his brother to death, castrating him at some point. Their naked bodies were dragged through the street and hanged outside the presidential palace, as a warning to the populace. As a considered insult, funeral prayers for Najibullah were forbidden in Kabul.

On August 16^th this year, the American president Joe Biden gave a televised speech justifying his decision to withdraw his troops. Much of it was devoted to complaining about the conduct of the Afghans — the ones who had been left high and dry. “Afghanistan’s leaders gave up and fled the country,” he claimed. It would have been true with the addition of the word “some” — Hamid Karzai, for instance, stayed where he was, in Kabul. And if the president, Ashraf Ghani, took the opportunity to seek safety in the UAE, it may have been the memory of Najibullah’s grisly fate that encouraged him to flee. Or the fate of Shah Shujah. Biden, on the other hand, appeared entirely ignorant of how things go and have gone in Afghanistan. Ignorance is the general condition of many anti-imperialists in the West, and Afghanistan has paid heavily for it.

I am a novelist by profession. About twenty-five years ago, I found myself inexplicably possessed by a subject. I couldn’t understand it. I had very little interest in historical novels. I had never been to Afghanistan. But there was no alternative: I felt under a compulsion to write a novel about the First Afghan War.

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The Afghan Resistance has begun

By Bernard-Henri Levy

The British invaded Afghanistan in 1839, replacing the Emir, Dost Mohammed (who fled) with Shah Shujah. Two years later, forces loyal to Dost Mohammed routed the British, killing almost all of them on their retreat. Dost Mohammed regained his throne and kept it.

Nobody, in the late 1990s, could understand why I was writing this. I could only shrug. I could see that something important was happening in Afghanistan while I was writing, but I submitted to the compulsion rather than investigate parallels. Very strangely indeed, at one point I had the unarguable conviction that my hero, in 1839, should look up into the sky and see jet planes flying westward. It made no sense, and it had to be done.

The novel was finished, and the bound proof was delivered. It was September 10^th, 2001. The next day I switched the television on, and understood what The Mulberry Empire had wanted to say.

At this time, I’d also been writing a weekly column for the Independent, and though I seemed like an unserious person to the editors, they occasionally let me write something about Afghanistan if there was nothing else going on. These are curious to read now.

I wrote that, when the Taliban destroyed the 6^th century statues of the Buddha in Bamiyan in March 2001, it was a harbinger of much worse acts of destruction. After the war started, mindful of Dost Mohammed’s tactics in the 1830s, it was absolutely clear to me that the Taliban had usefully melted into the mountains to regroup patiently. In an interview in March 2002, I complained with comic exaggeration that rather than an imperialist project, the West in Afghanistan was “going there for three months, sending sandwiches and then leaving again, which is a recipe for disaster”. Quite soon after, I wrote that in the end of our Afghan adventure, “when it comes to the point, we can evacuate in shame and dishonour”. And so it has proved.

All this was perfectly obvious to a fairly lazy novelist sitting in South London. Why the sequence of events has proved so astonishing to every Western commentator and politician is an interesting question, and unlike many things said to be an interesting question, this one has a fairly easy answer. They don’t know anything.

This is not much of an exaggeration, as Biden’s amazement at Ghani running for safety instantly shows. What has primarily driven all political decisions in the absence of understanding is something universally agreed upon. Imperialism was a very bad thing. No-one must ever be able to describe us, now, as imperialists. We must “start a conversation about Empire” — since this demand came fifty years after Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica was a bestseller, this did not quite mean what it seemed to.

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Biden's most heartless betrayal

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

There was plenty of very interesting work being done on empire, but not much of it seemed to enter into the “conversation” — neither Srinath Raghavan’s exceptional study of India’s transition from empire through the experience of World War II, nor Amartya Sen’s lucid understanding of how Empire both shaped and went on restricting India.

Instead, a soothing bromide like Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland was much preferred by the lumpenintelligentsia, however ill-informed or misleading. Sanghera’s approach to his subject was summed up by his account of the “brutal truth” that the Koh-i-Noor diamond ended up in the Crown Jewels after being seized from Ranjit Singh. He fails to mention that Ranjit Singh’s family had owned it for all of 36 years, having seized it from Shah Shujah as the price of hospitality. Still, the evils of imperialism emerge consolingly from the half story Sanghera tells.

What lies behind Biden’s decision is a horror of what people might think of us. This is never going to lead to a stable position. People might think that an unstable and wicked foreign state needs to be dealt with. People might also think that putting things right by moving in and running is wicked imperialism. The end result is that the West decides to move in; after a while, they get bored and nervous of bien pensant opinion; their President declares that twenty years’ presence is a “forever war” and the only solution is to run away, and anyway, look how expensive it’s been. We tried to get them to do stuff our way for, like, forever, and my God they just wouldn’t. Their fault, obviously.

Since there is clearly no appetite for an open-ended imperial commitment, with a viceroy in the Bala Hissar, the only realistic option would have been never to have engaged in the first place.

“Hang in there, sisters,” a groovy Greek commentator advised the women of Kabul last week, and that seems to be about the limit of our interest. The old imperialists, appalling as they were to our eyes, at least took the trouble to find out about these cultures and talk to them. Sathnam Sanghera sneers at the limit of engagements of the imperialists who were to be found “dining on curry and arak, chewing betel and smoking hookahs, forsaking beef, donning dhotis and growing moustaches.”

I doubt Sanghera’s knowledge of Pushto and Dari is as confident as Alexander Burnes’s, however, or his Sanskrit up to that of William Jones. I suspect, on a lighter level, that those imperialists who dined on curry were a bit better informed than the commentator in the Washington Post who, from an impeccably bien pensant position, informed his readers this week that Indian food is “the only ethnic cuisine in the world insanely based on one spice”.

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The man who lost Afghanistan

By Will Lloyd

We are never, now, going to be able to have an honest conversation about Empire. It would now be quite impossible to say on paper, for instance, that Fiji tried to join the British Empire in 1852 and was turned down flat. Or to talk about the establishment of the medical school in Agra in the 1850s. Or to suggest, as I did, that the heroic ability to fight off imperial annexation, whether in the 1830s or the 2000s, may carry something of a cost.

The current confused state of affairs is that we are perfectly certain that wrong is being done elsewhere, and something must be done, and, also, it would be terribly wrong to do anything but run away in order to put that wrong right, or at any rate excuse ourselves from being called names.

I dare say that the Taliban are going to settle in for an extended period of rule after a certain amount of initial bloodshed, just like Dost Mohammed on his glorious return. There was always considerable tension between them — parochial, tribal, Afghanistan-focussed — and the sophisticated internationalists of al-Qaeda they found themselves hosting. They might not want to go down that path again, and the West will stick to mouthing platitudes and leaving the men, women and children of Afghanistan in the situation they find themselves in.

What’s the alternative? Learn something about the long history and culture of those men, women and children? Talk to them in their own languages? That’s never going to catch on.