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Sunday 7 September 2008

A choice of first novels

Giles Wareing, a freelance journalist, is days away from his 40th birthday...

The Night Climbers by Ivo Stourton (Doubleday, £10) heralds the début of a brilliant writer. This is far from being your average tale of Oxbridge decadence. The characters are glamorous and extreme, and a lesser writer might have found it difficult to maintain credibility, but Stourton’s narrator has enough acumen to scrutinise his friends while stopping short of over-analysing them. The narrative switches effortlessly between the roofs and cafés and parks of Cambridge and the claustrophobic flat of the protagonist ten years on; the plot could easily have seemed formulaic but Stourton’s skill keeps the story from descending into melodrama. The writing is elegant, and bold similes combine imaginative description with original psychological insight. Stourton is a storyteller with perfect poise.

In Adam Foulds’s The Truth About These Strange Times (Weidenfeld, £12.99) Howard is a fat Scotsman with a criminal record; Les and Barbara take him into their home, whereupon he makes off with their son Saul, 11, a memory champion in the making. Howard is completely useless and can’t hold down a job as a towel attendant in a gym; over-worked, over-achieving Saul has never seen anyone like him, and yearns for the freedom he imagines that Howard has at his command. A touching relationship grows between them as Howard gives Saul a break from his matrices and binary sequences and begins to realise quite how much trouble they’ve got themselves into. The characters work well together: the child’s superior intelligence is balanced by the superior experience of the fat man, thus enabling a friendship to grow on equal terms, a new experience for both of them. There is an amusing cast of minor characters — Alfonso, a chip-shop owner and boxer, Hassan, an offensive co-worker who looks like a fridge, and a gaggle of friendly Russians who get Howard embroiled in a nerve-racking scheme of their own. Foulds is too gentle with his gentle giant, but perhaps that is really what we want for our weirdos and misfits.

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