Book reviews roundup: MaddAddam, The Orchard of Lost Souls and Unexploded

What the critics thought of MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood, The Orchard of Lost Souls by Nadifa Mohamed and Unexploded by Alison MacLeod

23 August 2013

L

ast week's TLS made Margaret Atwood its cover star, but its review of MaddAddam was by no means as lionising as its readers might expect. Ruth Scurr regretfully identified "glitches" – "her ear for dialogue is unsteady", and the introductory recap of her dystopian trilogy's first two instalments is "leaden" – before reaching the less than thrilling verdict that the concluding novel is "the work of a wild, subversive writer who has looked long and hard at her craft". Other critics displayed more enthusiasm. In the Independent, Michèle Roberts tut-tutted that "the gender politics remain fairly conventional", and noted that the novel "zigzags" between several genres. Yet "behind the apparent disorder Atwood the conjuror remains in firm control". The Sunday Times's Peter Kemp praised her "deadpan wit, intellectual sizzle and sensuous immediacy", calling MaddAddam "a dystopia over which Atwood sets swirling a glitterball of different sorts of fiction". In the Independent on Sunday, James Kidd found it "an extraordinary achievement … Atwood's body of work will last precisely because she has told us about ourselves."

In a Man Booker longlist that omitted Atwood, the winner in 2000, this year's judges found room for two other authors with novels published this month. Nadifa Mohamed followed her debut, Black Mamba Boy, with The Orchard of Lost Souls, also set in war-torn east Africa, but in the 80s rather than the 30s. The Independent's Arifa Akbar detected none of the usual "second album" flaws: "her writing shows signs of maturity and a greater richness in characterisation." In contrast, Claire Lowdon wrote in the Sunday Times that "Mohamed's quest to inform often lends the prose a Wikipedia-like tone"; and "inevitable comparisons" with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun do her "no favours [since] Adichie avoided all the errors Mohamed seems to embrace: clunky reportage, sentimentality, facile reliance on the atrocities of war to impart power and profundity". Less damning was the Financial Times's Fatima Bhutto, who praised the book's "fascinating insights into late-1980s Somalia"; but concluded that the novel is "too rushed and [its heroines] are lost to the odd pace of the story and its many, many revelations".

Also Booker-longlisted, Alison MacLeod's Unexploded, set in wartime Brighton, fared better. "Intelligent and well-observed", applauded the London Evening Standard's Rosamund Urwin, although "the novel occasionally feels over-doused in adjectives". The Independent and Independent on Sunday were happily in harmony: "a novel of staggering elegance and beauty" and "a worthy [Booker] contender", said Lucy Scholes in the former, while the latter's Leyla Sanai praised MacLeod for being "potent on the devastation of war" and (despite agreeing with Urwin about adjectives) for "the sensuality of her prose". The Daily Telegraph's Anthony Cummins liked much of it – "the persuasive period setting, intricate plot, some sumptuous prose" – but found the handling of one key character, a German painter, "a big problem".

THE GUARDIAN