Violence

Sheila Armstrong’s strange and beautiful novel has 12 chapters, each named for a month of the year – though not always the same year or even the same decade. The author plunges us into archaeology, history, geology and complex human relationships. Time is fluid here: we might encounter an obscure neolithic weapon or stumble on a beer can left by a thoughtless 21st-century rambler. Occasionally Irish words dance across the page. The Red Mouth – an beal rua – introduces us to a group of strangers whose lives are linked by an Irish peat bog that yields long-buried evidence of past lives: an antler from an extinct species of deer, or an Iron Age woman, throat slashed, a rope around her neck, body curled into the shape of a question mark.

Andrea Bajani’s short novel The Anniversary won Italy’s Premio Strega prize last year and has since become an international bestseller. It is narrated by a 51-year-old man who, ten years earlier, cut all ties with his family, and who, on the anniversary of that audacious and purifying move, looks back and tries to make sense of the events that led to it. It is a deliberately simple story, of considerable and radiating power. In tight, short chapters, a portrait builds up of a family dominated by an abusive father. References accumulate less to incidents than to the overwhelming atmosphere of dread between those incidents, ‘the looming threat that tightens our throats’; ‘a constant sense of impending danger...

Like the Booker, the Prix Goncourt’s laureates now tend to veer between diamonds and duds. One of the strongest recent novels to take France’s premier book award was, in 2021, The Most Secret Memory of Men by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, from Senegal. Almost a West African Possession, it sent its narrator on a quest for a cult writer named T.C. Elimane – inspired by the Malian novelist Yambo Ouologuem – who had vanished after claims of plagiarism shredded his reputation. A combination of mystery, satire and cultural inquiry, it spotlit the fate of African authors who are lionised and then forsaken by the Parisian literary elite. The Goncourt coup has prompted English-language publishers to revisit Sarr’s backlist.

Shaun Wilson’s latest novel gets going with a childhood recalled like James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and it is one marred by violence. Oh here we go again, I thought, as the young Shaun is thumped repeatedly by his enraged father Malc. Every novel I review these days seems to be about a working-class lad with a violent father from, say, north of Birmingham. I braced myself and thought of the immortal Bacon parents in the comic magazine Viz whose main purpose in life is to thrash their young son half to death in every issue. (Auberon Waugh, late of this parish, once said that it was impossible fully to understand Britain without reading Viz, and he was right.

For his third novel, Douglas Stuart moves north from the Glasgow tenements of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo to the island of Harris in the Outer Hebrides. John-Callum, known as Cal, returns to his family croft after spending four years at a mainland textile college, following a call from his father, John, to tell him that his grandmother is dying. John is the precentor of his local church, a congregation of Free Presbyterians, who adhere to an extreme biblical morality. The 26 remaining members attend four services each Sabbath and believe that fathers have authority over children and husbands over wives, since women ‘rarely know what is best for themselves’. Stuart treats this faith, which will be inimical to the majority of his readers, with great respect.

David Keenan’s seventh novel is quite the ride, but its plot is not always easy to disentangle. The author has said that its title is his favourite word, and the book’s clearest narrative thread concerns the abduction of a young boy outside a Glasgow football ground in 1979. The boy’s older brother, Aaron, is subsequently guided by an angel called the Precious Gift. Aaron meets the guardian angel during a run for charity in 1986, on the last day of his boyhood, or so he thought, because he could never imagine doing a sponsored run again after that, because he got into literature and smoking pot straight afterwards.

In the Kolkata of Megha Majumdar’s gripping second novel, set over seven days in an unspecified ‘ruined year’, restaurants deliver meals to the rich under cover of darkness. Others in the pestilent, depleted city do what they must to feed their loved ones – storming ration shops, looting the pantries of the well-to-do, even battering old women for a fistful of green beans. A Guardian and a Thief follows Majumdar’s virtuosic debut, the political fiction A Burning. It opens a week before the flight that is meant to take a woman, known only as Ma (Bengali for ‘Mother’), along with her young daughter and widower father, from Kolkata to Michigan, where Ma’s husband, a research scientist, awaits them. In the meantime, the child needs to eat.

By the late 1980s, the war against pornography was lost. Feminists, as well as Christian moralists, mainly in the UK and US, had been raging against the industry since the early 1970s. In 1980, the American feminist author Robin Morgan coined the phrase: ‘Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.’ In 1983, alongside the legal scholar and feminist author Catherine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin came up with the Dworkin-MacKinnon Anti-Pornography Civil Rights Ordinance, which would have granted those directly harmed by pornography a right to civil recourse by enabling victims to sue both the producers and the distributors of porn.

This is an account of the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard court cases with a top-dressing of pretentious tosh about the meaning of celebrity, etc – but you can easily ignore the tosh because the basic story is so gripping. Depp was 46 and already a global superstar when he met Amber Heard in 2009. She was a relatively unknown 22-year-old actress, but he auditioned her for the female lead in a film he was making of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary. Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson were also up for the role, but as soon as he saw Heard he decided ‘Yep... That’s the one.’ Amber arrived for filming with her girlfriend Tasya van Ree, whom she introduced as her wife. The director Bruce Robinson panicked: ‘She’s gay?!

Old Kiln is a novel spoken by the muse of memory but carved into shape by the fear of forgetting. Jia Pingwa (b.1952) wrote the first draft in 2009 after visiting his home village. Remembering a prolonged bloody conflict that tore the village apart during the Cultural Revolution, he was disturbed to find all traces of it gone – and the younger generation knowing nothing about either the violence or the Cultural Revolution itself. Old Kiln also confronts a similar amnesia afflicting the entire country. The fictionalised village is China writ small – its kiln that fires porcelain providing the book’s title.  Jia is superb at marshalling large-scale scenes of chaos and balancing them with quieter interiors.

Although Gordon M. Williams died as recently as 2017, his heyday was the Wilson/Heath era of the late 1960s and 1970s. During that time he managed to appear on the inaugural Booker shortlist, dash off a ten-day potboiler, The Siege of Trenchard’s Farm, that would be filmed by Sam Peckinpah, and continue to file a series of ghost-written newspaper columns for the England football captain Bobby Moore. As these accomplishments might suggest, Williams was the kind of writer whom the modern publishing world no longer seems to rate. Essentially, he was a literary jack-of-all-trades, alternating straightforward hackwork with more elevated material as the mood took him, and eventually abandoning fiction for a desultory career as a screenwriter.

This slim, unsettling novel opens with Lucia trying to navigate the ‘mess’ of her daughter Amanda’s return home to their apartment near Pescara, in Italy’s Abruzzo. Pieces of torn bread, a heaped-up blanket and other strange ‘traces’ are indications of Amanda’s emotional disarray after hastily leaving Milan on the eve of lockdown. But she’d already abandoned her university studies by the time she’d been violently mugged. Lucia attempts to achieve the difficult balance of caring for, but not suffocating, her daughter, resigning herself to Amanda’s ‘unpredictable comings and goings’ while leaving her ‘something nourishing in the fridge in case she skips breakfast’. But she has already spectacularly misjudged this.