Mario Reading | The Spectator Columnists & Writers

Chinese whispers

Peter Ho Davies’s second novel, The Fortunes, is a beautifully crafted study, in four parts, of the history of the Chinese in America. Though it deals, of necessity, with racism in all its insidious forms, it does so with humanity, humour, self-deprecation and a hefty dose of irony. Each section — ‘Gold’, ‘Silver’, ‘Jade’ and ‘Pearl’ — covers a separate period in Chinese-American history. ‘Gold’ follows Ling, a half-white upwardly mobile immigrant, who arrives before the Civil War, starting as a laundryman and progressing to become the valet of one of the four big barons of the Central Pacific Railroad. On the way he falls in love with a prostitute, Little Sister, and has his queue cut off by a fellow Chinese to whom he has been attached in a race riot.

Mario Reading

The years of pain

I remember the exact day my illness first declared itself. Twenty-seven years ago. Thursday 20 October 1988. My then wife and I were at a viewing of Harry Hook’s The Kitchen Toto at the Strode Theatre in Street when I felt a sudden, crippling pain in my back. Being 35 and a grown-up, I tried to ignore it. But the pain came back when we went for a pizza that evening, and I ended up crawling to the gents’, mewling and cawing. It took me 11 days to summon up the courage to go to my GP. ‘I’m having terrible pain on the left of my spine. I passed something like a piece of liver in my urine. And I’ve got a lump on one testicle.’ The GP looked me up and down, as if to say, what is a young man like you doing in a place like this? ‘You’ve had a kidney stone but you’ve passed it,’ he said, at length.

First-rate firsts

It has become something of a truism among writers’ groups and in articles offering advice on how best to secure the services of an agent or publisher that the opening of a novel is everything — the ne plus ultra of the writer’s armoury. If one can knock the reader’s socks off with the first few lines one is almost there. So I’ve decided to conduct an experiment. Before reading any of these four first novels to the end, I shall compare and mark their opening couple of pages. First in line (and chosen entirely at random) is Michela Wrong’s Borderlines. Miss Wrong (you’ll find no silly jokes from me here) has been writing non-fiction books about Africa for years. This is her first try at a novel. She opens with a scene on a plane which stands in for her heroine’s life story.

A choice of first novels | 14 May 2015

As all writers know to their cost, first novels are never really first novels. They make their appearance after countless botched attempts at the perfect debut — a debut that always lurks just out of view, but seems tantalisingly easy for everyone else. My first published novel was fifth down the line. It was a line of sad, self-obsessed and achingly self-conscious junk manuscripts that now gather dust in a filing system that has long since lost any recognisable methodology. Jesse Armstrong, on the other hand, although making his debut in fiction with Love, Sex and Other Foreign Policy Goals, is no stranger to writing success. He already has a glittering career as co-author of Peep Show, The Thick of It, In the Loop and Four Lions under his belt.