Andrew McKie

Hot on the heels of The Stranger, the Netflix series based on his novel but transplanted to the UK, Harlan Coben returns with his 32nd book. Some of us have been getting our regular dose ever since he introduced his sports agent sleuth Myron Bolitar in the mid-1990s, and The Boy from the Woods (Century, £20) contains all the usual ingredients. For those new to Coben it has the virtues of The Stranger — addictive and full of twists, with an intriguing premise. It also has its deficiencies: too many subplots, a tendency to drop promising strands of the story when something else comes along, and characters whose motives are often unclear and whose behaviour is downright far-fetched.

NVK, which is the IATA (International Air Transport Association) code for Narvik’s old airport, is in this instance Naemi Vieno Kuusela, a Finnish femme fatale whom we first meet in this novel in North Karelia in 1579 and later in the company of Zhang Guo Xing, a wealthy Chinese businessman, in a Shanghai nightclub in 2012. This surely offers a clue about her. But, as she says on page 118: You think you know what I am. You have no idea. I’m not in any of your books. You try to catch me. Your hands grasp empty air. I’m not a story you can tell. That doesn’t sound like a promising basis for a novel, but its author gives it a go.

When it was recently announced that Robert Pattinson, who played the vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight films, had secured the role of Batman, a Twitter user wrote: ‘Worst vampire ever. Took him 11 years to turn into a bat.’ This is  probably Twitter’s second greatest bat joke, beaten only by @LRBbookshop’s ‘I reckon Nagel actually knows full well what it’s like to be a bat’. It is in the nature of social media to carp, though, and in that spirit I point out that, while Twilight’s Edward didn’t become a bat (his main uncanny powers beside immortality seemed to be great cheekbones and a Mr Darcy-ish froideur), Batman isn’t really a bat either.

Fantastic fiction loves contrasts made explicit: Eloi and Morlocks, orcs and elves, and above all humans battling vampires, Martians or robots. Small wonder that Claude Lévi-Strauss specifically invoked science fiction for his theory of ‘binary opposition’. Sometimes these tensions are in the mise-en-scene — not just Earth vs. outer space, but settings — Lilliput and Brobdingnag, say — which try to make themes concrete. Classics of that sort are Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (set in two dimensions) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books.

Science fiction is not the first thing one thinks of in connection with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, though the Nobel Prize for Literature has in fact been awarded for science fiction poetry — Harry Martinson’s Aniara was an epic about a spaceship. Then again, many English speakers probably don’t primarily associate Milosz with poetry either, but with The Captive Mind, his damning critique of the moral crisis of artists under authoritarian regimes.

Christopher Priest, now 73, has been quietly turning out oddly mesmerising fiction for nearly half a century but, like the protagonists of his 2005 novel The Glamour, somehow has the knack of never quite being noticed. It is true that he has devoted admirers; he has won awards; he was on Granta’s original list of best young novelists — scraping in on age, not quality — and Christopher Nolan filmed, cleverly, his even cleverer novel The Prestige (1995), which was about Victorian illusionists and duplicity.

Few people, perhaps, will immediately seize on this title as just the thing for a relative’s Christmas, even if their surname is Cooper. If it doesn’t have the wide appeal of the latest Lee Child or Jamie Oliver, though, there is plenty in it of interest, and not just for the many fans of wine and whiskey. Since the unexpected commercial success of Mark Kurlansky’s Cod, there have been a number of attempts to dare to be dull, approaching apparently unpromising subjects with the attitude that anything becomes interesting if you look at it closely enough.

The first Broadway musical that I saw, a quarter of a century ago, actually on Broadway, wasn’t, of course, actually on Broadway; it was on West 44th Street. The first Broadway musical that I saw, a quarter of a century ago, actually on Broadway, wasn’t, of course, actually on Broadway; it was on West 44th Street. It was 42nd Street. The geography is confusing, but so is the history, and indeed the nomenclature. For 42nd Street was not, of course, a Broadway musical, but a musical film made in 1933, based on a novel about life backstage at a Broadway theatre, with staged setpieces — notably the title song — in Hollywood’s version of the style of Broadway musical theatre.

There’s a number in Merrily We Roll Along called ‘Opening Doors’, in which two young songwriters audition for a producer who interrupts: ‘That’s great! That’s swell!/ The other stuff as well!/ It isn’t every day I hear a score this strong,/ But fellas, if I may,/ There’s only one thing wrong:/ There’s not a tune you can hum.’ Urging them to be ‘less avant-garde’, he exits, asking for a ‘plain old melodee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee’ — sung (inaccurately) to the tune of ‘Some Enchanted Evening’. There’s a number in Merrily We Roll Along called ‘Opening Doors’, in which two young songwriters audition for a producer who interrupts: ‘That’s great!

More than quarter of a century later, 1984 remains firmly fixed in the future, fiction having provided a more vivid view than our memories of the year which actually happened. Even so, a couple of things from the real, boring 1984 were memorable: Apple introduced the Macintosh personal computer (with a celebrated advertisement based on Nineteen Eighty-Four) and William Gibson published his first novel, Neuromancer, which popularised the idea of ‘cyberspace’, a term he had minted. Both seemed like science fiction then. Apple’s machine, with its 128 kilobytes, now seems antediluvian.

William Trevor’s collected short stories were published in 1992 and brought together seven collections. William Trevor’s collected short stories were published in 1992 and brought together seven collections. But since reaching the standard age for retirement, Trevor has produced four further volumes, and now Penguin has brought out a handsome new edition, in two slipcased volumes. The industry is impressive, but not nearly as impressive as the quality. Trevor is routinely described as the world’s greatest living writer of short stories (I suppose the competition is Alice Munro), which makes the reviewer’s task a little tricky. It boils down to this: is he?

Toby Litt begins the titles of his books with consecutive letters of the alphabet and takes delight in shifting style and genre. He has now reached J, and science fiction. There has been a flurry recently of ‘literary’ writers trying their hands at SF. For the most part, the complaint raised against these efforts is that they may be better written than most of science fiction, but they aren’t much cop as science fiction. Anyway, science fiction need not be badly written: fans are fond of quoting Sturgeon’s Law (after the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon) — ‘Ninety per cent of SF is crud, but then 90 per cent of everything is crud’. The corollary is that even the badly written stuff must offer something special to succeed.