News from Nowhere

The Guardian is as guilty as any of treating genre fiction as "not quite literature", (look at the way literary fiction is reviewed book by book, while genre is covered in brief, within a carefully labelled column) but it runs this article by Peter Preston (its former editor), attacking the Man Booker judges for arbitrary exclusion of genre from consideration for the prize. He is pretty much associating himself with remarks made by Ian Rankin and P.D. James at the Cheltenham Festival, and, of the recognised genres, seems most familiar with crime, traditionally the respectable place to go slumming (though Ian Rankin makes some generous claims for SF, too).

Preston develops an interesting argument, that literature is snobbish about genre in a way that theatre and cinema are not:

Any tolerable list of great movies would have John Ford's The Searchers in there somewhere, not to mention Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep and Ford Coppola's three Godfathers. That is a western, a private eye thriller and a gangster saga - genres immemorial. Choosing them wouldn't preclude other, wholly different choices, to be sure: a Truffaut, Fassbinder or Wajda.

Interesting, but not entirely convincing; it is undermined by the blithe assumption that a figurehead of art cinema, like Truffaut, is "wholly different" to genre. That's François Truffaut, director of noir classic Tirez sur le Pianiste, not to mention the pure SF Fahrenheit 451. In other words, Preston may be right that cinema is less wedded to the belief that "If it's genre, it can't be any good..." but his thinking retains an element of "...and if it's good, it can't be genre."