The arrival of a new installment in John Banville’s highly successful Quirke/Strafford series gladdens my heart. The latest, The Drowned, which I think is the tenth, continues and extends a very popular franchise. Continuity matters to devotees of such series. Familiar characters (Quirke, the pathologist, and Strafford, the Inspector), a familiar setting (Dublin in the 1950s), and most of all a familiar atmosphere or ambiance, a world of looming menace, the immanence of illness and death, and the strategies we all deploy to make sense of it all while searching for happiness.
It is clear Banville understands very well how the success of such series depends on a balance of the familiar with the new. The Drowned sees one established character depart while the stage is set for the entrance of new ones. Established relationships shift into a different gear, all against the background of a fairly straightforward plot.
Banville is a wonderfully sensitive and skilled storyteller. The Drowned, like its predecessors in the series, is the sort of novel one wants to devour in a single sitting, perhaps sitting by the fire on a winter’s day, or on a long, comfortable train journey.
Kate Atkinson’s latest novel is the sixth to feature Jackson Brodie, the sour and sweet private investigator. We find him back in the north of England, Yorkshire specifically, hired to investigate the disappearance of a valuable painting. The missing painting leads to another missing painting which in turn leads to a shadowy woman who may (or may not) have stolen them both. Brodie’s sleuthing takes him to a country house hotel in a snow storm. Not just any country house hotel, but one hosting a Murder Mystery Night for its guests ….
If this all sounds a little like Agatha Christie, that’s exactly what Kate Atkinson intends. In the hands of a less accomplished writer, not to mention one with a less sure comic touch, it might all seem more than a little self-conscious or twee. That is not the case here. Atkinson is having fun adapting a well-worn genre to her popular Brodie series and the fun is infectious. Having said that, the build-up to the gathering of the characters at the hotel (roughly the first two thirds of the novel) was what I enjoyed the most. The denouement was a bit too contrived for my tastes.
Death at the Sign of the Rook is a light and frothy tale and a great addition to the series. Perfect holiday reading.
Niall Williams’ latest novel is one of the finest I have read in a very long time. I rarely use the word, but I think it’s a masterpiece. The novel is beautifully crafted and practically every sentence is a joy to read. It is written with a lyricism that is so rare in contemporary fiction and with a sensitivity for language and for its nuances that feels like a skill from a bygone age. Who else writes like this today? Marilynne Robinson comes to mind, but few others.
Time of the Child is set in the fictional village of Faha in the west of Ireland. The time is December 1962. Electricity, televisions, and telephones came to the village just a few years earlier, but many of Faha’s residents are stuck in earlier times. They live in houses illuminated by candles and heated by peat fires. They work mostly on the land, and the rhythms of their lives are set by the changing seasons and by religious festivals. The priests have power. The church and the pubs are where people meet. If this sounds far-fetched, it isn’t. My childhood visits to rural Connemara and West Cork started in the mid-1960s, and Williams’ depiction of the place is faithful to what I saw and experienced.
A gift arrives in this isolated and timeless place. A newborn baby is abandoned in the village churchyard and discovered by a local boy. Thinking it dead, he takes it to the local doctor. What happens next is a mystery. Whether by Dr. Troy’s skill or the power of prayer, the baby girl is revived and given the name Noelle. No more about the plot. I do not want to spoil anyone’s enjoyment of the novel.
Time of the Child is everything I want in a novel. Exquisite lyrical prose, deep insight into what it is to be human and humane, into how to live alone and in community, and what it means to be open to the possibility of transformation and redemption.
A new book from Tessa Hadley is always a treat, even a slim novella like The Party. It ought perhaps to have been called Two Parties because the story is bookended by two social events, attended by two sisters, Evelyn and Moira, both students. The first takes place in a Bristol pub shortly after the end of World War Two and the second, more of an ad hoc get-together, in a grand but faded house elsewhere in the city the following weekend.
How far can any of us really achieve the lives we want to have? What real influence do we have over the shape of our future? Can we realize the lives we want by sheer force of personality and determination, or are our futures mapped out for us by factors over which we have so little control such as class or gender constraints, real or perceived? These are the questions that interest Tessa Hadley, and she uses the sisters with their common upbringing and history as exemplars of two distinct perspectives. Not that Moira and Evelyn are simple cyphers. Not at all. Hadley is far too accomplished a writer for that, and Evelyn especially is a brilliantly realized character.
Does this all sound a little old-fashioned, like Anita Brookner or Barbara Pym for the 21st century? Perhaps, but don’t be put off. There is more inventiveness, daring, and insight in Hadley’s writing than some more experimental novelists can dream of realizing.
Only a very confident and self-assured author takes a familiar genre, in this case the spy novel, and uses it as a channel for ideas. A burden comes with that decision. Spy novels are traditionally plot-driven vehicles and readers of the genre expect pace, twists and turns, and action. So manipulating and subverting the classic espionage tale is all very well, but the ideas had better be worth the effort and at least some of the familiar features of the genre had better be respected. No one ought to buy Creation Lake expecting a conventional spy novel, and anyone who does will be disappointed. If that happens, some reviewers might be responsible. The Guardian critic talked about “a killer plot and expert pacing”. That’s downright misleading in my view.
Sadie Smith, the heroine and narrator of Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, is a spy working in the private sector and has an assignment to infiltrate a shadowy group in rural France suspected of planning acts of sabotage. Sadie is unscrupulous, a quality that might be considered an asset in her line of work. It has, however, got her into trouble in the past when, working for a spy agency in the US, she was found to have entrapped an innocent man and got fired as a result. Now in France, she has seduced an impressionable activist to gain entry to the suspected terrorist cell. This lack of a moral compass might be Sadie’s least unattractive quality. Her superficial pronouncements on everything from Europe and its culture (overrated) to Italian food (horrible), her glib philosophizing (“The truth of a person, under all the layers and guises, is a substance that is pure, and stubborn, and consistent”), her unassailable belief in the superiority of English (in other words American) culture marks her out as the worst kind of entitled, privileged, and semi-educated American who has everything, values little, and has earned nothing. Sadie hacks into the emails of Bruno Lacombe, the leader and guru of the protest group, and pokes fun at his tiresome ideas, but his silly intellectualizing about what we can learn from Neanderthals makes him look like a genius compared to Sadie and her moral vacuity.
I am surprised that Creation Lake was shortlisted for The Booker Prize. It’s a novel that’s executed with lots of confidence and it’s an enjoyable enough read, but I couldn’t shake off the feeling that there’s no substance or heart in the book. Rachel Kushner’s critical reputation seems to be growing with every new novel, but on the evidence of the two I have read (The Flamethrowers and Creation Lake), I don’t understand why.
There is a new Tessa Hadley novel coming at the end of the month (The Party). Hearing that news while I was browsing in Hatchard’s recently prompted me to pick up an older collection of short stories, Married Love, first published in 2013. The cover includes a gushing quote from The Times‘s review, describing the collection as “unexpected, exhilarating, life-changing”. Married Love is none of those things. It’s an uneven collection that includes masterful stories and some that miss the mark. The best of them are a reminder of what a supremely accomplished writer Hadley is. I have pre-ordered The Party and will devour it once it arrives.
The Western Wind is a novel set in a small and isolated English village at the end of the 15th century. Its narrator is the local priest, John Reve. John’s parish, Oakham, is a farming community, mostly poor, mostly hardworking, and mostly god-fearing. As the story opens, its wealthiest and worldliest member, Tom Newman, is missing, feared drowned in the treacherous local river after unprecedented storms and floods. His torn shirt has been found, nothing more, and the villagers are distressed and fearful. The local dean, representing ecclesiastical and temporal power, has arrived to investigate, making things uncomfortable for Fr. Reve.
My summary makes the novel sound like a medieval mystery story. To some extent it is, but there’s so much more to The Western Wind. It’s a beautifully written and thoughtful tale about faith, superstition, and power, and about how and where we find meaning in life. It’s a novel that never strives to be explicitly historical, but is filled with authentic detail of life in a medieval English village. It plays with time, telling the story in reverse, and this helps make medieval Oakham shockingly modern. It’s best read slowly and carefully, with every sentence savored.
Summer vacations are the perfect opportunity to dive into a mystery series. Nothing makes a long flight or train journey pass more quickly. Having exhausted some of my favorite novelists in the genre (Henning Mankell, Susan Hill, Nicci French, et al), and on the cusp of a trip to Europe, it seemed like the perfect time to make a start on a series that I have inexplicably overlooked until now – Donna Leon’s celebrated Brunetti novels. There are now more than 30 titles in the series, so I’m making no commitment to read them all at this point, but it seemed only right to start at the beginning, Death at La Fenice.
A celebrated conductor is found dead in his dressing room during an intermission at a performance at the famous Venice opera house. The cause of death is immediately clear, cyanide poisoning, but who killed the maestro, and why? Enter Commissario Guido Brunetti, the senior detective assigned to solve the puzzle. Flawed in many ways, Brunetti is a contrary, anti-establishment figure, a man who loves his family, Venice, and his work (probably in that order).
Death at La Fenice sets, I suspect, the tone of the entire Brunetti series. This is a long love letter to Venice and a prolonged character study of a passionate Venetian. The plot here is secondary and the denouement feels hurried. I have already bought numbers 2 and 3 in the series, so we’ll see if anything changes.
Miscellaneous Musings 