And then came the 1980s. It all started quite well for the Royal Family with the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer in July 1981. I remember the event well and at the time it seemed like the biggest event that had ever happened in my life. The nation was enthralled by Diana Spencer, a fact that would become a problem for the Queen in the years to come.
It was the decade of my teens and much of the music of my youth was pretty dire – I was a fan of Adam and the Ants and Duran Duran! I was also a big fan of Japan and OMD, which was somewhat better. The Smiths and Joy Division came to the fore, but I was not into indie bands until much later. The prevailing culture was of materialism, prizing wealth and selfishness. Margaret Thatcher told us there was no such thing as society. In 1987 I went to university, truly a dream come true. With so many young people going on to higher education today (a very good thing in my view, though I do wish it was cheaper for them), it is easy to forget that in the 1980s this was a privilege gifted to only about 15% of 18 year olds, and the majority of those came from either a privately educated or grammar school background.
Most of my reading in the 1980s was of the classics, either in my preparations for studying an English degree, or during my studies. I did also study American and Irish literature, which was more modern, but I read little from post-war authors. I missed out on a lot!
There were some landmark books published in the 1980s. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, came out in 1985. It has always been an iconic novel, but has enjoyed a resurgence in the recent years with the extraordinary television series and the author’s follow-up The Testaments. It is truly frightening to me that some of the horrors envisaged in that novel are materialising before our eyes today.
In the US, Alice Walker was blazing a trail for non-heterosexual women of colour with her novel The Color Purple, published in 1982. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1983 and was adapted into a film in 1985, by Steven Spielberg and starring Oprah Winfrey. It holds the dubious record for the film receiving the most nominations at the Academy Awards without winning a single Oscar. Hmm. It is hard to overstate the importance and significance of this book.
Magical realism as a literary style was being explored with exceptional applomb. Isabel Allende published her extraordinary debut novel The House of the Spirits in 1982 and Milan Kundera published The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a novel about the Prague Spring in 1968. His books were banned at the time by the communist regime in his native Czechoslovakia.
Of British books published in the 1980s I could choose a number as my book of the decade. An author I admire hugely, Kazuo Ishiguro, born in Japan but brought to the UK by his parents at the age of five years (and now a knight of the realm), published his Booker and Nobel Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day in 1989. A beautiful book encapsulating perfectly British character and manners with tenderness and empathy.
In 1985, Jeanette Winterson published her groundbreaking semi-autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit about a teenage girl growing up in northern England in the 1960s in a fanatical religious family and discovering her sexuality.
While I love both of these books very much, I don’t think I read either of them in the 1980s. So, my book of the decade is by Salman Rushdie (another knight of the realm, while Winterson is merely a CBE), who is described as an Indian born British-American, so I think it counts in the parameters I have set myself. Midnight’s Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was voted the ‘Booker of Bookers’ a few years ago. An awesome novel which was one of the first contemporary novels I read after I graduated in 1990 (the end of the 1980s, strictly speaking!), I remember being blown away by it. It is set at the time of Indian independence in 1947, specifically following the life of Saleem Sinai at the stroke of midnight in the new republic. Children born at that time were said to have been imbued with special powers. It is a spectacular novel, perhaps the finest of the second half of the twentieth century.
Julia's books 