Caroline Moore

Peter Carey’s fictions are like a powerful old-fashioned car driven with the modernist hand-brake on — revved-up narrative that stutters, stalls, leaps in unexpected spasms. With a less good writer this would be intensely annoying. Carey runs through many of the tricks of post-modernism — the tricksy shifts, the dislocations of chronology and viewpoint, the refusal to allow the reader the common courtesy of speech-marks, which might make it altogether too easy to know what is going on — yet, time after brilliant time, he carries it off (sometimes better than others; but this is one of his best). His tricks move beyond mere trickiness.

In The Master, a fictional portrait of Henry James, Colm Tóibín constructed a convincing and ultimately moving account of a man who craved — albeit ambiguously — emotional distance. His life is shown as balancing between a yearning for and shrinking from personal intimacy; involving what can be seen as a ‘betrayal’ of the world, ostensibly at least for the sake of his art. In Mothers and Sons, Tóibín returns to the theme of the deep need for, and painful cost of, emotional withdrawal, this time concentrating upon the maternal bond. All of the short stories in this collection are about separation, which is felt as both necessary and a form of betrayal.

Listing page content here Every time I pick up the latest novel by Anne Tyler, I wonder whether she is quite as good as her fans, of which I am one, like to think. Is she, in fact, no more than the Thinking Woman’s Good Holiday Read? No more than that! many readers will exclaim (and perhaps, like Henry Tilney, add that men ‘read nearly as many as women’): only a thoroughly readable book that doesn’t insult your intelligence! Even outside the airport bookshop, we are all grateful to find such a treasure. But there are a lot of readable books out there of the sort recommended by the Richard and Judy Book Club (no sneer at all intended: their choice encompasses some excellent works); and the question is why Anne Tyler should stand out.

Would-be artists clinging to the belief that they are in possession of strangely unrecognised genius draw comfort from the thought of Van Gogh. For struggling writers, the biography of Herman Melville is almost equally potent. In some ways, indeed, it is even more poignant, for it is one of early success; early glamour, after the publication of Typee in 1846, as ‘the man who lived among cannibals’; abundant early promise that, in the eyes of contemporaries, merely fizzled out. He wrote published fiction for only 12 years of his 72 years, to increasingly bad reviews and poor sales: when he died, his last work, Billy Budd: Foretopman, was an unpublished manuscript. His last novel was published in 1857, when he was only 38, and the rest of his life is sad reading.

The very title of Leaving Home announces a quintessential Brook- ner theme. A heroine in her novels will always face a struggle to escape, not only from an airless, restrictive upbringing (almost invariably embodied in a claustrophobically close relationship with her mother), but also from traits embedded in her own character. Her problem is that she has been so moulded by maternal genes and love, so bonded and bounded by her environment, that her character has become inseparable from her upbringing — and can, indeed, only be described as a ‘mindset’. Emma Roberts has been brought up by her widowed mother, cocooned in mutual love ‘so exclusive … that it was experienced more like anguish’.

Despite the title, this is not one of those gloom-mongering surveys of the state of culture that so regularly (usually at the end of a decade) predict the Death of the Novel, the End of History, the Death of the Individual, and the like. Indeed, on closer inspection, ‘The Last of England’ turns out to mean only ‘the last volume, for the present, in this particular series of the Oxford English Literary History’, bringing us up from 1960 to the millennium. Still, it nevertheless managed to monger a certain mild gloom in me. My chief complaint is that it does not make the period exciting enough. On internal evidence, I must be much the same age as Stevenson, first becoming thrilled by modern poetry and the theatre in the Seventies. And goodness, it was thrilling.

Annie Proulx's latest work is a strange hybrid. It is more a series of short stories than a novel; and though it is immensely readable, fusing sentiment and bleakness with Proulx's customary wit and irresistible relish for the quirky, some may find the whole ensemble less than a fully fledged work of fiction.