Culture

Rachel Cusk is a writer who provokes strong reactions in her readers, and her critical reputation has swung wildly in a short space of time. Many, who not long ago were offended by the overflowing emotion of her memoirs of motherhood and divorce, are now full of praise for her current trilogy of novels, admiring particularly their restraint. What’s interesting about this turnaround is that while Cusk’s mode of presentation has changed, her subjects — the uncertain nature of reality, the relation of the individual to society, and the calibration of power — have not. Moreover, switching her focus from an outraged, opinionated woman to a recalcitrant, enigmatic one, has intensified her writing and clarified her project.

On the night of 17 March 1959, the 14th Dalai Lama, aged 23, slipped out of the Norbulinka, his summer residence in Lhasa, and began his flight to India, where he arrived on 31 March, after crossing some of Tibet’s most rugged terrain. He was so heavily disguised that the faithful crowds who had gathered to worship and protect him along the way mistakenly prostrated themselves before a monk in his entourage. Establishing in Dharamsala Tibet’s first democratically elected government, the Dalai Lama has ever since travelled the world making clear how the Chinese occupiers — who invaded Tibet in 1950 — eviscerated the country’s traditional culture.

Emma Donoghue’s novel Room was short-listed for the 2010 Man Booker prize and made into a film in 2015. Inspired by Josef Fritzel’s incarceration of his daughter Elisabeth, it described a mother and son held captive in one room for several years. It depicted their intense, private world and focused on maternal love. The Wonder also inhabits a small, claustrophobic space, whose inhabitants cling to idiosyncratic rules and beliefs. Set in the Irish Midlands soon after the potato famine, the story shows the reliance of the poor and often starving on a mostly joyless and self-punishing Catholicism. The Wonder, as Room did, depicts maternal love, this time distorted, but no less intense.

To tell this story of his search for a mother lost to mystery in early infancy, its author uses the techniques of documentary drama. He describes past scenes and conversations in extreme, atmospheric detail: a particular dream on a particular night in the 1940s, a conversation in the 1950s. Perhaps his work as a screenwriter has helped in this, but it is the clarity of his prose and the emotional significance of his search that ensure an entirely plausible imaginative reconstruction. As one would in reviewing a novel, the characters may be described in the present tense.

Picking a day at random, ‘an unremarkable Saturday in America’, the Guardian journalist Gary Younge identified ten children and teenagers throughout the United States who were shot dead on 23 November 2013. Whichever day he chose, he knew it would be typical. Determined to investigate each of these deaths, none of which bore much — or any — press coverage even locally, Younge would pore over the internet, visit grim parts of cities far from his Chicago home, locate as many relatives, friends and witnesses as he could and speak to them. His book, Another Day in the Death of America, is as one would imagine it: sad and bleak, an altogether terrible tale. Hopeless, too: no one, certainly not Younge, is under any illusion that this story will get better.

Searching for a 12-month stretch in the life of Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923–2013) that might illuminate the kind of person she was and the circumstances of her fraught and chaotic career, I settled on the year of 1955. Our heroine, then living in a maisonette flat in Little Venice and reading manuscripts for the publishing firm of Chatto & Windus, was hard at work on her well-received second novel, The Long View (1956). She was also having an affair with Arthur Koestler, who, when they entertained, her biographer tells us, expected her to ‘produce a three-course meal, look demurely beautiful and say as little as possible’. And so the year winds on. Koestler dazzles her with his volcanic temperament, gets her pregnant and then fixes an abortion.