Fiction

Finders Keepers is a sort-of sequel to last year’s Mr Mercedes, Stephen King’s first foray into what he called ‘hard-boiled detective fiction’. The new book is not so much hard-boiled as slowly poached, Heston Blumenthal style, in a sous-vide water oven, then finished on a violently hot grill. King has the popular novelist’s gifts in spades — a flawless sense of pace, an ear for dialogue, an eye for the telling detail, a no-mess-no-fuss approach to characterisation. He also has special insights into the uncanny: his frequent forays into the supernatural are wrenchingly plausible, while his rendering of ‘ordinary’ things — a face, a doorway, the hollowed-out roots of a tree — is steeped in mystery and threat.

Two men walk into an ice cream parlour in Austin, Texas, order the three teenage girls working there to undress, then tie them up and gag them with their own underwear, and set fire to the place. However, See How Small is not interested in the why or the who, but rather in the lives of a group of characters affected by the incident. We learn about these lives both before and after the murders, mostly after. This book is a kind of modern ghost story, without the frightening bits. Kate Ulrich is the mother of two of the girls. She is haunted by them. Jack Dewey is the firefighter who discovers their bodies. He too is haunted by them.

Earlier this year Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation’. A prolific and celebrated novelist in France, Modiano is not well known in Britain or America, where only a third of his works have been translated and many are out of print. Yale University Press has a coup in these circumstances with Mark Polizzotti’s translation of three of Modiano’s novellas, commissioned before the Nobel announcement. The novellas originally appeared over five years: Remise de peine (Suspended Sentences) 1988; Fleurs de ruine (Flowers of Ruin) 1991; and Chien de printemps (Afterimage) 1993.

Nadine Dorries’s novel, Four Streets, may have been unilaterally panned by the critics, with the Telegraph’s Christopher Howse labelling it the ‘the worst novel I've read in 10 years’, but Nadine’s first official journey into fiction has been a runaway success. It spent the last 43 days in the top 100 Kindle books on Amazon, before shooting up to number one for a week, seeing off stiff competition from that other Tory scribe Lord Archer. Four Streets is selling at a much reduced rate of 59 pence; so it’s going to take a while for publishers Head of Zeus to make up the £18,000 Nadine has declared as an advance to the Commons authorities. That’s at least 39,508 copies.

I’m not sure if Rumer Godden wrote An Episode of Sparrows for children or adults. It was originally published on an adult list but I read it when I was about ten, Lovejoy’s age. She’s the heroine of this book, a small, strong-willed girl with the tenacity and determination of 20 adults. She’s got a feckless mother, no father at all, and scarcely any friends. It’s not perhaps surprising. Lovejoy is fierce and selfish because she had to learn to be tough to survive. She snatches, she steals, she’s witheringly scornful if she doesn’t like anyone. I knew as I read the book that I’d be very wary of Lovejoy in real life — but even so, I cared about her passionately.

William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all dandies, he had a nose for hedonistic hot spots which he could mythologise along with himself. On the occasion of his centenary, Barry Miles takes us through these gorgeous, macabre scenarios with an attention to detail reminiscent of Dadd or Bosch: the boyhood in suburban St Louis; Harvard and early trips to Europe; the war, Greenwich Village and the Beats; Latin America and exile in 1950s Tangier, Existential Paris, Swinging London; the return to the USA and emergence as a literary celebrity adored by Warhol.

Countless writers and film-makers this year will be trying their hand at forcing us to wake up and smell the first world war.  How do they plant a fresh, haunting, horrifying image into our unwilling and saturated heads? We know it all: the trenches, the mud, the shell holes, the rats, the man plodding towards the house with the telegram, the local surnames repeated with different initials on the war memorial. All very much in the ‘too sad to think about’ department, particularly if you love Edwardian children’s stories and start contemplating What Happened to Oswald Later. Helen Dunmore, an assured writer who in a previous novel has forced us to live through the siege of Leningrad with its freezing and starving babies, does not shirk from her task.

Among the clever young Australians who came over here in the 1960s to find themselves and make their mark, a number, as we all know, never went back. A few became household names — Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, Clive James — and British cultural life owes them a great deal. Madeleine St John, the novelist and semi-reclusive eccentric who smoked herself to an early death in London in 2006, was one of them; but although eventually she made a  minor literary reputation for herself, writing four novels in her middle age of which the third, The Essence of the Thing, made the Booker shortlist in 1997, she has remained largely unknown here.

Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov, is a retired chemist in his early eighties. I met him not long ago in the house in Mexico City where his grandfather was murdered in 1940 with an ice-pick. Volkov had grown up in that house surrounded by 20-foot garden walls and watchtowers with slits in them for machine-guns. The protection was no defence against Trotsky’s eventual assassin, the Spanish-born Stalinist Ramón Mercader, who very ably infiltrated Trotsky’s Mexico circle and, on 20 August, struck the revolutionary on the front of his head with that gruesome weapon. Trotsky bellowed in pain but managed to fend off his assailant before collapsing. His bodyguards hurried in and beat off the intruder; Trotsky was rushed to hospital, where he died the following day.