Culture

Nowadays, most of us living in the liberal West agree that there can never be anything morally wrong with love between consenting adults. This is good for society but bad for novelists. The tale of the grand passion that runs foul of societal mores is a staple of literature. What is Madame Bovary if Emma can slam divorce papers on Charles’s desk after her first few sexts with Rodolphe? Writers who want to do the love versus society theme have to get creative. Ross Raisin has hit on the sterling idea of heading for the world of professional football. Not a single one of Britain’s 5,000 full-time players is openly gay — though statistically about 500 of them must be. Tom, the hero of Raisin’s new novel, is one of them.

In my work as a reviewer, a small, steady proportion of all the books publishers send me concern the Holocaust. With middle age has come a curious foreshortening of my perspective on modern history so that, paradoxically, the Nazis’ inhumanity has begun to seem less distant in time and, therefore, more horrible still. Fortunately I can reassure myself that, objectively, it happened long ago and that even the atrocities of eastern Europe and Rwanda are now a couple of decades safely in the past. Such consolations vanish when confronted by The Raqqa Diaries, which is shockingly of the present. It is a terrible reminder that we are unwise to impute any kind of teleology to history.

The call for lessons in the art of seduction in the style of an author of your choice drew a large and stellar field. Henry James — whose labyrinthine sentences would surely bore the objects of his affection into submission — was a popular choice. Here he is, as expertly imagined by John Maddicott: ‘If her defences, imperfectly nurtured by an occasionally burnished but never entirely unshakeable conscience, were to be penetrated — and he allowed the delightful vulgarity of the thought to send a miniature frisson of undeniable pleasure through his diminutive frame — it must be by methods which, though crude in their essaying, combined the subtlety of experiment with the heavy-handed assertiveness of the tried and not infrequently tested.

In Delmore Schwartz’s story ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, a young man dreams he is watching his father and mother’s engagement onscreen from a seat in a cinema. Weeping at the certain knowledge of the pain to come, he’s patted on the back by a woman. ‘There, there,’ she says, ‘all of this is just a movie.’ In a way, this moment distils the challenge of all oneiric narratives — it’s a fiction within a fiction, one in which anything can happen, but without real-world consequences. In this dark, brilliantly controlled debut, the Argentinian Samanta Schweblin uses the fabric of a dream to weave a novel in which everything is at stake and at risk: identity, love and existence.