I returned again yesterday to my reading of John Brannigan's* excellent book on "Literature in England, 1945-2000", sub-titled "Orwell to the Present" (well not quite the present, the book was published in 2003).
Nevertheless, Brannigan's choice of post-war English literary subjects is remarkably prescient. By way of illustration, early on he quotes from Richard Goodwin's poem "Return to England" which refers to none other than :
"the headline bankers, the spinners of captions,
the millionaires -"
This sounds rather familiar ! However, it is on the opening of the later chapter entitled "English Journeys" that I want to focus today.
In this, Brannigan returns to "the summer of 1983" when the novelist "Beryl Bainbridge joined a BBC television crew in a journey around England" :
"Bainbridge retraced the journey undertaken by J B Priestley fifty years earlier....'English Journey, or The Road to Milton Keynes' pays homage to Priestley, and, as its sub-title suggests, also to Orwell's 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (1937)".
Eventually arriving at Milton Keynes, Bainbridge finds :
"....'a cathedral dedicated to the worship of the credit card, a place where people could come and pay their respects to the consumer society'"
She also finds : "...it's housing estates empty, its shopping arcades derelict, and an architectural planner who tells her that 'no one had foreseen a recession and unemployment.'"
Once again, this sounds all too familiar : please see below my post of yesterday.
* I have also referred to this work @ http://witchofworcester.wordpress.com/ in a post of 3 June 2009.
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