Our regulars will recall that only last summer Margaret Drabble went into print on behalf of Angus Wilson’s splendid Late Call (1964), one of the jewels in our Finds offerings of Wilson’s works; and now Gillian Darley has composed a long piece for the Guardian‘s Re-Readings page in which she too extols the merits of what she describe as ‘to my knowledge, the only work of fiction to be set in a postwar new town.’ The socio-historical interest of the new towns and their ripeness for writerly exploration only grows, I suppose; and that is why Darley is smart to note Andrew O’Hagan’s reflections on his Irvine childhood in The Missing toward the end of her piece. This is her thoughtful conclusion:
“The late social theorist and anarchist Colin Ward who, as he put it, “wandered around new towns for 40 years” and steadfastly believed in their aspirations, remarked how by the early 1990s they had “become old towns for the new generations growing up there”. People had grown old and died in those houses, entire generations had come and gone. As O’Hagan wrote, “some things had gone well with the new town idea; other things had not gone well at all”. Yet, seen from our current cramped perspective, that underlying breadth of vision is still admirable, embodying a social morality that we, apparently, can no longer afford. For [Wilson's protaonist] Sylvia Calvert, at least, the new town was a new beginning…”
