Book now / The essential new fiction from the big names in 2014
Clockwise from top left: Sarah Waters, James Ellroy, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Hilary Mantel and Howard Jacobson. Photographs: Murdo MacLeod/Richard Saker/Sarah Lee/Marco Garcia
Book now: the essential new fiction from the big names in 2014
Autumn is always the busiest time in the publishing calendar – this year more than ever, with new books from many of the best-known authors
Alex Clark, John Dugdale, Justine Jordan and Steven Poole
Throughout his career, Amis has had a fascination with the Holocaust and the problem of how to engage imaginatively with a historical horror beyond imagination. He set his 1991 novel, Time's Arrow, in a world where chronology runs backward, so that the Nazi death camps become places of healing and rebirth. His new novel is just as unsettling, following the progress of a love affair in Auschwitz and taking us into the minds of Germans doing their best to normalise their part in the Nazi regime. The camp, says one character, is a mirror on the soul: "You can't turn away." But how to come to terms with such darkness? Time's Arrow was Man Booker-shortlisted, but this new novel hasn't made the cut.
Atwood's last collection of short stories was 2006's Moral Disorder, in which the history of a family is explored from the shifting point of view of one of its members. Since then, Atwood has completed the dystopian trilogy that began with Oryx and Crake with the publication of The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam. Now comes a gathering of nine stories, including her 2012 piece "I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth", in which she returns to the characters from The Robber Bride. Elsewhere, we encounter an elderly lady who finds a way to accommodate the little people she has begun to see everywhere, another woman is mistaken for a vampire and – perhaps most intriguingly – a 1.9 billion-year-old Arctic stromatolite helps to revenge an old crime. With plaudits from Alice Munro, Germaine Greer and Michael Ondaatje, this looks set to be one of the story collections of the autumn.
Already longlisted for this year's Booker, Jacobson's new novel promises different pleasures from the comic fury of Kalooki Nights or The Finkler Question, which won the prize in 2010. It is set in the future, after some catastrophe. The title itself is a mystery – one character's father always drew his fingers across his lips when pronouncing any word that began with the letter J. That character, Kevern, now meets a woman, Ailinn, and they fall in love. The novelist himself has confided to this writer that it is "my best book". Energetically promoting the dystopian literary cred, meanwhile, the publishers invoke Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, though, oddly, not The Hunger Games.
Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
The now-permanent Nobel favourite Murakami probably has the biggest following of any literary novelist on the planet. But readers who jumped on the bandwagon with his previous novel, the two-volume supernatural vigilante epic 1Q84, will here find a change of mood. As a teenager, Tsukuru is told one day by his four best friends that they don't want to see him any more, and they refuse to give any reason. Now Tsukuru is 36, a designer of railway stations, and his new girlfriend encourages him to seek out his old friends and demand to know why. Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki is a naturalistic coming-of-age story in the vein of his 2001 novel Norwegian Wood, sprinkled with strange images and written in a hauntingly mournful key.
This is Smith's first venture into historical fiction and you can bet it won't be like any other historical novels you've read. Clues about its contents are tantalisingly oblique. Suffice to say it adopts a double timeframe, with one strand tethered to the the Renaissance art world of the 1460s and the other wrapped around a "child of a child of the 1960s". We're promised a tale that borrows from painting's fresco technique, to bend time, genre and medium – Smith is such an artful novelist that we would expect nothing less. This year, she's the only British woman on the Booker longlist.
Waters has become a virtuoso historical novelist. Her last book, The Little Stranger, was set in the aftermath of the second world war; now she winds back the clock to an earlier period of postwar class and gender turmoil. South London, 1922: genteel Frances and her widowed mother have fallen on hard times, rubbing along in a big suburban house that used to be busy with menfolk and servants. During the war, Frances saw opportunities for freedom and love; now duty and bereavement have resigned her to confined spinsterhood and the kind of domestic hard labour previously unknown to a woman of her class. Until a couple of the "clerk class" move in as lodgers, and surprising intimacies develop … Waters has created both a page-turning melodrama and a fascinating portrait of London on the verge of great change.
Cusk's last novel, 2009's The Bradshaw Variations, told the story of three brothers and their families, and was set during the course of a year; Outline, her eighth, takes place over a few days and is concerned with characters more or less unknown to one another. In between these novels, Cusk wrote Aftermath, a non-fiction meditation on the end of her marriage. Here, too, the narrator has recently been through a domestic cataclysm, and perhaps as a result she is receptive to the stories of others: the charismatic Greek businessman she sits next to on a flight to Athens, where she is going to teach a writing course, the Irish short-story writer co-teaching the course, and sundry other writers. She presents their narratives in an artless, affectless style, passing the occasional comment but otherwise fostering the illusion – for illusion it is – that she is leaving her material unshaped. It has a mesmerising, cumulative effect, as fragments of lives and differing points of view overlap.
Ellroy's 14th novel opens in late 1941, a decade before LA Confidential, and like that book has the LAPD at its centre. Pearl Harbour brings the US into the war, and Japanese-Americans become the focus of paranoia and hatred. In this atmosphere of rising racism, the brutal killing of a Japanese family is investigated by Captain William H Parker and Sergeant Dudley Smith, who have a Japanese chemist on their team. Also prominent is 21-year-old Kay Lake, a typical noir heroine who, like Smith, has appeared in Ellroy's fiction before. Perfidia brings the two sides of his work together: the period crime-writing of LA Quartet, with its highlighting of police misdemeanours, and the wider politico-historical concerns of his subsequent Underworld USA trilogy, a "secret history" of the years from 1958 to 1972.
Three guests at a London hotel are found murdered, each with a cufflink in their mouth, on the same evening that a woman tells Hercule Poirot she is about to be killed. In the first ever Agatha Christie sequel, the Belgian sleuth is resurrected by Sophie Hannah, who has chosen to keep him (in contrast to Sherlock's creators' updating of the rival fictional detective) in his original period, the 1920s. A crime writer herself, and a Christie devotee since building up a complete collection of Poirots and Marples between the ages of 12 and 14, Hannah has talked of aspiring only to "polish" her idol's shoes, rather than step into them; and of a whodunnit's key ingredients being "an apparently impossible mystery, a totally unguessable solution, a super-brilliant detective", and a denouement in which a memorable motive is "the last present to be unwrapped". No sweat, then.
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher by Hilary Mantel
With only The Mirror and the Light, the final part of her Cromwell trilogy, to put the finishing touches to and the theatrical adaptations of the first two parts successfully launched, it's no wonder Mantel has found time to write a collection of stories. Nor that this most fearless of writers has given it such a provocative title, though it is not as yet clear to what precisely it refers, although the late prime minister is reported to feature as a character. Aside from that, settings include Greece, London and Saudi Arabia, where Mantel lived in the 1980s and which she wrote about in Eight Months on Ghazzah Street.
Mitchell's most recent book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, came dangerously close to being a straight historical novel. Four years later, he lets loose with something truly fantastical: an epic in many voices featuring supernatural beings, rips in reality and a global battle between good and evil. Yet Mitchell's superlative prose makes this much more than a tall tale: the novel also takes in family love and loss, the wars in Afganistan and Iraq and a horribly plausible near-future in which the end of oil is catapulting the world towards barbarism. (There's also a cheeky satirical sideswipe at the literary world, narrated by a Martin Amisesque novelist whose back catalogue includes the celebrated volume Desiccated Embryos.) Through friends and lovers we follow the life of Holly Sykes, from runaway Gravesend teenager in 1984 to an old woman in the west of Ireland, as she and the reader gradually discover that her mental quirks are all too real. It's a globe-trotting, mind-bending, hair-raising triumph, already sitting pretty on the Booker longlist.
Us was perhaps the most surprising inclusion on this year's Booker longlist. Nicholls's fourth novel follows in the footsteps of the mega-selling One Day in the sense that it's a will-they-won't-they male-female romance, but it's located firmly in middle age, as narrator Douglas, a staid biochemist, battles to save his marriage to the more free-spirited Connie. Their response to the crisis – a drifting apart that has revealed more fundamental issues – is an ill-advised decision to whisk their moody teenage son off on a grand tour of European cities, taking in art and culture and, Douglas fervently hopes, healing all rifts in the process. Needless to say, the Eurostar has barely shrugged free of suburban London before the first cracks appear, proving that travelling hopefully is far more difficult than actually arriving. But what gives Us an extra bit of charge is the careful elaboration of Douglas and Connie's meeting, courtship and long marriage, which results in a more complex picture of chance, circumstance, social mobility and personal difference than might at first have been expected. Us is likely to hit the spot with Nicholls's gently maturing readership.
Judge Fiona Maye is firmly ensconced at the heart of the establishment, bringing cool rationality as well as down-to-earth wisdom to the moral and domestic dilemmas she pronounces on. (Her judgments sound rather McEwanesque: among fellow judges she is "praised, even in her absence, for crisp prose, almost ironic, almost warm".) It is her duty to decide whether to overrule those who resist life-saving medical interventions – whether they are conjoined twins or Jehovah's Witnesses who need blood transfusions. But her personal life is in crisis, and her professional life is threatening to become personal. McEwan investigates the legal niceties and moral complexities of individual responsibility with precision-tooled prose – but has missed out on a Booker listing this year
Another Booker-longlistee, The Dog is the first novel since 2008 by the New York-based Irish writer. O'Neill's previous book, Netherland, attracted the admiration of Barack Obama ("An excellent novel," the president judged). The Dog sees a middle-aged New York lawyer, fresh from the collapse of a romantic relationship, accepting a new job in Dubai, where he will oversee some vast family fortune. This, he hopes, will be a fresh start, but people in novels are rarely allowed fresh starts. Here, expat-infested Dubai is an "abracadabrapolis" observed by a character the publishers describe as "a brilliantly entertaining antihero" who is "imprisoned by his endless powers of reasoning": we might hope for some Beckett in the Gulf. A critic for United Arab Emirates paper the National notes admiringly: "The Dog is unlikely to have a Middle Eastern launch at our local department of tourism."
The followup to Self's widely admired (and Booker-shortlisted) modernist novel Umbrella features an actual incident from the second world war, when the ship that had delivered the Hiroshima bomb materials to the South Pacific was sunk by a Japanese submarine. Nine hundred men died, including 200 victims of the worst shark attack (on humans) ever recorded. Given the cult success of Syfy's films Sharknado and Sharknado 2, Self appears to have his finger on culture's squalene pulse. Meanwhile, in the 1970s, a resident at a therapeutic home in north London begins to recount visions of struggling in a shark-infested ocean. His psychiatrist – Zack Busner, who has previously appeared in Umbrella and The Book of Dave – must decide whether there is some truth behind his patient's tales, or whether, so to speak, this whole imbroglio is epiphenomenal.
In Michel Faber's 2000 novel Under the Skin, now an enigmatic film, an alien comes to Earth with a mission. Faber's new novel – his first major work since the neo-Dickensian epic The Crimson Petal and the White – reverses the scenario. Evangelical Christian Peter leaves a world collapsing into environmental chaos to take the word of the Lord to a distant planet, Oasis – and, unnervingly, the inhabitants are desperate to receive it. "The book of strange new things" is the Oasans' title for the Bible, which Peter sets out to translate into words their alien physiognomy can cope with. As he toils to connect with them across an immeasurable gulf, he becomes increasingly estranged from his wife and his own planet, millions of miles away. Faber conjures the strangeness of an alien planet and the fervour of faith and doubt in a stunningly singular book.
After a long absence from writing fiction – her first novel, Housekeeping, was published in 1981 – Robinson returned in 2005 with the Pulitzer prizewinning Gilead, followed in 2009 by Home, which won the Orange prize; both set in the small Iowa town of Gilead. Lila returns us there, its eponymous protagonist a young woman with an exceptionally troubled past who becomes the wife of the elderly Reverend John Ames, already well known to Robinson's readers. As in the previous books, Robinson's interest in Calvinism – she described John Calvin recently as a humanist, "terrifically admiring of what the human mind does" – runs through the narrative, underpinning and illuminating the characters' moral dilemmas and choices. In Lila and Doll, the drifter who rescued her from childhood abandonment, Robinson creates a duo driven by the need to survive in a precarious and unpredictable environment, which lies in stark contrast to the more stable married life that Lila later finds; her struggle to reconcile the two halves of her experience is what powers this intriguing novel.
Colm Tóibín's 2009 novel Brooklyn was a masterful study of the mass emigrations that radically altered 1950s Ireland, as told through the story of Eilis Lacey, who travels from a small town on the country's southeastern edge to New York in search of work. Eilis recurs by mention in the opening chapter of Nora Webster, as her mother tells Nora how much she misses her daughter, now married and part of the vast Irish diaspora. For Nora, newly and prematurely widowed and with four children to look after, there is little prospect of such a transformation in her circumstances; her challenge is to make a new life under the watchful eyes of her friends, family and neighbours. Slowly, her horizons begin to broaden – and there are glimpses too of wider changes in Irish society. This patch of Ireland – bounded by the Wexford county lines, with the metropolises of Kilkenny and Dublin in the distance – is Tóibín's own, and you can feel his careful familiarity in every line, in the speech patterns and social habits of his characters, and in the half-nurturing, half-oppressive atmosphere he brings to life. Nora's story, though, remains as much her own as Eilis's was hers, and they represent a formidable part of Tóibín's varied and inventive body of work.
When a young woman from the Melbourne suburbs releases a computer virus into the privatised Australian prison system, it not only liberates hundreds of asylum seekers in her own country but frees the inmates of 5,000 American jails as well. Was it a deliberate act of cyberwar, or an accident made possible by a globalised jail-management system? Journalist Felix Moore is soon on the case, tracking Gaby Bailleux's actions back to the battle of Brisbane, a little-known incident in the second world war, when Australian and US servicemen scrapped in the streets. Double Booker prizewinner Peter Careydraws on the troubled history of Australia's "special relationship" with the US to frame an acutely topical story of cyberhackers and radicals.
Richard Ford had announced that he would not write any more about Frank Bascombe, protagonist of The Sportswriter and two further novels, and possibly the most admired Everyman of late-20th-century US fiction. But some heroes are too good to abandon for ever (as Conan Doyle and others found), and now Bascombe is back, to the probable pleasure of all who enjoy his chewy observational style. Though the novel's title might seem to imply some cringeworthy standup act, we are assured that here Bascombe will confront the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and embark upon an "odyssey", if you will, through today's America. Ford himself has explained his change of heart, not very apologetically: "I always think that, when I'm writing Frank Bascombe, I have the chance to write about the most important things I know, and that's always been irresistible." Only a grouch would argue.
It's four years since we've had a novel from the prescient pen of Neuromancer author William Gibson, whose recent work has concentrated on branding, technology and political conspiracies. This is his first novel to extend into the far future, with an American woman in 2020 witnessing a murder within a video game and a boy killed remotely on the London streets a century later. As ever, his futuristic subjects – "drones, outsourcing and kleptocracy" – are pressing concerns today.
In between writing the script for the film adaptation of Tóibín's Brooklyn, due to be released next year, Hornby has been hard at work on his first novel since 2009's Juliet, Naked. That novel told the story of a musician's mysterious disappearance from public view through the prism of obsessive fandom, and this new book looks set to take another look at the world of showbusiness and celebrity. Set in the 1960s, it follows a young woman who goes from Blackpool beauty queen to fame on a far greater scale as the star of a hugely popular sitcom. Hornby recently gave an audience a taster of Funny Girlat a small event in north London, at which he explained that the novel is an attempt "to rewrite history and create a British Lucille Ball".
No comments:
Post a Comment