The Week In Culture: For Grenada, the long wait is over

Last week, I had the privilege of hearing the Grenadian novelist Jacob Ross talk about his wonderful new novel, Pynter Bender. Ross has had a long career without publishing a novel until now. His substantial reputation rests on two volumes of short stories, one now a generation old: Song for Simone (1986) and A Way to Catch the Dust (1999).

Those books are immensely treasured in the little island country of Grenada. Ross said, truthfully, that Song for Simone is his country's favourite book, despite having been highly controversial on its first publication. Talking about his immensely impressive novel, Ross went on to say what is, surely, no more than the simple truth: that a lot of people in his native country had been waiting a long time for his novel.

From here, if we have an interest, Caribbean fiction as a whole looks immensely rich and rewarding. There's a substantial amount of interesting and original writing in English, French and Spanish from the region, which we happily acknowledge as a whole. What tends to be forgotten from this distance is the fact that readers in the region think of themselves much less as "Caribbean", and much more as citizens of a particular country. For a Grenadian, it is much more worth celebrating that a novelist such as Ross has emerged from his particular history than that a St Lucian like Derek Walcott or a Trinidadian like VS Naipaul has won the Nobel Prize. Ross makes it clear that his island has had a tragic history of its own, which we hardly knew about or had forgotten; the novel that sets out those national tragedies has now been written.

Earlier in literary history, many languages tried to produce an epic, often in verse, devoted to the subject of the founding of their nation. Inspired by the Aeneid's tale of the founding of Rome, many now fairly obscure poets tried to mount a verse epic of the founding of their own newer nations, of which Camoes's 16th-century The Lusiads, about Portugal's imperial adventures, may be allowed to stand for a great deal.

What has lasted much better are the works of prose fiction, many written in the 19th century, that somehow address, however obliquely, the subject of the nation and ended up by being read by the nation. Listening to Ross, I felt transported back to a time when the act of writing a novel could have some larger significance for a nation's pride, and could take a place in its history, not just its literary history.

Few writers now could dream of making such an intervention with a publication. And yet Cervantes, Goethe, Manzoni, Tolstoy, Flaubert marked national history with the publication of a book. Spain, Germany, Russia and France could not be marked in that way now; it is difficult to conceive of a novel even having the campaigning impact of an Oliver Twist.

That moment has passed for us in the West, but it is still there in much of the world. Particularly for us English, there is an immense body of literature of the first order about most aspects of our experience, and certainly about the mapped geography of our country. Most of the London A to Z has been written about, for instance, at some point or another, and parts of it have been overlaid with so much fictional commentary that it grows rather hard to see Bond Street, say, at all.

It must be thrilling to be able to write freshly about a landscape; to present history to a readership that has been eagerly waiting to see their lives reflected in fiction. In some ways, nothing really exists until it has been written about – somebody once remarked that we know more about life on board a 19th-century sailing ship than about what it is like to take a ride in a space shuttle, because no great or even good writer has ever done the latter.

Grenadian history has been fairly fully documented, if you to know where to look, but it is unlikely that anyone, even those who lived through its darkest period, will have an honest sense of it until they read Ross, and other Grenadian novelists who are now emerging. For the rest of us, it is a great stroke of luck that the first chronicler of his country also looks likely to be one of its best.

You like it? Is nothing sacred?

The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, who died last year, has seen a remarkable upturn in popularity since then. Whole days at the Proms and weekends at the South Bank have received some very healthy box office. Those of us who for years have been accustomed to stretch out into the unoccupied neighbouring seats in the stalls at anything with the faintest tinge of Darmstadt have, recently, been startled at the crowds at Messiaen, Nono, Boulez, and even that hardest of tough nuts, Barraqué.

Years ago, we used to assure the legions of sceptics that this was music that was going to take time to find an audience, but in the end, people would start to like it. Perhaps not everyone, but enthusiasm would come from a substantial segment of the audience. Now it seems to have happened, I'm not sure whether I quite approve of it: I'd grown rather accustomed to thinking of Stockhausen's Kontakte, say, as my own private pleasure.

The Royal Opera House has announced its intention of setting up a provincial outpost in Manchester. The lovely Palace Theatre in Oxford Street may be refurbished to provide a northern base, and, in time, new productions may originate there.

Cultural icons such as the Royal Opera House tread a fine line between glamour and accessibility. A Manchester outpost sounds like a nice idea, but one knows that Mancunians have an unfortunate tendency to believe that nothing can be really good if it's happening routinely in their city – the excellent BBC Philharmonic is shockingly underrated. This project is quite as likely to be quietly abandoned in five years as to have a long-term future.