Fiction

Saturday

Sam Leith

Names to conjure with

Golly gee. Academic literary critics are going to hate Faulks on Fiction like sin. Here is Sebastian three-for-two Faulks, if you please, clumping onto their turf with a book of reflections on a couple of dozen great novels. And he declares in his introduction, with some pride, that he intends to take ‘an unfashionable approach’ and examine characters in these books ‘as though they were real people’. And he then divides them into four character types — Heroes, Lovers, Snobs and Villains — without so much as footnoting a structuralist ethnographer, instead declaring ex cathedra that these are ‘the four character types that British novelists have returned to most often’.

Lewis Jones

And then there was one . . .

The English fascination with spies is gloriously reflected in our literature, from Kim to A Question of Attribution, and while their Egyptian and Israeli counterparts remain untranslated, and the Americans unreadable, English spy novelists rule. Compromised, divided and alienated, the spy is a model modern hero, and the spy’s world, with its furtive and fetishistic arcana, is an admirable theatre of identity, of English attitudes to sex and class, hypocrisy and betrayal. (The best recent spy novel is John Banville’s The Untouchable, which tells the story of Anthony Blunt more freely than Alan Bennett’s play, nudging the facts into outrageous fiction — casting Graham Greene as the villain, for example.)

Saturday

Anthony Cummins

Odd characters

Cedilla picks up where Adam Mars-Jones’s previous novel Pilcrow (2008) left off. Cedilla picks up where Adam Mars-Jones’s previous novel Pilcrow (2008) left off. That book described the early life of John Cromer, a boy whose joints are fused by arthritis. Most of it saw him bed-bound, whether at home in Bucks, at hospital, or boarding at a school for the disabled, where, sizing up the bulges in his classmates’ trousers, he wowed his dormitory with an unrivalled ability to talk filth after dark. The new book gets out more. Over the course of the 1960s, John has corrective surgery (painfully botched), passes his driving test, flies to India for

Cressida Connolly

The real deal

‘“We weren’t phoney,” Stephen said. “Our whole point was to live an authentic life, to challenge the bourgeois conventions of our parents’ generation. We wanted to make it real.”’ Such is the lifelong aspiration of Stephen Newman, the baby boomer hero of Linda Grant’s new novel. ‘“We weren’t phoney,” Stephen said. “Our whole point was to live an authentic life, to challenge the bourgeois conventions of our parents’ generation. We wanted to make it real.”’ Such is the lifelong aspiration of Stephen Newman, the baby boomer hero of Linda Grant’s new novel. As ambitions go, it’s fairly modest. He doesn’t want to scale Everest or found a business empire or

Saturday

Charlotte Hobson

The sweet smell of danger

If this novel is ever published with a scratch-and-sniff cover — which incidentally, I think it might be successful enough to warrant — this is what it would smell of: cheap petrol, lust, the ripe, acidic scent of decaying corpse, cat litter, $2,000 suits, Cristal champagne, decaying encyclopaedia, corruption, fumes from the power plant, betrayal, sausage. If this novel is ever published with a scratch-and-sniff cover — which incidentally, I think it might be successful enough to warrant — this is what it would smell of: cheap petrol, lust, the ripe, acidic scent of decaying corpse, cat litter, $2,000 suits, Cristal champagne, decaying encyclopaedia, corruption, fumes from the power plant,

Saturday

Philip Hensher

A novel approach

An interesting phenomenon of recent years is the novel about a real-life novelist. Of course, writers have often included fictitious members of their trade within their work — one thinks immediately of Thackeray’s Pendennis, Anthony Powell’s Nick Jenkins and Waugh’s Pinfold. Often, too, novelists have contrived extended tributes to favoured masters — Fielding features prominently in Kingsley Amis’s I Like It Here — without intruding into their social world. But, until recently, the novel which openly entered into biographical territory, writing a romance about the private lives of classical novelists or other artists, was rarely taken very seriously. Carl Bechhofer Roberts’s This Side Idolatry on the life of Dickens is

Alexander Masters

Smart ass

It’s the way Caroline pisses onto the concrete during the lunch break that delights her work colleagues: in a steaming, splattery arc. It’s the way Caroline pisses onto the concrete during the lunch break that delights her work colleagues: in a steaming, splattery arc. ‘It seemed to them an eloquent demonstration of the fact that the rules they lived by did not apply to her.’ Caroline is a donkey. During the day she analyses policy documents, calculates premiums and nibbles the pot-plants. In the evening she trots home across the city, through the chaotic tides of traffic and confusion of construction sites, to her keeper, Mr Shaw, to play chess.

Charlotte Moore

Too good for words

I confess myself baffled by this fable. The narrative is as clear, the prose as uncluttered, as one expects from Susan Hill, but its very simplicity leaves me wondering whether I’ve missed the point. I confess myself baffled by this fable. The narrative is as clear, the prose as uncluttered, as one expects from Susan Hill, but its very simplicity leaves me wondering whether I’ve missed the point. The strapline tells me to expect a tale of ‘greed, goodness, and an extraordinary miracle’. Well, it doesn’t seem to be about greed at all. There isn’t a greedy person in it. Needy, yes; it deals with need. ‘Goodness’ is more like

Saturday

Caroline Moore

The gentle touch

My main disappointment with this collection of stories was that I had already read six of them, in publications ranging from the New Yorker to the Guardian. This, however, only goes to prove the eagerness with which I seize upon Julian Barnes’ intelligent and subtle writing wherever it may first appear. Barnes’ two previous collections of short stories were loosely linked by a theme, though this was never overbearing: Cross Channel explored Anglo-French relationships, while The Lemon Table circled bleakly around old age. The stories in Pulse are more tenuously linked — except in so far as this is a collection about the tenuousness of links within human relationships. Indeed,

Saturday

Jessica Ruston

Journeys and strangers

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

Francis King

Miracles of compression

In the course of a lifetime of fiction reviewing, I have come to the conclusion that, though my colleagues are prepared doggedly to persevere with the reading of a novel from its muddled opening to its inconsequential end, they will read no more than four or five stories in a collection. What always guides them in this lazy choice is that one of the favoured stories will be the title one and another the most substantial. Since the title story is also the most substantial — in effect a novella — in Allan Massie’s Klaus, one can be absolutely certain that it will be the one on which every reviewer,

Saturday

Margaret Drabble

Mysteries and hauntings

Javier Marias’s elegant new volume is a collection of ghost stories, but its alluring dust jacket, illustrating the first tale, shows us a sunny midsummer image of a woman in a bikini admiring herself on a beach. Javier Marias’s elegant new volume is a collection of ghost stories, but its alluring dust jacket, illustrating the first tale, shows us a sunny midsummer image of a woman in a bikini admiring herself on a beach. All is not as pleasant as at first it seems, of course, and we soon enter his characteristically darker world of voyeurism, jealousy, revenge, doppelgängers and crime passionel. But the tone throughout the volume is playful

Saturday

Simon Baker

BOOKENDS: In the bleak midwinter

Salley Vickers name-checks (surely unwisely) the granddaddy of all short stories, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, in the foreword to her first collection, Aphrodite’s Hat (Fourth Estate, £16.99). Salley Vickers name-checks (surely unwisely) the granddaddy of all short stories, James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’, in the foreword to her first collection, Aphrodite’s Hat (Fourth Estate, £16.99). However, the less desirable influence of Roald Dahl seems to preside more tellingly in many of these yarns, which recall Tales of the Unexpected in their predictable twists and spooky presences. Fortunately, Vickers does not stay completely within the formula, and the volume contains a number of sketches about unhappy couples, dreadful mothers and uncared-for children

Philip Hensher

Classic makeover

Philip Hensher finds Flaubert’s scorn for his characters relieved by hilarity Astonishingly, this is the 20th time Madame Bovary has been translated into English. I say ‘astonishing’ because, as everyone knows, great novels in foreign languages tend to get done once, if at all. Most of Theodore Fontane has never been translated, or Jean-Paul, or Stifter; only in the last few years have the antique H. T. Lowe-Porter translations of Thomas Mann been superseded, and if you want to read most of Balzac’s immense work you will have to resort to 19th-century collected editions. Couldn’t one of those translators or publishers have turned their attention instead to Balzac’s Louis Lambert,

Saturday

Robert Cooper

Feeling pleasantly uncomfortable

It is rare for stories to be specially commissioned for an audio book, but as Maxim Jakubowski, the editor of The Sounds of Crime tells us in a pre-thrill talk, he ‘begged’ the five writers he considered to be the best in their field to produce a new story for this collection; and ‘happily for me,’ he tells us, ‘they all agreed.’ Jakubowski’s introduction evokes those black-and-white days when Alfred Hitchcock shuffled on to millions of walnut-encased television sets to present us with half an hour of spine-tingling tension — very much as we have with each of the stories here. It is rare for stories to be specially commissioned

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

Mean streets | 27 November 2010

Christmas is coming, which generally leads to a surge in sales of crime fiction. Fortunately for readers, some delectable crime novels have appeared in the past few months. Among them is Val McDermid’s Trick of the Dark (Little, Brown, £18.99). This is not one of her series novels but a standalone thriller whose plot revolves around St Scholastika’s College, Oxford, a women’s college with a certain resemblance to St Hilda’s. One of its alumnae is Charlie Flint, a clinical psychologist whose professional reputation is hanging in the balance. She receives an anonymous bundle of press cuttings relating to a recent murder at the college, now the subject of a high-profile

Ian Dunlop

Ring of truth

The glamorous art world of Manhattan is a natural subject for novelists and film-makers, but with the honourable exception of William Boyd’s Stars and Bars, written before the great art boom of recent times got going, few of the novels or movies have quite got it right. The glamorous art world of Manhattan is a natural subject for novelists and film-makers, but with the honourable exception of William Boyd’s Stars and Bars, written before the great art boom of recent times got going, few of the novels or movies have quite got it right. But now comes a novel by Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty, which does seem to

Susan Hill Susan Hill

Under the skin

Why do so many aspiring writers think it best to begin with the short story and graduate to the novel? It’s madness. The short story is infinitely harder to write well. Some novelists succeed at both — William Trevor and John McGahern are the names that spring to mind — but Chekhov never wrote a novel and, coming up to date, our leading woman short-story writer, Helen Simpson, has not been tempted to do so either. I can count on a hand the names of contemporary writers whose collections of short stories are worth reading, but Polly Samson has belonged on one of its fingers since her fine first volume,

Saturday

David Sexton

Change, decay and success

After having for so long been treated with such disdain by the French literary establishment, Michel Houellebecq has at last been embraced by it. Last week La carte et le territoire, his fifth novel, was awarded the Prix Goncourt, a distinction any of his previous novels might just as well have merited. Perhaps it has been possible to do him this belated justice because La carte et le territoire is less explicitly scandalous than its predecessors, more conventionally substantial even. If his previous novels have insolently portrayed life in our faithless, free-market world as a race between sex and death, here that race is over. There is almost no sex

The Spectator

Books of the Year | 20 November 2010

Philip Hensher The English novel I liked best this year was Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (Cape, £18.99) — humane, rueful and wonderfully resourceful in its wit. Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (Fourth Estate, £20) was simply a marvel of technique, observation and sympathy. At the other end of the artistic spectrum, Lydia Davis’s Collected Stories (Hamish Hamilton, £20) were a must for anyone seriously interested in the means of fiction. All three were, among other things, masterpieces of comedy. The memoir of suffering now has its own section in bookshops. Few of them deserve one’s attention, but Candia McWilliam’s magnificent What To Look For In Winter (Cape, £16.99) transcends its apparent