Broadcasting is regularly accused of having a bias against older people, but this charge could never be advanced against modern literary fiction. Across the combined 2,768 pages of the six books shortlisted this week for the 2009 Man Booker Prize, it is almost impossible to find a character born in the second half of the 20th century, and most of the protagonists belong to periods between the 16th (Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall) and the 19th (AS Byatt's The Children's Book, Adam Fould's The Quickening Gaze). The most contemporary material – in JM Coetzee's Summertime and Simon Mawer's The Glass Room – takes place no later than the 70s and 80s.
As the two books that many critics regard as the most grievous omissions from the list are both set in the 1950s – William Trevor's Love and Summer and Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn – even those most resistant to cultural generalisation will struggle to deny a trend. But the question to be settled is whether authors are failing to write contemporary novels or judges are declining to recognise them.
Certainly, the Booker selectors ignored some strong present-day tales – such as William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms and Justin Cartwright's To Heaven by Water – but their final selection fairly reflected the available field: a huge majority of the eligible novels were retrospective in scope.
Admittedly, this imbalance results partly from a prejudice about the kind of fiction that receives big cheques at black-tie dinners. Crime and thriller fiction – a genre never represented on a Man Booker shortlist – routinely reflects very recent events: typically, Ian Rankin's latest, The Complaints, incorporates the financial crisis. Such novels, though, are generally perceived by critics and judges as lacking the weight of books that are past-tense in both prose style and content. This bias is partly a trick of the mind.
Because a key judgment in the construction of a literary canon is how long a work has lasted, modern stories that share the period of acknowledged classics (a "new" 18th- or 19th-century tale) can seem to have greater significance. And this process may then become circular, with novelists and publishers who seek awards calculating, consciously or subconsciously, that historical fiction is the better bet.
But there also seems to be a sense among writers that it is hard to put the now into a novel, and it's easy to see reasons for paddling backwards. Several of the books that either reached or narrowly missed the Booker six – including the William Trevor and Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger – featured characters questioning whether to submit to a romantic possibility. And such poignant tension – always rich material for a story – is almost impossible to achieve in a modern setting. Trevor acknowledged in our recent Radio 4 interview that he had been drawn to the 1950s because the moral stakes were so much higher.
That point is well made. The current easiness of divorce, infidelity and serial monogamy would render useless the plots of many of literature's greatest novels: from Austen's Pride and Prejudice through Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier to Graham Greene's The End of the Affair. In a society in which, at least in its nominally Christian sectors, guilt and shame have largely been abolished, fiction loses some of its best petrol. Indeed, for this reason, even on the contemporary-looking crime shelves, the investigators are now frequently to be found re-examining "cold cases" from a time when one word or action could still end a career or life.
While nostalgia for the possibility of disgrace leads some writers to turn their backs to the windows of their studies, others are simply alarmed by the speed of the world going past. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens" title="<00ad>Dickens">Dickens and Balzac established early on the reportorial possibilities of fiction as a record of the present. But, in a culture where reporting is so widespread and so fast – with events on air or online within seconds of occurring – novelists understandably fear that their manuscripts, usually published around a year after completion, will have been contradicted by subsequent developments in their chosen area. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/sep/05/sebastian-faulks-novel-review" title="Sebastian Faulks's A Week in <00ad>December">Sebastian Faulks's A Week in December, which features a collapsing bank, is framed as a snapshot of a moment in 2007, early in the credit crisis, to reduce the risk of being accused of having missed the sinking ship.
This summer I re-read two Graham Greene novels: The Quiet American (1955) and Our Man in Havana (1958). Situated respectively in Vietnam and Cuba, these books dramatised events still drinking newspaper ink. In strict journalistic terms, both narratives were rapidly overtaken by events – the Vietnam war and the Castro revolution – and yet the detail and atmosphere are so precise that they stand as historical rather than topical accounts of a stage in a nation's development.
The enduring power, five decades later, of those novels set and written in the 1950s should perhaps encourage some 21st-century novelists to aim for a future Man Booker shortlist in which the time of the action is within reach of the copyright date in the frontpapers.
