A long-playing anthology is short on British hits
Many pieces included here appear to have exited from creative writing workshops: indeed, they should have stayed there. The self-conscious sterility that adheres to modern British art taints this collection too, particularly in the poetry department. A plethora of work, one suspects, was written for women's magazines with high-minded aims - far too many stories end as soppily as a romance novel.
One cannot help but wonder why British writing has degenerated to this point, where it resembles rejects from the New Yorker in the days of its less exciting fiction. Several online magazines have also proved that contemporary writing is alive and kicking, so the tedium of this anthology comes as a surprise.
It is very hard to put together an anthology with absolutely no merit. Unsurprisingly, some of the best inclusions come from established names: Anita Desai's Diamond Dust sparkles, while William Boyd's Adult Video shows what a seasoned practitioner can do with style and form. Michael Heyns' The Children's Day is deeply disturbing. A treasure is Toby Litt's A Small Matter for Your Attention, where a smooth treatment obscures the horror of the theme - the Disneyfication of the process of capital punishment.
If there had been more of this kind of thing and less self-indulgence, this would have been an anthology with bite. As it is, it reflects the same malaise that afflicts the Booker shortlist every year, where few of the names of the selected authors are genuinely English any more.