Fiction

Wednesday

Michela Wrong

Bluff and double-bluff

Like Philip Larkin in ‘Posterity’, imagining an American lecturer yawning over his research into an ‘old-type natural fouled-up guy’, J.M. Coetzee places himself in the shoes of a notional English biographer gathering the material that will make sense of the years that followed his 1972 return to South Africa. The result is Summertime, third part of Coetzee’s semi-fictionalised biographical trilogy. Two previous volumes — Boyhood and Youth — recounted the author’s childhood in the Western Cape as the son of middle-class Afrikaners and his move to London, where he tried his hand as a computer programmer. Like Summertime, both of those books used the distancing third person, as though Coetzee

Wednesday

Sam Leith

Let me not be Mad

I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.’ Few epigraphs to fiction have been so widely disregarded as the disclaimer with which Evelyn Waugh presaged Brideshead Revisited. Immediately it was published, as Waugh’s great friend Nancy Mitford wrote to him, the general view was simply: ‘It is the Lygon family. Too much Catholic stuff.’ And it is easy to see why people were tempted to see Madresfield Court, seat of the Earl of Beauchamp, as the original of Brideshead. Just as in Brideshead, here is a stiff older son and a younger son losing the golden beauty of his youth to alcoholism. Here were

Cressida Connolly

Daily grind

This vast novel, well-plotted and gripping throughout, is the first that Sebastian Faulks has set in our time. It is a state of the nation book, and what a state we seem to be in: if Faulks is less kind to the contemporary than he has been to the past, we cannot blame him, for he is only reporting what he sees. We follow a large cast of characters around their daily lives in London, in the week before Christmas 2007. There is a venal hedge-fund manager and his neglected son, a skunk-smoking, reality TV-obsessed teenager; a mean-spirited book reviewer; an Islamic youth who gets recruited into a suicide-bombing cell;

Susan Hill

An indisputable masterpiece

Of how many novelists can it be said that they have never written a bad sentence? Well, it can be said of William Trevor, as it could of his fellow countryman John McGahern, and of many another Irish novelist. What was it that so formed them, to write such elegant, flexible, lucid, beautiful but serviceable prose? Instead of spending time doing MA courses in Creative Writing, all aspirants should be locked in a castle with only the novels of Trevor and McGahern to read and re-read. That would teach them how it should be done. It was Edna O’Brien, another Irish novelist, who said ‘Love and Death, that’s all any

Caroline Moore

Ticking the boxes

How do you describe novels written by a Fellow of All Souls, laced with extreme post-modern self-consciousness and lavish with cultural references, but revolving almost entirely around graphic permutations of the sexual act? As a genre, it can surely only be called clever-dick-lit. This is Adam Thirlwell’s second foray into this exclusive terrain. His first work, Politics, hit the news when he was included as the youngest writer in Granta’s 2003 list of Best Young British Writers before the novel was even published, which may or may not have affected the reviews. A sour note of envy was certainly struck by some. Often, a clever young author will show off

James Walton

Rhyme and reason

On the face of it, Nicholson Baker’s books are a varied bunch. His fiction ranges from the ultra close-up observations of daily life in the early novels to the hard-core sex of Fermata and Vox (a copy of which Monica Lewinsky famously gave to Bill Clinton). His non-fiction includes a tribute to John Updike, a plea for libraries not to abandon card catalogues and an attempt to prove that Winston Churchill was a bloodthirsty anti-Semite. There is, though, one quality they do share — and that’s an unmistakable obsessiveness. It’s a quality definitely not lacking in Baker’s new novel either. The narrator of The Anthologist is Paul Chowder, a middle-aged

Wednesday

Philip Hensher

Moments of clarity

By now, Alice Munro has established a territory as her own so completely, you wonder that the Canadian Tourist Board doesn’t run bus tours there. Perhaps they do, even though it presents an appearance more characteristic than inviting. To think of her world is to think of lonely houses at the edge of bleak, small towns; of unsatisfied backrooms looking over muddy fields; of suburbs, making do; of institutions imposed on half-made landscapes, and human disappointment reflected in the world about her characters. It is classic short-story territory, and over the years Munro has carved a substantial reputation without venturing very far from what she does best; the classic short

Saturday

Patrick Skene-Catling

Dangerous liaisons | 27 June 2009

Surviving, by Allan Massie The Death of a Pope, by Piers Paul Read Coward at the Bridge, by James Delingpole Alcoholism, with its lonely inner conflict between escapism and conscience, is an inexhaustible subject for literature. The emotional agony of addiction is fascinating, as long as it is other people’s. Allan Massie, the illustrious Scottish littérateur, has written an empathetic novel about the loneliness of the long-distance boozer, always isolated, even in the company of fellow alcoholics who try to help. Some alcoholics in desperation submit to Alcoholics Anonymous, in the hope that mutual support may ease the daily fear of lapsing. Massie once spent several years in Rome and

Julian Barnes

Everyman’s voice

Frank O’Connor was once stopped on the road west of Kinsale by a man who said to him: ‘I hear you’re a famous writer. I’d like to be a famous writer too, but ’tis bloody hard. The comma and the apostrophe are easy enough, but the semicolon is the very divil.’ The man was wrong, of course: the ability to punctuate, and even to spell, correctly are often missing from some of the best writers. What counts is the ability to be on that road, allow yourself to be stopped, listen to what the man says, remember the voice, and know when and how best to use it. O’Connor’s art

Wednesday

Dan Jones

Running on envy

Please, someone give me a pound for every PR floozy who’s told me over breakfast that she’s ‘writing a novel’ about the dirty world of, er, PR. One minute you’re sucking up a nice creamy plate of scrambled eggs at the Wolseley, the next you’re trying to control your acid reflux. (But control it you must; she’s paying.) I have spent so much time shuddering at the very thought of these ditzies’ unwritten books that to read Nicholas Coleridge’s splendidly realised tale of sexy beastliness in the world of corporate communications — and to find it captivating, pacy and scandalous — was a blessed relief. I cackled like a zany

Lee Langley

Sounding a different note

What is inspiration and how does it work? Music and literature have a long record of mutual nourishment: Beethoven inspired Tolstoy who inspired Janacek, and each Kreutzer Sonata was different; miraculously rich and strange. Jeanette Winterson, inspired by Glyndebourne’s 75th anniversary, has asked some distinguished fellow-writers each to produce a work inspired by an opera. The result is Midsummer Nights — 19 short stories, plus Posy Simmonds illustrating the Glyndebourne experience with wry affection. Edited by Winterson, who also provides a story of passion and Puccini, the book offers a glimpse of how the inspirational and the creative juices interact. The brief was clear: ‘Choose an opera, and from its

Wednesday

Anne Chisholm

The benefit of the doubt

With her brilliant new book, Hilary Mantel has not just written a rich, absorbingly readable historical novel; she has made a significant shift in the way any of her readers interested in English history will henceforward think about Thomas Cromwell, the man at the heart of what the historian Geoffrey Elton, who first put him on the map 50 years ago, called the Tudor revolution in government. To activate what she has called her ‘informed imagination’, she has read widely and deeply in the literature of the period and then let all her extraordinary talent as a writer of fiction rip. Her book is as true to the facts as

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