Outrages are not the only truth
It’s sad that comic novels so seldom take prizes, writes Rowan Pelling.
By Rowan Pelling
Daily Telegraph,  20 Mar 2010

The Chairman of the Orange Prize, Daisy Goodwin, has ploughed her way through novels full of “grimness”. She said many started with a rape and: “If I read another sensitive account of a woman coming to terms with bereavement, I was going to slit my wrists.” I sympathise. When I was a Man Booker judge there were numerous novels about alcoholics and incest, and every other heroine had red hair, though only 4 per cent of the world’s population is naturally Titian.

I don’t think literature should eschew life’s dark side, but it’s sad that comic novels so seldom take prizes – especially when the finest comedies make the most serious points, as Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn clearly demonstrate. Certainly the novels I recommend to others are rarely miserabilist. There’s a canon of what I call “books every mother should give her daughter”, which I pass on to female friends with a scandalised screech of, “What do you mean, you’ve never read it?”

On the shortlist are: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy, Love Lessons by Joan Wyndham, National Velvet by Enid Bagnold, Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson, The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark, and Northanger Abbey, the funniest of Jane Austen’s novels.