I have spent the last 25 years selling and then publishing books, so I read with interest Melvyn Bragg's recent comments on working-class characters in fiction being stereotyped and cliched. "All this 'it's grim oop north' sort of stuff. Well, it was a joke once, but we've got to the stage where the working class has been turned into a cliche and it deserves a lot better."
The surprising thing is that his comments are considered newsworthy. We know that literary fiction is the record of the middle classes by the middle classes. Sometimes working-class characters exist, but they are there in the main to be ciphers or consequences. However, though it's not a recent phenomenon, it is getting worse.
Have we all become so anaesthetised to other people's experiences that working-class characters can be reduced to cartoons who have sex with their grandmothers? When the aspirational cry from our leaders is "strivers not skivers", are contemporary writers reflecting society, whether with satire or realism, or is something more pernicious going on?
Publishing is in dire need of readers and yet, because of ingrained perceptions, millions of readers are unable to read about their experiences because those who commission and market new writing feel uncomfortable with something they know so little about.
There is a belief in publishing that books set in the north with working-class characters are too "small" and don't fit the middle-class demographic who will be interested enough to buy such books. My publishing company Bluemoose Books brought out Pig Iron by Benjamin Myers in 2012. I had been told by several agents that nobody would "want to read about a working-class young man from a small northern town". That small northern town is Durham and the book went on to win the inaugural Gordon Burn prize.
Benjamin Myers remarks that "the terms 'working class' and 'northern' have, in the publishing world, become interchangeable – as if the suburban middle class is only a southern social construct; as if 'northern' fiction too has to revert to the same tired themes of old: kestrels, fish suppers and bully-boy brothers."
A novel set in the North about working-class characters always attracts those lazy editorial and marketing ciphers "gritty" and "dark". For authors, the "northern" label is inescapable – think of Ross Raisin, author of God's Own Country – but I don't see Zadie Smith categorised as a southern writer.
There is an increasing disconnect between the lives of those who commission books and the real world of readers up and down the country. As Benjamin Myers points out: "Working class does not mean sink estates, lives lived on hire purchase, teenage pregnancy and so forth. The world has changed and the working class has changed: it cannot be so easily categorisable."
An author I publish was told by a very eminent writer with whom she was studying that "literature is always middle class; written about, by and for … " To write in a different way, about different people, the way Ken Loach makes films, is assumed to be political. It is of course no more political than Malcolm Bradbury being angsty on behalf of the intelligentsia in The History Man, but anything that is different is judged by what is deemed to be normal.
Publishing has many challenges confronting it: from online retailers, the digital world and competition from every other entertainment company vying for our money and time. We should just publish great stories that reflect our times and be done with the categorisation of class. Stories can transcend stereotype and cliche if we can be bolder and less blinkered. If marketing considerations take precedence over art then literature contracts, becomes safe and bland. If we are to sell more books we have to turn the gaze away from the assumed audience to a different character. A more interesting and rounded working–class one?
