It has been said that the world of story- telling contains two fundamental plots — a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town. Here we have two journeys, and one unexpected visitor, from three debut novelists who show great promise.
In the first, the stranger arriving in town is the eponymous Mr Chartwell, the large and ‘strikingly hideous’ black dog that is the embodiment of Winston Churchill’s depression, who turns up on the doorstep of Esther Hammerhans one morning in July 1964. Esther, a library clerk in the House of Commons, has advertised a room to let, and Mr Chartwell is the sole respondent.
He is in the area for work, he tells Esther; he has clients nearby. One of those clients we know to be the 89-year-old Winston Churchill, who is preparing to retire from parliament, and who is desperate for a little respite from Mr Chartwell’s attentions. When Esther is asked to act as secretary and take dictation of Churchill’s resignation speech, the role of ‘Black Pat’ in their respective lives comes into focus.
This is not a complex narrative; it is an exploration of the depression that Black Pat embodies. But Rebecca Hunt portrays the murky fug with a psychological astuteness which gives the book a satisfying depth. Her prose is beautifully visual — the dog grins ‘filthily’ and a kettle ‘stopped its screaming and threw out hysterical clouds of steam’. It comes as no surprise to learn that she is also a painter.
The Lost Kings sets out its stall right from the start: its subtitle is ‘A stirring tale of adventure and derring-do set on the far frontiers of Empire’. In the opening scene, a rough-looking man (who is swiftly revealed to be a dastardly murderer) comes flying into the shop of the watchmaker Cyril King, demanding help in tracing the origins of the strange looking watch he is clutching, before promptly dropping dead. The story unfolds through excerpts from Cyril’s notebooks (he is an explorer manqué) and letters to him from the famous traveller Sir Paul Lindley-Small.
The Lost Kings is firmly in the adventure novel genre, and is packed with colourful characters and escapades. There are lusty maharajahs with harems of tempting wives; there are dark warnings from salty old captains, army deserters, crates of whisky stashed in mountain hideaways and rumours of a creature that is a cross between a cat and a deadly snake.
Though it at times resembles one of the choose-your-own adventure stories popular in the 1980s (‘You’ve seen the fort, I assume? Walk east, can’t miss it. If you can make it out in this bloody dust, of course’), the book is skilfully written, rattles along at a fair old pace and never fails to entertain.
The World Beneath centres around the fractured family of Rich and Sandy, whose idealism has been softened into compromise by time and the pressures of life, and their teenage daughter, Sophie. On Sophie’s 15th birthday, with the casual cruelty that only teenagers can manage, she drops a bombshell on her mother — she and her father have been in touch, unbeknown to Sandy, and are planning a walking trip in Tasmania together. Sophie is an Emo kid, who spends her days planning the tattoo she will get when she turns 18, hiding uneaten food in the compost heap, despising her parents. A perfectly normal family, then — yet like so many others, entirely unique.
Cate Kennedy is articulate and wise; resentments and old wounds bubble beneath the surface, threatening to spill over, and she keeps the tension taut throughout her tale, particularly as father and daughter walk further into the outback and, as they do so, tread the hesitant path towards a functional relationship.
Rich and Sandy may be frequently bitter, partly beaten down by life and full of regret and denial, but Kennedy manages to ensure that they do not become tediously self-pitying: all her characters have a self-awareness, wry humour, and are treated with warmth. The journey may not have as many twists along the way as that undertaken in The Lost Kings, but ultimately it is no less significant for those making it.
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