It was the creative paradox of Thatcherism that a reactionary, philistine regime should sponsor a remarkable explosion of literary talent. Thatcher herself was a stranger to the theatre, disdained poetry, unless it was by St Francis of Assisi, and always claimed that her favourite reading was Jeffrey Archer. And yet, despite the miners' strike and the Falklands war, Britain also enjoyed Caryl Churchill at the Royal Court, some of the greatest Booker prizewinners from across the Commonwealth, and the early work of writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Robert Harris, William Boyd, Pat Barker and Jeanette Winterson.
The unintended consequence of Tory indifference to the arts, hostility to the BBC, and a kind of petit bourgeois triumphalism, was an astounding book boom: during the 1980s, the British novel came roaring out of the intensive care unit to which 70s critics had consigned it, Waterstone's revolutionised bookselling, literary prizes hit the front pages as never before, literary festivals such as Hay and Charleston took their first, tentative steps and a great tide of money washed through Grub Street like a tsunami. We are still contending with the aftermath of an extraordinary moment.
In hindsight, the friction between the literary community and the state yielded a surprising creative dividend. Several writers, notably David Hare, Hanif Kureishi, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie, expressed their opposition to aspects of Thatcherism, on stage, in print or on celluloid. Even such an Olympian figure as Seamus Heaney was moved to declare artistic independence.
At the heart of this tortured decade, 1984, Orwell's fateful year, resounded like a storm bell in the fog of history. Inevitably, his predictions were unfulfilled. When Big Brother finally materialised it would be as farce, not tragedy. The 80s were always slightly lurid. No surprise that, a generation on, contemporary writers should return there for creative renewal.
Alan Warner, the author of Morvern Callar and The Stars in the Bright Sky, is one of Scotland's best, a writer who has begun to create his own, often surreal, imaginative world out of the flotsam and jetsam – the detritus – of modern life. His new novel, Their Lips Talk of Mischief, treats a mid-80s landscape as the edgy, often bleak, backdrop to the marginal lives of two struggling writers, Llewellyn "Lou" Smith and Scotsman Douglas Cunningham, young slackers occasionally reminiscent of Withnail and Marwood ("I"), stranded high in a block of flats in Acton, west London. "Lou" launches occasional anti-Thatcher sallies ("everything everyone fought for is getting pissed on now, by that sellout shopkeeper from Grantham and her second-rate cast of blethering toffs"), but Warner is too scrupulous to turn him into a full-blown comic dandy.
Smith, however, does have a beautiful Irish girlfriend, Aoife, and a baby daughter. Out of the top line of a Welsh-Irish-Scots joke, Warner begins to weave a strange, dark metropolitan story from another narrative archetype, the eternal love triangle. Marry that with his portrait of two would-be literary artists as young men in mid-80s London, and you have an audacious scenario that, on my reading, falls slightly short of the high expectations with which some readers might approach a Warner novel.
There is plenty to admire. The relationship between the two literary musketeers is entertainingly drawn. Their gruesome meetings with Toby Hanson, publishing creep extraordinaire, contains some memorable satire about the ghosting of pop memoirs and, finally, the lads' work on blurbs for novels such as Brothel of the Vampire or the captions for Cat Calendar 1985.
Warner is also very good at garret life. He understands what it means to survive on pasta and porridge. The revelation that, if you can't afford Tippex, two coats of Milk of Magnesia does the trick, speaks of time served in the trenches of literary London. What he cannot quite decide, it seems, is what Cunningham's obsession with Aoife really adds up to. Plus, he's too subtle a writer to give pat narrative solutions. The best parts of Their Lips Talk of Mischief, especially Lou's midwinter wedding to Aoife in Ealing town hall, a brilliant set-piece, have the intensity of a fine short story. It's a shame that these elements, exceptional on their own terms, don't quite cohere into a novel. This is odd, and disappointing, because if there's one thing Warner has done outstandingly in the past it's telling a tale that seems like nothing you've read before.
To buy a copy of Their Lips Talk of Mischief for £13.59 with free Uk p&p call 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk
