Fiction

Saturday

Andrew Taylor

Recent crime fiction | 23 July 2011

John Lawton’s Inspector Troy series constantly surprises. John Lawton’s Inspector Troy series constantly surprises. A Lily of the Field (Grove Press, £16.99), the seventh novel, has a plot stretching from Austria in 1934 to Wormwood Scrubs in 1949, via Los Alamos and Paris. Fiction rubs shoulders with fact. There are big themes — including the Holocaust, the atomic bomb and Cold War espionage — but they are linked to individual lives, beautifully and economically described. Meret is a cellist whom we meet as a schoolgirl in prewar Vienna, and her career provides the thread that binds together the various strands of the novel. Like all the characters, she is caught

Thursday

David Blackburn

Summer reading | 21 July 2011

It’s a tradition of the British summer. A Tory MP produces a summer reading list of weighty and worthy tomes to co-incide with the summer recess. This year, Keith Simpson has compiled the list, and as you can see it’s long as your arm. Spectator Book Blog contributor Nik Darlington has made a few selections from the list. And of course, we’d like CoffeeHousers’ recommendations too. Diary: Alastair Campbell, Diaries Vol. II: Power and the People and Diaries Vol. III: Power & Responsibility. Peter Catterall (editor), The Macmillan Diaries Vol. II: Prime Minister and After, 1957-1966. Earl Ferrers, Whatever Next? Reminiscences of a journey through life. Chris Mullin, A Walk-On Part: Diaries 1994-1999, A View

Saturday

Paul Johnson

When the going got tough

The acute emotional pain caused by his first wife’s infidelity was of priceless service to Evelyn Waugh as a novelist, says Paul Johnson Evelyn Waugh died, aged 62, in 1966, and his reputation has risen steadily ever since. His status as the finest English prose-writer of the 20th century is now being marked by an annotated complete edition of his works, sumptuously published by the Oxford University Press. As a prolegomenon, Penguin is issuing another complete edition in hardback, the first eight volumes of which are now available, priced £20 each. They include his life of Rossetti, three travel books, Labels, Remote People and Ninety-two Days, and his first four

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Flouting all those pieties

If not equal to his best novels, Kingsley Amis’s short stories are still wonderfully entertaining, says Philip Hensher Some writers of short fiction — there doesn’t seem to be a noun to parallel ‘novelist’ — are dedicated craftsmen, like Chekhov, Kipling, William Trevor, Alice Munro or V.S. Pritchett. Others, like Evelyn Waugh or E.M. Forster, are more haphazard, producing stories to commission, or as a sketch, to try something out in moments when an idea on a small scale seems to be all that inspiration can supply. The result, when the collected edition finally surfaces, is generally more varied in surface than the works of the specialist — just think

Simon Baker

The man who came to dinner

Each year Genevieve Lee holds an ‘alternative’ dinner party, to which she invites, along with her friends, a couple of people she wouldn’t ordinarily mix with — a Muslim, say, or homosexual. Each year Genevieve Lee holds an ‘alternative’ dinner party, to which she invites, along with her friends, a couple of people she wouldn’t ordinarily mix with — a Muslim, say, or homosexual. At her latest party a guest named Miles, whom she’s never met before, locks himself in the spare room, and refuses come out. In the first of the novel’s four sections, Genevieve contacts Anna, who had met Miles during a holiday in 1980, hoping that a

Saturday

Sam Leith

Golden lads and girls | 2 July 2011

Sam Leith tracks the careers of Alan Hollinghurst’s captivating new characters through youthful exuberance to old age, dust and a literary afterlife It’s quite hard to know where to begin, reviewing The Stranger’s Child. As I finished it, and was heard making bloody-hell-this-is-good noises, two people asked me: ‘What’s it about?’ That, as it turns out, is a very good question. Ostensibly, it’s about a fictional poet called Cecil Valance, a diffusion-line Rupert Brooke described years after his death in the first world war as ‘a first-rate example of the second-rate poet who enters into common consciousness more deeply than many greater masters’. Cecil is a Ripping Yarns toff, complete

James Grande

Chinese whispers

River of Smoke begins with the storm that struck the convict ship the Ibis at the end of Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 Man Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies. River of Smoke begins with the storm that struck the convict ship the Ibis at the end of Amitav Ghosh’s 2008 Man Booker-shortlisted Sea of Poppies. Redruth, the vessel of a Cornish plant-hunter, Frederick ‘Fitcher’ Penrose, sails in to Port Louis, Mauritius, two days after the Ibis, while the Anahita, belonging to Bahram Modi, a Bombay opium merchant, encounters the same storm on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Counting the cost of their voyages, characters from all three ships make their way

Saturday

Justin Cartwright

Mumbai and Mammon

This is a state of the nation novel or more accurately a state of Mumbai novel. Behind the tale of a struggle by a developer to acquire, for flashy redevelopment,  the three towers of the lower-middle-class, crumbling Vishram Co-operative Housing Society, lies a colourful and ambitious novel about the changing standards and habits of the citizens of Mumbai, poisoned as much by the rocketing wealth all around, as by the foul air and excrement-laden byways. (Adiga mentions shit and its stench time and again.) On the one side of the divide is a group of friends and neighbours who live in Tower A of the Society. The most respected of

James Walton

When more is less

If you know anything at all about Cynthia Ozick — an officially accredited grande dame in America, less famous in Britain — you won’t be surprised to hear that her new novel is influenced by Henry James. If you know anything at all about Cynthia Ozick — an officially accredited grande dame in America, less famous in Britain — you won’t be surprised to hear that her new novel is influenced by Henry James. Throughout Ozick’s career, James has hovered over her fiction and featured heavily in her essays. Now, in Foreign Bodies, she goes for, among other things, a full-scale recasting of The Ambassadors. In James’s novel, the middle-aged

Saturday

Clarke Hayes

Bookends: When will there be good news?

I am in love with Jackson Brodie. Does this mean that, in a literary homoerotic twist, I am actually in love with Kate Atkinson, his creator? I think it must. Sometimes I think I am Jackson Brodie. We share many traits: 50-odd, mid-life crisis, a lost (though in my case not murdered) sister. I know that it’s really Kate Atkinson who is Jackson Brodie. She must have a lost or murdered sister, mustn’t she?   I am in love with Jackson Brodie. Does this mean that, in a literary homoerotic twist, I am actually in love with Kate Atkinson, his creator? I think it must. Sometimes I think I am

Anthony Cummins

Those who die like cattle

An ex-farmer whose brother has died fighting in Iraq is the man at the centre of Graham Swift’s new book, a state-of-the-nation novel on a small canvas. An ex-farmer whose brother has died fighting in Iraq is the man at the centre of Graham Swift’s new book, a state-of-the-nation novel on a small canvas. Jack runs a caravan park on the Isle of Wight, having sold his centuries-old Devon farm to a banker in need of a bolt-hole. His parents are dead, and more than a decade has passed since he’s last been in touch with Tom, nine years his junior. Now Tom’s gone too, blown up by an IED,

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Honour the most exalted poet

What’s your punishment going to be, when you get to Hell? At least as envisaged by Dante, you might be somewhat surprised. Hitler (mass murderer) is in the outer ring of the seventh circle, up to his eyebrows in a river of blood and fire. Still, that’s a little better than the innocent manager of your local HSBC (banker), who is in the inner ring, running perpetually on burning sand. Both get off much lighter than the poor lady who, the other day, told me how much she’d enjoyed something or other I’d written (flatterer). She’s a whole circle lower down in the second bolgia, or pit, sitting in excrement

Judith Flanders

Pearls before swine

The story of Harry the Valet is the stuff of fiction. He was a dazzlingly adept, smooth, glamorous jewel thief, who never stooped to petty crime but carried off the kind of robberies more commonly found in novels and films: huge ruby necklaces, diamonds and pearls all poured out, pirate-treasure fashion, into his waiting hands. The Valet was the son of a successful lower-middle-class tradesman, a picture-framer, who died when he was a young man, leaving his widow to carry on his business, unsuccessfully. Harry meanwhile bet on horses, drank and smoked and revelled in bad company, soon finding himself with no money and no profession. He took the easy

Anthony Cummins

We are the past

Julie Myerson’s eighth novel is told by a woman who roams the City of London after an unspecified apocalypse (no power, bad weather). Julie Myerson’s eighth novel is told by a woman who roams the City of London after an unspecified apocalypse (no power, bad weather). The Monument is rubble, Tower Bridge has ‘long gone’ and scavengers are chopping fingers off frozen bodies to snatch rings. Our narrator can’t remember much — two thirds of the book pass before we find out her name is Izzy — but a couple of randy fellow vagrants claim to know her, and some children say she’s their mum. By the time one of

Saturday

Charlotte Moore

All shook up

Olivia Glazebrook’s first novel begins with a disaster. Olivia Glazebrook’s first novel begins with a disaster. Kit, painter of meretricious society portraits, has whisked Alice, his younger, pregnant girlfriend, off to Jordan for an indulgent weekend. Their car skids off a mountain road leaving Alice trapped inside. Kit behaves like an unheroic imperialist. ‘You bloody little man, Karim!’, he yells at the driver, but it is Karim who reminds him that they ought to be aiding Alice. They are rescued, but not all the artifice of a luxury hotel can prevent Alice’s miscarriage. Blood pours out of her ‘as if she were a vase, carelessly knocked over on a table.’

Richard Davenporthines

Victorian rough and tumble

Derby Day is meticulously plotted and written with bouncy confidence. It tells the story of a sordid, conniving rascal called Happerton who plots a betting swindle for a Derby of the 1860s. He marries the colourless but near-sociopathic daughter of a rich attorney, and cheats on her without noticing the intensity of her passion for him. The couple sedate the old man, reduce him to his dotage and raid his savings. Happerton also masterminds a raid on the strong-room of a City jewellers — echoes here of the jewellery raid in Taylor’s previous novel, At the Chime of a City Clock. All the while, with smug, relentless guile, he also

Saturday

A.N. Wilson

The way to dusty death

Beryl Bainbridge’s last novel is a haunting echo of her own final years, according to A. N. Wilson Some writers die years before bodily demise. They lose their grip. In the last five or six years of life, Beryl Bainbridge feared that this was happening, or had happened, to her. The books which had come in a steady flow from middle age onwards slowed to a trickle, and she was seized, not merely by illness, but by a black sense that the ‘bloody book’ on which she was engaged would not come. Yet her last book, all but completed, suggests something odder was happening in her case. A prescient friend

Saturday

Susan Hill

The villain as hero

Juvenilia is an unfortunate word, with its connotations of the derogatory ‘juvenile’. Juvenilia is an unfortunate word, with its connotations of the derogatory ‘juvenile’. When they reach adult estate, most writers prefer their early work to be forgotten. But publishers have long ferreted about to unearth the juvenilia of anyone with half a name.Though the reading public has never been so easily conned, such works are appreciated mainly by scholars of an author’s entire ouevre, wanting to trace early influences. So, if you could buy only one book this week, would it be The Doll, which contains a dozen very early short stories by Daphne du Maurier, and one rather

James Walton

Freudian slip

At Last is the fifth — and, it’s pretty safe to say, most eagerly awaited — of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels. At Last is the fifth — and, it’s pretty safe to say, most eagerly awaited — of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels. The first three, now called the Some Hope trilogy, took Patrick from an upper-class childhood where he was raped by his father from the age of five, through his understandably drug-addicted youth and on to the nervous beginnings of recovery at 30. Somehow, though, the result was a joy to read: full of dazzling phrase-making, terrific black comedy and stirringly vicious satire on the

Saturday

D J-Taylor

Doomed to disillusion

The Forgotten Waltz is one of those densely recapitulative novels that seek to interpret emotional crack-up from the angle of its ground-down aftermath. At the same time, it is not really a book about hindsight. Sometimes extending information to the reader and sometimes deliberately covering its tracks, sometimes inviting sympathy for its characters and sometimes implying that sympathy only gets in the way of knowledge, it offers the enticing spectacle of a heroine determined to decode the human acrostics that strew her path while darkly conscious that most of her judgments are either horribly provisional or downright inchoate. Everything kicks into gear back in the early 2000s, down by the