Tugging the review copy of Granta 100 out of its jiffy bag, I decided to conduct a little experiment. I would write down the names of the writers whom I expected to find in it and award myself marks out of ten. Two minutes’ thought produced the following: Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Alan Hollinghurst, Hanif Kureishi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jay McInerney, Jonathan Safran Foer and Zadie Smith. Two more minutes with the contents table, scrupulously ignoring Zadie Smith who doesn’t contribute a piece but takes part in one of the features, produced a score of six.
Successful literary magazines play to their strengths, of course: anyone who compiled an anthology of Cyril Connolly’s Horizon and left out Connolly, Waugh, Orwell and Angus Wilson would not be doing their job. On the other hand, there is a fine line between playing to your strengths and cliqueishness. Waugh once complained of the Auden-Isherwood-Spender axis of the 1930s that its members ‘ganged up and captured the decade’. The same could be said of the Granta crowd assembled by its founding editor Bill Buford in the 1980s, notably in the wake of the Best of British Young Novelists promotion of 1983, which helped to make the world safe for a certain kind of English writing not just for a decade but for the better part of 20 years.
Edited by William Boyd, its contents specially commissioned rather than ransacked from the vault, this 100th number duly welcomes the Granta stable to the paddock while keeping a rail or two spare for talented newcomers such as Tash Aw and Helen Oyeymi. Amis offers another of his fictional despatches from the post-9/ll bunker. Julian Barnes supplies a wry little tale in which a widower returns to the Scottish island where he and his late wife spent their holidays.
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