Where is the twenty-first-century British novel headed? The answer to this question depends on which contemporary novelists are taken into consideration, and this in turn depends on the view one takes of the contemporary British literary scene. Certainly it is very different from the scene described by David Lodge in 1971, when he pictured the British novelist at a crossroads, one choice being to continue within the realist tradition, and the other to further the modernist experiments of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson. Lodge expected the British novel to follow one road or the other, but on re-examining the British novel in 1992, he found that the crossroads no longer existed. Its place had been taken by an ‘aesthetic supermarket’ where novelists could choose from a number of available options.

From this it is clear that an increasingly complex contemporary world has given rise to increasingly complex contemporary novels – novels that members of the reading public, as well as students in schools, colleges, polytechnics and universities around the world, often find daunting. Those who write about contemporary fiction are not always clear what they mean by key terms like ‘realism’, ‘postmodernism’, ‘postcolonialism’ and ‘globalisation’. The Contemporary British Novel Since 2000 seeks, like its predecessor, The Contemporary British Novel Since 1980, to define (or identify the problems involved in defining) these terms not only for students but also for teachers and interested members of the reading public. In addition, it reveals the extent to which the practice of eighteen leading British novelists embodies, exemplifies or modifies the theories that these terms represent.

The present collection of eighteen hitherto unpublished chapters examines the work of some of the leading British novelists of the past sixteen years. By virtue of winning major literary prizes, these novelists have become the most widely taught at educational institutions in Great Britain and elsewhere in the English-speaking world. They have also become the most widely bought by public libraries worldwide, and have thereby become known to members of the reading public wanting to keep up with ‘serious’ fiction.

The protagonist of Anthony Burgess's A Malayan Trilogy (1957-9) nastily formulates a relation between history and books. “'History,' said Crabbe . . .'The best thing to do is to put all that in books and forget about it. A book is a kind of lavatory. We've got to throw up the past, otherwise we can't live in the present. The past has got to be killed.'” As soon as Crabbe makes his declaration, however, the narrator adds that “he reverted to his own past, and pronounced the very word in the Northern style . . . of his childhood” - a style that makes past sound like pest. Pestilent or not, emetically or not, history has been put into the twentieth-century English novel with a vengeance. It has occurred in a persistent idiosyncratic form: historical fiction by a single author about characters whose stories proliferate in multiple volumes. Burgess's trilogy is a mere mini-example of what might be called historical “series novels.” Tetralogies and five- or six-unit sequences abound; some stretch to a dozen and more.

Does so much reference to the past make living in the present easier? Some novelists write about the present as a product of the past or as itself epochal. Does seeing the present as historical also have vivifying effects? Or is it just a matter of profits for writers and publishers whose readers can be captivated by characters with whom, repeatedly, they “live”? Whatever the immediate material determination of the series form, historical crises suggest a motive. A culture undergoing actual transformation from an empire into an island might want to absorb the shock by reading about it, perhaps endlessly. The American title of Burgess's trilogy is The Long Day Wanes, a reference to the setting sun of Empire. As if in compensation, as the day wanes, the fiction waxes.

Maine lobstering: general information

The American lobster (Homarus americanus, see Fig. 7.1) is found in the waters off the Atlantic coast of North America from Newfoundland to Virginia. Concentrations of lobsters are greatest in waters less than 55 meters deep. Although lobsters are found on all kinds of bottom types, they prefer rocky areas, especially where there is a good deal of kelp in which to hide.

Lobsters eat a wide variety of foods, both living and dead organisms. Their preferred foods are fish, mollusks and small crustaceans. They can also filter plankton from the water, and thus can live in untended traps for considerable periods. They are also cannibalistic and will eat small lobsters and soft shelled lobsters regardless of size. For this reason fishermen immobilize the lobster's claws, usually by placing a thick rubber band around each claw, making it impossible to open.

When lobsters have outgrown the capacity of their shells, molting occurs. During molting the lobster wiggles out of its shell, after which the lobster is soft, weak, and highly vulnerable. Its only defense is to hide for a few weeks until its shell has hardened again. Although lobsters can molt in any month, a very large proportion molt from mid-June to mid-August. For this reason, fishing is bad during mid-summer, since so many are in the rocks and not feeding. Small lobsters molt several times a year, but commercial size lobsters molt only once.

Lobsters mate after the female has molted.