In a 1958, essay, Georg Simmel characterizes the ruin as a space between “the not-yet and the no-longer” (“Two Essays,” Hudson Review 11, no. 3 (1958): 371–85, at 382). Simmel's categorization might be applied to his native Germany and to Britain during the period in which he wrote, as both nations engaged in complex and divergent processes of demolition, building, rebuilding and revisioning to counter the ruination of the Second World War.
Following Emily Cuming's Housing, Class and Gender in Modern British Writing, 1880–2012 (2016), in Reconstruction Fiction: Housing and Realist Literature in Postwar Britain, Paula Derdiger takes housing as the focal point for its study of postwar British writing. The inherent materialities of the term housing offer a means of disrupting the enduring, apolitical seductions of the word home at a time when, between the Blitz, peripatetic war efforts, and enforced evacuations, “no one was permanently at home” (44). Like Cuming, Derdiger expands literary analyses of domestic space beyond that enduring and bourgeois correspondence between self-identity and the interior.
The novel has long been understood as the most routinely habitable of literary spaces, and Derdiger's analysis is focused upon a category she nominates as reconstruction fiction. This allows her to bring together an interestingly disparate group of authors, the content and form of whose work are demonstrably altered by the particular postwar environment—Elizabeth Bowen, Patrick Hamilton, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes, and Elizabeth Taylor among them. Through the building and demolishing of figurative spaces and places and narrative structures, these authors intervene to seek change in that environment. “How,” Derdiger asks, “are postwar texts, alongside transformed and transforming postwar homes, communities, and landscapes, built—and to what end?” (8–9).
Derdiger traces many intriguing intersections, imbricating analyses of literary realist spaces and detailed postwar contexts such as Alison and Peter Smithsons’ impassioned promotion of New Brutalism. As the Welfare State is constructed to attend to the needs of the collective, the (authorial) rights of the individual are scrutinized, and Derdiger offers some illuminating contextual readings. For example, she reads the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act as an anxious cultural negotiation of planning as a potentially totalitarian act. Rich in nuanced connections, the book is also full of substantial footnotes that include the kind of intriguing semi-digressions that the conventional monograph form sanctions only in a reduced font size. It is only in the final chapter, which moves post-properly-postwar to the geopolitics of the 1970s and 1980s, that Derdiger's argument suffers slightly from a lack of room in its preliminary discussions to establish the vast conceptual spaces it addresses.
Roaming through boardinghouses, billets, safe houses, squats, tower blocks, and country houses (the latter newly acquired in a postwar rush by the National Trust) Reconstruction Fiction is founded upon genuinely revelatory close reading. In Graham Greene's “The Destructors” (1954) for example, the opaque motivations of “T.” are aligned with those of that new, sinister breed, the planner; in Elizabeth Taylor's Angel (1956), the writer-protagonist is revealed as the desperate curator of a country-house museum in a nation (and a literature) stricken by antagonistic priorities of past and future. Contextual and formal analysis is intricately integrated to explore a grouping of writers whose stylistics and status have often been marginalized. Derdiger convincingly links innovations in authorial voice, and in narrative and generic mobilities, to the diversity of contested spaces that fill these selected realist fictions. Moving beyond the compulsive figurative homology of nineteenth-century realism, in which the physical structures of the house parallel family, social, and psychological structures, these writers dismantle the bildungsroman, offering more complex fictional spaces that are epistemological, phenomenological, and provocatively ambiguous.
No study of the postwar in British literature can avoid the cultural conflict between realism and modernism that, however justly, defined the period and endures in its received reputation today. Derdiger's selection of authors and texts, though lacking in racial diversity, nonetheless reveals a mode of realist representation that is various, dynamic, and potentially disruptive, despite its initially approachable form. These novels tend to maintain a bold referentiality at the same time that they attend to individualities of consciousness and ambiguities of language. In the introduction, Derdiger quotes a 1944 essay by Elizabeth Bowen, “Calico Windows,” in which Bowen claims a potential positive consequence of continual bombing—the destruction of “the old plan for living”: “When the war is over,” Bowen asserts, “there will be no more of this nonsense; we shall look out through glass” (6, quoting Bowen). Bowen's optimism impulsively demands transparency, interiority, realism, and a modernist architectural aesthetic. Invoking the possibility of all these qualities existing simultaneously, she exposes the purportedly unbreachable cultural binary, modernism versus realism, as itself a nonsense. Derdiger's category of “reconstruction fiction,” so imaginatively close-read and intricately sited within the postwar British cultural context, does the same.
