Fiction

Saturday

Claudia FitzHerbert

Triumph and disaster

The title of this first novel refers to a version of childhood as a magical kingdom where evil can be overturned and heaven and earth remade at the whim of a power-crazed infant. In fact our narrator’s world has already been darkened by the time she is presented by her beloved elder brother with the rabbit she insists on calling God. She has been sexually abused by an elderly neighbour, a Jewish musician who fascinates her with tales of the concentration camp in which he was never interned. The brother discovers the betrayal, promises to keep it a secret and — this all happens in the first 30 pages —

Saturday

Patrick Skene-Catling

Bookends | 12 March 2011

About 80 per cent of books sold in this country are said to be bought by women, none more eagerly than Joanna Trollope’s anatomies of English middle-class family life. Her 16th novel, Daughters-in-Law (Cape, £18.99), is sociologically and psychologically as observant as ever, showing how not to be a suffocatingly possessive mother-in-law. About 80 per cent of books sold in this country are said to be bought by women, none more eagerly than Joanna Trollope’s anatomies of English middle-class family life. Her 16th novel, Daughters-in-Law (Cape, £18.99), is sociologically and psychologically as observant as ever, showing how not to be a suffocatingly possessive mother-in-law. Men, too, should benefit from this

Anthony Cummins

The family plot

Hisham Matar is a Libyan-American writer whose father, Jaballa — an opponent of Gaddafi — was kidnapped in Cairo in 1990. Hisham Matar is a Libyan-American writer whose father, Jaballa — an opponent of Gaddafi — was kidnapped in Cairo in 1990. He is believed to be in jail in Libya; Matar campaigns from London for his release. If you already knew this, it’s probably because of the attention that came Matar’s way when he published his first novel, In the Country of Men (2005). That book, set in Tripoli in 1979, is told from the point of view of a dissident’s young son. Although the details don’t match Jaballa’s

Saturday

Matthew Dennison

Death of the Author

The death of the Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad is the central event of David Miller’s debut novel. The death of the Polish-born British novelist Joseph Conrad is the central event of David Miller’s debut novel. A reimagining of Conrad’s final days, Today explores the nature of bereavement. Within the novel’s confines, Conrad exists simply as a character — a dying man whose profession has been that of a writer and whose working life has necessitated the presence of a secretary, Lillian Hallowes, who, up to a point, offers the reader a commentary on the novel’s happenings. Miller attempts no assessment of Conrad’s work, his literary status or psychology. In

Saturday

Charlotte Moore

Desk-bound, needing to get out more

Great House is an ambitious novel, if it’s a novel at all. Great House is an ambitious novel, if it’s a novel at all. It’s an exploration of regret, longing, loss, and of how Jews attempt to cope with the destruction that characterises their history. The title refers to the Book of Kings: ‘All the houses of Jerusalem, even every great house, he burned with fire’. If, as one of Krauss’ spokesmen puts it, ‘every Jewish memory were put together, every last holy fragment joined up again as one’, would the Great House be built again? The book divides into two sets of linked sections, the halves mirroring each other

Saturday

Lewis Jones

The call of the wild

Annie Proulx (pronounced ‘Pru’) began her writing career — quite late, in her fifties — as E.A. Proulx, to baffle misogynist editors; then she was E. Annie Proulx, until she dropped the E and became simply Annie the Proulx. Annie Proulx (pronounced ‘Pru’) began her writing career — quite late, in her fifties — as E.A. Proulx, to baffle misogynist editors; then she was E. Annie Proulx, until she dropped the E and became simply Annie the Proulx. (Her father’s ancestors, who left Anjou for Canada in the 17th century, were called Prou or Preault; her mother’s arrived in New England soon after the Mayflower.) Her fiction tends to be

Honor Clerk

Walking wounded

Paul Torday’s phenomenal success with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was always going to be a hard act to follow. Paul Torday’s phenomenal success with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was always going to be a hard act to follow. The idea of it was the thing — a wonderfully funny, mad idea, carried out economically in an epistolary style that rushed along from start to finish in a single fluid motion. ‘When once you have thought of big men and little men,’ a curmudgeonly Johnson said of Gulliver’s Travels, ‘it is very easy to do all the rest,’ but Salmon Fishing in the Yemen showed just how crucial that

Saturday

Patrick Skene-Catling

Beatrix Potter meets the Marquis de Sade

Anthropomorphism and a weird, astringent sense of humour combined to make The Queue, the late Jonathan Barrow’s only novel, a work of genius in the opinion of his brother Andrew. Anthropomorphism and a weird, astringent sense of humour combined to make The Queue, the late Jonathan Barrow’s only novel, a work of genius in the opinion of his brother Andrew. The typescript he inherited, though ‘unedited, repetitious and often excessively scatological’, he writes, ‘appealed to me immediately . . . I found it screamingly funny.’ In this affectionate expression of sibling adulation, he describes Jonathan’s style as ‘part journalese, part satire, part Beatrix Potter, part Marquis de Sade’. Jonathan wrote

Fay Maschler

Bruising times

In a market town in Kent at the time of Thatcher’s Britain, Charles Pemberton attends the town’s minor public school where his businessman father is a governor. In a market town in Kent at the time of Thatcher’s Britain, Charles Pemberton attends the town’s minor public school where his businessman father is a governor. Back in the 1930s, his grandfather Clarence had had ‘the right idea’, which was to build an eight-foot wall across a residential road in Oxford to separate his family home from newly built council houses. There is no such fortification available against the arrival at the school of Clark Rossiter, ‘a London chuck-out’ from a fringe

Sebastian Smee

Cross-cultural exchanges

The 18 stories, each around a dozen pages long, in E.C. Osondu’s Voice of America seem to have poured out of him like water. They have a fluency, an evenness of tone and texture, that creates an illusion of transparency and simplicity. The 18 stories, each around a dozen pages long, in E.C. Osondu’s Voice of America seem to have poured out of him like water. They have a fluency, an evenness of tone and texture, that creates an illusion of transparency and simplicity. There’s great comedy — and also artistry — in this because almost every story actually describes some degree of false consciousness, wrong-headedness or pathetic illusion. Life

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