John De-Falbe

The first short chapter of The Other Side of You looks so simple. After introducing us to Elizabeth Cruickshank, a suicide patient who ‘in a certain light could have been 14 or 400’, Dr McBride explains how he and his psychiatrist colleagues ‘come alive at a certain kind of raving’. For McBride it is ‘the suicidally disposed who beckoned’. Then he tells us matter-of-factly how, when he was five, he saw his older brother run over by a reversing lorry, and of the loss that has weighed on him ever since. In these five pages Vickers discreetly and with immense skill establishes her narrator and sets out her primary theme. Perhaps because the author is herself professionally familiar with her subject matter, there is an ease to the narrative voice.

There is a delightful moment in this novel when Nathan, the narrator, is standing on one side of the street with his nephew, Tom, and they see Nancy Mazzucchelli on the other side. Tom thinks of her as the BPM, the Beautiful Perfect Mother, and he would never dare approach. Nathan simply walks over and starts talking to her. Characters do things like this in Auster novels — they assert themselves over destiny with clear logic and sunny optimism; they know what they want for lunch and they ask for it. The moment is delightful, however, because what animates Auster’s work is the unexpected.

The phrase ‘armchair travel’ sounds quaint; suggestive of austerity at home and anarchy abroad; an era of currency restrictions and mustachioed bandits, when it was altogether more advisable to stay at home and read some daredevil’s account of the Damascene soukhs or the Grand Canal than risk venturing into such places yourself. But travel is now so easy that settling for its sedentary reflection looks like admitting to rather withered aspirations: so it is a surprise to see four attractively packaged books from Haus in a new series cheerfully called ‘Armchair Travellers’. Among them is one for which I can think of no precedent, a travel book written by someone who stayed at home.

This superb novel takes place in the remote settlement of Yazyk, at the end of a 100-mile spur off the Trans-Siberian Railway. It is 1919. Most of the inhabitants belong to a bizarre Christian sect who desire no part in the political upheavals further west. But events have intruded upon them in the form of a detachment of the Czechoslovak Legion. The soldiers are commanded by the terrifying Matula, whose flesh was ‘coarsely flayed by heat and cold and fevers and jaundices and scurvies gone by.’ While his exhausted men dream of escaping from years of fighting to Vladivostock, and thence home to Prague, Matula seems to contemplate establishing a private fiefdom in the wilderness even though he understands that the Reds are closing in.

The Rules of Perspective is set in a provincial German art museum as it is bombed by the Americans at the end of the second world war. The pivotal scene is revealed at the outset: Corporal Neal Parry comes across four corpses seated in the ruined museum’s vaults. There are two men and two women, and they appear to have been killed by heat. A fifth corpse lies on the ground further away. It is evident that some paintings had been brought down here for protection, but all appear to have been destroyed except one. This vivid tableau exerts a powerful tension throughout the book, for the narrative is structured as a counterpoint alternating between the events relating to the Germans beforehand and the aftermath which is seen through Parry’s eyes.

All of a sudden, there is a buzz about Cynthia Ozick. Although respected for many years as a writer of fiction and criticism, no one ever seemed to expect her to reach a wide audience. Now, together with more famous luminaries, she has been announced as a contender for the first Man Booker International Prize: the media circus has opened itself to her. Her last novel, The Puttermesser Papers, was never published in the UK at all, despite critical acclaim in the USA, but The Bear Boy (called Heir to the Glimmering World in the US) has been published with a conviction that looks as if it expects substantial sales. The Mitwisser family are German Jews who have been rescued by the Quakers and brought to the Bronx in the 1930s.

As a former second lieutenant leading a rifle platoon in France in 1945, Paul Fussell may be supposed to have an intense personal interest in posterity’s understanding of military combat. He is the author of The Great War and Modern Memory and several other related books, so this theme is certainly one of profound intellectual interest for him too. His latest book, The Boys’ Crusade, is short and anecdotal, manifestly not the product of great research. For an author of such experience, one feels, it could almost have been written off the cuff. So what is Fussell’s purpose?

If the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, is one of those world events that many people remember very vividly, it may be because of its inherent drama, or it may be because it happened at Christmas, when we were all at home and ready to enjoy the heady voyeurism it offered on television. Since 1989, international attention has moved along a bit. Dimly, perhaps, we recall in our self-righteous, warmongering times that this monster was toppled without outside intervention. Our masters in Washington and Downing Street would probably regard this as irrelevant, but then no foreign power ever had much of an interest in Ceausescu’s fall. There is one man, however, who has kept his eye on Romania in the last few years, and we should raise a glass of tsuica to him.

This is a reissue in paperback of a novel that utterly vanished on its first publication in 1998. Since it is exceptionally good, it is worth explaining its disappearance. Review copies were sent out by Bellew, its original publisher, and copies were sent to the Society of Authors for submission to their Sagittarius Prize (best first novel by an author aged 60 and over), but ten days later Bellew went bust. The receivers sold all the stock to a remainders firm who took the view that The Danube Testament was unsaleable and pulped the whole edition. No copies went to bookshops. This does not quite explain why it was never reviewed if it is so good, but fiction from a small press has to fight hard for space in newspapers and bookshops.

In 1919 my grandfather was in Kars, near what is now Turkey’s north-eastern frontier, as part of a British occupation force connected with what might be regarded as the first oil war. Kars had recently been abandoned by the Russians after nearly a century (Pushkin stayed there) and was soon to be handed over to the Turks. Twenty years ago I happened to visit this dilapidated town myself; the colonial buildings still endowed it with pathetic grandeur. The Russians and Armenians who once lived here hover like shadows behind the modern Turks of Snow, and the prejudices and politics that bedevil the characters of this remarkable novel echo the forces that ejected their predecessors from the city.

Set in Anatolia in 1922, The Maze describes the retreat of a Greek brigade to the sea. Under the questionable guidance of a brigadier addicted to morphine and a hypocritical priest without the slightest understanding of their parlous situation, the detachment is lost in the arid landscape. Thanks to the trail of droppings left by a runaway horse, they reach a town where we are introduced to a venal mayor, a schoolmaster, an Armenian grocer, a French whore and various others. A mysterious spate of thefts is explained, and the man responsible for spreading seditious pamphlets is identified. Accompanied by civilians of the professional classes, the brigade then makes its way to the sea, leaving behind the Turkish underclass. It is not immediately clear why this is such a good novel.

Already a bestseller in the many countries where it has been published, I'm Not Scared was described to me as a modern version of The Go-Between. After struggling through the wooden introduction to a group of children cycling up a hill somewhere in the south of Italy, I was steeling myself for one of those second-rate bits of whimsy like Silk or Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress which unaccountably become international bestsellers. But the secret soon discovered by Michele, the child-narrator, is not just emotionally confusing like the illicit love affair to which the boy is made accessory in L. P. Hartley's novel, but a very real horror.

Michael Kr.