Recent first novels

Harry Thompson’s death last year cut short a rampantly successful television career and a budding literary one. He will not be remembered for his fiction, but his only novel is strong-limbed, clean-cut and robustly hearty. It bravely makes straight for the most torturing of Victorian questions, the challenge to religious faith by the brash self-confidence of science. The two voyages of the Beagle fill the majority of the book, the second of which was accompanied by a young naturalist and prospective churchman, Charles Darwin. He is a formidable antagonist, though his increasingly sceptical rumblings provide an ostinato accompaniment to the tremulous flutings of the soul of Robert Fitzroy, the Beagle’s captain. Fitzroy was a remarkable man, a meteorological pioneer and, unlike many of his imperial colleagues, a true believer in the equality of all humans before God. His only memorial is a patch of the Atlantic, off the north-west coast of Spain. He also suffered from manic depression; Fitzroy regularly undergoes black-dog interludes but a full topography of the swell and pitch of melancholia eludes Thompson. The rumination that deflates Fitzroy also seeps into the rest of the book: there is enough discussion of geology, palaeontology and natural theology to furnish a sizeable intellectual history of the 19th century. Frequently characters mull over their emotions rather than feel through them. However, there is sufficient nautical derring-do and moral ambiguity to engage both appetitive and contemplative spirits.

Rules for Old Men Waiting ought to be terrible: an ageing writer (yawn) married to an artist (eyes glaze) spends a solitary bleak winter slowly dying with only his memories and self-pitying thoughts for company (chin collides with table). It seems the last resort of a plotless literary arse-gazer, desperate to write a novel.