Fiction

I first heard of this tragicomic spy romp around Israel and Palestine when Julian Barnes sang its praises in the Guardian a few months ago, having been ‘lucky to see an advance proof’. Lucky? Well, he and Nathan Englander do share an agent, who perhaps noticed that Dinner at the Centre of the Earth just happens to take its epigraph from a novel by, er, Julian Barnes. That’s showbiz, I guess; and in any case, a spot of sly boosterism rather suits this mixed-up tale of cloaked allegiances, which never quite supplies the facts you need to grasp what’s going on — at least not during the globe-trotting, time-toggling fug of the novel’s opening half.

Jane Harris’s novels often focus on the disenfranchised: a maid in The Observations, a woman reduced by spinsterhood in the Victorian era in Gillespie and I, and now, a young slave in this third novel. Disenfranchised they may be, but her protagonists don’t lack agency. The narrator of Sugar Money is Lucien, a slave who is barely in his teens and whose voice is startlingly optimistic. In Martinique in 1765, Lucien and his older brother, Emile, are tasked by their French master with returning to Grenada — where they once lived — and smuggling back 42 slaves who are living under the rule of English invaders at a hospital plantation in Fort Royal. Emile is realistic about the scale of the challenge, but Lucien views it as a great adventure.

Given the brilliance of his career as a fiction-writer, it is easy to forget that J.M. Coetzee has a commensurate career in non-fiction. He trained as an academic (English literature, mathematics, linguistics and computer analysis of stylistics), taught for several years in the US and in South Africa, and continues to translate, write essays and reviews — most notably for the New York Review of Books — and introductions to books. This third volume of non-fiction pieces, Late Essays 2006-2017, gathers a selection mostly from the NYRB and from his introductions to a series of novels translated into Spanish and published by the Spanish-language press El Hilo de Ariadna.

All Involved, Ryan Gattis’s breakout novel about the LA riots of 1992, was an absolute blast. Ballsy, vivid and immersive, it took various voices from the gangs, from families left behind and the thin blue line, joining them in a rousing cacophony that made up a frightening mosaic of a hot, heady, violent time. In Safe, he returns to more recent history, choosing the 2008 financial crisis to chart a game of cat-and-mouse between Ghost, a drug-addict turned federal safe-cracker (who has stolen a large amount of money to fund the father of his dead lover’s sinking property business) and Glasses, the gang member tasked with getting the money back. There are two problems with this.

The Man Booker shortlist is out. My colleague Philip Hensher isn’t convinced. He today tweeted 'Booker shortlist – McGregor, Z Smith, Whitehead, Roy, Barry, Shamsie. Oh wait – those were the ones they left off. Baffling.' But you can make your own mind up. Or, be guided by our critics.

If you had to choose one book that both typified spy fiction and celebrated what the genre was capable of doing, then John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is probably the one to go for. Published in 1963, and set within the comfortably binary framework of the Cold War, it combined moral ambiguity and an air of grim authenticity with a steady narrative pull. It also had an unforced literary distinction that made it impossible to dismiss as ‘mere’ genre fiction. Now, over half a century later, le Carré’s latest novel returns to this murky episode and proceeds to make it even more complicated and harrowing than it was before.

Towards the end of his life, Robert Louis Stevenson travelled widely in the central and southern Pacific Ocean. As well as the region’s exotic reputation, he was drawn by hopes that its benign climate would alleviate his chronic bronchial problems. In 1889 he arrived in Samoa and decided to settle there. He was a hit with the locals. Unlike so many of his peers, he declined to dismiss them as savages. Certainly, he was scathing about their disregard for property rights, which he labelled communism, and he found some of the women’s dancing obscene. But Joseph Farrell tells us that Stevenson was relaxed about extensive tattoos and scanty attire, and that he was a willing participant in kava drinking (kava is a narcotic plant extract, recently banned in the UK).

A CIA agent, a naive young filmmaker, a dilettante heir and a lost Mayan temple form the basis of Ned Beauman’s latest, and arguably most impressive, novel. Two rival expeditions set off from the United States to the jungles of Honduras to find the temple — one with the intention of using it as a location in which to film an absurd comedy, the other determined to disassemble it and take it back to New York. The two sides clash, each refusing to give way. The weeks roll into years; and life around the temple, populated with a disparate and distinct array of characters, steadily deteriorates into greater savagery. Meanwhile, Zonulet, rogue CIA agent (and primary narrator), under internal investigation, needs to unlock the secrets of the temple to prove his innocence.

Neel Mukherjee has had a two-handed literary career, working as a reviewer of other people’s novels and writing his own. In 2014, his second novel, The Lives of Others, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His latest book is a state-of-the-globalised-nation novel which gives human particularity to those deadened concepts we pass around such as migration, inequality and neoliberalism. A State of Freedom breaks into five chapters, each telling the story of a distinct individual in India, whose connection to the others is only fully revealed in the final pages. Mukherjee has observed wryly that due to stereo-typical ideas about the Indian novel, whatever their formal properties, his fictions tend to be read as family sagas.

For one who has, since boyhood, regarded the secondhand bookshop as a paradise of total immersion, it is quite shocking to discover Albatross, an unknown imprint from the English literary past. Before Albatross there was Tauchnitz, the Leipzig firm which for 100 years cornered the market in English language books outside the territories of the British Empire and the USA. One often comes across Tauchnitz and I have two of its editions: a Thomas de Quincey, with a stamp from a circulating library in Lausanne; and a Ruskin, with one from a British club in Portugal. I only keep them as curiosities, because normally I avoid Tauchnitz editions: cheap boards with awful print on awful paper.

In the autumn of 1888 London was in a state of terrified excitement over Jack the Ripper. There had never been a killer like this in England before, wrote Meredith Townsend and Richard Holt Hutton, the joint editors of The Spectator. They congratulated the British public on not succumbing to the continental habit of lynching (‘In Naples the doctors would have perished, in Berlin the Jews’) but warned that ‘this devil’ might never be caught. By January 1889, Townsend and Hutton were calling for an end to all the ‘morbid interest’ in the Ripper’s crimes.

On the Whitsun weekend of 1935 an art student called Denton Welch was knocked off his bicycle by a car and suffered catastrophic injuries, including a fractured spine. Although he made a remarkable partial recovery, he subsequently endured regular bouts of disabling illness, and would die in 1948 aged only 33. Welch continued to paint after the accident, but also began writing the autobiographical fiction for which he is now best known, publishing his first novel, Maiden Voyage, in 1943. By this time he was living in a chauffeur’s flat over a garage in rural Kent.