Anglia 2021; 139(3): 494–515

Ingrid von Rosenberg*

Old Age as Horror Vision or Comfort Zone in
the Late Fiction of Contemporary British
Novelists
https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2021-0040

Abstract: Old people have always figured in literature, but the unprecedented and
worldwide growth of longevity in the twentieth century has triggered new fic-
tional approaches to the topic of aging. Thus, since the late 1980 s, an ever grow-
 

ing number of established British writers, reaching their own advanced years,
have written on age from an insider’s perspective, creating old main characters
and focusing on their mental and physical experiences. I have examined six of
such novels, published between 1986 and 2019, trying to find out how the authors
construct their heroes’ and heroines’ aging selves by imagining their attitudes to
certain central issues like time, death, physical decay and human relationships.
Of the classical formative categories (gender, class, ethnicity, etc.) gender has
proved to be the most essential, especially when it comes to the perspectives on
time. While the view of heroes created by male writers remains fixed on the past,
often with nostalgia, sometimes with regret, the women authors’ heroines focus
on their present situation with a view to the future, represented by children and
grandchildren. Class turned out to be a second important category: the (uncon-
templated) safe middle-class position of all protagonists appears as an indispens-
able precondition for the free choice of attitude to the challenges of aging.

Key terms: the new longevity, aging in contemporary fiction, gendered views,
the class factor, Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey, Margaret Drabble,
Bernardine Bishop, Bernardine Evaristo

1. The Sociological Background

“[...] ours is probably the most age-conscious period in human history”, writes
sociologist Mike Hepworth in his book Stories of Ageing, in which he analyses the
view of aging in popular novels and TV series (Hepworth 2000: 3). The reason for

*Corresponding author: Ingrid von Rosenberg, Technische Universität Dresden

E-Mail: rosenb@msx.tu-dresden.de
 Old Age in the Late Fiction of Contemporary Writers 495

this is the unprecedented increase in longevity the last decades have seen – biol-
ogist and gerontologist Tom Kirkwood even speaks of a “revolution in longevity”
and does not see an end to it, convinced that humans are “programmed not to die,
but to survive” (Kirkwood 2001: ix and 13). While in the nineteenth century life
expectancy at birth was less than 50 years worldwide, it has – despite the two
World Wars – constantly and globally increased since then, though with remark-
able differences between the various parts of the world. In the WHO’s statistics of
2019 Britons reached an expectancy of about 81,4 years (men 79,8, women 83,0),
while Italians and Spaniards, for instance, fared slightly better, Italians reaching
83 (men 80,9, women 84,9) and Spaniards 83,2 (men 80,7, women 85,7) (World
Health Organization 2020: n. pag.). But still, the share of people over 65 in the UK
has risen considerably in the last century: while in 1900 only 5 % of the then 38
 

million inhabitants of the UK were older than 65, in 2019 12 million of the 66,4
million Brits (i.e. 22 %) were aged 65 and above, with the 85+ age group being the
   

fastest growing (Age UK 2019: 3).

Not surprisingly, this development has not gone unnoticed by politics,
science, art, literature and the population at large and has changed both social
and personal views of aging, which in the western world had for a long time been
predominantly negative – quite in contrast to the great reverence for outstanding
old figures in literature such as wise Prospero and tragic King Lear. According to
Mike Featherstone and Mike Hepworth, pioneers of cultural gerontology, the dis-
dain of old people as deficient old trots and old shrews was deeply rooted in pre-
industrial society, even if a minority of the wealthy and/or powerful enjoyed re-
spect (Featherstone and Hepworth 1993: 318–322). Industrialisation made things
worse, as the skills and knowledge of the older generation were rendered redun-
dant and a young workforce preferred. The introduction of retirement, though
meant as a compensation or even a reward, turned out to have a negative side
effect: the old, perceived as a kind of ‘subclass’ (Hearn 1995: 100), were increas-
ingly stigmatised as a useless group on the margin of society, living at the ex-
pense of the working population (Featherstone and Hepworth 1993: 322–324).
Gradually, however, with incomes rising (pensions in Britain rose between 1980
and 2000 by 150 %) and health care improved, in the past decades many older
 

people have been able to keep up an active lifestyle, taking part in various social
activities or even staying in work until weakness and dependence take over in the
final stage. As a consequence, the extended period after retirement (now about
double the 10 years expected in 1908, when state pensions were first introduced
in the UK) has no longer been primarily seen as a threat to public resources, but
pensioners have increasingly become respected as ‘full adults’ and even been dis-
covered as a new pool of work force (Hill 2019: n. pag.). In response to a fall of
young people entering the workforce (partly due to a longer educational period)
496 Ingrid von Rosenberg

and the growing willingness of older people to move into post-career jobs, Cath-
erine Itzin and Chris Phillipson, in a study of 1993, had made urgent suggestions
to local governments and business for the removal of age barriers in recruitment,
training and promotion (Itzin and Phillipson 1993: 48–51). Meanwhile, according
to the latest statistics of the ONS, the share of the over 65 s in employment has
 

actually doubled from 4.9 per cent in 1993 to 11 per cent in August 2020, though
the Brexit and Corona may have a slowing down effect in the next few years (Of-
fice for National Statistics 2021: n. pag.).
The improving image of the elderly seems to have been especially promoted
by two developments. Probably most important was their discovery by the mar-
ket: the over 65 s (remember: in Britain 22 % of the population) were recognised as
   

potent customers for many goods and services such as body care products and
fitness training, cosmetic surgery and cures, clothes and cruises, to name only a
few exploitable niches, and courted accordingly in advertising and given atten-
tion by the media. The other development – probably partly triggered by the first –
was the growth of cultural gerontology, since the 1990 s a fast expanding field of
 

research. Simone de Beauvoir and Norbert Elias in their classical studies of old
age, The Coming of Age of 1970 and The Loneliness of the Dying of 1985, had still
deplored the social disregard of the old in modern societies, urgently calling for a
general change of attitude. Thus de Beauvoir wrote: “Old age exposes the failure
of our entire civilization. It is the whole man that must be re-made, it is the whole
relationship between man and man that must be recast if we wish the old person’s
state to be acceptable” (de Beauvoir 1970/1996: 543). Since the late 1980 s a  

younger generation of sociologists and cultural gerontologists from Mike Feather-

stone and Mike Hepworth to Chris Gilleard, Paul Higgs, Tom Kirkwood and many
others, by exploring in great detail the physical and mental capacities as well as
the financial potency and social activities of older people under the changing
conditions of postmodern society, have successfully undermined the cliché of the
demented, good-for-nothing old. A basic insight was that more and more people
in their ‘third age’ or ‘later life’, as the period over 65 came to be termed, led a life
not much different from that led in their 40 s and 50 s, thus reducing the visibility
   

of age differences. Featherstone and Hepworth noticed, that the “relatively clearly
marked stages of the life course” (childhood, schooling, career, marriage, retire-
ment) of earlier decades have become blurred, observing “an increasing similarity
in modes of presentation of self, gestures and postures, fashions and leisure-time
pursuits, adopted by both parents and their children [...]” (Featherstone and Hep-
worth 1989/1990: 144). Pensioners tended to no longer define their identity by
their former work, for instance as miners, steel workers or company directors, but
are – like the members of the younger generations – constantly forced to make
choices in their activities and consumption to express their (aging) identity. Gil-
 Old Age in the Late Fiction of Contemporary Writers 497

leard and Higgs write: “The emphasis upon choice that is the hallmark of consum-
er society raises continuous questions over self and identity – who am I; what do I
want; [...] what marks my individuality; what meaning do I give to the shape and
directions that my life takes?” (2000: 7). Financial inequality, however, plays a
decisive role: as several researchers have observed, some choices, for instance
concerning travel and participation in cultural activities or certain sports, depend
on sufficient economic and cultural capital, so that full freedom of decision is
limited to members of the upper and middle classes (Gilleard and Higgs 2000: 8;
Gilleard and Higgs 2005: 158; Ginn and Arber 1995: 8).
Gender differences have also been noticed as a factor influencing attitudes to
the aging process. After the female menopause had been the focus of – mostly
feminist – research for many years, research interest also turned to gendered atti-
tudes to the later years. Whether men or women cope better with the challenges of
aging has become a central issue, and the answers vary. References to Bourdieu’s
theory of the various forms of capital has proved handy to assess the differences.
Traditionally men were seen as acquiring more power with growing age (e.g. in  

management, academia or politics) and therefore suffering more from a feeling of

loss at retirement (cf. Hearn 1995), but compensated by retaining greater econom-
ic capital and biologically unlimited fertility. While it was widely believed that
women lose their sexual attractiveness with the menopause, it was assumed that
older men “can still command sexual goods; can still be presented as ‘attractive
partners’; and can still play the role of lover [...] in a way that is still culturally
acceptable to most, if not all, sections of society” (Gilleard and Higgs 2000: 49).
This has been disputed by female researchers, who have re-interpreted the meno-
pause as a liberation process enabling women to reinvent themselves by engaging
in new activities such as social or intellectual work or in continued care for the
family (e.g. Woodword 1995: 90–91; Friedan 1993: esp. 14–19, 149–154). In fact,
 

there is now widespread agreement that women’s greater social capital in the
form of family relations, friendships and voluntary social activities proves to be
a decisive advantage over men in coping with old age despite their greater eco-
nomic capital. Already Simone de Beauvoir had argued that “generally speaking
the elderly woman adapts herself to her state better than her husband”, putting it
down to the part women “have to play in their homes and families that allows
them to remain active and to retain their identity” and especially mentioning “her
role of grandmother which brings her fresh possibilities” (de Beauvoir 1970/1996:
261–262). One of the many voices confirming de Beauvoir’s judgment was sociol-
ogist Diane Gibson’s who thirty years later drew the conclusion “that the experi-
ence of being old and female is characterised by lower income, greater disability
[but also] better social support, higher social participation [and] greater continu-
ities” (Gibson 1998: 144).
498 Ingrid von Rosenberg

Though on the whole the understanding for older people in society and their
image in public perception have certainly improved in the last decades, this is by
no means a matter of course yet. The Corona crisis of 2020/2021 and the ensuing
public discussions about proper treatment of the elderly, especially the debate
about triage, i.e. the right to exclude them from intensive care in case of limited
 

resources, have shown how fragile the new esteem for the elderly is.

2. Old Characters in Literature

In western literature old characters have always played important roles as out-
standingly wise, tragic or comic figures or simply as a natural part of families and
communities. But only fairly recently, presumably in consequence of the visibly
increasing number of the elderly in real life, authors have focused on groups of old
people as main protagonists. The enforced living together of the (poorer) modern
old, e.g. in homes and alternative institutions, seems to have been of special fasci-
 

nation. One of the earliest literary examples dealing with the new phenomenon was
Muriel Spark’s novel Memento Mori published in 1959. In this “moral fable” (Lodge
2010: n. pag.) she constructs a telling contrast between a group of upper-class men
and women on the one hand, who do not heed the warning by an anonymous caller
(death?) reminding them over the phone “Remember you must die!” (Spark 1959/
2009: 2, 33, 99, 121, 128), and 15 poor lower-class women on the other who, confined
to a geriatric hospital ward, behave more wisely, calmly accepting their uncomfort-
able situation and supporting each other. Kingsley Amis short novel Ending Up of
1974 is another famous example, in which he strikes a more cynical note. Five hard-
up septuagenarians share a run-down cottage in the English countryside in order to
save money, but their reactions to the enforced closeness, whether good-natured
helplessness or downright viciousness, lead straight to their destruction. Recently
Maricel Oró-Piqueras has read the novel as a critical parable of the state of society,
in which old people of limited means are left to themselves (2016: 196–198). But in
fact, the satire does seem less directed at society, but at the old people themselves.1
Helen Small in her encompassing study of old age in western philosophy and lit-
erature, referring to the texts by Spark and Amis among others, sums up:

1 Oró-Piqueras also contrasts Amis’s book with a more recent fictional version of old people’s en-
forced living together: Deborah Moggach’s comic novel These Foolish Things of 2004. In times of
globalisation she imagines the outsourcing of care to India, telling the story of a motley group of
British pensioners who cannot afford a decent lifestyle in the UK anymore, but find a new home in a
converted guesthouse in Bangalore. In 2012 the book was made into the successful feel-good film
Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.
 Old Age in the Late Fiction of Contemporary Writers 499

Even in very recent years, representations of old age in fiction, drama, and poetry have been
symptomatic of a culture (in Kathleen Woodward’s phrase) ‘profoundly ambivalent, and
primarily negative, about old age’. It is noticeable how often black comedy has been the
mode of choice, at once mocking and confirming long-standing prejudices. (Small 2007: 5)

Yet from the late 1980 s on a new type of fictional approach to old age has
 

emerged. Rather than throwing a satirical look from the outside, an ever growing
number of elderly writers who won literary fame early in life have been trying to
explore the process of aging from the inside, imagining the mental and physical
experiences of one or several main protagonists – with considerable success as
some Booker prizes confirm. Such narratives seem especially interesting, be-
cause – according to anthropologist and novelist Ceridwen Dovey – writing from
experience gives fictional versions of “oldness” a specific flavour of authenticity
(Dovey 2015: n. pag.). This does not mean that the texts are autobiographies in
disguise, but obviously experienced feelings and first-hand observations flow
into these invented stories. Thus the novels offer insights into both: the aging
individuals’ self-perception and society’s view of them. Mike Hepworth even no-
tices an increasing gerontological appreciation of the value of stories: “Fiction
evidently adds a further dimension to our understanding of the quality of the
ageing experience. [...] novels are in the advantageous position of admitting read-
ers to a variety of different perspectives of a situation of an ageing individual”
(Hepworth 2000: 5). We shall see if the novels to be analysed might add to or
qualify results of gerontological research.
It was already mentioned that aging people, just like all other members of our
postmodern society, are involved in a permanent process of constructing and ex-
pressing their identity. But age is only one of the categories which impact on the
formation of a sense of self and intersects with other important categories such as
gender, class, ethnicity, occupation, religion or region. The influence of each of
these and their interplay are subject to changes according to varying social cir-
cumstances, views and evaluations. In the following I will explore how individual
authors have constructed their protagonists’ aging identities by investigating the
characters’ positions vis-à-vis certain key issues in the experience of growing old,
and then try to assess which additional formative categories beside age have been
at work. Key issues to be given attention will be the protagonists’ attitudes to
time – i.e. the past, the present and the future – and to death, the experience of
 

physical changes, their relationships to partners, family members and friends of

the same age as well as younger ones and, finally, participation in social activities
and political attitudes.
500 Ingrid von Rosenberg

2.1. Aging Heroes of Some (Once) Angry Young Men

The first group of texts to be analysed are novels by former ‘Angry Young Men’,
authors who won early fame with novels and plays that idolised youth as a power-
ful force breaking with encrusted conventions. Some of them started on long writ-
ing careers, continuing well into their advanced years. It seems intriguing to see
how these writers, who witnessed dramatic social changes while growing older
themselves, construct the identities of their aging heroes.
The so-called ‘Angries’, grouped together by literary criticism under this la-
bel, began publishing in the 1950 s and 1960 s. Born in the 1920 s and 1930 s, they
       

were members of a generation which belonged to “Modernity 1” (a term coined by

Ulrich Beck, Wolfgang Bonss and Christoph Lau), a period still dominated by es-
tablished class divisions, traditional family patterns and relative poverty of the
lower classes (Beck, Bonss and Lau 2003; cf. Gilleard and Higgs 2005: 25–27).
With the exception of Kingsley Amis, son of a London middle-class family and an
Oxford student, whose famous first novel Lucky Jim (1954) ridiculed the dusty
conventions of university life, most of the young writers came from the working
class in the North of England and had left school early to start work. In their real-
istic texts they described life as they had experienced it, denouncing the exploita-
tion in factories, the military and professional sport and making fun of the petri-
fied moral standards of the time. None of them, however, engaged in political
action – their rebellion remained private, concentrating on the self-realisation of
the individual.
For a closer look I have selected three novels by once angry young writers,
who all – despite experimenting with other fictional genres in the meantime –
returned to the realist mode in their stories about aging, focusing on the everyday
experience of their heroes dotted with (few) happy moments and (many) sad ones.
One example is Alan Sillitoe’s Birthday (2001), which he wrote at 73 as a surpris-
ing sequel to his successful debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning of
1958 and which is like much of Sillitoe’s fiction largely based on his own experi-
ences. Protagonist Arthur Seaton, now 60, is one of three brothers who meet in
Nottingham to celebrate the 70th birthday of brother Brian’s old flame Jenny, an
event that is modelled on a real birthday surprise party for Doreen Haslam, an old
girlfriend of the author (Bradford 2008: 365). In the novel Sillitoe splits his own
work experience between Arthur, who has remained a manual worker in Notting-
ham, and his brother Brian, who has made a career as a writer in London, in his
case as an author of TV comedy shows. The second text is David Storey’s A Serious
Man, written in 1998 when Storey was 65. Best remembered for his first novel
about a rugby player, This Sporting Life (1960), and Booker prize winning Saville
(1976), the story of a Yorkshire miner’s son, as well as numerous plays, Storey in
 Old Age in the Late Fiction of Contemporary Writers 501

this late fiction concentrates on the portrait of an aging writer and painter with
working-class roots. Richard Fenchurch, hero and first-person narrator, of the
same age as the author, won fame in the past, but is forgotten by the public and
suffers from depression and anxiety neurosis with bouts of madness. The third
book to be examined is Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils, which earned him the
Booker Prize in 1986, 13 years after Ending Up came out. This – much longer and
milder – novel focuses on the lives of five old friends and their wives, all in their
60 s and retired to a small Welsh town, and on the events that happen when an-
 

other old friend, a successful TV journalist, and his beautiful, warmhearted wife
Rhiannon retire to the same place. The relatively peaceable, thoughtful atmo-
sphere of the book strikingly contrasts with the often cynical tone of earlier works,
probably thanks to the peace and quiet Amis had found in the last phase of his
life, when he had escaped solitude and isolation by joining the household of his
first wife Hilly (the model for Rhiannon) and her third husband in Wales. With his
emotional change apparently also Amis’s view of human behaviour had softened.
Symptomatically, in a letter to critic and teacher John McDermott he pointed out:
“It may interest you to know that the novel I am now working on has three un-
equivocally sympathetic characters, two women and a queer” (Amis 2001: 997).
All three authors present their fictional world from a decidedly male perspec-
tive, just as they had done in their early work. Women do play a part in the events,
but no effort is made at including a cross-gender perspective. As wives, lovers or
ex-lovers, usually better preserved, more self-controlled and more kindly dis-
posed to others than the men, they represent – mostly – friendly male projections.
Some of them, notably Arthur’s wife Avril and Brian’s old love Jenny in Birthday
as well as Rhiannon in The Old Devils, are regretful, nostalgic portraits of women
the authors had once loved or admired but lost, either by fate or their own doings.
The most characteristic common feature of the novels is the treatment of time.
In contrast to their famous early works in which the Angries had been fascinated
by the present, in their later novels the past looms large. “Old times”, one of Silli-
toe’s characters muses, “were important to everybody the older or more physi-
cally difficult life became” (Sillitoe 2001/2002: 27). Sometimes impersonally de-
scribed, more often in the form of memories of the protagonists, the past is the
obsessive centre of their reflections, and it is also the foil against which the pres-
ent is judged. Remarkably, the past thus intensely remembered is not the time of
their professional triumphs, but their not-so-easy youth.
In all three stories the motif of home-coming serves as the occasion to con-
template the past: Sillitoe’s Seaton brothers meet in Nottingham, home of both
the author and his protagonist Arthur Seaton; Richard Fenchurch in A Serious
Man is fetched from his sleazy London haunt of a flat by his daughter and brought
back to Yorkshire, to the big old house in which he had spent the happiest time of
502 Ingrid von Rosenberg

his life. And in The Old Devils the protagonists all retire to the small Welsh town
from which they once started out (Keulks 2003: 217). Going back to the roots helps
the protagonists understand the course of their own lives and present positions.
Most strikingly, all the authors see the changed social world around them in
dark colours. Whereas the young heroes in the novels of the 50 s and 60 s had    

suffered from hard physical work and boredom in provincial Britain, their later
senior counterparts – though most of them have lived important parts of their
lives in London – are obsessed with the areas in which they grew up, the North of
England or Wales. They react with mixed feelings. While they enjoy walking down
memory lane in parks and forests, where they had their first boyish adventures or
romantic encounters, the old heroes unanimously deplore the alterations that the
structural change has worked on the townscapes of their youth. Thus Alun Weav-
er, the TV journalist in The Old Devils, wonders at the deserted sight of Cardiff’s
harbour:

Now, where once ships by the dozen had lain, bringing timber, ores, pig-iron [...] there was
just the harbour dredger [...] and a single dirty little freighter flying the blue, white and red of
Yugoslavia. (Amis 1986/2004: 101)

Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton makes similar observations from a footbridge crossing

railway tracks:

No more coal trucks laboured under canopies of smoke because there were no collieries for
them to go to. [...] There were crowds around here, but it’s a desert now. [...] Shop doors were
boarded up: brambles and dandelions sprouted from doorsteps [...]. (Sillitoe 2001/2002: 4)

Depressed Richard Fenchurch draws an almost apocalyptic conclusion from his

visual impressions:

Places, not only pits, are disappearing, their entire surface workings with them, so that all
we are left with is the residue of a pre-industrial landscape across which is scattered a post-
industrial fenestration of streets and houses [...]. The landscape is bereft – bereft of all but
the people living on it. No one appears to work. (Storey 1998/1999: 101)

If an outsider like Arthur Seaton’s wife Avril, a Londoner, sees positive effects of
the historical changes: “People are in flats and new houses. And good luck to
them”, her husband sees only community life destroyed by “bulldozing whole
districts and throwing up high-rise hencoops” (Sillitoe 2001/2002: 5, 35). Drug
traffic (Storey 1998/1999: 307; Sillitoe 2001/2002: 91), violence, crime and vandal-
ism seem the only activities left, just as Sillitoe deplored in an interview: “It’s not
the old Nottingham types who are involved in crime, we all know that – it’s the
drug dealers killing each other and I would never write about them because I have
no sympathy for them” (tinynoggin 2017: n. pag.). In retrospect the hardships and
 Old Age in the Late Fiction of Contemporary Writers 503

poverty of the past appear negligible, are even slightly romanticised: “Some of us
didn’t mind living like that. We didn’t know any other life”, Arthur says (Sillitoe
2001/2002: 5). “Coal smoke used to reek as if it would cure the flu. Even when it
makes you cough enough to think you’d got TB, it was a tonic to us” (Sillitoe
2001/2002: 3). This echoes Sillitoe’s own memory, expressed in an interview:
“People used to say to me ‘what was it like to grow up in the slums?’, and I’d say
‘fuck you. I didn’t grow up in the slums.’ Radford [an inner-city area of Notting-
ham] was alright, it wasn’t slummy [...] we had a good time” (Sillitoe 2010: n.
pag.).
No new interests or activities, political or social, offer compensation for past
pleasures and hopes. The course of official politics is mostly ignored, and if at
all noticed, with apathetic disillusion. Thus Arthur Seaton muses: “Now there’s a
Labour government, but they’re no better than the Tories because they don’t
care about ordinary people either” (Sillitoe 2001/2002: 85). Rebellion by break-
ing the rules of convention and passionate outbursts of abuse relished in the
early texts are also out: the rebels do no longer rebel. This acquiescence cer-
tainly has to do with a softening of temper in old age, but perhaps even more
with the protagonists’ personal financial position, which allows them comfort-
able houses, cars, good food and luxuries considered manly in their youth but
since the 1970 s frowned upon as unhealthy: plenty of cigarettes and – above
 

all – an amazing amount of booze. They all are very conscious of their rise from
poor and limited conditions to relative wealth. In sociological terms they have
made clever use of the more pluralised work chances offered by what Beck et al.
termed “Modernity 2”, beginning in the 1960 s (Beck, Bonss and Lau 2003; cf.
 

Gilleard and Higgs 2005: 28–37). Arthur Seaton has profited from the rising
wages in industry and a decent pension; one of Amis’s old devils makes money
with a restaurant; and three men have succeeded in the creative industries:
Brian Seaton and Amis’s Alun Weaver in televison, and Storey’s Richard Fen-
church as a painter, playwright and book author. Yet though enjoying the mate-
rial advantages of their social rise, they do not really feel contented, but suffer
from an uncomfortable feeling of loss, of having been uprooted, which Richard
Hoggart, as early as 1957 in The Uses of Literacy, had diagnosed as common to
many scholarship boys of the period. The result is a kind of inertia. Especially
the men of letters and the media have serious doubts concerning the relevance
of their doings and lifestyle, which leads to writer’s blocks, depression, restless-
ness and loneliness. Storey’s Richard Fenchurch, losing the ground under his
feet, is worst off, yet Storey in an interview with Harriet Gilbert in the BBC de-
clared that the aspect of aging had not been his prime concern in constructing
Richard’s fate, but that he had been focused on presenting the “disintegration of
a mind” (Storey 1998: 05:17).
504 Ingrid von Rosenberg

To a certain degree the heroes’ discomfort is also aggravated by their physical

state, for they have not escaped the undeniable biological dimension of aging. As
to minor ailments, no one is more outspoken about them than Kingsley Amis, who
seems especially fascinated by digestion problems (e.g. 1986/2004: 4–6, 223–224)
 

but also dwells with relish on worries about losing one’s teeth (2), “twinges in the
balls” (13, 223) and the “strenuous performance” of cutting jagged toenails (149–
150). But – with the exception of Storey’s protagonist’s mental disorder – serious
illness is projected on other characters and thus kept at a distance: not the men,
but their loved ones suffer. Thus long passages in Birthday deal with Arthur’s dis-
tress at watching his wife Avril’s unstoppable dying process, a moving descrip-
tion which is based on Sillitoe’s own experience as a letter of 1999 to his friend
Hilary Bussey revealed: “My brother’s wife died of cancer five months ago so I
have been going there to cheer him up a bit – impossible of course, but I like to
think my presence helps, and we have always been close. There are three of us
brothers” (Sillitoe, qtd. in Bradford 2008: 363). The heroes’ own impending death
is seldom contemplated, belief in an afterlife offers no consolation in any of the
texts. When Arthur Seaton thinks briefly of his end, he faces it coolly: “I came out
of my mother, and when I kick the bucket I’ll go into the soil. No more daylight.
Nothing at all. What more can you say?” (Sillitoe 2001/2002: 150).
What the aging characters mind, however, is the loss of sexual agency. Here
the novels strikingly deviate from the traditional view confirmed by Gilleard and
Higgs that men, in contrast to women, retain their sexual power and attractive-
ness right into old age – perhaps providing a more realistic picture. With the ex-
ception of Amis’s Alun Weaver, who enjoys quickies with his friends’ wives until
he dies of a heart attack, most of the older protagonists’ sexual activity is only a
remembered passion. To Storey’s Richard Fenchurch the secret obsessional sex
with his mother-in-law is the central uplifting memory of his life, while Arthur
and Brian Seaton console themselves with reminiscences of the wild sex-life
young working-class people had practised long before the famous 60 s: “They had
 

got at it every weekend on the settee in her parents’ house like rabbits in a thun-
derstorm or, to use another local phrase, had many helpings of hearthrug pie in
front of the fire” (Sillitoe 2001/2002: 6).
If warm family relationships can be a compensation, there is little of it, and a
loving partnership appears as a rare exception, the one between Arthur and Avril
Seaton being the only convincing one, while those begun or renewed in the last
chapters of The Old Devils belong to the category of fairy-tale endings. Grown-up
children are often mistrusted, while grandchildren – only Storey’s Richard Fen-
church has some – do not mean anything. For Arthur Seaton his son Harold,
wearing a ponytail and an earring and drawing unemployment money rather than
trying to find work, is a real worry until he finds a nice girl and becomes conven-
 Old Age in the Late Fiction of Contemporary Writers 505

tional. Etty, the daughter of Storey’s hero, takes her mentally unstable father into
her family, but is perceived by him as a kind of prison warden. This distancing
from the young is especially interesting as it indicates that the once so vivacious
young authors have lost the belief in the positive potential of youth and take no
comfort in the ongoing cycle of life.
Friendships between members of the same generational cohort do not prom-
ise much comfort either. Fenchurch has no friends left, and the old devils and
their wives regularly party in pubs, homes and on weekend travels, but they also
betray each other. Sillitoe’s Birthday is, in fact, the only text that conveys a con-
vincing picture of a circle of friends and family members supporting each other in
old age. On two ceremonial occasions, Jenny’s 70th birthday and Avril’s funeral,
they come together, sharing memories and interest in each other, and the bond
between the Seaton brothers promises to continue into the future, just as Sillitoe
described the relation to his brothers.2
To sum up: though in the three authors’ early texts class and region had
played an important role as formative forces (industrial work and traditional
working-class culture in the North und stultifying conditions in a Midlands red-
brick university), their importance in the later texts has dwindled to nostalgic
memories as the aging heroes have reached the middle-class positon of finan-
cially safe intellectuals spending large parts of their lives in the metropolis. They
share certain views and emotions, produced by the progress of time: a feeling of
forlornness, regret about the loss of sexual prowess, disinterest in their offspring,
the playing down of physical decline, the refusal to think about death and, above
all, a nostalgic obsession with the locations of their youth combined with nega-
tive judgments of any changes that have taken place.

2.2 Novels on Aging by Women Writers

Three novels by well-established women authors will now be examined: novels

by Margaret Drabble, Bernardine Bishop and Bernardine Evaristo. Evaristo, born
in 1959 and at the beginning of her ‘young old age’, is one of the black British

2 Alan Sillitoe had written another novel with aging heroes before, Last Loves (1990), which is set
in South East Asia and radiates even deeper sadness. Two old friends make a memory trip to Singa-
pore and Malaysia, where they served in the army in World War Two. They are shocked by the
changed sights: “Beyond the cooking zone, Singapore had lost its soul, George thought, not the
same place as in the old days [...] All charm gone in highrises and freeways [...]” (Sillitoe 1990/
1991: 39). The outcome of the story confirms the melancholy mood: one friend is ditched by his wife,
while the other, newly in love, dies of a heart attack after the first erotic encounter in the jungle.
506 Ingrid von Rosenberg

writers who conquered the literary scene in the 1990 s. Drabble and Bishop, both
 

born in 1939, began writing fiction in the early 1960 s, not much later than the
 

Angries, but under already changing economic and social conditions and in a less
traditional cultural climate. While Bishop interrupted her literary career for many
years to work as a psychotherapist, Drabble – like the Angries – continued writing
all her life, becoming one of the most prominent feminist authors in Britain, fo-
cusing on the problems of academic women in contemporary society. It does not
seem surprising that she, herself now in her advanced years, has recently focused
on the experiences of aging intellectual women, but she also takes a view of el-
derly men, hetero- as well as homosexual ones. As the texts of the three women,
all very complex, differ in many aspects, they will first be analysed separately
before important similarities will be pointed out.
In Drabble’s novel The Dark Flood Rises (2016/2017) four female and three
male main characters over 65 represent different ways of reacting to the chal-
lenges of aging, with the women remaining notably more active than the men.
The most energetic of them is Francesca Stubbs, called Fran by her friends, who
in her 70 s is still employed by an organisation checking on the quality of senior
 

residences and restlessly travels England’s roads with her car. She loves her life-
style, the long drives as much as the stays in the familiar hotels of the Premier
Inns chain, the company of her younger colleagues and cooking dinners for bed-
ridden friends, in the first place her ex-husband. Claude, whose energy seems to
have been used up by a career as a prominent surgeon, rather enjoys his – in
contrast to his ex-wife’s extremely – immobile state, listening to Callas records
and Classic FM and gratefully receiving an occasional cuddle from his buxom
black house help. Friends present further options of making the best of one’s ad-
vanced years: a gay male couple have withdrawn to a leisurely life in a beautiful
house on Lanzarote, enriched by contacts with creative guests and neighbours;
two retired teachers of English literature, Fran’s friend Josephine and Professor
Owen England, room neighbours in a posh senior residence in Cambridge, enjoy
weekly literary discussions over a drink, while energetic Josephine, despite her
more modest former academic position, also still runs courses and carries on with
research, if on a slightly absurd topic. The fate of the poorer members of the age
cohort, sentenced to a state-run home, is imagined from a distance and with a
shudder, when Fran together with a young colleague visits his aunt, a delicate,
but hopelessly demented woman.
All these people have come to terms with their reduced physical and/or social
conditions and remain agents of their own lives. Their best support and consola-
tion is the loyal help and understanding of partners, ex-partners or friends. New
partnerships do not occur and sex (apart from Claude’s occasional cuddle) does
not happen, is not even remembered. The children are no great cheering factor
 Old Age in the Late Fiction of Contemporary Writers 507

either. Fran’s daughter, an environmentalist doing research from her isolated cot-
tage in the marshlands, is single and rather estranged from her mother. And son
Christopher, on the verge of founding a family with his girlfriend, who works as a
war correspondent in the Middle East, loses her by sudden death.
Drabble’s view of aging seems unsentimental and practical. Not much
thought is given to impending death, which can also hit the young as the plot
shows, nor is an afterlife contemplated by any of the characters. Asked in an inter-
view, if she thought there is an afterlife, Drabble bluntly answered: “I don’t, ex-
cept in the way you’ve just mentioned”, which was “some kind of afterlife in one’s
work” (Drabble 2020: n. pag.). In one instance, the fatal disease of Fran’s school-
friend Teresa (which is based on her friend and colleague Bernardine Bishop’s
fate), the process of her gradual fading away is described with empathy, but in
general Drabble is remarkably short on death. The end of most of the main protag-
onists, even Fran’s, are reported with amazing abruptness: “Owen England out-
lived Bennett Carpenter and Fran Stubbs and Claude Stubbs and Simon Aguilera.
They are all dead now. We won’t stand upon the order or the manner of their
going” (Drabble 2016/2017: 325).
But in spite of this apparent similarity to the male authors’ texts Drabble’s
focus of interest differs greatly from theirs: it is not on the aging heroes’ nostalgia
for their past, but on presenting various ways of dealing with the present. When
asked by interviewer Emily Rhodes to select her five favourite books on aging,
she specially praised Penelope Lively’s “note of happy stoicism” in her volume
of essays Ammonites & Leaping Fish: A Life in Time (2013): “She makes the best of
things. She does the bits of gardening she can do and doesn’t weep over the bits
she can’t” (Drabble 2020: n. pag.; original emphasis). And she adds – with a
pinch of humour – personal advice on how to age well: “Don’t die falling down
the stairs; always hold the banister”, and, “more sublimely, I think learning a
new language is good. It’s slightly better for the brain than crossword puzzles”
(Drabble 2020: n. pag.). Drabble’s message seems to be: life in the advanced
years is worth living, keep active doing the things you can still do and never mind
the end.
In the large circle of characters in Bernardine Bishop’s Unexpected Lessons in
Love (2013) young people – as sons, daughters, their partners, grandchildren –
play a more weighty role than in Drabble’s text, and some of them have to cope
with problems no less serious than the afflictions of the old: mental disorder or
the desperate search for a birth mother. The central figures are Cecilia Banks, a
psychoanalyst aged 65, and her newly acquired, slightly younger friend Helen, a
successful novelist. An unusually boldly described fate connects them: both have
had an operation of cancer of the bowel and live with a stoma bag. Bishop is a
pioneer on a topic of which Helen Small had written: “The significance of cancer
508 Ingrid von Rosenberg

in scientific research on senescence is [...] not matched by any noticeable literary

interest in cancer in old age” (Small 2007: 254). Though cancer, of course, had
been mentioned in literature before – Will Self, for instance, let the monstrous
heroine-narrator Lily Bloom of his surreal novel How the Dead Live (2000) die of
breast cancer before joining the community of the dead –, no novelist had yet
presented the view of a real-life patient. Bishop writes from experience: cancer
had stopped her working as a psychotherapist. She addresses the issue face on-
wards with her realistic and detailed descriptions of the profound physical and
emotional effects of the disease and its treatment. In the very first pages we read
about Cecilia’s thoughts in a hotel room relaxing from her first lecture after a long
sick break:

The unhealed, perhaps unhealable surgical wound hurt as she got out of bed [...] she con-
sidered not changing the stoma bag until she got home. [...] On the other hand, she thought,
beginning to remove and replace bags, it might unpredictably awaken and be in full cry, or
rather full chuckle and whisper, on the train. (Bishop 2013/2014: 2–3)

Yet, far from giving in to hopelessness, Cecilia and Helen, her friend with the
same predicament, discover ways of compensation. Helen finds new love in a
relationship with a younger man – contrary to the widespread prejudice that
women beyond menopause lose their erotic interest and attraction. Cecilia an-
swers to a call for help from her son Ian. He is shocked one day to find a baby
on his doorstep, as he (wrongly) believes, the fruit of a passionate affair with a
psychotic girl (whose story is also told). Cecilia, despite her weakness and
pains and only half-heartedly supported by her husband, takes the little boy in
and develops an overwhelming love for him. But, realistically, Cephas cannot
stay with her for long, and Bishop invents a happy end for all: Ian marries his
girlfriend and takes Cephas into his family where he grows up together with a
new-born stepbrother. Cecilia can now enjoy her role as a supportive grand-
mother, occasionally babysitting rather than exhausting herself to her limits.
Cecilia’s story reads like a convincing case study to prove the feminist theory
that “her role as grandmother brings [women] fresh possibilities” (de Beauvoir
1970/1996: 262). Her straying husband – he temporarily falls for the psychotic
girl – by contrast shows little interest in caring for baby Cephas, quite in line
with the traditional patriarchal grandfather role (Boden 2009: 36, 39; de Beau-
voir 1970/1996: 474). The younger generations are given special significance in
Bishop’s novel: they represent the continuance of life into the future, but at the
same time maintain a close bond to their roots. As the title indicates, the heal-
ing force in all these troubled life stories is love in many forms: love between
women and men, between friends, parents and children, even love between a
cat and baby Cephas and, prominently, grandmotherly love.
 Old Age in the Late Fiction of Contemporary Writers 509

A similar message, though on a lighter tone than struck by Bishop and Drab-
ble in their realist novels, is conveyed in Bernardine Evaristo’s fanciful Booker
Prize-winning Girl, Woman, Other (2019). Already a few years before Evaristo had
turned to the topic of aging in Mr. Loverman (2013), in which the group of char-
acters was limited to a family of well integrated Caribbean immigrants in London.
Always ready for an experiment, Evaristo had created a male homosexual hero, a
74-year-old “Caribbean queen” (Evaristo 2013: 223), with remarkable empathy, an
elegant example of a doubly cross-gender narration. After a (not uncomfortable)
life of convention and dissimulation Barry Walker and his wife finally venture to
live their sexual identities openly, Barry with Morris, his secret lover of many
years, his wife with a rediscovered old admirer. To complete the happy prospects,
grandson Daniel wins a scholarship for Harvard, inspiring in his grandfather not
only pride but comforting trust in the ongoing cycle of life. He thinks: “Daniel –
part of me. He my future. I will live on through him” (Evaristo 2013: 302).
In Girl, Woman, Other Evaristo has, as the title indicates, returned to prioritis-
ing female perspectives and creates a much wider network of characters, but con-
tinues and even intensifies the positive evaluation of old age. In her “fusion fic-
tion” (Evaristo 2019 b: n. pag.), as she describes her free-flowing style in this text
 

that “pushes prose towards free verse” (Bucknell 2019: n. pag.), Evaristo inter-
weaves the life stories of a large number of black or mixed race people, women,
men and trans people, some young, but the majority middle-aged or old, most of
them having gone through phases of poverty and now in different class situa-
tions, representing various careers and lifestyles. The time frame reaches from the
nineteenth century to the Brexit referendum, and the locations range from various
places in Britain, predominantly London, to the US, Barbados and several African
countries. The central figures are 12 women and girls and one gender-neutral per-
son, while men play their roles as partners, male relations or ancestors. One event
bringing many figures together frames the plot: the triumphant premiere of black
dramatist Amma Bonsu’s play about lesbian warriors in ancient Africa at The Na-
tional Theatre. Obviously, this is a symbolic moment, signifying the hope of per-
fect integration.
Of the five women who have reached their old age (at different stages of the
narrated timeline), four are explicitly content with their situation, which they
have actively shaped after overcoming hard times in younger years. The following
little scene nicely captures the happy mood of satisfaction:

Bummi sits back and sips the lemonade Kofi has made from fresh lemons and brought out to
her
she wishes her mother was alive to enjoy her new life
see me now, Mama, see me now.
(Evaristo 2019 a: 188)
 
510 Ingrid von Rosenberg

In an interview Evaristo explained the significance she had given to the old char-
acters in her novel:

I really wanted to write an intergenerational novel, and to have women at every stage in
their lives. I wanted them all to have their faculties intact and to be, to a certain extent,
enjoying their lives and enjoying their independence. Older women [...] are actually much
more interesting than younger women, because we’ve lived full lives. (Evaristo and Atwood
2019: n. pag.)

Only one woman, Shirley, a disillusioned teacher at a problem school, although

with “hunky husband, lovely daughters and granddaughter, good house and car,
no debts”, is “never satisfied” as her mother Winsome judges (Evaristo 2019 a: 251;  

original emphasis). Material conditions for the old ladies’ personal well-being are
a sufficient income and congenial surroundings (a house and garden in London, a
farm on the Scottish border or a village on Barbados) plus, if possible, a support-
ive partner – not necessarily the ideal one. But for a contented sense of self in
their age something else is even more important: strong family bonds both to
ancestors and descendants. The women are instinctively aware that knowledge of
the stories of their origin and forbears, which Evaristo tells in detail, is an essen-
tial part of their identity. The one person who is in the dark – Penelope – is utterly
shattered when at the age of 16 she is informed of her adoption and only finds her
peace of mind at 80, when through an Ancestry DNA test she discovers her birth-
mother. Equally important to the old ladies is the knowledge that their beloved
children and grandchildren are safely on a track into a good life: one young wom-
an is a student eager to become a journalist, another a successful banker and
safely married, a third makes a fresh start in Australia with husband and children.
The favourite young relation on whom the hope rests to see life carried on in
the ancestors’ spirit, is, however, not necessarily the next of kin. This is exempli-
fied by the story of 93 years old Hattie, a widow who runs her own farm in North
England. She does not leave it to son or daughter, “light-weight relatives” (Evar-
isto 2019 a: 345) who never cared for the farm, but to gender neutral granddaugh-
 

ter Megan/Morgan, who has often come to help, and her transwoman lover on the
understanding that Megan at her death “will pass it on to the family member most
likely to look after it” (Evaristo 2019 a: 332). A clever new version – in accordance
 

with up-to-date gender theory – of the hope-inspiring ongoing cycle of life, a

theme which was already important in Mr. Loverman.
Looking back at how women novelists treat the topic of old age, two common
features are striking: for one thing the circle of characters is more comprehensive
than in the male authors’ texts, which focused on partners, close family members
and friends of a few central heroes. The female writers take a wider spectrum of
characters into their view, some of whom are spread over several, sometimes far
 Old Age in the Late Fiction of Contemporary Writers 511

away locations and only distantly or indirectly connected to the heroines and
heroes. This may be due to a generally greater interest in human relations as-
cribed to women, i.e. their greater social capital, but it also offers the chance to
 

demonstrate a greater variety of attitudes to aging, determined by gender posi-

tions (woman, man, other), different personal temperaments and varying social
and economic conditions. The second common feature is the attitude to time:
while the heroes of male authors looked back with nostalgia even at hard times,
the female main characters hardly give a thought to the past, but engage reso-
lutely with the challenges of the present, drawing satisfaction and pleasure from
finding ways to cope with them.
It seems that in Evaristo’s case the postcolonial perspective, combined with a
feminist view, may be responsible for an even more optimistic construction of the
meanings and possibilities of old age than Drabble’s and Bishop’s. The writers of
Evaristo’s generation can look back with pride on a successful career in the UK
and may imagine old age as the time of life to finally relax and enjoy the fruits of
integration, including the liberation from conventional gender views still ruling in
some former colonies and among members of the first immigrant generation.
Thus her vision may be truly – and is very likely meant to be – encouraging read-
ing for Britain’s ethnic community in times when, sadly, after decades of success-
ful integration, in the wake of the Brexit campaign racism and xenophobia have
been resurfacing with shocking fierceness.

3. Conclusion
Looking back at the findings, it is obvious that all the novels examined, however
much they differ in mood and detail, share certain features. Thus all the authors,
male or female, shy away from thematising death: it is either only briefly men-
tioned or, if the process of dying is at all described, it concerns a minor character.
Religious or philosophical thoughts about last things are left out. The focus is al-
ways on the experience and handling of aging, not on the final decline. Physical
changes are treated discreetly: smaller discomforts are mentioned, often humor-
ously, but serious illnesses and decay are as a rule projected on minor characters;
memorable exceptions are Storey’s creation of a mentally disturbed hero and
Bishop’s realistic description of cancer.
Beyond these similarities some important differences between texts by male
and female authors came to light, the most striking being the gendered attitude
to time. That the fascination with the past is not a specialty of the Angries, has
recently been confirmed by two new works by famous male authors, now in their
sixties, though the motivations are different. One is Julian Barnes’s novella The
512 Ingrid von Rosenberg

Sense of an Ending, Booker Prize winner of 2011, which followed on his Nothing to
be Frightened of (2008), a book of meditations on his family history and the
meaning of death. One of the main points in that text was scepticism towards the
human inclination to construct one’s life story as a coherent narrative, to “stamp
a final meaning on it”, which is, however, “believable mainly to ourselves”
(Barnes 2008/2009: 189). The Sense of an Ending reads like an example to support
this argument: the novella is not so much concerned with the state of feeling in
old age as the novels of the Angries were, but with the deconstruction of false
memories. The aging hero, in a painful step-by-step process of self-recognition,
discovers that though he remembers events from his youth, he did not want to
understand what was really going on between the people concerned, because he
was an emotional coward, unwilling to engage with the risks of love and empa-
thy. The other recent book with a troubled aging anti-hero is Hanif Kureishi’s
bitter but entertaining novella The Nothing, published in 2017, in which every-
body deceives everybody in film noir style, and which perfectly fitted into the
beginning of the #MeToo debate. The narrator Waldo, a famous black film direc-
tor, once “a gorgeous man in flares and love beads, with wide shoulders,
shoulder-length black hair and ass you’d pay to bite” (Kureishi 2017: 18) and a
womaniser, but now in his 80 s bedridden and paranoid, complains about the
 

loss of everything that has meant anything to him: his work, his status, his fame
and the love of his wife, who is having it off with his friend, thereby finally rob-
bing him of “his genuine sense of himself as a man” (Kureishi 2018: n. pag.). The
story illustrates Kureishi’s conviction that old age above all means loss, as he
explained in an interview: “However much you accumulate in life, the end of
your life is about loss. Your friends are going to die, your children grow up, your
position in the world, your vocation will probably be gone. You’ll lose your status
and people’s respect will be gone. [...] there is going to be a lot of loss” (Kureishi
2018: n. pag.).
Women authors, on the other hand, tend to create heroines who focus on the
present and unsentimentally create a new, age-specific identity from current con-
ditions such as demands by needy family members or friends, habitual or new
activities, and – with the exception of Drabble`s book – loving relationships to
children and grandchildren, which symbolise a comforting window into the fu-
ture. Thus the novels confirm the findings of gerontological research, that wom-
en’s greater social capital, their stronger connections to family members and
friends, and the continuation of their household tasks prove to be bonuses en-
abling them to look at the – undoubtedly in many aspects depressing – aging
process with more equilibrium of mind than men. Thus, ironically, it seems the
traditional woman’s role, so eloquently fought by feminism, has had a positive
side-effect: it has trained women for coping rather well with aging.
 Old Age in the Late Fiction of Contemporary Writers 513

The optimistic view of life in old age in the women’s novels rests, however, on
two conditions, which are not explicitly thematised, as the authors project their
own position on their main protagonists as a matter of course. Several gerontolo-
gists, as may be remembered, had pointed to the strong influence income has on
the possibility to maintain a positive sense of self in later years, and the novels
read as proofs for this assumption. All the main characters are in a comfortable
financial situation and additionally have some intellectual training. That less
privileged people may have greater difficulty in old age is hinted at in the stories
of some minor characters, but the problem is nowhere explicitly discussed. Thus,
despite the authors’ ignoring its importance, class in the form of an inherited or
achieved middle-class position plus a good education, appears to be a crucial
factor for constructing a positive self in old age – even if the male heroes still see
reasons to grumble and idealise their youth in hard circumstances.
Bernardine Evaristo’s novels present an exception in so far as they surpris-
ingly highlight a third factor promising a positive outlook for the aging individ-
ual: ethnicity. Though initially in many cases a handicap for some of her black
young protagonists born and brought up in England, Evaristo insists, their ethnic
identity as a black woman, man or other, can be turned into a source of empower-
ment and satisfaction through acceptance, education, creativity, determination
and solidarity.

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