Fiction

The Exiles Return has been published as a beautiful Persephone Book, with smart dove-grey covers and a riotously colourful endpaper. Before this glorious incarnation, it existed for many years as a ‘yellowing typescript with some tippexed corrections’, one of the few things that Elisabeth de Waal held on to during her ‘life in transit between countries’, one of the few things eventually handed down to her grandson, celebrated author and potter Edmund de Waal. In The Hare with Amber Eyes, Edmund de Waal told the astonishing and very moving story held in his collection of netsuke, which was also passed down through the generations. Now, in getting Persephone Books to

While Ian McEwan’s recent piece in the Guardian is not expressly termed a treatise on the value of art, it is hard to see it otherwise. What is the use of fiction, what can a novelist tell us of, ‘why the Industrial Revolution began, or how the Higgs boson confers mass on fundamental particles…?’ he asks. At the heart of this modern day ‘defense of poesy’ is McEwan’s devotion to realism: it is realism that falls last to ‘the icy waters of scepticism’ and it is realism that saves him from it. He gives an account of how his thirteen year-old self, so overcome by the description of the 1900

Kevin Maher’s debut novel The Fields is set in the suburban streets of south Dublin in 1984. The story is narrated by Jim Finnegan: an innocent 13-year-old boy who lives in a carefree world that consists of hanging out in the local park and going on nightly bike rides with his geeky friend Gary. But shortly after his fourteenth birthday, Jim’s life drastically changes when he falls in love with a beautiful 18-year-old woman, Saidhbh Donoghue. After a brief honeymoon period their relationship turns sour when the young couple are forced to take a boat to Britain to arrange for Saidhbh to have an abortion. Both Jim and Saidhbh decide

The salubrious surroundings of the Waldorf Hotel seem like a very apt setting to interview a master of style and sophistication. When I arrive in the lobby, John Banville is nowhere to be seen. Peeping into the bar, I notice a grey haired man with a moustache, wearing a tuxedo, softly playing a grand piano. Taking a seat, this strikes me as the kind of place that Alex Cleave would enjoy a drink. Alex is a semi-retired actor, and the central protagonist and narrator of Ancient Light; a novel that recalls a passionate love affair that took place over fifty years ago. The object of Alex’s desire was Mrs Gray,

There is much to be said for godfathers. They offer the wisdom of maturity without the complications of direct filial ties. Likewise there is much to be said for 21st birthday celebrations, the last relic in our ossified, post-industrial society of the adulthood rituals of traditional peoples. However, it is the fusion of these two noble quantities that gives the most pleasing outcome. The godfather’s 21st birthday present to his godson marks a notable point in the annals of gift giving, unmatched since the general demise of dowries and Danegeld.  The occasion suggests gifts with an Edwardian tone, badger hair and ivory shaving tackle or rawhide hand luggage; stout apparatus

Death Comes For The Poets is an unliterary book with a highly literary subject. It’s usually done the other way around: exquisite quodrilogies about American car salesmen; towering works about bored wives in French villages. Here we have a thriller, but one written by two eminent contemporary poets in which poets are murdered in correspondent ways to their work. A man who wrote a collection called Stray gets torn apart by dogs. A womaniser who writes about oceans gets lured to his watery death by a beautiful woman. Is the murderer jealous of these poets’ reputations? or is somebody trying to create much needed publicity for the art? Luckily, there

Had he not died 12 years ago, Douglas Adams would have been 61 yesterday. Google produced a doodle in his memory, and the Guardian published an interesting piece which declared that Adams remains the king of comedy SF, before going on to argue that he was unique, pretty much the only writer in that genre. Take a bow Mr Adams; you’re top of a league of one. But, in a way, Adams was, or very nearly was, unique. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels are comedies of ideas flavoured with lashings of silliness: the restaurant at the end of the universe and Marvin the Paranoid Android, a robot beset

People call Lars Iyer a ‘cult author,’ which is odd, because almost every paper to have reviewed him from here to Los Angeles has praised him endlessly. The ‘cult’ thing is probably down to people naturally associating innovative, serious and challenging art with the marginal. This no doubt plays up to Iyer’s own theories about the climate of contemporary literature, but the reception of these books tells quite a different story. While his manifesto claims masterpieces cannot be produced in our age, and that no contemporary literature could be as important as anything by Samuel Beckett, critics call his books masterpieces and constantly compare him to Beckett. His characters lament

Rumer Godden’s prose tugs two ways at once. It is subtle, descriptive, and light, but also direct and unashamed of being turned inside out until darkness consumes it, rendering what was beautiful irrelevant and suddenly opaque. There is also a lot of it. Rumer Godden OBE (1907-1998) wrote over sixty works of fiction and non-fiction over a lifetime divided between England, where she was born, India, where she spent much of her young adulthood, and Scotland, where she lived for the last twenty years of her life. Godden’s three best-known novels, Black Narcissus, Breakfast with the Nikolides, and Kingfishers Catch Fire are set in India. Flickering with the awe and

‘Where have all the great French writers gone?’ the people cry. Or at least they would if anyone was interested in French books. Translated literature claims just 3 per cent of the UK literary market. This number, according to The Economist, is the lowest in the Western world. It is a sign of Britain’s often parochial literary culture, made even more glaring by statistics from France. The French translate a great deal; indeed, according to The New Yorker, many foreign books come to us in English by way of France. Do these facts imply that France is more outward looking? Is French culture being consumed by the American-led Anglosphere? Or

Issue 39 of Areté starts with the words “MEMOIR ISSUE” on the front cover. It is dedicated to writing which remembers its author. Hence we get essays on Proust; Art Spiegelman’s MAUS; Nabokov’s Speak, Memory; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Salman Rushdie’s 2012 memoir Joseph Anton; and a terrific account of the monomania of bored US soldiers in Iraq, by an ex-US airborne ranger, among others. Craig Raine – Areté’s founder and editor – disguises his editorial line artfully. On p42 Candia McWilliam asks the question: ‘What have biography and fiction to give one another?’ Questions like this occur throughout Areté. They serve to frame Raine’s long, crux essay

Here are the answers to the quiz posted last week. The winner will receive a signed first edition of Lynn Shepherd’s new novel, A Treacherous Likeness, which was inspired by the Shelleys. You can read Andrew Taylor’s Spectator review of A Treacherous Likeness here, or subscribe to do so here. 1 Who as a child a) Sent a cat up in a kite in the midst of a storm – Shelley b) Lost his father at the age of eight when he died falling from his horse – Keats c) Was bullied by his eight older brothers – Coleridge d) Played in the very first Eton versus Harrow cricket match at Lord’s – Byron 2 Who a) Left

This blog post is not going to say anything original. You’ll have read it all before. Its sole purpose is to convince you that P.G. Wodehouse is the master so everyone else should give up, particularly the people who’ve tried to adapt Blandings for the telly. Blandings on TV is not all that bad. I’ve laughed at the gentler moments of farce. Some of the dialogue sparkles. The performances are good-ish. The setting has some charm. But I’m inclined to agree with everyone else who has spent brain power on it: the screen can’t do Wodehouse. My father once told me that he kept copies of The Code of the Woosters

At 3pm this afternoon Radio 4’s Ramblings with Clare Balding will broadcast a programme about The Walking Book Club, to which Emily Rhodes belongs. ‘I love walking in London,’ said Mrs Dalloway. ‘Really it’s better than walking in the country.’ As a keen reader, writer and walker, I am always intrigued when an author writes a walk into their work of fiction. Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Bond Street at the beginning of Mrs Dalloway is one of Virginia Woolf’s most astonishing authorial feats. Woolf notes the outside world – ‘shop-keepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and diamonds … June had drawn out every leaf on

Regularly voted one of the greatest American novels of the last century, Theodore Dreiser’s moralising epic An American Tragedy (1925) hasn’t aged well. Adapted for the cinema as A Place in the Sun, however, it paired Montgomery Clift with the 17-year-old Elizabeth Taylor and gave us a film that still grips more than 60 years later. Director George Stevens disparaged what he called Technicolor’s ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning’ quality, and monochrome is indeed more suited to the ethical grey area explored by the film: whether a man who plans a murder but can’t go through with it is as guilty as a killer. Clift and Taylor don’t have conventional

In her Times column on Monday (£), Libby Purves valiantly attempted to fit together two things that were obviously on her mind. Discussing Pride and Prejudice, which is 200 years old this week, in relation to the modern permutations of marriage was sure to be a delicate operation. Purves argued that the book’s appeal lies in both its wit and the intellectual and emotional foreplay between Elizabeth and Darcy. What might seem ‘subversive’ for modern sensibilities, Purves suggests, is the fluttering of Elizabeth’s heart when she sees the size of Darcy’s pile. Nowadays, she argues, marriage is about ‘love’, of course. It doesn’t matter about class, wealth or gender. That

David Mitchell slaps a big hand on his head. ‘I look back at that kid and think, what were you thinking! How dare you, idiot!’ He is talking about his recklessness as a young writer. ‘Yeah I’ll stop it halfway, five times, and start it again. I’ll pretend I’m a Chinese woman living up a mountain.’ He compares it to being a teenager ‘leaping off a 12-foot wall’ without fear. As writers get older, he says, the recklessness subsides, and ‘it needs to be replaced by technique. If you can do that, you’re still in business.’ One of his most madly structured books, Cloud Atlas, has just been made into