Novel

Enigma variations

This is a novel full of hints and mysteries.  Why does the Dutch woman rent a house in rural Wales, bringing with her a mattress, some bedding and a portrait of Emily Dickinson? What is the matter with her — at times she seems energetic, at others obscurely suffering. And what is she escaping from? In due course information filters through, in a series of deeper hints and teases, and the story switches back and forth between Wales and Amsterdam, where her husband and parents and a friendly policeman discuss the possible reasons for her flight — and speculate about her whereabouts, and how to trace her. In Wales, the

Joy to the world

Patrick Gale’s new novel could be read as a companion work to his hugely successful Notes from an Exhibition, and in fact, in a satisfying twist, some characters and even objects slip from the latter into this novel. Notes from an Exhibition centred around the character of Rachel Kelly, whose mental instability and solipsistic devotion to her art left a painful mark on her family. The ‘perfectly good man’ of this title is a vicar, Barnaby Johnson, as kind, gentle and balanced as Rachel Kelly was not, yet with the same sense of vocation — in this case, selfless service to the church — that moulds and in its own

Thirty years on

One of the pleasures of Alan Judd’s books is their sheer variety. His work includes biographies of Ford Madox Ford and Sir Mansfield Cummings, the first head of what became MI6, as well as nine novels, many of which have little in common with each other apart from unflashy but elegant prose. The Devil’s Own Work, for example, is a brilliant novella, almost a fable, that explores the fatal temptation of a novelist and the relationship between art and success. Another, The Kaiser’s Last Kiss, shows us both the Third Reich and the elderly Kaiser Wilhelm in a wholly unexpected light. Three of Judd’s novels, however, have both a protagonist

A matter of life and death

Hmm. Of the 30-plus characters in this novel, not one is both black and British. Odd, since it’s set in 2007-8, in south London. An early passage shows us a Polish builder listening to a ‘crowd of black kids’ on the Northern Line: ‘You never—’ ‘He never—’ ‘Batty man—’ And that’s it: six words in 650 pages. Capital, a metropolitan panorama that takes in the dawn of what we call ‘the current climate’, is wonderful — warm, funny, smart — but you do feel John Lanchester might be afraid to fall flat on his face with a fuddy-duddy faux pas. So no black Britons or (equally weirdly) teenagers of any

Apocalypse now

The blurb on the front of Grace McCleen’s debut novel (from Room author Emma Donoghue) proclaims it to be ‘extraordinary’, and goes on to praise it as ‘brutally real’, commending its mixture of ‘social observation and crazy mysticism, held together by a tale of parent-child love’. Unusually for a blurb, this is all accurate. McCleen’s novel may not be perfect, but it has a compelling and, at times hideously tense narrative that makes it an arresting read. It is deservedly named as one of Waterstones’ most promising debut novels of 2012. Owing something to both Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Stephen King’s Carrie, the story concerns

Tragedy of Antigone

Sofka Zinovieff’s absorbing first novel has two narrative voices. Maud is the English widow of Nikitas, whose death in a mysterious accident leads her to contact Antigone, the mother-in-law she has never met. A former Communist freedom fighter, Antigone was forced to leave Greece for the Soviet Union following the Greek civil war. She gave birth to Nikitas, her only child, in prison, and handed him over to her family when he was three years old, severing all further contact. Maud was the third wife of the dominant, swaggering Nikitas. She remained passive throughout their marriage; now, liberated by his death, she starts asking the questions to which she ought

The view from the top

Halfway through this book, the veil lifted, and I thought: ‘I see! I see what he’s trying to do!’ Pickering gets his characters, and moves them along, and then, after 150 pages, he manages to convey a really powerful sensation of something; you might call it amorality, or nihilism, or the sense of the pointlessness of it all. For the first 12 chapters, you are walking uphill, and then you get the view. For the hero, there is horror, and a Graham Greene-like sense of things not being what they seem. Before this moment, it’s a strange set up. I suppose it’s meant to be. Malone, our Greene-ish hero, is

Our man in Vienna

Just in case Private Eye smells a rat, let me put my cards on the table. Not once, but twice, I have sent the galley proofs of my novels to William Boyd and, not once, but twice, he has responded with generous ‘blurbs’, which my publishers have gratefully emblazoned on the covers. Believe me, in the exalted literary company Boyd keeps, that kind of generosity of spirit is as rare as hen’s teeth (try asking Sebastian or Salman for a jacket quote and see how far it gets you). So I’m not about to give Boyd a stinking review. Waiting for Sunrise could have been a sub-Da Vinci Code catastrophe,

Winter wonderland | 18 February 2012

Jack and Mabel move to Alaska to try to separate themselves from a tragedy — the loss of their only baby — that has frozen the core of their relationship. They intend to establish a homestead in the wilderness, but it is 1920 and they are middle-aged, friendless and from ‘back east’ — unprepared and ill-equipped for the backbreaking work and unspeakable loneliness of pioneer life. By the middle of their second winter the climate, isolation and sorrow of their situation seem to have got the better of them; at the opening of The Snow Child we find them at the end of their wits and their resources. During a

Many parts of man

In some ways, you’ve got to hand it to Craig Raine. Two years ago, after a distinguished career as a poet and all-round man of letters, he published his first novel — and received a series of reviews that, as Woody Allen once put it, read like a Tibetan Book of the Dead. According to virtually all of them, Heartbreak was fragmented, name-dropping, pretentious, and not really a novel anyway: more a loose collection of thoughts, revealing an alarming obsession with sexual organs. But with The Divine Comedy, Raine responds with almost heroic defiance. If you felt like that about the last book, it seems to shout, try this one

Bookends: A network of kidney-nappers

Raylan Givens, an ace detective in the Raymond Chandler mould, has encountered just about every shakedown artist and palooka in his native East Kentucky. His creator, Elmore Leonard, is a maestro of American noir; Raylan (Weidenfeld, £18.99), his latest thriller, presents a familiar impasto of choppy, street-savvy slang and hip-jive patter that verges on a kind of poetry. Typically, Raylan charts a murky underworld where criminals are in cahoots with politicians, and where murder is a consequence of this corruption. In his curl-toed cowboy boots, Federal Marshal Givens is summoned to investigate a case of trafficking in human body-parts. A man has been found moribund in a bathtub with his

Menace, mystery and decadence

It is fitting that Charles Dickens’s bicentenary coincides with Lawrence Durrell’s centenary, for the two novelists have crucial resemblances: both of them are triumphant in the intensity and power of their writing, but capable of calamitous lapses of taste; both of them are riotous comedians who sometimes plunge into hopeless melodrama. It is true that Einstein’s theory of relativity, which Durrell foisted on the structure of The Alexandria Quartet (reprinted, with a new introduction by Jan Morris) has no more part in Martin Chuzzlewit than the ludicrous sexual obsessions derived from Sade and Henry Miller which sully Durrell’s plot. But Dickens in certain moods was, as Angus Wilson said of

A choice of first novels | 4 February 2012

Mountains of the Moon is narrated by a woman just released after spending ten years in jail. The reason for her sentence and the details of her previous life are pieced together through disjointed fragments, forming a complex jigsaw. Lulu had a shocking childhood, with a violent stepfather and negligent mother. Her only loving relatives were her grandfather, who fuelled her imagination by conjuring up the Masai Mara in her dreary south-England surroundings, and her two half brothers, from whom she was eventually separated. This account, related in an idiosyncratic patois, with the matter-of-fact innocence of an abused child for whom abnormality is the norm, is quite horrifying. Lulu is

Chaos and the old order

If Gregor von Rezzori is known to English language readers, it is likely to be through his tense, disturbing novel Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (partly written in English), and/or his ravishing memoir Snows of Yesteryear. Rezzori was born in 1914 in Czernowitz in Bukovina, when it belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the first world war he became a citizen of Romania, from where, as a so-called ethnic German, he was ‘repatriated’ to Germany during the second world war. From the 1960s he lived in Italy, at Santa Maddalena, the home that he shared with his second wife near Florence, which she has since set up as a writers’ retreat.

Susan Hill

The phantom lover

Driving past several long abandoned second- world-war airfields in East Anglia last year I was struck by how spooky they seemed, just like the decommissioned army base that used to exist near me. Places where people have not only lived and worked but which form the background of wartime drama, and from which men went to their deaths, are bound to be haunted, and in Helen Dunmore’s short novel, it is an airfield that once saw Lancaster Bombers fly out into the night that forms a ghostly scene. Isabel is newly married to a doctor, Philip, and the two have moved to Yorkshire where he is now a GP. It

Lake Michigan days

It is probably hard to enjoy this new big novel from America without some understanding of the shortstop’s position on the baseball field. But that is easily remedied, thanks to YouTube, where searching for ‘shortstop, fielding’ arouses multiple videos that compete for attention, with stars of the game in their infield position between second and third base, taking ground balls hit at, near, or even away from them, scooping them up, throwing to first base for the out: something the shortstop does six or more times in a game. Besides the catcher, who largely stays put, it is the most demanding field position in baseball, and if you’re going to

Rather a cold fish

Published first novel (Salmon Fishing in the Yemen) at the age of 59, Richard and Judy choice, won Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction; spent his whole career in industry; lives in Northumberland, wears tweed cap, likes fishing…These are the facts you read about Paul Torday time and again, and he must be getting tired of them.    That first book really was good: the kind of novel you wish you’d written yourself, all done in emails, extracts from diaries and letters, snatches of Hansard, articles in newspapers, transcripts of interrogation sessions. It was a charming satire, about politicians, entrepreneurs and fish. His late career-change and success gave hope

Poison Ivy

‘Who was she?’, a browser might ask on finding three re-issued novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett, and ‘Why should I read them?’ Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) was one of 13 children of a Victorian physician. After his death, his widow wrapped herself in anger and subjected her children to cruel, neurotic tyranny. Their verbal laceration continued after her death in 1911, for Ivy took control of her siblings, and enforced a sadistic autocracy learnt from her mother. On Christmas Day 1917, the two youngest girls, ‘Topsy’ and 18-year-old ‘Baby’, for whom family life seethed with aggression, nerve storms and spite, locked themselves in a bedroom, and died in one another’s arms

Lifelong death wish

In February 2009, in a review in these pages of Stefan Zweig’s unfinished novel, The Post Office Girl, I wrote: ‘Here surely is what Joseph Conrad meant when he wrote that above all he wanted his readers “to see.’’  In The Post Office Girl Zweig explores the details of everyday life in language that pierces both brain and heart.’ Especially the details of loneliness, I should have added. Intimations of suicide darken this novel, and in 1942, with the manuscript incomplete, Zweig, age 60, and his much younger second wife, Lotte, poisoned themselves in a small Brazilian town and died in bed with her embracing him. It is telling that

A literary curio

Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, better known as Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), the son of French-Canadians spiced with the blood of Mohawk and Caughnawaga Indians and subdued, no doubt, by migration from Quebec to Lowell, an old mill town in Massachusetts, eventually fulfilled his adolescent ambition to live the life of the eccentric ‘artist’ . . . a high form of aesthete who has nothing to do with this maddening world of Philistines. He hoped that ‘lingual spontaneity’ would enable him to achieve ‘Supreme Reality’. In fact, On the Road (1957) did indeed serve as a guide to all America for the Beat Generation of the Fifties and after. His closest boyhood