Fiction

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime novels | 26 May 2012

William Brodrick’s crime novels have the great (and unusual) merit of being unlike anyone else’s, not least because his series hero, Brother Anselm, is a Gray’s Inn barrister turned Suffolk monk. The plot of The Day of the Lie (Little, Brown, £12.99), Anselm’s fourth case,  is triggered by the discovery of files relating to Poland’s suppression of dissidents in Warsaw, mainly in the 1950s. Anselm’s oldest friend, now blind, was caught up in a linked later betrayal while working as a journalist in Poland. He wants Anselm to go there in his stead to examine the file that holds the name of the informant who betrayed both him and many

Marcus Berkmann

Straying from the Way

No sensible writer wastes good material. A couple of years ago Tim Parks published a memoir, Teach Us to Sit Still, a tale of chronic, debilitating back pain that appeared to have no physical cause. He tried everything, short of major surgery, and even toyed with that for a while. Finally, in desperation, this lifelong sceptic took up meditation, and found to his amazement that it worked. By the book’s end we realised that we had been reading not so much about a man’s ill health as about a very particular and challenging midlife crisis. Parks is a novelist and academic who has lived and worked in Italy for the

Saturday

Nicola Shulman

Method in her magic

Bring Up the Bodies, as everybody knows, is the sequel to Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel’s fictional re-imagining of the life and times of Henry VIII’s most effective servant, Thomas Cromwell. We have long been banging our spoons and forks for it. Speaking for myself, I finished the first with an almost unbearable curiosity to find out what was going to happen next — a strange result, when you think of it, because we all know perfectly well what is going to happen. Mantel is comprehensive with her sources. Every scene is secured, like a piano key to its hammer, to the corresponding page of the great 21-volume Calendar of State

Adam Zamoyski

Fatal entrapment

I am no great fan of spy thrillers and positively allergic to conspiracy theories, but I found this book difficult to put down. In an earlier study, Edward Lucas examined Russia’s use of energy as a weapon against the EU and the Atlantic alliance. In this one, he dives below the surface into the murky waters of the country’s security apparatus and demonstrates that, while it has shed the old KGB image, it remains as pervasive and just as menacing. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the battlelines were clear cut and so was the role of the Soviet Union’s defenders. At home, they silenced any criticism of the

Anthony Cummins

The courage of their convictions

HHhH is a prize-winning French novel about a writer writing a novel about the plot to kill the Gestapo boss Reinhard Heydrich. A lot of people reckon it’s a big deal — Martin Amis, Mario Vargas Llosa, me — so naturally there’s a backlash afoot. In a fit of territorial pissing disguised as an interview, Michael Burleigh revealed that Laurent Binet ‘does not even read German’ (which HHhH admits on page 28) and professed surprise that his research failed to take in a Heydrich biography published (as Burleigh didn’t say) almost two years after HHhH first came out. I suppose part of the problem is that Binet asks for trouble

Thursday

Margaret Drabble

The usual suspects | 3 May 2012

It is disconcerting to discover that a novelist a generation older than oneself has been trying to write ‘a sort of Margaret Drabble effort’, even if the book ‘hadn’t turned out like that at all’. This is how Barbara Pym described her then unpublished campus novel An Academic Question in 1971 to her friend and admirer Philip Larkin. Naturally I was intrigued to know what she meant. Pym’s publishing history is well known: between 1950 and 1961 she published six  highly praised novels, and then ran up against a solid rock of refusals. Jonathan Cape dropped her, and she was told her work was out of fashion. Puzzled and down-hearted,

Justin Cartwright

Putting the fun in fundamentalism

Turnaround Books, the publishers of Timothy Mo’s remarkable Pure, are revealed to operate from Unit 3, Olympia Trading Estate, Coburg Road, London N22. From this we may deduce that the publishing history of the three times Booker-shortlisted Anglo-Chinese novelist continues on its maverick way. Imagine if Mo had approached a conventional publisher with a proposition: this is a novel about jihad in south-east Asia, as seen through the eyes of a Muslim ladyboy. Mo’s perversity and boldness apply in equal measure to his hero/heroine. In the person of Snooky, né Ahmed, the katoey, or ladyboy, from the Malay south who has moved to Bhuddist Bangkok, a film critic and an

Sophia Waugh

Family get together 

Mark Haddon is in what must sometimes seem like the unenviable position of having written a first (adult) novel which was, and continues to be, a smash hit. Drawing in part on his own experiences of working with the autistic, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time has become one of those books that anyone who claims to be a reader must know. His second novel, A Spot of Bother, did not receive the same acclaim, perhaps partly because the subject was a man in mid-life crisis who convinces himself he is dying. It too was wonderful, though — funny, perceptive and moving. His latest book, The

Saturday

Charlotte Moore

Cry freedom

Scenes From Early Life is a rather dull title for a deeply interesting book. It is a novel; this is stated on the jacket, as if anticipating the possibility that readers may question that definition. Set in Dacca (now Dhaka), it is about the emergence of Bangladesh as a state independent of Pakistan after the savage civil war of 1971. Philip Hensher has drawn on memory and history — family history and ‘real’ history. Historical characters, notably Sheik Mujib, the courageous and civilised Bangladeshi leader, mingle with semi- and wholly fictional ones. The joins are seamless. Finishing the book, I was startled to realise that Hensher, an Englishman, had written

D J-Taylor

Nowhere to go but down

I am just old enough to remember the terrific fuss that was made about the first Scots literary renaissance when it kicked into gear in the early 1980s. Inaugurated by Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981), whipped up into a movement by Gray, Agnes Owens and James Kelman’s Lean Tales (1985), and sent on a downward spiral by the latter’s Booker-winning How Late It Was How Late (1994), its distinguishing features were Glasgie patois, the conviction that everything was Mrs Thatcher’s fault, and a colossal amount of swearing. If you knew the meaning of the word ‘fuck’, a critic once wearily suggested, then about 10 per cent of Kelman’s work was already

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

The lady vanishes

The spy thriller is not the easiest genre for an author to choose. In the first place, it is haunted by the shade of John le Carré, past and present. Secondly, the end of the Cold War destroyed the comfortable framework that has underpinned the majority of espionage fiction for the last 40 years. Undeterred, however, Charles Cumming has succeeded in making something of a speciality of it with intelligent, literate novels like Typhoon and The Trinity Six that approach their subjects from unexpected angles. A Foreign Country, his sixth, revolves around the disappearance of a senior MI6 officer, Amelia Levene, six weeks before she is due to take up

Cressida Connolly

A bit of slap and tickle

Hard on the heels of the ecstatically received London revival of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (currently playing at the Novello Theatre) comes this hilarious novel. It’s not easy to pull off farce on the printed page when so many of the laughs of the genre generally depend upon physical comedy. In Noises Off, for example, one character hops about the stage like a demented kangaroo, his shoelaces tied together. But just as a filthy joke is made funnier when told by an apparently po-faced academic, so a really silly plot is enlivened when composed by a highly clever author. Frayn is that man. In the hands of someone less accomplished,

Saturday

Richard Davenporthines

A polished fragment

One evening nearly 40 years ago the world’s press descended on Patrick White in Sydney: they rampaged outside his house, pounded its doors, shouted through windows, camped on the lawn. The reason for this hullabaloo was that White had beaten Saul Bellow in the race for the Nobel Prize for Literature of 1973. Yet in contrast to Bellow, there is scant recognition of White’s name nowadays. His books are seldom read. There is no bodyguard of loyal emulators, as Bellow has with Martin Amis. The publication — in the year of White’s centenary — of an austerely precise slice of his literary remains provides a moment to recall and appraise

Sophia Waugh

… in the fall of a sparrow

Set in Romania in the 1950s, this is the story of two people, Augustin and Safta, who are both very different and yet very closely linked. Safta is the daughter of the big house, while Augustin is the deaf mute illegitimate son of the cook. Safta’s mother, high-minded, overly religious since the death of a baby, disappointed in her marriage, takes Augustin into the schoolroom until it becomes clear that while the boy has an impressive artistic talent he can learn nothing, and so he is returned to the stables. War comes, the house is dismantled, Safta, mourning her lost love, leaves the countryside and becomes a nurse and Augustin

James Walton

To thine own self be true

Azazeel comes to Britain as the winner of the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, inevitably known as the ‘Arabic Booker’. It’s also been both a source of controversy and an unexpected popular hit in Youssef Ziedan’s homeland. According to the translator’s afterword, within months of publication, ‘piles of the novel appeared on the pavements of Cairo, alongside the self-help manuals, political memoirs and Teach Yourself English books that are the staple of the Egyptian popular book market.’   The action takes place — and this is the controversial bit — during the relatively brief period when Egypt was a Christian country. By the early 5th century, the temples to

Anne Chisholm

What was it all for?

What happens to a novelist who becomes the conscience of a nation? Nadine Gordimer, who is now 89 and whose writing career began in the 1940s, has represented the progressive white intelligentsia of South Africa through a large corpus of fiction and essays, exploring personal and political morality with passionate lucidity through the apartheid years and beyond. She has long been internationally admired, winning the Booker Prize with The Conservationist in 1974 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. This latest book, a study of the troubled state of her nation after apartheid, is outspoken and unflinching. Her courage and her moral stature are unquestionable; but as this novel

Saturday

Richard Davenporthines

Picking up the pieces

‘The World of Interiors’ might have been a better title for this novel. Its two chief protagonists, Catherine Gehrig and Henry Brandling, live a century and a half apart, but both are beset by circumstances that make them physically isolated and emotionally stunted. They rail in furious misery, and are sunk in interior communing. Commodities matter to them: they are materialists gift-wrapped as aesthetes. Gehrig muses on ‘the huge peace of metal things’, appreciates Clarice Cliff tea-cups, arrays with austere elegance the tools of her work, ‘pliers, cutters, piercing saw, files, hammer, anti-magnetic tweezers, brass and steel wire, taps and dies, pin vice.’ Alone in his bedroom, Brandling is consoled

Diana Hendry

Memory games

I read this novel while convalescing from pneumonia. It proved admirably fit for purpose. A light diet, mildly entertaining and with enough twists and turns of plot to serve as a tonic. John O’Farrell is a man of many parts — comedy scriptwriter (Spitting Image, Alas Smith and Jones), political satirist (An Utterly Exasperating History of Modern Britain) and bestselling novelist. The Man Who Forgot his Wife is his fourth. The protaganist, Vaughan, hasn’t just forgotten his wife, he’s forgotten everything. Travelling on the underground one fine October afternoon, he suddenly finds his memory has been ‘wiped’ (more computer references to follow) and staggers into a hospital where a consultant

Alexander Larman

A choice of first novels | 24 March 2012

Charlotte Rogan’s The Lifeboat (Virago, £12.99) comes garlanded with praise from the likes of J. M. Coetzee and Hilary Mantel. Rogan, who has only taken up writing after a career in architecture and engineering, tells the story of Grace Winter, a young woman on trial for murder as the novel opens. She and her husband Henry had been travelling on a transatlantic liner, the Empress Alexandra, in 1914. When the ship mysteriously sank, Grace managed to secure  a place on a crowded lifeboat, commanded by the enigmatic Hardie. But what happened to her husband? And why did the ship sink? Rogan does an excellent job of conveying the fear and

Saturday

James Walton

Deviation and double entendre

If there’s anything full-time novelists hate more than a celebrity muscling in on their turf, it’s the celebrity doing such a good job that it seems as if anybody could write fiction. Happily for the pros, this isn’t a problem with Briefs Encountered. Not only is the book full of obvious flaws, but it also makes the whole business of novel-writing look unbelievably difficult. There is, it turns out, so much to do — what with plot, characters, dialogue and tone all to be created and, worse still, made coherent. And then there’s all those pesky sentences you have to string together… In fact, Clary’s set-up is quite promising. Richard