Fiction

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.

In an admiring review (Spectator, 15 May, 2004) of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood, Philip Hensher conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that ‘Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank’. In an admiring review (Spectator, 15 May, 2004) of Peter Parker’s biography of Christopher Isherwood, Philip Hensher conceded, perhaps reluctantly, that ‘Isherwood was not, in the end, a writer of the first rank’. This is probably true. The second half of his career, after his departure to the USA in 1939, was disappointing.

The Flying Troutmans, by Miriam Toews Suicidal single mothers, delinquent teenagers and unwashed children sound like the ingredients for a standard-issue misery memoir with an embossed, hand-scripted title and a toddler in tears on the cover. Fortunately, Miriam Toews has instead shaken them with wit, warmth and a firm pinch of absurdity, and produced a grittily sparkling cocktail of a novel. The Flying Troutmans takes a bleak premise, adds pitch-perfect, fully human characters and makes it, if not laugh-out-loud funny, at least difficult to read without a couple of sniggers per chapter. Hattie Troutman has fled to Paris to escape the emotional masochism of proximity to her disturbed and chronically depressed sister, Min.

Ruth Rendell’s Kingsmarkham series is set against the changing backdrop of a provincial town over more than 40 years. But her London-based books, though they lack recurring characters and locations, almost amount to a series in their own right. She has made the city her own, and writes with both knowledge and compassion about its streets and buildings, its transport and its shops — and above all about its inhabitants. Her latest novel, Portobello (Hutchinson, £18.99), is almost incidentally a crime story. The road of the title provides the spine of a narrative that shifts expertly between groups of characters in widely disparate social settings. An art dealer tries to conceal his pathetically plausible guilty secret from his GP fiancée.

2666, by Roberto Bolaño Not every writer would write a novel in the form of a completely invented encyclopaedia of imaginary writers and call the result Nazi Literature in the Americas. Not everyone, either, would write a novel in two paragraphs, the second less than 12 words long, or produce a novel about a torturer-poet who writes his work in jet-trails in the sky. As soon as Roberto Bolaño came to the attention of the world, it was clear that, however extraordinary his work seemed in formal design and subject, he might have something even more extraordinary under wraps. After his death in 2003, word emerged from the Spanish-speaking world of a gigantic novel called 2666.

Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’ Evelyn Waugh told Nancy Mitford he was ‘surprised to find’ that Proust ‘was a mental defective. He has absolutely no sense of time.’ (Joke, given the novel’s title?) ‘He can’t remember anyone’s age. In the same summer as Gilberte gives him a marble and Françoise takes him to the public lavatory in the Champs Elysées, Bloch takes him to a brothel.’ Well, I can’t remember just where all this comes in A La Recherche, but suspect that either Waugh or Scott-Moncrieff, whose translation he was reading, made a confusion of tenses.

And Then There Was No One, by Gilbert Adair And Then There Was No One is a metaphysical murder mystery, a deconstructionist detective story, a post-modern puzzle — all of which could, very, very easily, become as arch and wearisome as persistent alliteration. But Gilbert Adair — though fantastically clever-clever, and horribly addicted not only to alliteration but also to puns and to literary in-jokes so self-referential that he is perpetually disappearing up his own recto (oh dear, his style is catching) — has created a hugely enjoyable entertainment. And Then There Was No One is billed as the third in Gilbert Adair’s ‘Evadne Mount Trilogy’.

In these hard times it is gratifying to find one Christmas present which has remained virtually unchanged in price for the last seven or eight years — the children’s book. Most of the illustrated books for the very young and the increasingly elaborate pop-ups and stories incorporating various pockets, inserts and DVDs are produced in the Far East. They are well made and extremely good value. Christmas represents the last stand for the hardback, with the opportunity for children to enjoy a book as an object, not just for its contents. There are two new titles in Sarah Garland’s series for pre-school children, Going Shopping and Doing Christmas, both £6.99 from Frances Lincoln.

Susan Hill reappraises Charles Dickens’s classic You may be sure you have done more good by this little publication, fostered more kind feelings and prompted more positive acts of beneficence than can be traced to all the pulpits and confessionals in Christendom. So wrote the Edinburgh critic, Lord Jeffrey — not an easy man to please — to Charles Dickens. Thackeray said: ‘It seems to me a national benefit and to every man who reads it a personal kindness.’ And as A Christmas Carol was first received so it has continued: 6,000 copies were snapped up on its first day of publication and it still appears in some new edition almost every year. The total number sold round the world since 1843 must run into billions.

‘It looks to me like Boris the Blue Whale,’ said Rightwayup Bird. ‘I have read all about him. He is one hundred feet long and weighs 150 tons.’ Astonishing prescience for 1981? Willy and the Killer Kipper — like the first of Jeffrey Archer’s two ‘Willy’ books, Willy Visits the Square World (1980) — is full of delights. A submarine has stalled on the ocean floor, and Willy and his teddy bear, Randolph, set out on the back of the Rightwayup Bird to save it from Konrad the Killer Kipper. On the way they are helped by Sybil the Seagull, an aspiring author and correspondent for the Bird Times who talks loftily about how humans are always plagiarising her articles.

When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so. When does a novel stop being a novel and become a crime story? It’s often assumed that there is an unbridgeable gap between them, but that’s not necessarily so. When Will There Be Good News? (Doubleday, £17.99) is a case in point. It is the third of Kate Atkinson’s novels about Jackson Brodie, a former policeman who is crime-prone in the way that other people are accident-prone. Here he is involved in a train crash in Edinburgh, which brings him again to the notice of Louise Monroe, a hard-bitten Scottish CID officer.