Fiction

Wednesday

John De-Falbe

A patriarch and his family

The title story of this exceptional collection is the only one directly concerned with the presiding figure of K. K. Harouni, a wealthy Pakistani patriarch. In each of the others, a drama quietly unfolds among his extended family and dependents. In ‘Nawabdin Electrician’, Harouni’s Mr Fixit is attacked by a robber while driving his new motorcycle home to his wife and 12 daughters. ‘Saleema’ and ‘Provide, Provide’ describe girls giving themselves to employees. Saleema loses the protection of Rafik, the valet, when he is moved to a different house after his master’s death. ‘Within two years she was finished, began using rocket pills, went on to heroin . . .’

Byron Rogers

Instead of the poem

On this book’s title page its publishers enlarge on Peter Ackroyd’s ‘retelling’: his book, they declare, is at once a translation and — wait for it — an ‘adaptation’ of Chaucer, and from the beginning, you are made aware of what form this adaptation will take. This is how Chaucer introduces his Prioress in the General Prologue, and it is a moment of quiet, if sly, humour as he sketches the prissy little ladylike ways of this Merle Oberon in a wimple: And Frenssh she spak ful faire and fetisly, After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe, For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe. And you don’t need to

Wednesday

Simon Baker

One out of five

Nocturnes is a collection of five longish short stories, four about musicians and a fifth about friends who once bonded over musical tastes. As the title neatly suggests, the book is filled with characters living in obscurity; the stories are populated by people, often musicians, who have been forced to downgrade their ambitions dramatically. While the title also suggests classical music, however, jazz and its related forms feature more prominently. The standout success among the five is ‘Malvern Hills’, which features a university drop-out who is trying (like countless others) to write songs, while helping out at his sister’s café in Worcestershire. Ishiguro insightfully portrays both the man’s self-regarding pomposity

D J-Taylor

Trouble at the Imperial

It was probably a mistake for Monica Ali to call the hero of her third novel Gabriel Lightfoot. The reader thinks of Hardy’s bucolic swains and the reddle-man’s cart disappearing over Egdon Heath, whereas instead there lumbers into view a 42-year-old hotel chef with an incipient bald spot and inadequate leisure. On the other hand, Hardy would doubtless have cocked a knowing eye at the complexities of Gabe’s personal-cum-professional life, the fading nightclub singer avid to marry him and bear his children, and the pair of business associates keen to bankroll a swish Pimlico restaurant with his name above the door. The first sign that all might not be well

Sebastian Smee

Home is where the heart is

Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín Colm Tóibín’s Brook- lyn is a simple and utterly exquisite novel. The writing is so transparent, so apparently guileless, that I kept wondering what trickery Tóibín had used to keep me so involved, so attached, so unaccountably warmed. The tale’s simplicity is, in a sense, like life’s: an Irish girl called Eilis can’t find good work in her home town of Enniscorthy, so she goes along with a well-intended family conspiracy to send her to a decent job in Brooklyn. It is the early 1950s. Her father is dead. In Brooklyn, she finds her feet and falls in love. But when her older sister dies, she

Wednesday

The Spectator

Fatal attractions

The Oxford Despoiler, by Gary Dexter Twisted Wing, by Ruth Newman Windows on the Moon, by Alan Brownjohn The Oxford Despoiler is a collection of eight stories introducing Henry St Liver, a Victorian detective, and his biographer and assistant, Olive Salter. Henry is tall and lean, with a lofty bearing but the habits of the most dishevelled bohemian. Olive drifted to London and met Henry, and in very little time became his invaluable foil. If it sounds familiar, it should, since this is in part a warm and cleverly observed pastiche of the Victorian detective genre and of the Sherlock Holmes stories in particular. Nods to Conan Doyle include the

Caroline Moore

An irresistible highbrow

The Children’s Book, by A. S. Byatt I should declare an interest. Nineteen years ago, I believe that A. S. Byatt saved the lives of my unborn twins. When I went into premature labour at 22 weeks, I was rushed into hospital, put on a drip, and told it was absolutely vital Not to Panic. Useless advice. So I took to fiction, as narcotics for the unquiet heart and brain. On that first long night, day and night, I read Possession, at a single sitting, or rather lying; and it worked, magnificently. The twins were not born until eight weeks later, and survived. The point of this confession is to

Saturday

Matthew Dennison

The day the music died

An earnest young man upbraids his singing teacher. ‘Why don’t you sing classical more often?’ It is Bombay in the early Eighties. The young man’s father has enjoyed a successful career in management, with the result that ‘his childhood had been almost entirely chauffeur-driven’. His singing teaching, peddling remarkable gifts to earn an unremarkable living in the rambunctious city in which his talent is only one among many, is older and pragmatic. You cannot practise art on an empty stomach. Let me make enough money from these lighter forms; and then I’ll be able to devote myself entirely to classical. The argument is not a new one. Amit Chaudhuri’s latest

Saturday

Lee Langley

On the waterfront | 4 April 2009

Geoff Dyer is the least categorisable of writers. Give him a genre and he’ll bend it; pigeonhole him and he’ll break out. Clever, funny, an intellectual with a resolutely bloke-ish stance; irreverent and incorrigibly subversive, this is the man who set off to write a study of D. H. Lawrence and came up with Out of Sheer Rage, a rant against academia in which Lawrence figured as a spear-carrier. His book about jazz, But Beautiful, started life as a critical study, and in its final form combined laconic history with poignant vignettes; short stories that uncovered the heart and soul of the music. Fiction as truth. His most beguiling book,

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime novels | 28 March 2009

The Ignorance of Blood (Harper Collins, £17.99) is the fourth of Robert Wilson’s novels to feature Inspector Javier Falcon of Seville, and it completes a planned quartet examining some of the demons, old and new, plaguing modern Spain. The Ignorance of Blood (Harper Collins, £17.99) is the fourth of Robert Wilson’s novels to feature Inspector Javier Falcon of Seville, and it completes a planned quartet examining some of the demons, old and new, plaguing modern Spain. A fatal traffic accident leaves an absconding Russian gangster dead. In his Range Rover, the police find more than eight million euros, drugs, compromising DVDs and a gun. As the August heat increases, Falcon

Saturday

Harriet Waugh

Mysteries of Paris

Fred Vargas — nom-de-plume of the French archaeologist and historian Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau — took to writing crime novels in 1991. Among the many unusual aspects of her books is the English take on the French titles. L’Homme à l’envers appears as Seeking Whom He May Devour, Pars vite et reviens tard as Have Mercy on Us All while Sous les vents de Neptune becomes Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand. These English versions possess a sort of genius which I find irresistible. The novels have also been translated out of the order in which they were written. Just issued is Vargas’s first, The Chalk Circle Man, which will be

Andrew McKie

The wide blue yonder

Toby Litt begins the titles of his books with consecutive letters of the alphabet and takes delight in shifting style and genre. He has now reached J, and science fiction. There has been a flurry recently of ‘literary’ writers trying their hands at SF. For the most part, the complaint raised against these efforts is that they may be better written than most of science fiction, but they aren’t much cop as science fiction. Anyway, science fiction need not be badly written: fans are fond of quoting Sturgeon’s Law (after the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon) — ‘Ninety per cent of SF is crud, but then 90 per cent of

Saturday

Patrick Marnham

Not for the faint-hearted

‘You might be wondering how I end- ed up in the lace business . . . ’, so the hero of The Kindly Ones, a doctor of law and former SS officer, introduces himself to readers of his fictional memoirs. Dr Max Aue, an ingenious Nazi of Franco-German descent, has survived the war and assumed a false identity in order to escape ‘the rope or Siberia’. As Berlin falls to the Red Army he slips out of the city and makes his way to Paris disguised as a returning French STO, an enlisted worker. But the war has reduced him to ‘an empty shell, left with nothing but bitterness and

Sebastian Smee

The invisible man

Bleak, bleak, bleak. Anita Brookner’s new novel, Stran- gers, is unlikely to inspire resolutions to self-improvement or even cathartic tears. But its main character, a retired bank manager called Paul Sturgis, is a brilliant and affecting creation by a writer whose empathy runs deep, and whose pitch is perfect. Sturgis, 72 years old, is in good health and financially well off. His trouble — and it is deep — is of another kind. He lives in a well-kept but dark and depressing flat in London. He has no children — only a distant female relative who lives on the other side of town and for whom he has no particular

Colin Amery

Architect of his own misfortune

Tom Coraghessan Boyle, in some 20 books, has energetically demon- strated his enthusiasm for turning the bio- graphies of figures from early 20th-century American life into quasi-historical fiction. After writing the story of the sex-obsessed researcher Dr Alfred Kinsey and the rare tale of the inventor of the cornflake, Will Keith Kellogg and his health farm, perhaps it was inevitable that the roaring private life of the architect Frank Lloyd Wright would be a natural sequel. The Women is certainly not a novel about architecture, although the narrator of the story, Tadashi Sato, is a young Japanese architectural student who is drawn to the studio/commune run by Wright at Taliesin

Saturday

Anita Brookner

Pure, but never simple

Here at last is a novel informed by exceptional intelligence. The blurb states that the author, Simon Mawer, was born in England, but it seems likely that his ancestry was Czech, since he is acquainted with the language and the customs of pre-war Czechoslovakia and has learned of its travails during the German and Russian occupations. And it is clear from his narrative that the country was both sophisticated and cultivated in its manifestations, influenced perhaps by its position at the heart of Europe and subject to both the best and the worst of its fashions. This alone would mark it as unusual: the clarity with which it is written

William Brett

Loved and lost

Iain Sinclair is as dark as London scribes come. Engaged in a lifelong literary project, he records his own psychic and physical travels around the city, identifying what he calls ‘disappear- ances’ — people, buildings, spaces that no longer exist, but that haunt the present. While Peter Ackroyd is in thrall to London, revelling in its labyrinthine past and bounding enthusiastically over its landscape, Sinclair instead seems tortured by the place, lost in an infinity of connections and coincidences, and made paranoid by the ghosts that he unearths. Nowhere, it seems, is this paranoia more intense than in Hackney, his home borough for the last 40 years. This book is

Wednesday

Jonathan Mirsky

Heartbreak hotel

Here surely is what Joseph Conrad meant when he wrote that above all he wanted his readers ‘to see.’ In The Post Office Girl Stefan Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart. Born in 1881 into a rich Austrian-Jewish family, Zweig was the embodiment of pre- and inter-war Viennese intellectual life. A biographer, essayist, memoirist, short-story writer and the author of one finished novel, Beware of Pity, he delivered the oration at Freud’s funeral. During the Thirties, Zweig wrote The Post Office Girl, originally Rausch der Verwandlung (The Intoxication of Transformation). The English title is better. In his informative afterword, William Deresiewicz

Ian Thomson

Surviving the Middle Passage

The Book of Negroes, an historical romance, creates an unforgettably vivid picture of the Atlantic slave trade and the philanthropists who sought to oppose it. The novel opens in Africa in the year 1745. Aminata Diallo, a midwife’s daughter, has been abducted from her village in present-day Mali and marched in chains to a slave ship, where she is sold to white traders. In the course of the two-month voyage to America, she witnesses a violent shipboard slave revolt, yet is miraculously able to survive the Middle Passage, before reaching Carolina. Plantation life in the American south, with its hierarchy of skin tones ranging from black to cinnamon to white,

Wednesday

Sam Leith

For better, for worse

Love Stories, edited by Diana Secker Tesdell In Bed With: Unashamedly Sexy Stories by Your Favourite Women Novelists, edited by Imogen Edwards-Jones, Jessica Adams, Kathy Lette and Maggie Alderson When Kurt Vonnegut was interviewed by the Paris Review in 1977, he was asked: ‘Let’s talk about the women in your books.’ ‘There aren’t any,’ he replied. ‘No women, no love.’ He described this as ‘a mechanical problem’: I try to keep deep love out of my stories because, once that particular subject comes up, it is almost impossible to talk about anything else. Readers don’t want to hear about anything else. They go gaga about love. If a lover in