Fiction

It has been said that the world of story- telling contains two fundamental plots — a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. Here we have two journeys, and one unexpected visitor, from three debut novelists who show great promise. In the first, the stranger arriving in town is the eponymous Mr Chartwell, the large and ‘strikingly hideous’ black dog that is the embodiment of Winston Churchill’s depression, who turns up on the doorstep of Esther Hammerhans one morning in July 1964. Esther, a library clerk in the House of Commons, has advertised a room to let, and Mr Chartwell is the sole respondent. He is in the area for work, he tells Esther; he has clients nearby.

Javier Marias’s elegant new volume is a collection of ghost stories, but its alluring dust jacket, illustrating the first tale, shows us a sunny midsummer image of a woman in a bikini admiring herself on a beach. Javier Marias’s elegant new volume is a collection of ghost stories, but its alluring dust jacket, illustrating the first tale, shows us a sunny midsummer image of a woman in a bikini admiring herself on a beach. All is not as pleasant as at first it seems, of course, and we soon enter his characteristically darker world of voyeurism, jealousy, revenge, doppelgängers and crime passionel.

It is rare for stories to be specially commissioned for an audio book, but as Maxim Jakubowski, the editor of The Sounds of Crime tells us in a pre-thrill talk, he ‘begged’ the five writers he considered to be the best in their field to produce a new story for this collection; and ‘happily for me,’ he tells us, ‘they all agreed.’ Jakubowski’s introduction evokes those black-and-white days when Alfred Hitchcock shuffled on to millions of walnut-encased television sets to present us with half an hour of spine-tingling tension — very much as we have with each of the stories here.

Christmas is coming, which generally leads to a surge in sales of crime fiction. Fortunately for readers, some delectable crime novels have appeared in the past few months. Among them is Val McDermid’s Trick of the Dark (Little, Brown, £18.99). This is not one of her series novels but a standalone thriller whose plot revolves around St Scholastika’s College, Oxford, a women’s college with a certain resemblance to St Hilda’s. One of its alumnae is Charlie Flint, a clinical psychologist whose professional reputation is hanging in the balance. She receives an anonymous bundle of press cuttings relating to a recent murder at the college, now the subject of a high-profile criminal trial.

After having for so long been treated with such disdain by the French literary establishment, Michel Houellebecq has at last been embraced by it. Last week La carte et le territoire, his fifth novel, was awarded the Prix Goncourt, a distinction any of his previous novels might just as well have merited. Perhaps it has been possible to do him this belated justice because La carte et le territoire is less explicitly scandalous than its predecessors, more conventionally substantial even. If his previous novels have insolently portrayed life in our faithless, free-market world as a race between sex and death, here that race is over. There is almost no sex in this book.

So just how good is it? Because of course those splendid people, the Man Booker judges, have rather prejudiced this review by going and giving their prize to Jacobson’s latest. If only they’d had the patience to wait for the launch of this blog. Because although not on the panel this year (September is such a busy time), I am always more than happy to drop the odd word of wisdom, share my insights, and generally do my bit to see that contemporary novelists are held to account for their various crimes against culture. And all in all, perhaps this year’s prize hasn’t been too badly awarded, because Jacobson has less to answer for than most. That is praise, by the way.

The subtitle of The Box, the oddly compelling novella Günter Grass wrote when he reached 80, is ‘Tales from the Darkroom’. The subtitle of The Box, the oddly compelling novella Günter Grass wrote when he reached 80, is ‘Tales from the Darkroom’. The darkroom, in this circumstance, is both a place where photographs are developed and the habitat of the famous writer’s imagination. The box in question is an Agfa box camera, producing snapshots of a six-by-nine format, which was purchased for a few marks in 1932 and has been in use for decades since. Its sole user is Marie, or Mariechen, the widowed friend of the Grass family in its various manifestations, the novelist’s assistant and at some time (his eight children suppose) his lover.