Fiction

Michael Moorcock’s career is indisputably heroic. Michael Moorcock’s career is indisputably heroic. At a rate of up to 15,000 words a day, rudimentarily equipped with exercise books, bottles of Quink and a leaky Osmiroid, he has written, among other things, novels by the score, some of which — The Cornelius Quartet, The Colonel Pyat sequence — are among the most ambitious, interesting and funny to have been published since the war. He is not taken as seriously as he might be, though, because most of the rest of his fiction is in the despised and dreaded genre of SF.

‘C’ is for Caul, Chute, Crash and Call, the titles of the four sections of Tom McCarthy’s new novel; for Serge Carrefax, its protagonist; and for, among other things, coordinates, communication technology, crypts, cryptography, Ceres, carbon, cocaine and Cartesian space, motifs that trellis this book. ‘C’ is for Caul, Chute, Crash and Call, the titles of the four sections of Tom McCarthy’s new novel; for Serge Carrefax, its protagonist; and for, among other things, coordinates, communication technology, crypts, cryptography, Ceres, carbon, cocaine and Cartesian space, motifs that trellis this book.

Thriller writers, like wolves and old Etonians, hunt in packs. In the summer months, roaming from city to city, we can be found at assorted festivals and crime fiction conventions, gathered on panels to discuss the pressing literary issues of the day: ‘Ballistics in the Fiction of Andy McNab’, for example, or ‘The Future of the Spy Novel in the Age of Osama bin Laden’. The high tide of these get-togethers is the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, which takes place every July, over four days, in Harrogate. This year, the guest of honour was Jeffery Deaver, recognised across the pond as one of America’s pre-eminent thriller writers.

Though Lydia Davis probably first came to the attention of English readers through her translations, she has been making a substantial reputation for herself in America with sharp, inventive and demanding short stories. Her field is awkwardness, social ‘leakage’, as sociologists say, and the often bad fit between acts and speech, language and meaning. There is a certain delectable inappropriateness in the fact that some readers (like me) will first have encountered her as one of the translators of Penguin’s 2002 Proust. She did an accurate job, but as a writer herself she could not be much further from that great but voluble and frequently casual writer (your punctuation, Marcel, your punctuation).

Memory Lane always looked so unthreatening to me. But this is Bret Easton Ellis, so a cast reunion for the characters he first wrote about in Less Than Zero 25 years ago is bound to end in tears, screaming and blood. And so it does, with grim efficiency. No sooner has our protagonist, Clay, checked back into his Hollywood apartment complex, than he is plunged feet-first into a swamp of paranoia, sin and violent double-cross. As the doorman says to him on his return, ‘Welcome back.’ So what’s Clay been up to all these years? Becoming a screenwriter would be the literalist’s answer, but drifting further into Easton Ellis’s subconscious is more the truth of it.

While I was living in Tokyo, a Japanese girl friend of mine fell in love with a British investment banker. After promising marriage, he abandoned her for an English wife from the counties. But my girl friend was no Madame Butterfly. She did not attempt suicide. She felt she had had a lucky escape. A visit to Wiltshire to meet his family had convinced her the English upper classes were mad. Emerging from her room on Sunday evening, she discovered her lover’s father polishing the family shoes. She rang me in shock. Did he suffer from some kind of foot fetish? she asked. I explained that men of that generation who had been to public school and then the army frequently got out the shoe box on a Sunday evening.

Robert Coover’s Noir is a graphic novel. Robert Coover’s Noir is a graphic novel. Not literally, in the contemporary sense in which the phrase is used to designate a highfalutin words-plus-pictures album; but figuratively, in that its language cannot help but be converted, in the reader’s inner eye, into a series of monochromatic images, images suggestive less of a film than of, precisely, the layout of some neo-noir comic-strip. Frank Miller’s Sin City, for instance. Like Miller, Coover pulverises the film noir aesthetic to a hallucinatory essence. In a conceit subsequent pasticheurs will find it hard to improve on, he actually has the nerve to name his private eye Philip M. Noir (‘M’ presumably standing for ‘Marlowe’).

Here are two novels about that most harrowing and haunting of subjects — children who go missing. Here are two novels about that most harrowing and haunting of subjects — children who go missing. Rachel Billington’s Missing Boy is Dan, a 13-year- old runaway. Dan’s disappearance marks the beginning of a nightmare for his parents, Eve and Max, plus aunt Martha. Has Dan run away or has he been kidnapped? Will he be found? The if, where and how are the questions that torment them. As Ronnie, the police liaison officer puts it, though families vary, when there’s a missing child the suffering is always the same, a pattern of ‘disbelief, anger, terror, despair, endurance.

If you wanted to write about Marilyn Monroe, how would you go about it? The pile of biographies, memoirs and novels about poor, sad Marilyn is already teetering. How could you make something new of her life? Clever Andrew O’Hagan has come up with an answer: by writing as her pet dog. How the hound came to be in her possession is a terrific story in itself. Maf, a Maltese terrier, was given to Marilyn by Frank Sinatra (the dog’s name was her sly reference to Sinatra’s alleged mafia connections). Sinatra got the dog from Natalie Wood’s mother, who regularly travelled to Britain to scoop up puppies, in much the way that contemporary Hollywood stars now trawl the globe for orphaned children.