Myth of Return Fiction of the 1970s and 1980s: ‘A bit of this and a bit of that’

Abstract

After the efflorescence of Muslim texts about Britain from the 1950s and 1960s (Hyder, Hosain, Ghose, Abbas, and Salih), the 1970s was a quiet decade. Leaving aside Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra’s 1970s memoirs, discussed in the second chapter, the only creative texts that I have been able to find do not fit this book’s remit neatly enough to discuss them in more than the broadest terms. Zulfikar Ghose’s novel Crump’s Terms (1975) is a rare book set in Britain by an author of Muslim heritage that was published during this decade. However, as Kanaganayakam (1993: 61) and Brouillette (2007b: 149) observe, Ghose actually completed the novel in 1968 but it took him seven years to find a publisher. This is not surprising, because Crump’s Terms is ‘far from mainstream reading’ (Brouillette, 2007b: 149), whose almost unreadable experimentation (long sentences, stream-of-consciousness techniques, unlikeable first-person narrator), marked a change of direction for Ghose. It contains some discussion of late 1960s fraught race relations; for example, in relation to the Nigerian boy, Kola, who is nicknamed ‘Coke’. However, this is not a book about Muslims in Britain, thus disqualifying it from detailed analysis here. Its narrator, the irascible white British teacher Crump, works at Pinworth School, a chaotic secondary modern in London much like the one at which Ghose worked during the early 1960s.¹