Alice Munro’s 11th book, Runaway, is the subject of the second in a series of five reviews of short fiction collections.
Runaway is heavy with accolades: it won The Giller Prize, was a New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year, and made the shortlist for the Governor General’s Award. For so long a Canadian treasure, it seems that Alice Munro is at last getting the international recognition she so deserves.
Everyone loves pirates, don’t they? Not the Somali kind, but the Caribbean sort that used to say arrr a lot. There’s a rather good film of Captain Blood with Errol Flynn in the title role and, having watched quite a few pirate films lately, I thought I’d pick up the book.
I wouldn’t bother if I were you. It’s only a couple of hundred pages but feels like far more. The story meanders along, one episode not really flowing into another in a way that decent editing hid very effectively in the film, but makes the book feel as though it should have ended but there’s another fifty dreary pages to get through before you can go to bed.
Patrick Hamilton is probably best known for the plays Rope and Gas Light. The former was made famous on film by Alfred Hitchcock and the latter ran for three years on Broadway and was filmed twice. However, in recent years the reputation of Hamilton’s novels has been growing.
Hangover Square is typically considered part of the crime genre – indeed, that’s how I heard of it – but it’s a broader book than that. Though it’s clearly a thriller – in large part a study of a murderous mind – it’s also a moving story of unrequited love, a black comedy and a portrait of Britain on the edge of war.
Published in 1930, William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying follows Anse Bundren, his sons and daughter on their journey to bury Addie, Anse’s wife and the childrens’ mother. The story is a patchwork of the viewpoints of 15 different characters, each of whose ‘narration’ is simply a stream-of-consciousness monologue. The effect is as entrancing as it is bewildering.
While there is much to admire in the novel – the strong evocation of place, for example, and the ear for country vernacular – it’s the unusual narrative technique that makes the greatest impression. Faulkner makes the reader work hard; his characters do not provide helpful recaps of prior events or of their relationships with one another, which is exactly how real people think. The result is a story that emerges slowly, with questions often remaining unanswered for long periods and the reader forced to fill in the blanks with guesswork.
Though her name is never mentioned in the text, the murderer of the title is Myra Hindley who, with her boyfriend Ian Brady, killed five children between 1963 and 1965. She died in late 2002, which is when this novel takes place. It follows Billy Tyler, the policeman tasked with standing guard in the mortuary on the night before Hindley’s funeral. Tyler’s wife doesn’t want him to go, fearing that Billy will somehow be spiritually corrupted. Billy sees it as just a job.
Still, the tension with his wife has Billy pondering their relationship as his 12-hour shift unfolds and the body he is guarding leads him inevitably to wondering about the nature of evil. He begins to consider the misdeeds from his own past and the times he was tempted to do worse. Are some people simply evil or are we all the result of what Malcolm MacCulloch, Brady’s psychiatrist and professor of forensic psychiatry at Cardiff University, called a “concatenation of circumstances”?
I have an uneasy relationship with Don DeLillo’s work. Parts of Underworld, DeLillo’s masterpiece, are stunning, among the best prose that I’ve read. However, I just don’t find his characters convincing. They all sound the same and appear to be there not to have conversations but only to express ideas to each other, ideas that aren’t really listened to because characters in DeLillo are always talking at crossed purposes. But I persist because DeLillo’s reputation is such that I feel I must be missing something.
To White Noise, then, which was DeLillo’s breakthrough novel and tells the story of a university professor who runs a course in Hitler studies and lives with his wife, their son and their children from assorted previous relationships. The professor, Jack, and his wife, Babette, are both strongly afraid of death and obsessed with the idea of which of them will die first.
I got Jill Mansell’s Perfect Timing free with some magazine years ago and it remains one of my favourite uplifting books. Like Jilly Cooper, Mansell excels at capturing people, and makes implausible scenarios seem totally likely.
Take A Chance On Me is really enjoyable for about three chapters and then dips down into autopilot. Mansell makes an engaging male character (saddled with the hideous lothario name of Johnny LaVenture), makes him warm and witty and generally nice, and then makes him hop around until our heroine deigns to fall into his arms. I know this is always going to happen and it’s not rocket science, but it helps if the story along the way makes its fantasy vaguely realistic, and this may as well be actual Mamma Mia! instead, in which case God help us all.
Reading Angela Carter’s lovely descriptions of south London earlier this year had made me realise how little I read about contemporary London, and this really fitted the bill nicely.
Hurray for Twitter: I found out about this book, set in a shop close to where I live, through the @Se1 account. Even though it’s square-shaped. For some reason this really grinds my gears. I like books to be book-shaped, otherwise I feel like I’m reading an accordion or a copy of Meg and Mog. Also, I worry about dropping it in the bath.
Hands up – I absolutely judged this book by its cover. I was hoping Jacqueline Winspear would be some soupy-eyed matron from the 1930s a la Agatha Christie, and deliver me a nice, unchallenging 30s-set murder mystery. The cover’s pastel pink for crying out loud.
Anyway, it turns out the Kent-born Winspear is no such thing: she writes today, but now lives in California, where I hope she will soon develop soupy-eyes and a matronly attitude. And while Maisie Dodds is indeed set in the 1930s, it’s not fluffy and there’s very little 30s slang.
It’s probably a good thing that David Nicholls’ acting career didn’t take him stellar, because people adore his writing.(And how lucky is that, to have two talents to pick from?)
And people will, and do, love One Day. Partly because that cheery orange and white cover is gracing every 3 for 2 stand in the United Kingdom and a 3 for 2 offer is basically a Decree From God, and partly because, in Emma, Nicholls has written one of the best characters of the last few years.
Nicholls’s lovely gimmick is that each chapter rejoins two old friends on the anniversary of their meeting at university and gives us snapshots of what they’re doing. Dexter, a good-looking bloke blessed with charm and luck, is an absolute pillock, and is to be tolerated only because his zingy, wry friend Emma is just the most wonderfully-written girl. I started reading it before bed and found it so easy to read and fun that I was pushing myself to read faster so that I could cheat sleep until I’d finished it.
