26 Books

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.

As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner
Vintage 1996, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

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.

Death of a Murderer

Rupert Thomson
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC 2008, Paperback, 256 pages, £7.99

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.

White Noise (Picador Books)

Don DeLillo
Picador 1986, Paperback, 326 pages, £7.99

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.

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?)

One Day

David Nicholls
Hodder Paperbacks 2010, Paperback, 448 pages, £7.99

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.

Fatherhood, it turns out, puts a big dent in your reading time.

The Great Gatsby (Penguin Popular Classics)

F Scott Fitzgerald
Penguin Classics 2007, Paperback, 192 pages, £2.00

As I’m sure that Ready or Not, Mr Croc doesn’t count towards the 26 I decided to rattle through a couple of books I’ve had in the pile for some time, the first being the Great Gatsby. I’ve been rattling considerably more slowly than I had expected.

Race, music, education, institutions and the birth of hip hop are just some of the topics for which Jonathan Lethem finds room in this novel. The first half follows young Dylan Ebdus as he deals with growing up as one of the few white kids on his block in 1970s Brooklyn.

The Fortress of Solitude

Jonathan Lethem
Faber and Faber 2005, Paperback, 160 pages, £8.99

After his mother leaves, Dylan is raised by his father, a reclusive artist who spends his days in the attic painting a film frame by frame. Helping Dylan through his isolation and the frequent bullying he faces is Mingus Rude, another boy being raised by a reclusive father – in this case, Barrett Rude Jr., a soul singer who has retired and is sinking slowly into drug addiction.

I admire Don DeLillo’s work greatly, and Underworld remains one of my favourite novels in the English language. But since that masterpiece was published, DeLillo has been in uncertain form, the four novels he’s produced since then being slight, both physically and in substance. But a slight book from DeLillo is worth a great deal and, even though Point Omega is another mild disappointment, it still contains things to like.

Point Omega

Don DeLillo
Picador 2010, Hardcover, 224 pages, £14.99

Those looking for a fundamental change in DeLillo’s basic style of what can seem to be the occasional portentous and meaning-free sentence surrounded with gnomic, stilted dialogue will find nothing to like. But, if you’re looking for realism, DeLillo isn’t the place to start. His style can be monotonous (nowhere more so than in The Body Artist), but it can also be profoundly beautiful, often hauntingly so. Somewhere at the centre of his writing is a deep-seated angst, a fear about the business of being human, a fear about our future, and a profound sense of loneliness. It’s perhaps not surprising that this doesn’t appeal to everyone.

Eight years passed between Gold’s debut, Carter Beats the Devil, and this, his second novel. Carter Beats the Devil is a fictionalised story about Charles Carter, an American magician who was successful in the late 19th and early 20th century. It’s a very good book.

Sunnyside

Glen David Gold
Sceptre 2010, Paperback, 576 pages, £7.99

Sunnyside is more ambitious but, because it doesn’t quite reach its target, it’s ultimately less successful. It tells the story of the birth of celebrity, the rise of Hollywood and the earliest stirrings of American empire. At its centre is Charlie Chaplin but numerous other real life figures appear on its pages.

It’s probably no surprise that having just read a book about crime fiction I should turn next to one of the classics of the genre. Trent’s Last Case is significant because it was one of the first novels to subvert the conventions of the genre – and it did so in 1913, before the genre even reached its so-called golden age.

Trent’s Last Case

E. C. Bentley
House of Stratus Ltd 2008, Paperback, 240 pages, £10.14

Philip Trent is a gentleman detective who works mostly for newspapers. When the story opens he has already earned a degree of fame for solving several high profile cases. He is called in to investigate the death of Sigsbee Manderson, an American businessman who has been found dead at his country home. Manderson was unpopular with most people who knew him so there is no shortage of suspects but what’s baffling is how he came to be shot dead in his garden without any sound being heard.

Like John Scaggs’ Crime Fiction, which I read last year, this is an academic overview of the crime fiction genre. While I was disappointed with Scaggs’ book – I felt I had already read too widely to appreciate it – I enjoyed this one a little more, mostly because each chapter is given over to a different specialist.

The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

Martin Priestman (Editor)
Cambridge University Press 2003, Paperback, 308 pages, £19.99

I found the first two chapters, dealing with early crime fiction, particularly interesting. Ian A Bell’s chapter on 18th Century crime writing explains how early works didn’t seek to provide reassurance to the reader and largely omit any kind of detective figure. That’s followed by a chapter on sensationalist fiction by Lyn Pickett, who offers some good insights into the relationship between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature during this formative period.