Fiction

Empires are born to die; that’s one source of their strange allure. An untenable form of society judders, in technicolor and often loudly, to an inevitable end. Romesh Gunesekera was born in Ceylon in 1954, and much of his fiction has lingered in fascination on its years as a dominion — no longer a colony, not yet a republic. Reef, his first novel, took us to 1962, to the island’s coast and the childhood of Triton, a gifted chef. Suncatcher, his sixth, is back in the capital Colombo two years on. Kairo, who’s narrating what was then his teenage point of view, is a similar boy to Triton: same curiosity, same restlessness, same goodness of heart. He goes to school, when it isn’t closed — though usually it is.

Things keep recurring in the novels of Ben Lerner — snatches of conversation, lines of poetry, Lerner himself. But in The Topeka School, while things keep returning, something has also been lost. Lerner’s third novel reunites us with Adam Gordon, the protagonist — and Lerner surrogate — of his much acclaimed debut, Leaving the Atocha Station. Adam is a senior at Topeka High School in the late 1990s, an aspiring poet and champion debater (as was Lerner), whose parents are psychologists at the Foundation, ‘a world-famous psychiatric institute and hospital’ which treats just about everyone in the book.

It sounds in bad taste, but Scarlett Thomas has written a riotously enjoyable novel about a boarding school full of girls with eating disorders. It’s not that Thomas doesn’t take eating disorders seriously; she takes them so seriously that one of the girls dies. But there are few more vivaciously original novelists around today, and surely none of them is having as much fun while making serious points. Elsewhere, Thomas has written compellingly about her own orthorexia (or obsessive desire to control her diet); but this doesn’t mean that she is above lampooning the hysterical pronouncements of the diet-obsessed — not least that fruit, unless you pick it in the wild yourself, contains so much sugar that you may as well eat Haribo, which is nicer, after all.

This eerie, shortish book apparently had an earlier outing this year, when it purported to be a reissue of a 1972 ‘folk horror’ novel by Jonathan Buckley. Now John Murray reveal it as the third novel by Andrew Michael Hurley, whose gothic debut, The Loney, received widespread plaudits. Folk horror, a term popularised by the actor and writer Mark Gatiss, is one of those definitions, like ‘new weird’ or indeed, science fiction, useful to and immediately understood by those already familiar with the territory, but harder to nail down. It’s largely British, rooted in landscape, in isolated rural communities, in the subversion of religious practice and the suspicion that older, pagan forces are at work, sowing discord, suspicion, mayhem and death.

Kafka wrote a novella, The Metamorphosis, about a man who finds himself transformed into a beetle. Now Ian McEwan has written one about a beetle that is transformed into a man. He’s not the first writer to have thought of doing this, but he might be the first one who thought it was a good idea. Readers will remember that in Randall Jarrell’s classic comedy of a creative writing faculty, Pictures from an Institution, the heroine has a student called Sylvia Moomaw (‘I had remembered her name but had forgotten her’). One day, she hands in a story ‘about a bug that turns into a man…it’s influenced by Kafka’. The hero reads it (‘There was a part where the man said “Could I have ever really been a bug?

Genuinely surrealist novels are as rare as hen’s teeth. They are a different form from the magic realist, the absurdist, the wacky, the mimsical and the nastily satirical. But Brian Catling is a genuine surrealist novelist, and it no doubt helps that his artwork is surreal (he is professor of fine art at Ruskin College, Oxford: how Ruskin would have loathed him). He has previously written a trilogy of novels, The Vorrh, which has been among my highlights of the past few years. This is a more slender book, but it is slender like a stiletto. If there is one defining feature of truly surreal literature, it is that it defies the imposition of meanings while retaining an affective hold on the reader. Oh, and horrifying them.