Hanif Kureishi. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images
The Letters of Kingsley Amis contains a bravura passage in which Amis, writing to Philip Larkin sometime in 1982, complains about the theory of novel-writing espoused by their mutual friend Anthony Powell. "It did suddenly strike me how fed up I was about all those real people and real incidents he'd put in his books," Amis insists. "I thought you were meant to make things up, you know, like a novelist." The prime source of Amis's irritation turns out to be Powell's forthcoming novella, O, How the Wheel Becomes It! The subject is a famous writer who, like Powell, has just had a TV programme made about him. "Couldn't he at least make it a famous art historian?" Amis continues. "Can't he make anything up?"
Had these strictures ever got back to him, Powell would doubtless have replied that there are ways of making things up, and that nearly all of them have some kind of grounding in reality. He would probably also have comforted himself with the thought that accusations about novelists taking their material directly from life have been going strong almost since novels first came to be written. It is over a century and a half, for example, since Dickens, having put a diminutive hairdresser met on his travels into David Copperfield as Miss Mowcher, received such a withering letter of protest that he added an extra scene in which Miss M turns heroine and rescues several people from a fire.
The latest addition to this distinguished roll-call of cannibalisers is Hanif Kureishi, whose new novel The Last Word includes what seems to be a fairly exact portrait of one of our most senior novelists. In fact, having once spent time at an Italian literary festival with VS Naipaul, watched his faultless impersonation of an English gentleman abroad and listened to him abuse the Castilian literary tradition in the presence of one of its representatives, I knew almost from the moment that "Mamoon Azam" stepped on to the page and started offering his opinions on race, politics and the feebleness of all modern writers except himself precisely who Kureishi was taking off.
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Had these strictures ever got back to him, Powell would doubtless have replied that there are ways of making things up, and that nearly all of them have some kind of grounding in reality. He would probably also have comforted himself with the thought that accusations about novelists taking their material directly from life have been going strong almost since novels first came to be written. It is over a century and a half, for example, since Dickens, having put a diminutive hairdresser met on his travels into David Copperfield as Miss Mowcher, received such a withering letter of protest that he added an extra scene in which Miss M turns heroine and rescues several people from a fire.
The latest addition to this distinguished roll-call of cannibalisers is Hanif Kureishi, whose new novel The Last Word includes what seems to be a fairly exact portrait of one of our most senior novelists. In fact, having once spent time at an Italian literary festival with VS Naipaul, watched his faultless impersonation of an English gentleman abroad and listened to him abuse the Castilian literary tradition in the presence of one of its representatives, I knew almost from the moment that "Mamoon Azam" stepped on to the page and started offering his opinions on race, politics and the feebleness of all modern writers except himself precisely who Kureishi was taking off.
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