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Tuesday 2 December 2008

A choice of first novels

Archie Bland picks out some recent first novels

At 500 pages, Crusaders has heft, at least. Its scale isn’t redundant: Kelly has grand political ambitions, and it takes space to make an argument out of characters. Unfortunately, the writing is inadequate to the task. Gore’s magisterial style — fine when it’s coming from him — seems to seep backwards into the narrative voice, even when we’re supposed to be inside the head of a hard man or a barmaid. This is fatal: when you’re trying to work out if an author’s effects are by mistake or bewildering design, it’s hard to think about his book in any other terms.

The Other Book (Bloomsbury, £6.99), by Philip Womack, has a much more limited scope — its main aim is to be a ripsnorting children’s adventure about a prep school boy and his magical book, which has evil in it, and in the wrong hands may lead to a demonic invasion from the netherworld. Ripsnorting it certainly is, with a villainess of exquisite froideur and a gratifying lack of parental interference. There are hiccups in the writing — Womack is keen on explaining totally unimaginable experiences, like the walls of the brain thinning, in terms that seem to assume we’ve all been there, and isn’t it a drag — and the book takes rather a long time to get going; but once it does, the helter-skelter pace and well-worn formula for the triumph of the good will keep any right-thinking ten-year-old hooked.

The equations for What Was Lost (Tindal Street Press, £8.99), which won Catherine O’Flynn the Costa First Book Prize, are a good deal trickier. It starts off as a straightforward and immensely likeable account of a little girl who sets up a detective agency to honour her dead father. Kate Meaney is the classic child outsider, her only ally a stuffed monkey called Mickey. The pair begin to conduct amusing investigations in her local shopping centre, Green Oaks, and everything’s rolling along nicely. In the last paragraph of the first section, Kate ‘sees her future stretched in front of her’. And then the book abruptly cuts from 1984 to 2003. Green Oaks, pallid as it was 20 years previously, is still there. Kate is not.

The transition is remarkable. Suddenly what was nostalgic seems elegiac, what was whimsical macabre; What Was Lost begins to feel like a different book altogether, and, since Kate is missing, picks up the stories of a lonely security guard and a deputy store manager locked in retail hell. O’Flynn never abandons her wry sense of humour, but as she begins to tease out the connections between the two halves of her brilliantly conceived plot, the sense that something’s missing grows stronger and stronger. The masterstroke of that unexpected shift is to make it feel as if the novel itself mourns the absence of its heroine; the irony, of course, is that her presence is felt in every line.

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