Suzi Feay | The Spectator columnists & writers

Helpless human puppets: Liberation Day, by George Saunders, reviewed

George Saunders’s handbook published last year, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, gave masterclasses on seven short stories by four Russian masters of the form: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov and Gogol. His critical observations can be taken as the manifesto for his own work. (The winner of the 2017 Man Booker prize with his first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, he is still best known as a short story writer.) It’s fair, then, to apply his stated rules to the pieces in his new collection. The last story, ‘My House’, although briefer, holds up well against Chekhov’s ‘In the Cart’. The title immediately contains a twist, because it’s not the narrator’s house, even though the historical building is for sale and he can easily afford the asking price.

Explorer, author, soldier, lover: The Romantic, by William Boyd, reviewed

William Boyd taps into the classical novel tradition with this sweeping tale of one man’s century-spanning life, even to the extent of providing the accustomed framing device: the chance discovery of a cache of papers and mementoes. The items listed by ‘WB’ in his ‘Author’s Note’ – a musket ball, a fragment of a Greek amphora, a crinkly lock of hair – all find their place in the tale of this 19th-century adventurer, lover, traveller and author. Cashel Greville Ross (his name turns out to be as mutable as his identity and nationality) is born in Ireland in irregular circumstances – so irregular that a swift flight to England as a boy is effected, the first of his many transitions. The temptation is great for authors who place fictional characters in historical settings to have them meet famous people along the way, but at least Boyd is knowing about it.

Hysterical outbursts: Bewitched, by Jill Dawson, reviewed

‘Witch-hunt’ has become a handy metaphor for online persecutions, especially of women, though these days it is reputations that go up in flames rather than bodies. The mob mentality behind the phenomenon may not have changed as much as the medium or the mindset. In retelling a celebrated case from Elizabethan England, Jill Dawson enters thoroughly into her characters’ religious world view, while giving a meaningful glance at the issues of today. The fate of the Warboys witches – three members of one family – was recounted in prurient pamphlets of the time, but Dawson colours in the crude woodcut of history with passionate emotions and plausible motivations. As she sets the scene, we learn that the bells which had recently rung out in the Huntingdon village of Warboys to celebrate the defeat of the Spanish Armada have reverted to regulating daily life in the tight-knit community.

The Victorian origins of ‘medieval’ folklore

I would guess that contemporary pagans have a love-hate relationship with Ronald Hutton. With books such as The Triumph of the Moon and Stations of the Sun, scholarly accounts of the history of modern witchcraft and the ritual year in Britain, no one writes more sensitively about their worldview. On the other hand, as an academic, Hutton assiduously seeks to saw off the branch on which many of their fondest assumptions sit. The paradox can be explained. Queens of the Wild returns to one of Hutton’s key themes: the debunking of the idea that pagan practices and beliefs survived intact in Europe from archaic times. With characteristic frankness he explains in his preface that the alluring title is the result of a compromise between the demands of the marketing department and his own ‘pedantic anxiety to settle on one that most accurately [reflects] the contents of the book’.

Smugglers’ gold: Winchelsea, by Alex Preston, reviewed

The atmospheric medieval town of Rye on the south coast still celebrates being a former haunt of smugglers, and on foggy nights it’s not hard to imagine stealthy figures in the shadows rolling barrels of illicit rum down its cobbled streets. Alex Preston has relocated to nearby Winchelsea, making it the setting for this maritime yarn. But any residual glamour attaching to these tax-averse citizens of Sussex is largely dispelled in a tale with as many moral qualms as thrilling exploits. Goody Brown recounts the cross-dressing adventures of her youth as the sole female member of the infamous Hawkhurst gang in the 1740s. Rescued from the sea as a baby (her mother was not so lucky), she is adopted by a kindly local couple and brought up in a house named Paradise.

Interpreting for a dictator: Intimacies, by Katie Kitamura, reviewed

If this is a cautious and circumspect novel, it’s because it involves a cautious and circumspect job: that of interpreter. The young woman at the centre of the story speaks fluent English, Japanese and French, with some German and Spanish. She grew up in Paris, then lived in New York, but death and disruption in the family mean that city no longer feels like home. On a sudden impulse, she applies for a temporary job at The Hague, working at ‘the Court’. What she doesn’t speak is Dutch, though linguistically she’s a quick study. The instability felt when negotiating a new city without fully understanding the language is echoed by the moral relativity involved in her new task, translating for a Francophone African former dictator accused of genocide.

Death and dishonour: The Promise, by Damon Galgut, reviewed

If death is not an event in life, as Wittgenstein observed, it’s a curious way to structure a novel. But since death is certainly an event in other people’s lives, Damon Galgut’s family saga, shrunk to the moments of passing, is ingenious. That the narrative takes great leaps over time yet also gives a firm sense of continuity is impressive. The various deaths in the Swart family take place over decades of political change in South Africa, which they barely register on their remote farm. Theirs is a mostly unexamined life, with white rule a given, practically ordained by God. The first death, that of Rachel, or ‘Ma’, is not unexpected. Twenty years after marrying Manie Swart, with her youngest daughter, Amor, only 13 years old, she has finally passed after a long illness.

Cairo in crisis: The Republic of False Truths, by Alaa Al Aswany, reviewed

Certain novels complicate the very notion of literary enjoyment. This, by the author of the international bestseller The Yacoubian Building, is such a one. Despite its gripping narrative, compelling structure and vivid characters, every time I picked it up it was with a sinking heart. In telling the story of the Egyptian revolution of 2011 through the viewpoint of a variety of Cairenes both for and against, Alaa Al Aswany holds out the slender straw of hope against the slashing shears of repression. General Ahmad Alwany has just supervised the torture of a man and the abuse of his wife at his HQ. But it’s not as though he’s devoid of human sentiment; he adores his daughter, Danya, a medical student. Unfortunately for the general, Danya is impressed and influenced by a fellow student, Khaled, an implacable foe to the Mubarak regime.

The Generic Asian Man: Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu, reviewed

Of the handful of things we can establish about Willis Wu, the protagonist of Charles Yu’s second novel, the most crucial is that he has occasional small roles in an American TV detective series, Black and White, set in Chinatown. In a group of similarly complexioned jobbing actors, his scope is limited to Background Oriental Male, Striving Immigrant or Generic Asian Man. His dream, like everyone else’s, is to rise to the athletic heights of Kung Fu Guy. Printed in the form of a script, with a typeface that looks as though it’s come straight off a manual typewriter, Interior Chinatown comically charts Willis’s progress through the ranks of extras. Despite rising to the level of Special Guest Star, Willis is still cast as a stereotype with a fake Chinese accent, denied the depth of the show’s lead characters.

A brutal education: At Night All Blood is Black, by David Diop, reviewed

Alfa Ndiaye, a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in the trenches of the Great War, is consumed by bloodlust, which you’d think might be an asset under the circumstances. But after watching the protracted, gruesome death of his friend and ‘more than brother’, Mademba, a switch is flicked in Alfa’s mind. He becomes, in effect, a sadistic serial killer, until war itself cannot provide sufficient cover for his extremity. David Diop’s powerful novel, not much more than novella length, is full of echoes and portents. Over the course of his self-justifying narrative, Alfa says ‘God’s truth’ so often that the notion is drained of meaning. Translated from the French, the text revolves around recurring images and verbal tics, as though Alfa is trying a series of keys to unlock his troubled psyche.

A dazzling fable about loneliness: Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke, reviewed

Susanna Clarke is a member of the elite group of authors who don’t write enough. In 2004, the bestselling debut from a cookery book editor seemed to promise an unfailing fountain of the creative imagination: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, a three-volume reworking of Britain’s military tussle with Napoleon, but with added fairies, felt like Jane Austen brewed up with spells and a dash of the Brontës’ Angria sagas. A short story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu, set in the same eerie territory, followed, and since then — silence. Piranesi is a publishing event, therefore. Austere and classical, it has no fairies but plenty of magic. The title character lives secluded in a mansion of dizzying perspectival queasiness.

Madcap escapades: The All True Adventures (and Rare Education) of the Daredevil Daniel Bones, by Owen Booth, reviewed

The narrative of an adolescent travelling by water with an older companion, undergoing trials and ordeals, encountering scoundrels and villains, with glimpses of society from high to low as they drift pass: it doesn’t take long before the flavour of this picaresque novel starts to seem hauntingly familiar. In his mid-teens towards the end of the 19th century, Dan, like Huckleberry Finn, escapes from a drunken father, and, though his journey is down the waterways of Europe rather than the Mississippi, the way he silently registers the corruption he sees all around him is deeply reminiscent of his literary forebear. His companion, the charming cad Captain Clarke B, could equally have walked out of Mark Twain’s novel, and just like Huck and Jim, Dan and ‘the cap’ have a series of encounters that expose the cruelty of their world.

The sorrows of young Hillary: Rodham, by Curtis Sittenfeld, reviewed

Question: which American president and first lady would you care to imagine having intercourse? If that provokes a shudder, be assured that the sex scenes between Yale law students Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton in Curtis Sittenfeld’s latest novel are cringe-free — even the one involving manual stimulation that takes place in a moving car. They’re young, they’re in love, it’s adorable. For Hillary, who has ruefully accepted that a fierce intellect is a drawback when it comes to dating, the leonine charmer from Arkansas is a gift dropped from heaven. Until he isn’t. A stumbling first paragraph sounds a warning about the limitations and non-literary quality of Hillary’s first-person narration. Fortunately, Sittenfeld is a great stylist and moves on quickly to a voice that’s plain yet pained, subdued yet supple, with unexpressed depths beneath the surface.

Dr Livingstone becomes a dead weight : Out of Darkness, Shining Light, by Petina Gappah

The scope of Petina Gappah’s impressive novel is laid out in the prologue: the death of the Victorian explorer David Livingstone and the ferrying of his desiccated body by loyal servants to the East African coast, so it could be returned in glory to his native Britain. A passage in Herodotus sent Livingstone on a fruitless search for four mythical fountains which he believed were the source of the Nile. Out of Darkness, Shining Light restores the identities, personalities and passions of his unruly household, whose funerary quest is carried out with a courage and sense of honour that aligns them with classical heroes rather than servants. They even cry ‘The sea, the sea!’ on reaching their goal, the town of Bagamoyo.

The wanderings of Ullis: Low, by Jeet Thayil, reviewed

Jeet Thayil’s previous novel, The Book of Chocolate Saints, an account of a fictional Indian artist and poet told in a multiplicity of voices, was a tub filled with delicious things. It also contained quite a lot of bran. His follow-up, Low, is slimmer and more condensed, its scope just a few days rather than a lifetime, with a sole narrator, a troubled Indian poet named Dominic Ullis. We first encounter him on a plane to Bombay (his preferred name for the city). He has spent the flight from Delhi in a haze (‘The Ambien bloomed soon after take-off, all 20 milligrams at once’) and awakes to find his bejewelled neighbour, Payal, stealing the cutlery — presumably they’re in first class. She either mishears his name or assigns him ‘Ulysses’, the first of many literary references.

Beetle invasion

Silicon Valley moguls might not find Zed a particularly amusing read. Joanna Kavenna’s latest mindbender features the CEO of a multinational tech company whose sway has long outstripped that of mere governments. Guy Matthias’s creation, Beetle, has invaded western lives to an unprecedented degree. BeetleBands on wrists advise users when they need to eat, hydrate or calm down. Very Intelligent Personal Assistants or Veeps perform tasks and offer factual information. Monetary systems have long since switched to the cryptocurrency Beetlebits, leaving late adopters penniless. Beetle runs the premier mode of transport, all telecommunications and the ubiquitous surveillance cameras. The information is fed back to individual, constantly adjusted Lifestreams.

The pursuit of beauty

Michelangelo seems never to have travelled to Turkey to advise the Sultan on a bridge to span the Golden Horn, but he was asked to provide an architectural drawing after the design of his great rival, Leonardo da Vinci, was rejected. An ‘Author’s Note’ to this enigmatic novella references a sketch attributed to Michelangelo ‘recently discovered in the Ottoman archives’, together with a list purporting to be an inventory of possessions he left behind. From these intriguing if flimsy historical traces, Mathias Enard imagines the 30-year-old Michelangelo in Constantinople in 1506, transfixed by the majestic city and its captivating people, but baffled by court ritual and the scale of the engineering problem at hand.

Oedipus vex

Coming 12 years after his acclaimed debut, Londonstani, Gautam Malkani’s second novel Distortion features a vivid argot, complicating and defamiliarising everyday terms and activities. In its pages, young people do things in exciting new ways, for example going down stairs: ‘It’s the most longed-out staircase you ever saw. Steps so far apart you gotta keep checking your stride.’ Old-dude technology requires explanation: ‘Deskphone’s got some caller-display screen but it only does its thing if they dial you direct.’ Actually, everything requires explanation, nearly always called ‘mansplaining’, the narrator Dillon/Dhilan/Dylan missing the point that it’s what men do to women they assume are stupid. Why the three names? I’ll get back to that.

Playing for time

In a pleasing nod to Marcel Proust, Eustace, the middle-aged protagonist of Patrick Gale’s new novel, is propelled into memories of his childhood by a piece of music. An online flirtation via Skype with a much younger serving soldier is beginning to consume his thoughts, at least until a health crisis looms. Telling Theo nothing about his cancer diagnosis, Eustace goes for radio-active iodine therapy, having been warned to bring nothing with him that he doesn’t mind throwing away after. Saint-Saens’s ‘The Swan’ drifting through on his MP3 player leads him to relive his boyhood as a devoted cellist, and to reflect which parts of his past can also now be discarded. While Eustace lies in his hospital suite, the bulk of the novel deals with memories of his musical and sexual awakening.

From Troy to the Troubles

Recently there has been a spate of retellings of the Iliad, to name just Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, focusing on the female slaves, and Colm Tóibín’s take on the aftermath of the Trojan war, House of Names. For his second novel, Michael Hughes attempts something more literal and more challenging: to transpose the narrative of Homer’s war epic as closely as possible to the Troubles. The story concerns Achill, a disenchanted IRA sniper, and his paramilitary boss, who fall out over a girl. Pig is just as unappealing as Agamemnon; Helen is local beauty Nellie; Hector is SAS man Henry; and Patroclus pleasingly, becomes Pat, Achill’s young protégé but not bed partner. Hughes does his best, finding reasonable fictional correspondences for Ilium (Camp William, the ‘W’ having gone missing), and such moments as the child Astyanax (Max, here) being terrified by his father Hector wearing a helmet.

All their wits about them

From Aphra Behn to Virginia Woolf, women who make a living by their pens have frequently felt the need to announce their singularity; to be, as Mary Wollstonecraft announced, ‘the first of a new genus’. Each of the women in Michelle Dean’s survey of mostly American essayists, reviewers and novelists had to defend her right to debate, critique and observe. The lives of Sontag, Arendt, Parker, West, Didion, Ephron and others are woven into a thick braid running the length of the 20th century and into ours. It’s not quite a group biography, but more a study of how their lives and work dovetailed with each other and with the major political and cultural movements of the era. Dean begins with Dorothy Parker, poet, short story writer, acidic reviewer and queen of the Algonquin Round Table (Dean demythologises this, as indeed did Parker herself).

Getting away with murder | 22 March 2018

This true-crime narrative ought, by rights, to be broken backed, in two tragic ways. One is that the serial attacker it concerns, a sneaking California rapist who graduated to multiple murder, was never caught. The other is that its author died aged 46 before the book could be completed. That it is nevertheless so gripping and satisfying is thanks to its sensitive editors and compilers, but mainly due to the remarkable skills of Michelle McNamara herself. The subtitle is ‘One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer’. McNamara coined the catchy nickname for the shadowy figure that slaughtered five couples and two women between 1978 and 1986. The investigators knew him as EAR-ONS, after DNA connected the ‘East Area Rapist’ of Sacramento with the ‘Original Night Stalker’, so-called because his attacks began before those of the infamous Richard Ramirez, active 1984–85.

Just a few tweaks...

As I ploughed through this semi-autobiographical behemoth about an author and travel writer obsessed with his siblings and mother, I tried to imagine what a hapless editor might have had to say about the manuscript. ‘I like the way you, I mean Jay the narrator, makes the point that your, sorry his, mother is just like a scheming medieval queen, but I think you can assume readers willing to tackle 500-page literary novels will remember, so you don’t need to keep saying it, especially since the idea’s implied in the title,’ such a person might begin. ‘Likewise, the idea that the siblings interact like members of cannibal tribes that Jay encounters on his travels. So funny and apt, but just the one mention will do.

Something scary in the attic

How do you like your ghosts? Supernatural fiction is arguably the hardest to get right. Ideally it should terrify, but what appals A might bore B and merely confuse C. The mechanics of apparition, however fanciful, must be internally consistent, and explanations kept simple. M.R. James excelled at giving his spectres agency and focus, but in some hands ambiguity is more effective. Read a Robert Aickman and half the time you have no idea what happened, if indeed anything did. I was once put off by a description in a novel of a ghost drifting round a house at night and contemplating its sleeping inhabitants. While that might give you the willies, for me that violates an essential requirement for manifestation: that it involve interplay between deceased and living consciousness.

A gruesome retelling

‘A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead’ intoned W.B. Yeats in his sonnet ‘Leda and the Swan’, seeing in this avian rape the germ of the Trojan war. Leda gave birth to Helen of Troy and her sister Clytemnestra, the one renowned as the casus belli, the other the most infamous agent of the aftermath. Another Irish writer now takes up the story, without the magnificent cloak of myth. House of Names is a portrait of a brutal, disenchanted world of political tyranny, slaughter and revenge. In the first section, ‘Clytemnestra’, Agamemnon’s queen is an imposing but still sympathetic figure as she joyously accompanies her daughter Iphigenia to Aulis to betroth her, she thinks, to the warrior Achilles.

Perilous times

Helen Dunmore’s new novel concerns lives, consequential in their day, that pass away into utter oblivion. Appropriately, the ‘solitary and no doubt rather grim middle-aged man’ of the opening pages is unnamed and never appears again, once he discovers a forgotten grave near the pathway of the title. Bearing the image of a quill, the headstone commemorates a radical 18th-century writer, Julia Fawkes, who died in Bristol in 1793. The stone was ‘Raised… in the Presence of her Many Admirers’. But who was this Julia, wife of an equally obscure pamphleteer, and what is left of the works that, the stone optimistically proclaims, ‘Remain Our Inheritance’? The historically minded 21st-century dog-walker disappears, and a new scene opens in June 1789, as an unknown male tramps through an idyllic woodland scene that swiftly turns nightmarish with the appearance of a woman’s corpse.

Changing lanes

It’s fair to say Sonja Hansen’s life has stalled. Forties, tall and ungainly, veteran of failed relationships, she’s an uncomfortable fit for modern life in bustling Copenhagen. Geographical, spiritual and emotional immobility is expressed in her physical lack of ease, including ‘positional vertigo’ which renders the manoeuvre of the title difficult. Not without a certain quiet defiance, she still feels unable to fire her driving instructor, aggressive, non-stop-nattering Jytta, who won’t let her shift the gears herself. In between bouts of gossip and racist abuse of other drivers, Jytta bellows instructions at her cowering pupil: ‘GREEN ARROW, TURN GODDAMMIT, BIKE!’ In this short novel Nors manages to condense the essence of a life.

Riding the storm

Clover Stroud opens her memoir with the crippling bout of post-natal depression that hit after the birth of her fourth child. ‘I felt like a fist. Dash was always naked, plastered bare to my breast, sucking from me as my body dripped milk and tears.’ She even contemplates harming the baby then killing herself, guilelessly telling the health visitor: ‘But isn’t that normal?’ We spiral back in time to the cataclysmic events that spurred Stroud’s distress. Stroud’s life was idyllic up to the age of 16. Home was a rambling country house in the village of Minety, Wiltshire, filled with adorable siblings and presided over by her father Rick, a TV executive, and her exuberant earth mother Charlotte. Horse-mad from an early age, Stroud was not to know that her keenest passion was to turn into the family curse.

The American dream goes bust

One happy aspect of Lionel Shriver’s peek into the near future (the novel opens in 2029) is the number of unusually rounded elderly characters she presents. Her pitiless eye notes every mark of age and vanity in the older generation of the Mandible family, but they remain in robust health, sharp without being merely spry, and full of personality. They have too much life as far as the younger family members are concerned, waiting impatiently for the wealth to trickle downwards. Jayne and Carter, already in their sixties, will be disappointed, for Shriver’s doomsday scenario concerns a catastrophic devaluation of the dollar which wipes out the family fortune overnight. The Mandibles descend the social order rapidly, along with everyone else in the United States.

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