Fiction

Thursday

Matthew Walther

Angel, by Elizabeth Taylor – review

‘She wrote fiction?’ Even today, with the admirable ladies at Virago nearly finished reissuing her dozen novels, Elizabeth Taylor remains mostly unknown except to fellow novelists, literary journalists, worthier publishing types, and a handful of dedicated readers. Even Nicola Beauman felt obliged to call her wonderful 2009 biography The Other Elizabeth Taylor so as to avoid confusion with the overrated actress whose debut film, National Velvet, was released only a few months prior to the publication of Taylor’s first novel. It cannot help her reputation that she had a majority of her papers burned, produced no journalism and kept her distance from literary London, writing only to friends such as

Matilda Bathurst

Ann Patchett’s new book will win you over, in spite of yourself

Ann Patchett’s novels revel in the tightly constructed ecosystems imagined for their characters: an opera singer besieged among diplomats in the Orange Prize-winning Bel Canto; State of Wonder’s pharmacologist in the Amazon; a fugitive wife hiding in a home for unwed mothers in The Patron Saint of Liars. In this new collection of personal essays collated from publications including the New York Times, Vogue and Granta, Patchett maps out her own life, her own constructed universe. From a post-divorce stint at TGI Friday’s and an early writing career in women’s magazines (a world where some of the greatest writers cut their teeth, not least Jorge Luis Borges), we move towards

Matthew Dennison

Margaret Drabble tries to lose the plot

Halfway through her new novel, Margaret Drabble tells us of Anna, the pure gold baby of the title, ‘There was no story to her life, no plot.’ That statement is partly true. It is also a challenge, a gauntlet cast by this very knowing writer at the reader’s feet; in terms of Drabble’s narrative, it is something of a mission statement. Seven years after her last novel, and despite suggestions (by herself) that her fiction-writing days were over, Drabble has written a novel that consistently resists readers’ simplest assumptions. The Pure Gold Baby is a fiction apparently based on fact, which works hard to suggest that it has no pattern,

Thursday

Cecilia Grayson

Rebus is good, but not as sharp as he once was

Cig 1 Auld Reekie . . . Edinburgh . . . brewers’ town, stinking of beer, whisky, tweeness, gentility, hypocrisy, corruption . . . DS Rebus awoke with a start, his hand still clutching a can of lager. He’d been asleep in his chair, as usual. He rarely went to bed. Bed was for sober people. The phone was still ringing, so stumbling over LP sleeves, full ashtrays and empty bottles, he picked up the receiver, greasy from last night’s fry-up. ‘It’s Siobhan,’ his colleague DI Clarke announced herself. ‘A new case has popped up.’ Rebus massaged his brow with an Irn-Bru can and grunted. ‘An old case, I mean,’

Thursday

D J-Taylor

The thrill of the (postmodern neo-Victorian) chase

Charles Palliser’s debut novel The Quincunx appeared as far back as 1989. Lavish and labyrinthine, this shifted nigh on a million copies, while more or less inaugurating the genre of ‘neo-Victorian literature’, whose ornaments are still clogging up the bookshop shelves a quarter of a century later. There have been three other novels since, at least one of them set in the here- and-now, but Palliser’s fifth outing straightaway returns us to the world of creaking lawsuits, high-grade subterfuge and lickerish kitchen-maids in which he made his reputation. In fact the territory occupied by Rustication is so familiar as to make the case-hardened reader of A.S. Byatt, Sarah Waters and

Thursday

Matthew Dennison

The imitable Jeeves

For as long as I can remember — I take neither pleasure nor pride in the admission — I have been one of those people who feels an irresistible curling of the lip at reviews of the ‘I laughed till I cried’ variety. Something about that hackneyed claim, invariably trumpeted in bold letters outside West End theatres, inspires absolute scepticism. No longer. At two memorable moments in Jeeves and the Wedding Bells I did indeed laugh until I cried. To readers unfamiliar with his role as a team captain on Radio 4’s The Write Stuff, the literary quiz which culminates each week with a pastiche of an author’s style, Sebastian

Ian Thomson

Carlos Acosta, the great dancer, should be a full-time novelist

Carlos Acosta, the greatest dancer of his generation, grew up in Havana as the youngest of 11 black children. Money was tight, but Carlos won a place at ballet school, and before long he was enthralling audiences at Covent Garden as a half Jagger, half Nureyev figure with a twist of the moon-walking Jackson in the mix. Now Acosta is about to leap into the world of literature with a debut novel, Pig’s Foot, written over a period of four years during rehearsal breaks. For all its manifest debt to Latin American so-called ‘magic realists’ (Marquez, Borges, Vargas Llosa), the novel stands triumphantly on its own. In pages of salty-sweetprose,

Simon Baker

Village life can be gripping

Black Sheep opens biblically, with a mining village named Mount of Zeal, which is ‘built in a bowl like an amphitheatre, with the pit winding gear where a stage would be’. It is divided into Lower, Middle and Upper Terrace, the last-mentioned known by the locals as Paradise. If, like many bookshop browsers, you judge a novel by its first page rather than by its cover, you might think, at this early point, that Susan Hill’s fairly recent theological studies sit heavily on the structure. You might expect (not necessarily with wild excitement) a familiar tale of stock characters and their moral failings. But it’s not like that. The opening

Thursday

Michael Paraskos

What a coincidence

If you are going to read a novel that plays with literary conventions you want it written with aplomb. In Three Brothers we are not disappointed, as Peter Ackroyd shows a deftness of touch that comes from being a real master. Here his theme is families. Or rather, it is London. Or rather, it is the use of coincidence as a plot device. In fact it is all three, but perhaps the most important is coincidence. As a literary device, coincidence is the presence of the author in the novel acting like an ancient Greek god directing events. This is apparent from the start when, in almost fairytale fashion, Ackroyd

Philip Hensher

Donna Tartt can do the thrills but not the trauma

Donna Tartt is an expert practitioner of what David Hare has called ‘the higher hokum’. She publishes a long novel every decade or so. Her first book, The Secret History (1992), was about some highly affected college students who took to studying ancient Greek in a cult and murdering one another in Dionysiac revels. It was a genuinely popular success — chic, macabre and supremely well-constructed. Her second, The Little Friend (2002), pursued a small girl through her attempts to pin the murder of her brother on the wrong culprit. It confirmed Tartt’s gift for an intricate plot, escalating into some furiously exciting action. The handling of suspense in both

Thursday

Marcus Berkmann

Licensed to feel: The new James Bond fusses over furnishings and sprinkles talc

First, an appalling admission: I have never read any of Ian Fleming’s Bond books. Nor have I read any of anybody else’s, the number of which seems to grow with each passing year. For a civilised man of a certain age this is a shameful oversight, given that I have seen all but three of the 23 films in the cinema, many of them at the Odeon, Leicester Square within days of their opening; that I can’t put on a dinner jacket without wondering whether Sean Connery would look better in it; and that I still own a copy, on 7” vinyl, of ‘Nobody Does It Better’ by Carly Simon,

Ian Thomson

Stephen King isn’t as scary as he used to be, but ‘Doctor Sleep’ is still a cracker

Though alcohol withdrawal is potentially fatal, booze has none of the media-confected glitz of heroin (imagine Will Self boasting of a Baileys Bristol Cream addiction). The 17th-century word for the sickness that follows excessive drinking — ‘crapula’ — effectively hints at the alcoholic’s sleazy kind of stupor. In his earlier years, Stephen King would drink himself daily into a wall-eyed hangover. His scariest novels — Carrie, The Stand, The Shining — were written in the 1970s when sobriety was a no-no for him. Jack Torrance, the author who goes off his rocker in The Shining, suffers the most horripilating of alcohol-tainted visions while holed up in the Overlook Hotel in

Piers Paul-Read

An Officer and a Gentleman, by Robert Harris – review

The Dreyfus Affair, the furore caused by a miscarriage of justice in France in 1894, is a source of perennial interest. It raises questions of national identity, political morality and personal integrity that are still relevant today with immigration, Euroscepticism and dodgy dossiers. It is also, as Emile Zola recognised, a gripping story: ‘What a poignant drama, and what superb characters.’ Like Zola, Robert Harris has recognised the Affair’s dramatic potential and re-tells it here as the taut, first-person, present-tense narrative of the heroic Colonel Georges Picquart. Picquart was a high-flying young officer from Alsace who acted as observer for the Minister of War, General Mercier, during the court martial

Thursday

William Ryan

One Night in Winter, by Simon Sebag Montefiore – review

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s One Night in Winter begins in the hours immediately following the solemn victory parade that marked the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany — probably the high point of Stalinism. Two teenagers, dressed in 19th- century costume and members of a secret literary club called, aptly as it turns out, the Fatal Romantics, have chosen this moment, of all moments, to re-enact a duel from Pushkin’s Onegin on a bridge beneath the very walls of the Kremlin. Needless to say, when the duel goes fatally wrong and the dead boy and girl are revealed to be the offspring of members of the Soviet leader’s inner circle, we

Caroline Moorehead

Monsieur le Commandant, by Romain Slocombe – review

There can be few characters in modern fiction more unpleasant than Paul-Jean Husson, the narrator in Romain Slocombe’s Monsieur le Commandant. Indeed, he is at times too nasty. If this otherwise compulsively readable novel about betrayal in Nazi-occupied France has a flaw, it lies in Husson’s irredeemable villainy, as if to make such a man more rounded, more subtle, were to allow a flicker of understanding for his actions, or to suspect the author of a degree of sympathy for the man. Husson is an anti-Semite, a Pétainist, a much-decorated hero of the first world war and a member of the Académie Française. He numbers among his friends Céline, Brasillach

Thursday

Cressida Connolly

Expo 58, by Jonathan Coe – review

In 1958 a vast international trade fair was held just outside Brussels. As well as being a showcase for industry, Expo 58 gave each country the chance to present something of their own national character. What the Brits came up with was a far cry from the gorgeous opulence and spectacle of last year’s Olympic opening ceremony: instead, the United Kingdom chose to represent itself by building a full-scale model of a pub.   Watneys brewery even invented a new beer for the pub and called it by the same name, The Britannia. This is the setting of Jonathan Coe’s new novel. In other hands it would be only mildly ridiculous:

John Sutherland

Wilkie Collins by Andrew Lycett – review

In the outrageous 2010 press hounding of the innocent schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies over the murder of his young female tenant (of which a neighbour, Vincent Tabak, was later convicted and over which the guilty newspapers later shelled out punitive sums), the Sun produced, as suspicious facts, that Jefferies was ‘obsessed by death’, and ‘scared the kids’ in his classroom. He had, for example, exposed his pupils to the ‘Victorian murder novel’ The Moonstone. As an English teacher at a high-ranked school, Jefferies would surely have prescribed my edition of Wilkie Collins’s novel— the only one, if I may toot my trumpet, to make comprehensive use of the manuscript. Pulp the

Thursday

Ian Thomson

Mr Loverman, by Bernardine Evaristo – review

In 1998, the Jamaican singer Bounty Killer released a single, ‘Can’t Believe Mi Eyes’, which expressed incredulity that men should wear tight trousers, because tight trousers are an effeminate display of gayness. Fear and loathing of homosexuals has a long history in the West Indies. Jamaica’s anti-sodomy laws, deriving from the English Act of 1861, carry a ten-year jail sentence for ‘the abominable crime’. Similar laws exist elsewhere in the Anglophone Caribbean, yet Jamaica is outwardly the most homophobic of the West Indian islands. A white man seen on his own in Jamaica is often assumed to be in search of gay sex. Batty bwoys (‘bum boys’) are in danger

Caroline Moore

Multiples, edited by Adam Thirlwell – review

There is a hoary Cold War joke about a newly invented translating machine. On a test run, the CIA scientists feed in ‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’, press the button to translate it into Russian, and then re-translate it into English. It emerges as ‘The vodka is passable, but the meat is putrid.’ Our modern translating machine is Google Translate. It takes more than one transmutation to scramble the Biblical quotation: however, if you shift it through Russian, Azerbaijani, Chinese, Hungarian, Tamil and Haitian Creole into French, you can get ‘J’aime la chair, elle était faible.’ Since the original is usually quoted by dieters reaching for

James Walton

The Windsor Faction, by D.J. Taylor – review

In both his novels and non-fiction, D. J. Taylor has long been fascinated by the period between the wars. Now in The Windsor Faction, he brings us a counterfactual version. What would have happened in 1939 if Mrs Simpson had conveniently died three years earlier, leaving Edward VIII free to stay on the throne?  Would he have prevented war with Germany — perhaps even by treacherous means? Taylor explores these questions from a variety of perspectives. In big London houses, groups such as the Nordic League and the White Knights of St Athelstan meet to campaign against Britain’s involvement in a ‘Jewish war’, convinced that they have the king’s unspoken