Olivia Glazebrook

‘I used to be an atheist,’ says ten-year-old Oskar Schell, ‘which means I didn’t believe in things that couldn’t be observed... It’s not that I believe in things that can’t be observed now, because I don’t. It’s that I believe things are extremely complicated.’ On 11 September 2001, Oskar is sent home from school when the World Trade Center is attacked. He is not anxious for his parents, since neither of them works near the Twin Towers. But when he gets home, he plays the messages on the answering machine, and discovers that his father is trapped at the top of one of the burning towers. Minutes later, the tower collapses. Oskar is a brainy, precocious, charming, confident boy whose father has been his god.

The Glass Castle is a memoir of an extraordinary childhood. Jeannette Walls and her three siblings survived an upbringing truly stranger than fiction — if it were invented, it would not be credible. Rex Walls, Jeanette’s father, is a brilliant and charismatic man; a mathematician, a physicist, and an inventor. He is also a brutal, selfish and irresponsible alcoholic. His wife Mary Rose is a painter who detests domestic chores and has an attitude towards her children as robust as her husband’s. ‘Suffering when you’re young is good for you,’ she says, and expects them to find their own food, and fight their own battles. Lori, Brian, Jeannette and Maur- een learn harsh lessons about self- sufficiency from the earliest age imaginable.

There are plenty of books about the first world war, but that’s not to say there isn’t room for another. In any case, this, I think, is the first novel to take as its hero a young Irish volunteer, stepping up to fight for the Allies in 1915. Too short to be a policeman like his father, 18-year-old Willie Dunne sees his chance to be a soldier and a hero when he reads of Kitchener’s appeal. And indeed, John Redmond the Irish leader has ‘echoed the call’, having received from the British ‘the sure and solemnly given promise of self-rule’ when the war is over. So Private Willie Dunne is shipped out of Ireland and flung into the trenches.

These days we are all sophisticates, or so we like to think. Thanks to the media and the internet we can become worldly without leaving home. What’s more, if we stay at home our theoretical broad-mindedness is never put to the test; we can express hip views and appear open to cultural differences whilst remaining comfortable by the fireside. So, asks Matthew Kneale, what happens to that kind of shallow sophistication when it finds itself on foreign ground? What happens to a smug moral code removed from its context? In these 12 short stories Kneale demonstrates the convenient elasticity of moral values.

This collection was originally published by Faber in 1993, and was followed in 1996 by Martel’s first novel, Self. Then Canongate bagged the prizewinning Life of Pi in 2002, and now, in the wake of its colossal success, they have republished these four stories, ‘slightly revised’. ‘I’m happy to offer these four stories again to the reading public ...’ chuckles Martel fondly in his Author’s Note, ‘... the youthful urge to overstate reined in, the occasional clumsiness in the prose I hope ironed out.’ The title story is an account of the decline and death of Paul, a young man who has contracted the HIV virus as a result of a blood transfusion in Jamaica.

Finishing The Rotters’ Club and finding ‘there will be a sequel’ posted at the back was a bit of good news. As was finding that sequel on my doormat. And here’s more good news: The Closed Circle is terrific. Last seen on election night in 1979, the characters from The Rotters’ Club are now pushing 40 and bracing themselves for the new century. Coe manages to fill us in on the intervening 20 years with the minimum of fuss, and soon Benjamin Trotter, his brother Paul, Claire Newman (sister of the vanished Miriam), Doug Anderton and Philip Chase are up and running again.

‘When you look at families, there is no such thing as normal.’ Indeed not. Justin Cartwright gives us the Judds, an apparently ordinary English middle-class family, and examines their response to a private catastrophe. The book begins as Juliet Judd, eldest child and ‘prodigal daughter’, is released from prison in America. She has been locked up for two years, jailed for selling a valuable stained-glass window which she knew to be stolen. Juliet’s prison sentence cast her whole family into a state of suspended emotional animation from which they now begin to stir, as Juliet makes her way home. This awakening is a painful process. Juliet’s father, Charles, is bewildered by the turn of events which landed his favourite child in an American jail.

Doctor Johnson’s excellent recipe for cucumber: ‘a cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.’ Some readers will doubtless cry, ‘But what about sandwiches?’ There is, as we are all aware, no accounting for taste. Taste is a moot point for readers of James Hamilton-Paterson’s satire, Cooking with Fernet-Branca. Our feeble hero, Gerald Samper, lives on a Tuscan hilltop from which he looks despisingly down on ‘un-reddened Brits’ who flock to the lower slopes for their hols. Gerald considers himself a cut above the hoi polloi, but the joke is on him; he has fallen into the trap of thinking that only other people are tourists.

If time travel were possible, surely there’d be people from the future causing mischief in the present? Well, not necessarily: perhaps when you travel back in time you visit a parallel universe and therefore can’t muck about with history, even if you try to. Alternatively there might already be time travellers dotted about, but when they start talking about coming from the future we think they’re bonkers and cart them off to the friendly hospital — like Andrew Carlssin, arrested in New York in January 2003 on insider-trader charges after turning $800 into $350 million in two weeks.

Oracle Night describes a nine-day episode in the life of a writer, Sidney Orr. Orr is recovering from a long illness after a sudden collapse resulted in critical head injuries. He has been lucky to escape with his life — or, to put it another way, he should be dead. Eight months after the accident Orr drifts around Brooklyn on daily recuperative walks, a shadow of his former self: he is light-headed, detached from the clamour of city life. One morning he buys a blue notebook and starts writing again, curiously absorbed. And then, as if by magic, his life begins to unravel. Certainties become uncertain, trust becomes mistrust, an ordered life turns to disorder, to panic and finally to tragedy. But there are many more stories within this curious book.

Olivia Joules is born Rachel Pixley, a ‘normal schoolgirl, living with two parents in Worksop’. But after she is cruelly orphaned, sent to live with a batty aunt, and then abandoned by her boyfriend she takes ‘a long hard look at life’ and decides to ‘search this shitty world for some beauty and excitement’. She reinvents herself and arrives in London as Olivia Joules: thin, clever, fanciable, quick-witted and well-dressed. In fact, she is damn near perfect — the kind of girl other girls might resent — but of course no one knows girls better than Helen Fielding, so Olivia has a touch of daffiness. Now we like her after all.

A group of bored American fighter pilots liven up their posting in cold war Germany with round-the-campfire joshing, petty squabbles, and some traditional extramarital frolicking. But hey — it’s all locker-room stuff: the banter is kept within acceptable boundaries. For safety’s sake a code of behaviour, however peculiar, is observed. Everyone seems to know the rules, written and unwritten. Into this frustrated pride of alpha males arrives an anomaly, Lieutenant Robert Cassada. Cassada is ambitious, aloof, reticent and therefore different. He lacks the carelessness or the natural talent of his fellow officers. He is also Puerto Rican, a fact which causes confusion and suspicion: ‘Well, how’d he get in the American Air Force?