Fiction

Reading a new John Banville novel is like walking into a house you know but finding the dirty old armchair has moved. The shelf, still stacked with the same books, is now bathed in dusty light. The rug has shifted from right under your feet. Time and memory, ‘a fussy firm of interior decorators’, have rearranged the furniture. Whenever a Banville character peers into the recesses of their mind — and introspection is the norm — they experience a similar feeling of disorientation. We last met Alexander Cleave in Eclipse when the former thespian had retreated to wandering around his late mother’s house in an attempt to gather his wits

Hearing that rope sales were going through the roof in New York, many of us naively assumed it was bored housewives wanting to recreate scenes from 50 Shades of Grey. Now, after another weekend of wall-to-wall broadsheet analysis of the least sexiest bonkbuster of all time, you have to wonder whether it might have been bought for another purpose.   The Guardian dedicated their usually reliably highbrow Review section to the phenomenon, persuading some hilariously unexpected writers (Will Self! Jeanette Winterson! Lol!) to have a go at their own sex scenes. I couldn’t face reading them, but you can here. And if you’re really into masochism, here’s an angry blogpost

When Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished book (not quite a novel, not quite a novella) The Original of Laura was posthumously released in 2009, consternation over whether it was right to publish the work at all — Nabokov had instructed that it be destroyed after his death — swiftly gave way to consternation over what the work contained. And what the work contained was yet more evidence that Nabokov’s interest in very young girls was, well, something rather more than an interest.   Here was a figure who was not so much possessed of the ability to send planets spinning (Nabokov’s definition of the real writer) as he was the ability to

It is almost twelve months ago, following the below-par A Death in Summer, that I wondered aloud on these pages whether Benjamin Black (aka Booker-winner, John Banville) had what it took to write a crime series. A resounding yes comes in the form of the fifth instalment — sixth novel overall, after the 2008 stand-alone The Lemur — of the Quirke series, Vengeance. Black has finally rediscovered the formula that made his debut, Christine Falls, so memorable.   To be sure, crime fiction purists will still bemoan the absence of standard clue-laying. The novel begins with the suicide of businessman Victor Delahaye, witnessed by his business partner’s son, Davy Clancy,

Viz magazine. The Beano. Judge Dredd. 2000AD… But that’s about it. Why doesn’t Britain have a comic book industry? Try an extended metaphor: Think of all English literature, laid out like a vast library. Ten thousand Romantic novels by Trollope. Cupboards crammed with textbooks on Shakespeare. Ubiquitous thumbed paperbacks of Harry Potter, Narnia, the Lord of the Rings. And enough soft porn to fill an Olympic swimming pool. But the shelf – if there was even a shelf – of British comic books would be nasty, brutish, and short. Why is this? Are we somehow less talented than our square-jawed American cousins? Certainly, there is no shortage of appetite here

The Libor scandal continues to shock, prompting bewilderment as well as disgust. The mood has turned against the City, with the FT suggesting that it ‘may be necessary to retire this generation of flawed leaders.’  In the piece below, Geraint Anderson, a former stockbroker and whistleblower, explains why his latest book, Payback Time, a story of people taking revenge on a bank they blame for their friend’s suicide, was inspired by the self-loathing caused by working for Mammon and the divisiveness which the crash has caused.      I did not write Payback Time for the money. This is not an attack on my publisher’s generosity, but a reflection of the

The word ‘reboot’, is the most weaselly term I’ve heard in film since people started talking about scripts needing ‘edge’ twenty years ago. A reboot is not a remake or a prequel or sequel or any of that cheesy commercial fare; it’s a reboot, a subtly different, very sophisticated, creative endeavour that has been employed to bring an old film to life, usually by making it in 3D. Remember when Sellafield was called Windscale or even Calder Hill?   I owe my new career to that horrible word, reboot. I was a screenwriter but recently crossed to writerly shed to become a novelist — or, in deference to the pigeon-holing

New Martin Amis novels haven’t always received a fine reception of late. So much so that even tepid praise now reads generously. In the current magazine Philip Hensher reviews the latest, Lionel Asbo, and closes by declaring it, ‘not as bad as I feared.’ Having just finished it I think there is much more to recommend it than that. Not least because it is such a good attempt at satirising our almost un-satirise-able modern Britain. There aren’t many novelists who can make you laugh at the strange thing this country has become. But Amis does, and often. The London borough of ‘Diston’ where most of the action is set is

John Irving’s latest novel, In One Person is narrated by a bisexual writer, Billy Abbot, who recalls his high school days from the 1950s, in the small New-England town of First Sister — where the majority of the cross-dressing residents are more likely to celebrate polymorphous perversity than puritanical punishment. Billy takes a fancy to various people, including: his stepfather; his friend’s mother; the captain of the school wrestling team; and the local librarian, Miss Frost — who reveals to Billy a secret regarding her own identity. The mood of the latter half of the book darkens when Billy moves to New York in the 1980s, witnessing the AIDS epidemic.

It is perhaps fitting — given his lack of fame and success — that many of you will have never heard of Pat Hobby. Hobby was a character who featured in a number of F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories towards the end of the author’s life, when he was working in Hollywood. Hobby is a forty-nine year old scriptwriter whose best days are long behind him. Rather than reaching out for a green light at the end of a dock in Long Island, Pat is forever scrabbling around for his next ten dollars in order to buy another drink or pay off his bookie. Regardless of whether he employs honest

The promotional tour for Lionel Asbo: State of England has been suspiciously quiet. The fact that Martin Amis hasn’t sworn, bitched or nominated the queen as guinea pig for euthanasia booths stirred the press into feverish levels of anticipation. Had the OAP (Old Age Provocateur) finally lost his teeth? Or was he simply biding his time before biting back? A satire on Lionel Asbo – Wayne Rooney look-alike and dedicated chav –  and his lottery win, it seems written to offend … even without subplots involving teenage pregnancy (she &”was six months gone when she sat her Eleven Plus”), incest with a thirty-something year old granny, pit bulls and acid attacks.

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