Snowdrops

Of all the novels on the 2011 Booker Prize short list, it was perhaps A. D. Miller’s Snowdrops, self-consciously styled as a thriller, which most caused accusations of dumbing down. (It was, in fact marketed very much in the manner of Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44, also set in Russia, which had made it onto the Booker long-list in 2008). Snowdrops begins with the recovery of a corpse but its dynamic is not that of a murder mystery, instead focusing on the corruption of an Englishman abroad: Graham Greene with guilt-free capitalism replacing the angst-ridden Catholicism. However, if the judges cannot be criticised for a descent into genre fiction, they can be questioned where it matters: Snowdrops does not at any point seem like a prize-winning novel. It is not that it is terrible, only that it is rather ordinary.

Its theme is corruption and Miller cleverly runs a number of stories in parallel to make his point. The narrator, Nicholas, is an English lawyer who is working in Moscow arranging contracts between banks and businesses. The novel follows one particular deal where loans are arranged on the basis of oil; it is quickly transparent that the businessman in question (‘the Cossack’, who appears as if borrowed from a 1980s Bond film) cannot be trusted but Nicholas and his boss, Paolo, carry on regardless. At the same time Nicholas meets and falls in love with a Russian girl, Masha, who he has met on the subway. Again, her honesty is soon called into question: her ‘sister’ Katya is not her sister, and the ‘aunt’, Titiana, she has asked Nicholas to help sell her apartment is no relation. Though it becomes apparent that the intention is to dupe Titiana out of her valuable Moscow property, Nicholas carries on for fear of losing Masha. (Ironically, Nicholas and Paolo often use the expression ‘Lipstick on a pig’ in relation to the kind of businessmen they deal with; Nicholas becomes the lipstick in the plan to fool Titiana).

However, the novel’s swiftly irritates in its choice of a narrative device that requires the narrator to tell his story to another character ‘off-camera’:

“You’re always saying I never talk about my time in Moscow or about why I left. You’re right, I’ve always made excuse, and soon you’ll understand why.”

Of course this effect is not a mistake in itself – it works well enough for Heart of Darkness, a novel we can only hope Miller was not attempting to evoke comparisons with – but it is so clumsily handled that it only ever succeeds in puncturing any tension created and does not deliver any pay-off at the conclusion. Even more bizarrely, the audience is Nicholas’ fiancée, (“only three months away from the ‘big day’”) raising questions of plausibility at the very least. Is it traditional to confess to a previous love affair in as much detail as possible to the person you intend to marry?

The only possible explanation I can think of is that it allows Miller to continually demonstrate an ‘insider’s’ knowledge of Moscow with asides such as:

“Over the blouse she had one of those funny Brezhnev-era coats that Russian women without much money often wear.”

Or:

“They loved photographing each other, the girls in Russia – something about the novelty of cameras, I think, and the idea they might matter enough to have their pictures taken.”

The generalisations come thick and fast, and although they present an interesting (though never vivid) picture of the country, they do so in the manner of journalism rather than literature. They also reduce the dimensions of the Russian characters. When we are told that Katya “smiled the other smile that they have, the Asiatic smile that means nothing” the observation may be clever but it also reduces her to a type. There is a point where one begins to wonder if Nicholas himself sees the other characters as ‘real’.

Nicholas, however, is certainly credible, if unsympathetic. It is hard to feel he is an innocent who becomes corrupted as his very job requires him to turn a blind eye to criminality, though Miller succeeds in personalising this attitude through his deception of Titiana, ensuring he is seen as complicit. He is also not driven by any noble motives: he simply wants to have sex with a young, attractive woman while deluding himself that he is not paying for it. Finally, he doesn’t feel particularly bad about it. He makes it quite clear that he regrets losing Masha more than anything else (a rather strange confession to make to your prospective bride).

Miller paints a depressing picture of capitalist Russia, and the novel certainly has the ‘readability’ factor the Booker judges were looking for, but, in the end, there is little that raises it above mediocre.

Dotter of her Father’s Eyes

Comic of the Month

The first time I came across Bryan Talbot’s work was when early episodes of The Adventures of Luther Arkwright were published in the Edinburgh magazine Near Myths (which also featured a strip written and drawn by a young Grant Morrison). This (and its sequel) was only completed after many years while he also worked for 2000AD in the UK and DC Comics in America. Recently he has concentrated on graphic novels, and it would be no exaggeration to say he has become one of Britain’s most important creators in this medium, particularly with his wonderful Grandville series, with two volumes already published and another underway. His latest work is therefore not a departure from the fantasy world of Grandville, but it is certainly a detour, being a collaboration with his wife Mary and so rooted in reality as to fall under non-fiction.

Dotter of her Father’s Eyes is the story of Mary’s childhood, and in particular her relationship with her father, the noted James Joyce scholar, James Atherton. As this story unfolds, we also get a glimpse into the life of Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, as well as a few pages of a contemporary framing sequence. In each of these sections Talbot adopts a different artistic style. The present day is represented in clear lines and bold (though not primary) colours. Mary’s past, beginning in the 1950s, appears in sepia tones with only the occasional hint of colour: the orange of orange juice, the red of the Eagle’s banner, a fire, a fish-tank. The intention is clear: to illuminate those moments of pleasure that glow in the memory. As her story nears the present, so colour becomes more predominant: when Bryan appears in her teens she jokes in a side note:

“Strange how it suddenly bursts into colour when Bryan appears! I wonder why.”

Lucia’s story is rendered in black and white (with a blue wash) making clear it predates Mary’s by suggesting old photographs found in a trunk in the attic – indeed her first appearance gives every indication of having been copied from a photograph.

Both stories share a sense of the father’s work being of the utmost importance, to the detriment of the daughters. Mary’s father is frequently represented by the TAP TAP TAP of his type-writer; Mary’s is the head that appears round the door. He does not take interruptions well, at one point throwing a book at her. Lucia suffers more directly, her career as a dancer sacrificed for her father. Here it is her mother who is most insistent:

“It’s some fancy ideas you’ve got now! You’ve done enough of that for today already. And here’s your poor father needing help with his correspondence.”

In both cases adolescent rebellion can be seen to fail. Lucia’s attempts to create a career for herself are frustrated by her parent’s insistence that she move to London with them, and she never recovers from the end of her relationship with Samuel Beckett and the discovery that her parents are not married. Mary’s rebellion, if it is one, is almost diametrically opposed: she defies her father’s expectations that she will go to Cambridge and instead falls pregnant and marries: however, she is now a prominent academic.

Thematically, though, the links between the two stories are fairly weak. Though book-ended with the quotation form Finnegans Wake, “My cold mad feary father,” Joyce does not come across as fearsome at all (though Nora would certainly scare me), and both fathers are rather slightly portrayed: very much as observed from the outside. Both Mary and Lucia’s stories are interesting, but for every scene where the graphic format allows a lot of information to be delivered swiftly (the picture of Mary and Bryan talking with all their shared interest illustrated above them) or dramatically (Lucia being committed to an asylum depicted as dance moves in a strait jacket – see below), there are others where you wish the depth of a biography were available. However, it is a fascinating exploration of the comic medium as a form for documenting lives and highly recommended to anyone interested in the development of the graphic novel.

Lost Books – Between Nine and Nine

Between 1989 and 1996 Harvill published eight of Leo Perutz’s ten novels in English translations: he was being rediscovered, as Stefan Zweig, another Viennese writer (Perutz was born in Prague but lived in Vienna until 1938 and the Nazi Anschluss) has been more recently. His first novel, The Third Bullet, has (as far as I can ascertain) never been translated into English, but his second, From Nine to Nine, certainly had – in the 1920s. Having collected all of the newer translations of Perutz’s novels over the last ten years, it was galling to know that another was out there, especially with its intriguing 24 type premise, being set over twelve hours in the life of its protagonist (as it turns out, this isn’t entirely the case). Imagine my delight, then, when I discovered last year that a small American publisher, Ariadne Press, had brought out a new translation (by Thomas Ahrens and Edward Larkin), with the slightly altered title Between Nine and Nine.

Perutz has always reminded me a little of Robert Louis Stevenson – a serious writer who writes adventure novels. A fellow Austrian writer described his style as “the possible result of an illicit union between Franz Kafka and Agatha Christie.” Graham Greene and Ian Fleming, among others, were admirers. Though many of his novels are historical, Between Nine and Nine is set in Vienna at the turn of the century – in fact, much of it can be read as a satire of Viennese society. However, it is presented in the form of a thriller, with the initial tension created by the inexplicable actions of our protagonist:

“…a certain Stanislaus Demba who entered the store and whose strange behaviour provided the two women with much to talk about for weeks to come.”

His ‘strange behaviour’ includes entering the store warily, looking around, ordering numerous items of food one after the other but not picking them up, and leaving suddenly when the owner is out, but not without first having placed the money owed on the counter. The reason for his strange behaviour, which continues throughout a number of scenes, is not revealed until almost halfway through the novel. Needless to say I will be revealing it soon. If you would rather not know, don’t read on – I certainly had great fun not knowing (which is Perutz’s intention, mirrored in the fact that the narrative is never from Demba’s point of view, but always from that of those he encounters: seven of the first eight chapters begin with reference to a secondary character prior to Demba’s appearance).

As Demba eventually confesses to the only person he seems to trust, a young woman called Steffi, he was arrested at nine o’clock that morning and placed in handcuffs. Though he escaped through an attic window, sliding down the roof and falling to the ground, he has been unable to remove the cuffs and must keep them hidden if he is not to be caught. This has given him enormous problems with the basic requirements of life, like eating (hence the visit to the shop; later he asks a waiter to bring book after book to his table so he can eat unseen). Even common courtesies become an insurmountable problem:

“’I’ll wait,’ said Demba.
‘In that case, kindly remove your hat, Stanie. At our office, people take off their hats,’ said Etelka Springer.
Stanislaus Demba stood there with his hat on his head, broad and boorish, looking anxiously at Etelka Springer. A bead of sweat was dripping from his forehead.”

To prevent Demba simply remaining in hiding until Steffi can get him a key (at nine o’clock that night), Perutz gives him an urgent quest. Having discovered that his girlfriend, Sonja, is going on a trip with another man to Venice, he feels that if he can raise the necessary money to take her she will go with him. The second half of the novel is filled with near misses as he comes frustratingly close to the cash without being able to lay his hands on it. (It was an attempt to sell a stolen library book that first brought him to the police’s attention).

Demba is therefore an intensely sympathetic character: a betrayed lover, on the run, with two taxing problems to solve in twelve hours. Throughout his adventure Perutz also pokes fun at Viennese society; Demba’s position as an impoverished tutor makes him something of an outsider. The novel ends with a further twist I won’t reveal. This may not be Perutz’s greatest novel, but it is both tense and genuinely amusing. It’s time he was rediscovered again.

1Q84 Book One

Having waited four years since Murakami’s last novel, 1Q84’s near one thousand page length seems somehow too much at once: it’s a little like dieting for a year and then attempting to devour the contents of a baker’s window in one afternoon. I’ve therefore decided to take its division into three books at face value and read them separately, one a month, over the next three months. This will still allow me to be completed comfortably before his original Japanese audience: although Books One and Two were published simultaneously in Japan (in May 2009), there was then almost a year’s wait for Book Three. Its length, and the two and half year anticipation between publication in Japan and in English, were not the only reasons that made 1Q84 probably the most eagerly expected (translated) novel of 2011. There was also a sense that Murakami’s powers as a writer were on the wane, and that this ambitious undertaking would provide proof one way or the other.

Unlike most of Murakami’s work, 1Q84 is not written in the first person, and in fact adopts two perspectives in alternating chapters. In chapter 1 we are introduced to Aomame, a young woman on her way to work assignment who has become stuck in a traffic jam. She leaves the taxi and uses an emergency stairway to escape the motorway. It is at this point she enters the alternative reality of 1Q84 (the novel is set in 1984). The first indication of this is a passing policeman:

“Aomame noticed that there was something unusual about his uniform…His pistol too was a different model. He wore a large automatic at his waist instead of the revolver normally issued to policemen in Japan.”

Later investigation will show that this change resulted from a shoot-out between police and a radical sect at Lake Motosu which Aomame has no memory of. However, before this we will have seen Aomame kill a man she has never met before: her ‘work’, we discover, involves tracking down and murdering men who have been abusive to their wives, at the behest of a wealthy dowager. As Aomame’s back story unfolds we find that she has a personal motivation, her best friend having committed suicide after years of mistreatment at the hands of her husband.

The second narrative focuses on Tengo, an aspiring writer and Maths tutor, who becomes embroiled in a scheme of his publisher to cause a literary sensation by rewriting a story which a teenage girl, Fuka-Eri, has sent to him:

“This Fuka-Eri girl has something special. Anyone can see it reading Air Chrysalis. Her imagination is far from ordinary. Unfortunately, though, her writing is hopeless. A total mess. You, on the other hand, know how to write.”

Fuka-Eri is the daughter of the cult leader linked to the Lake Motosu Incident, although that particular group had splintered from the main sect. Her father, Fukada, hasn’t been seen in years and Fuka-Eri has been living with an elderly Professor and his daughter. It is increasingly suggested that Fuka Eri’s extraordinary imagination is instead a factual rendering of events in her own life, in particular the sinister ‘Little People’. When a ten year old girl who has escaped from Fukada’s commune is taken in to the dowager’s shelter for abused women (the girl has been raped), she also mentions the ‘Little People’, and though the phrase is hardly heart-stopping in English, the scene where they finally appear is:

“Soon her mouth began to open wider, and from it emerged, one after another, a small troupe of Little People.”

Murakami’s two great strengths come into focus here: his ability to create fictional worlds, and then to inject fantastic elements into them without losing credibility. 1Q84 might be seen as representative of this: there is little difference between it and 1984, but it is different. Similarly, Murakami takes reality and twists it slightly; it feels real but we are always aware of its difference.

By the end of Book One, we can see the links between the two narratives. An important connection is clearly Fukada’s commune, and Murakami has been interested in cults at least since he wrote Underground about the Tokyo gas attack. Tengo and Aomame are also connected through a childhood memory. Tengo remembers Aomame as a lonely classmate, isolated by her religious upbringing; they never talk but on one occasion he protects her from some childish bullying. Shortly after this happens:

“She strode quickly across the room, heading straight for Tengo, as if she had just made up her mind about something. She stood next to him and, without the slightest hesitation, grabbed his hand and looked up at him.”

Aomame also remembers the incident:

“I did have one person I fell in love with…It happened when I was ten. I held his hand.”

Murakami has used this rather sentimental image before to suggest some kind of spiritual bond, and here he contrasts it with a series of casual sexual relationships – Tengo’s with a married woman, Aomame’s with men she picks up in bars. However, a little like Dickens (though Murakami is not such a stylist), despite the implausibility and the sentimentality, the power of the narrative is difficult to resist.

Good Offices

Evelio Rosero won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2009 with his novel of civil war descending on a small Columbian village, The Armies. Now he returns with a second novel translated into English, Good Offices, where we are introduced to another isolated and inward-looking community, though with the more pacific setting of a church. This is a slighter novel, weighing in at only 141 pages, and the story it tells takes place over one night, with little in the way of action. What it does share with its predecessor is the haunting sense of a perfectly realised other world with its own unsettling logic.

The main character is a young hunchback, Tancredo, who has been brought up in the care of the church, and Father Almida in particular. Tancredo describes Almida’s household as being made up of:

“…the three Lilias, Machado the sacristan, his god-daughter, Sabina Cruz, and he himself, the acolyte, he himself, Tancredo, he himself, the hunchback.”

As we have been aware from the opening sentence (“He has a terrible fear of being an animal”), Tancredo is uneasy about his identity. He spends much of his time organising the community meals the church offer (for the elderly, for prostitutes, for street children: on each day there is a different category of needy), but has been long promised that the church will finance his further studies in theology and philosophy (though Almida has “been saying the same thing for the three years they had been offering the Community Meals”). He has also been secretly visiting Sabina in her room at night but has now decided, despite her pleas, that he “won’t be coming anymore.” He offers her little in the way of explanation, and we are given the impression of a character who would wish to assert his own identity if he could only be sure what it was. When the sacristan is introduced he is described as:

“…an obscure man, a shadow like the Lilias, and not just because he dressed all in black, but because of his deep reserve, a ring of blackness like a pit.”

To some extent this is true of all the characters, with Rosero deliberately obscuring their motives.

The chance for change occurs when Almida and the sacristan have to leave to visit a wealthy parishioner:

“Tonight…this very night, for the first time in all the years I lived with him, Reverend Father Juan Pablo Almida will not say Mass.”

After some difficulty locating a replacement, Father Matamoros appears. Though clearly a drunk, he sings like an angel and his Mass makes a profound impression on the congregation, the Lilias in particular. They ply him with food and drink, and we soon discover dark undertones in their comments on a particular cat who steals from their kitchen:

“He’s the thief…He’s driving us to despair, he’s asking for trouble, as they say; he gives cats a bad name.”

The name of this cat? Almida. Eventually even Tancredo is able to confide in the priest and “make his confession”:

“’No-one can rest here,’ he said, ‘we’re worked to death’
“To tell you the truth, he thought quickly, everyone here wants to kill Almida and the sacristan.”

Slowly Almida’s corruption is revealed, and his return becomes the focus of the novel’s tension. Rosero, of course, also has a wider target: the church itself, its leaders and its role in the community. While such satire might have a greater resonance in Catholic South America, this remains a haunting novel with a satisfying denouement: we might even consider that Tancredo will be able to reconcile the animal and intellectual sides of his character.

The Warlord

Comic of the Month

For anyone who wants to catch up quickly and cheaply on the history of American comics, there can hardly be a better way to do it than DC’s Showcase and Marvel’s Essential series. Over 500 pages of comic for a little over a tenner is not only a bargain, but allows for the reprinting of entire runs of a title rather than a few select issues. (Okay, so it’s black and white, but colour wasn’t up to much in the seventies, and the cheap paper is a nostalgic reminder of the originals). Of course, some comics benefit more from this format than others, and Mike Grell’s The Warlord is the perfect example of this: for a number of years it has been in my top three hoped-for reprints (the others being All Star Squadron, out later this year, and Master of Kung Fu).

The Warlord is ideal for Showcase as it’s written and drawn entirely by Grell (with Vince Colletta providing inks from issue 16) and it’s entirely self-contained: no background knowledge is needed of the character or the DC universe. It’s also great fun. The Warlord is Travis Morgan, an air force pilot (as Grell was) who, when his plane crashes, finds himself in a strange underground land known as Skartaris. Within a few pages he has wrestled a dinosaur, fallen in love with a warrior princess, and made a mortal enemy of the high priest Deimos. In fact, what is most astonishing about the series now is the pace with which it moves. Whereas today comics writers tend to take one idea and stretch it over many issues (often of more than one title), Grell seems to come up with a new idea every few panels. The fact that Skartaris is entirely imaginary is in his favour: it does, at times, feel as if literally anything could happen.

By the end of the first issue proper (The Warlord was first introduced in 1st Issue Special #8, also reprinted here) he has been captured by slavers; in issue 2 he is a gladiator who is soon leading a gladiator army in rebellion; in issue 3 he is attacked by lizard men and we get the first hint of science fiction undertones as the final panel reveals a very modern control room in a ruined city. Issue 6 sees him return briefly to earth; returning to Skartaris only a few days later he discovers he has been gone for far longer. Grell is clearly having fun plundering his favourite writers (Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells) to create something entirely new. He even manages a story with aliens.

Of course, it doesn’t always make sense. He tells his Russian travelling companion, Mariah Romanova (picked up when he briefly surfaced to allow some Cold War banter), to melt her rifle down for the steel as “your ammo is almost gone and there aren’t any sporting goods stores round here,” but his pistol is still firing away twenty issues later. (Female readers may also object to the fact that when she is asked to wear something less conspicuous than her earth clothes she opts simply for something less that looks to be mostly made out of ink.) However, you don’t read sword ‘n’ sorcery for its impeccable logic – what sensible man would walk around in a loin cloth in a land of perpetual sunlight? The stories are driven along by Grell’s love of the genre and the increasing dynamism of his art, with figures forever bursting out of panels, where the pages contain panels at all.

An enjoyable reminder of the less serious seventies for those with a tolerance for muscled men wielding swords at improbable angles. And with The Warlord lasting for 133 issues, with Grell writing and drawing the first 52, there’s plenty of opportunity for a second volume.

Noir

After reading Pricksongs and Descants last year, I made an immediate decision to acquaint myself more thoroughly with Robert Coover’s work, a resolution I was quick to keep in the new year with the purchase of his most recent novel, Noir. As the title suggests, Noir is Coover’s playful pastiche of the hard-boiled detective genre. (Coover has spoken about “the linguistic and structural fun it offers”). Written in the second person, it casts the reader as Philip M Noir, a private investigator hired by a beautiful but mysterious woman (of course) to track down her husband’s killer (if indeed he was killed).

As you might expect from a writer who has spent years experimenting with language, the novel is pitch perfect in echoing the language of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, with Coover also keen to remind us of his fascination with story-telling itself. The opening scene is set in a morgue, one of a number of locations lifted from a by-the-numbers police procedural, where the body of Noir’s client (the widow) has gone missing. Of the ‘stiffs’ he says:

“Their stories have not ended, only their own readings of them.”

This disconnect between stories and the ability to read them (that is, to follow them, to know what’s true and what isn’t, or understand how they connect) is central to the novel, as it is to any mystery:

“She reached under her black veil…and dabbed at her eyes with a white lace handkerchief. Until she did that, you believed her story because you had no reason not to. Now, it seemed as full of holes as her black veil.”

To add to this sense of disorientation (which is, of course, emphasised by the use of the second person), the story is not told in chronological order, with the murdered widow whose body Noir is hunting appearing more than once in his office.

As well as the beautiful damsel in distress, Coover offers us his version of as number of stock noir characters: the police chief, Captain Blue, who naturally dislikes Noir intensely, the night club singer, Flame, the corrupt cop, Snark, the mad homeless woman, Mad Meg, and various criminals with monikers such as Rats, Fingers, the Hammer and Mr Big. Noir also has his dependable but largely taken for granted secretary, Blanche. One of the most amusing recurring scenes in the novel is when Noir turns up at his office after a sustained beating (in an alley, down at the docks…) and Blanche has to remove and wash his clothes. All she can offer him to hide his embarrassment is her underwear:

“…a pair of pink silk panties with little flowers stitched on them. The glossy silk felt good but they were a tight fit and some of your unmentionables hung out…
If anyone asks, I’ll say I’m airing out my haemorrhoids.”

That he also manages to get a tattoo on his rear and bleached pubic hair in the course of the story all adds to the fun (and provides a way of sorting out the chronology).

And just when you think the humour and nudge-nudge wink-wink approach to genre is wearing a little thin, Coover provides an elegant solution (which I will not reveal here):

“It’s funny. While you’re working on a case every outcome seems possible. When it’s over, it’s like nothing could have happened otherwise.”

It is certainly true of Coover’s work that “every outcome seems possible”: that is exactly what makes him such a vibrant and fascinating writer.

Lost Books – House of Lies

In the late 1980s (when I read a great deal of Scottish literature) I particularly enjoyed two novels by a Scottish writer called Colin Mackay, although I knew almost nothing about him. The first, The Song of the Forest, was a set in Scotland’s distant past in a remote rural community; it was noticeable for its mythic, poetic style (I have since discovered it began life as a poem). The second, The Sound of the Sea, had a more contemporary background in the Falklands War, but also drew on the experiences of his father in the Second World War and his grandfather in the First. I was aware he had written a third novel, House of Lies, but had not bought it at the time of publication (1995) and as it soon fell out of print, it almost fell out of mind. Nevertheless, every so often I remembered this ‘lost book’, even retaining a picture of its stark black and white cover with its rather lurid use of red in the aforementioned house’s door and the word ‘Lies’.

It was only after reading it, when I decided to research a little into Mackay’s background (now so easily done online), that I discovered that House of Lies was his last published novel (though not the last he wrote), and that he committed suicide in 2003. (You can find out more about his work and read an interview here, and read his obituary in the Scotsman here). His autobiography, Jacob’s Ladder, written after he had decided to take his own life (It’s first sentence is, “Soon I will be dead”), is available online here.

Not only was the sad end to Mackay’s life something of a shock, so was House of Lies itself. it was quite different in tone form Mackay’s previous novels, a savage satire aimed at British Communists in the form of a horror story. Here is Mackay’s own summary:

“It’s set in a communist newspaper office in London at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Newspaper workers who have spent decades sanitising and distorting what was really going on in the Soviet Union are faced with a general public which now knows more of the truth. They start being visited by the ghosts of people who were tortured and lost their loves in Russia.”

This description seems a more focused idea than its execution. We begin, for example, with a brief prologue set in Moscow a few years later. Perhaps this is meant to offer a little balance – while Mackay attacks the blinkered nature of communism he does not seem to be suggesting unrestrained capitalism in its place:

“Were strip clubs really the sort of benefit we had wished to confer upon people longing for the joys of freedom?”

It may also be intended as a way of grounding the supernatural story which follows in contemporary reality, but, never returned to, it seems a misleading introduction.

The story itself begins with Tam Burns, an unemployed dock worker with literary aspirations, who gains employment as the night watchman on the premises of a communist newspaper in London via a meeting with its editor, Finlay McRath, at a creative writing class. Tam at first seems our introduction to the world of the newspaper, an everyman we can identify with. In one scene, when a statue is delivered to the offices, the various journalists are quite happy to leave it to the ‘workers’ like Tam to bring the statue inside, thus highlighting a more general hypocrisy. The statue, a symbolic representation of a member of the secret police, has been sent anonymously from Russia, and it is soon suggested that it has come to life and intends to repay the newspaper’s staff for their wilful blindness to persecution in the Soviet Union:

“I do the work of historical necessity here. That’s what I was told. I’m the liquidator.”

This fits well with Mackay’s satirical intent, but too many other elements muddy the waters. Burns, we discover, is not representative of the working man, but a union leader who neglected his daughter after his wife’s death because of the ‘big strike’. Coming half way through the novel, this leaves the reader slightly unanchored in the narrative. The other characters are caricatures of unpleasantness and self-absorption which can make the satire seem rather heavy-handed. Even the haunting of the house is not dependant on the fall of the Berlin Wall or the arrival of the statue, but has been going on for many years. Not only did it lead to the suicide of the previous caretaker after he had murdered his own daughter, they now seem to do most of the haunting. In other words, there is rather an excess of the supernatural in the novel, and with so many people being haunted, there is no other explanation than that the house is riddled with ghosts.

One might also question the target of the satire: exactly how many people in the UK, ten years after Margaret Thatcher came to power, still believed whole-heartedly in the Soviet Union? And were they really so powerful and dangerous that they needed bludgeoned (literally as well as metaphorically in this novel) by such a talented writer? Because talented Mackay certainly was, and the risk-taking of this novel alone (a horror / political satire cross-over) proves that he still had an enormous amount to offer.

New for 2012

Every year begins in expectation and, for readers, that optimism is often engendered by the books they hope to read. While the media tends to focus on a small band of UK writers, there are other exciting publications already scheduled for the year ahead.

Already published (in a handsome slip case edition) in January is Roberto Bolano’s The Third Reich, an earlier novel of his which was only released after his death. While Bolano’s place in world literature continues to be debated, any new volume is to be welcomed. Penguin Modern Classics also published two of Elias Canetti’s books towards the end of the month, the pick for me being Kafka’s Other Trial, an exploration of the letters Kafka wrote to his fiancée, Felice.

The same imprint also brings us Hans Fallada’s A Small Circus in February, building on the success of Alone in Berlin and once again translated by the wonderful Michael Hofmann. This earlier novel is set in 1929 and reflects the political turbulence of Germany at the time. The aftermath of the Second World War is explored in Dasa Drndic’s Trieste – I know nothing about this writer but I am intrigued by the novel’s description as being ‘like no other’.

March sees a new Cesar Aira, Varamo, from New Directions – always a good thing. This month’s treat from Penguin Classics is The Gold Rimmed Spectacles by Giorgio Bassani set in Italy in the 1930s. Anyone looking for anything a little different might try Harlequin’s Millions by Bohumil Hrabal published by Archipelago Books and set in an old folks’ home.

Briefly venturing into the mainstream in April, I must admit to looking forward to Peter Carey’s latest novel, The Chemistry of Tears, a double narrative centred on the reconstruction of a 19th century automaton.

May sees two other UK novels by writers who are always interesting. Adam Thorpe’s Flight is unfortunately described as ‘his most commercial yet’, but for a writer who has never settled on one particular type of novel this is perhaps not as bad as it sounds, a thriller about a pilot on the run from his past. Alan Warner’s The Deadman’s Pedal suggests a return to his earlier, more surreal style after The Stars in the Bright Sky. May also sees a new novel Ismail Kadare from Canongate, The Fall of the Stone City, set during the German invasion of Albania in 1943.

In June we will be able to read the one translated novel that has been generally noticed this year, Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt. Llosa’s political novels tend to be better than his relationship ones, and this fictional biography of the Irish revolutionary, Roger Casemont, has the potential to be as good as The Feast of the Goat. June will also see Enrique Vila-Matas’ James Joyce novel, Dublinesque –as usual with Vila-Matas, it is difficult to know what to expect.

Finally, in July, we find new novels from two individualists, James Kelman (Mo Said She Was Quirky) and Nicola Barker (The Yips). Barker presents her usual quirky cast of characters in what is described as a ‘state of the nation’ novel (for the nation in 2006); Kelman gives us twenty four hours in the life of an ordinary woman. And there is another dark fable from one of my favourite writers, Philippe Claudel, in The Investigation.

Most exciting of all, of course, is that great novel that we have yet to hear of, the one we will come across by chance or recommendation, and love more than any other.

Books of the Year 2011

The Year of Reading Dangerously is over and, although I didn’t quite make it through my list of ‘dangerous’ writers (I’ve still not read Paul Auster, William Burroughs, Harry Mathews or Arno Schmidt, and I’d also hopped to reacquaint myself with Beckett and Jean-PhilippeToussaint), it was an invigorating experience. Only occasionally did I feel I was reading more out of a sense of duty than enjoyment, and the number of writers I look forward to reading again is far greater than the few I will probably avoid(I wasn’t convinced by the cleverness of Christine Brooke-Rose or William Gass).

The most interesting effect can be seen in my Books of the Year – not a weighty novel in sight. All of them are either short novels (perhaps even novellas) or short story collections. Possibly experimentation works better in short forms…

Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck – like Michel Faber, I think that Erpenbeck is a major writer, and this short novel distilling 100 years of German history into the events around a single house is a masterpiece.

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis – the ideal Kindle read, a seemingly endless supply of imagination to dip into.

A Life on Paper by Georges-Olivier Chateaureynaud – another excellent collection of short stories by a French writer appearing for the first time in English thanks to Small Beer Press.

Europeana by Patrik Ourednik – a history of twentieth century Europe in this difficult to classify work, more an imaginative essay than a novel. Dalkey Archive have since published two more of Ourednik’s novels which I will be adding to my ‘to read’ pile.

How I Became a Nun by Cesar Aira – it’s difficult to define what makes Aira’s short novels so attractive, but the sheer joie de vivre of the telling is one quality. Couldn’t resist – already returned for a dose of The Literary Conference. The good news is that New Directions seem to be publishing him regularly.

Guadalajara by Quim Monzo – I’d previously enjoyed The Enormity of the Tragedy, but this collection of short stories was even better. And published by the wonderful Open Letter.

this is not a novel by David Markson – I found this title hard to resist, but there’s more to Markson than clever title: I found this book quite moving. Available thanks to another small press, CB editions.

Lightning by Jean Echenoz – the concluding part to Echenoz’s trilogy of biographical novels, this time based on the life of Nicola Tesla. A collected edition from a UK publisher would not be amiss.

The Sickness by Alberto Barrera Tyszka – deservedly on the short list for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, this was an impressive meditation on illness.

Pricksongs and Descants by Robert Coover – I now find it hard to believe I had never read Coover before. Highlight of the year was hearing him read at The Edinburgh Book Festival – two new stories just as good as this classic collection.