Fiction

An Empty Death (Orion, £18.99) is the second instalment of the series Laura Wilson began with her previous book, the award-winning Stratton’s War. An Empty Death (Orion, £18.99) is the second instalment of the series Laura Wilson began with her previous book, the award-winning Stratton’s War. Time’s moved on to 1944, and Hitler’s doodlebugs are spreading fear and destruction through the war-weary city. But Detective Inspector Ted Strattton’s immediate concern is the murder of a doctor on a bombsite near the Middlesex Hospital in Fitzrovia and the linked activities of a medical impostor.

Delicious is a word that keeps coming to mind as one reads Jane Gardam’s new novel. Delicious is a word that keeps coming to mind as one reads Jane Gardam’s new novel. Delicious and poignant. The 81-year-old author’s mood is elegiac, and so eventually is that of Elizabeth, Betty, the wife of Sir Edward Feathers QC, who was portrayed first as the protagonist of Old Filth. ‘Filth’ is the acronym for Failed in London Try Hong Kong. Actually, his career progressed right from the start in a smooth upward trajectory, as a successful barrister in the Temple, an eminent judge in the Crown Colony. Now, depicted mainly from Betty’s point of view, the portrait is stereoscopic.

Noah’s Compass, by Anne Tyler This is Anne Tyler’s seventeenth novel and will be welcomed by her many fans. It will also be familiar, even a little too familiar, to be judged on its own. There is the same Baltimore setting, the same domestic reassurance, the same blameless clueless protagonist, and the same invasive presence of over-zealous women. All these people are essentially virtuous, even at their most tiresome. One might say that Tyler’s style is virtuous: sunny, uninflected, and at ease with what she has to tell. Even the reader feels virtuous, perhaps beguiled by her characters into an assumption that nothing will shock or disturb. Thus a most agreeable alliance is once more sealed between writer and reader.

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 clever sisters, a starchy and religious materfamilias, and a father in exile following a scandal.

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 story of disappointment and epiphany, in the landscape she knows and understands.

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 evidently knows the city street by street. It is the perfect venue for his novel.

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 as I flipped the pages late into the night. Miles Straker is a tyrant and a snob.

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 she could make it, but just as true to her novelist’s gift for empathy and emotional insight.