Catching the train to London recently, I suddenly realised I was without a book. This is one of the most sobering of realisations. So when I noticed that Paul Torday’s wine-themed The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce was this week’s special offer with The Times I decided to give it a go.
I know next to nothing about Paul Torday and his novels. I’m aware that he’s written a very successful book called Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. I’m also aware that he didn’t give writing a proper try until he was in his sixties, which intrigues me. It also gives me hope. But I try and stay away from popular fiction because at heart I am a snob, but the three hours on trains without reading material other than work-related documents filled me with dread, so I took the plunge.
Wilberforce is a novel told backwards, which in four sections reverses the life of its narrator. The beginning is very much Wilberforce’s end; stuck in a four bottles of wine a day habit he’s slowly sinking towards oblivion. The opening chapters are excellent; Wilberforce is a comic character, strolling into a restaurant and downing two bottles of vintage wine worth thousands of pounds before being carried out in a stupor. I laughed, but I also asked both how he had reached such a decadent state of alcoholism and how he had become so rich. Torday answers these questions slowly as he strips away the life in question, revealing how Wilberforce has reached this sorry state.
Torday does something rare in a novel, and something I’m always crying out for. This is the third factor. This is where, at about a third of the way through a novel, I am hanging on every word. I’m loving it. I’m cracking open a bottle of wine and celebrating Paul Torday. But unfortunately, even though I found this novel great to start with and exceptional between a third and two thirds, I was disappointed by the final section. Without giving too much away, I realised I’d fallen for the drunken, careless and infuriating Wilberforce, and as Torday slipped back each year I was less enamoured by his earlier incarnations. Wilberforce is a wonderful creation in the tradition of the unreliable narrator, and as he becomes more reliable he’s less addictive. No matter. Torday is a very good writer and is almost as good as Jonathan Coe, who might have made this something really special. But worth a read, even if you have to pay full price for it.
One must be careful about evocations, for the markers of old graves are not always accurate.
It’s October time again so my choice in fiction is already turning towards the dark, haunted and peculiar. What better place to start than H.P. Lovecraft? I’ve always found Lovecraft’s work terrifying because it is so convincing. Even though the stories are usually fantastic, there is so much attention to detail and specifics that he draws you much further into the macabre than any less precise writer would do. He also has the tremendous power of suggest and, like M.R. James, offers many a warning to the curious. As our opening quote hints, necromancy is a dangerous and never exact science.
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is an excellent example of Lovecraft’s art. In this short novel, a young man slips further into apparent madness and perversity after learning that one of his ancestors dabbled rather too successfully in the occult. Even though the tale is effectively chilling, Lovecraft shows the reader very little. The evil and unwholesome deeds usually take place behind closed and locked doors, and the reader only gets glimpses of the true horror from the reactions of innocent bystanders. We rely on half heard disturbing cries and howls and unpleasant and overwhelming odours, always a favourite of Lovecraft. The descent into the depths of Ward is also well marked by his observers, his strange nocturnal habits, brief sightings and the muffled voices and secrecy.
Lovecraft also sets his scene with great skill. The account of Ward’s ancestor, Joseph Curwen, comes across like a work of fact in its studious attention to detail. It’s almost as if there is a legacy of horror built up brick by brick over the years before Ward mistakenly uncovers it. The best passage of the book, however, is when the bystander Dr Willett decides to investigate things:
Slowly, as befitted one of his years, he descended the ladder and reached the slimy steps below. This was ancient masonry, his torch told him; and upon the dripping walls he saw the unwholesome moss of centuries.
I really didn’t think this a sensible outing, and found his later discoveries even more unpleasant, but like poor Dr Willett, I feel like I’m slowly descending into a slimy and dark pit when I read Lovecraft, and sometimes the text is so layered and dense I find myself putting the book aside before realising I have only read a small number of pages.
Lovecraft’s short story The Dunwich Horror is successfully horrifying for many of the same reasons as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The backstory and chain of unsettling events, the odours, the sightings and the sounds. Much is relayed as first hand accounts of startled (and surviving) witnesses. There’s also the documented evidence, often present in ancient writings, ciphers and manuscripts:
He had not left the manuscript all night, but sat at his table under the electric light turning page after page with shaking hands as fast as he could decipher the cryptic text …. Toward the middle of the next night he drowsed off in his chair, but soon woke out of a tangle of nightmares almost as hideous as the truth and menaces to man’s existence that he had uncovered.
The Dunwich Horror is exhausting in its perseverance to unsettle you. Like all of Lovecraft’s work, you are only privy to half of the real horror. Just a glimpse, with the true terror just around the corner. But I still welcome the coming of October…
Yes, I was misled by the cover design of Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. But pleasantly so, if it is pleasant to discover that at what first appeared to be a work of fiction is in reality a work of fact concerning a true Victorian murder mystery. Summerscale gives a very thorough account of a mystery that, to use a phrase of the type beginning to creep into sensational journalism at the time, gripped the nation.
In 1860 the middle class and seemingly ordinary Kent family were subject to intense scrutiny following the murder of their young son. Inspector Jack Whicher, one of the first police officers honoured the distinction of detective, is despatched to investigate and what followed was a case that spanned several decades. Summerscale also proves that fact is far stranger than any invented murder mystery, and superbly chronicles the events that drew the attention of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and even Queen Victoria.
One of the reviews I’ve read of this account was careful not to spoil the outcome and intricate details for the reader. This is odd; even though the story is factual it has faded from memory – I’d certainly never heard of it – and at times you do become swept up in events, expecting a resolution that won’t come, at least not as neatly, as in most detective stories. And I feel I have to do the same, not spoil the outcome that is. The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is excellent reading, both as an account of Victorian society and as a critique of the sometimes sensational fiction of the day.
What I can prepare you for however is a sober alternative to the image of the detective in Victorian fiction, a man with undoubted reasoning as best personified by Sherlock Holmes. Gathering his evidence together, Jack Whicher suggests that Constance Kent, older sister of the murdered child, is guilty. His suspicions are discredited, Whicher falling into semi-disgrace, with a servant then emerging as the most likely suspect (Charles Dickens himself favouring the latter theory). Summerscale gathers her own evidence skilfully however, giving the reader a full and detailed insight into this compelling history.
You might think that wanting to read Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark because it was such a short novel is an odd reason for choosing a book. Perhaps you are right, but after listening to the author being interviewed I was intrigued to find out how he managed to pack to many interesting ideas into something so brief.
You might also describe the night hours that one spends sleeping as also brief; not so if you are an insomniac like August Brill. Recovering from a car accident (and, indirectly, recovering from the brutal murder of his grand-daughter’s boyfriend), Brill lies awake at night, inventing stories to while away the hours and prevent himself from addressing stark reality. Auster’s premise is an alternative America, a country where there was no 9/11, subsequently no war in Iraq – Brill sketches out in his waking dream a second US civil war. He invents his own hero, a man called Brick, who wakes up in this weird alternative world. The premise works wonderfully. As a fantasy in the mind of a sleepless narrator it is perfectly justifiable and believable. Eyes wide open, I found myself caught up in Brick’s plight.
Auster switches between the imagined narrative and Brill’s more sober existence. We slowly learn about his life and his relationship with his bereaved grand-child. The two spend hours watching classic films, and there’s an interesting meditation on the relationship between novels and the cinema, and some excellent criticism of European films. But just as things begin to fit into a comfortable rhythm Auster does something unexpected – he kills off his invented hero. Goodbye Brick. It’s so shocking, possibly as shocking – to compare an artist from the world of cinema – as Hitchcock killed off Janet Leigh halfway into Psycho. This turns Man in the Dark from a quirky novel that flirts with science fiction into something more thought provoking.
Despite Auster’s bold move I did feel let down. Secretly, I want neat and resolved endings. At least a conclusion of the absurd premise I’ve been given. Brick, in the alternative US, is ordered to kill Brill in the real universe. A sort of “kill the author, save the world”. But Auster isn’t interested in neat endings, and wants us to be reminded of the sometimes horrible world we’re stuck with, with means him delivering a final, and disturbing, incident from the Iraq war. This is a novel I will have to read again. While Auster is keen to offer an alternative world he’s sketchy about how we got there. He’s also unclear that if you remove horrors from recent history the outcome isn’t necessarily preferable. It’s a book of paradoxes. And it will probably keep you awake.
Call me unusual, but I found Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 perfect summer reading. Although large and cumbersome, the hardback edition was always high on the list when packing our beach kitbag, and it always went in alongside the crocs, bucket and spade and water bottle. Smith’s debut novel has received a lot of attention for being part of the 2008 Booker longlist and, uncharacteristic for the Booker, being a thriller. This is also a novel that takes many thriller conventions (a serial killer, a wrong man chase) and wraps them up in the setting of 1950s Russia. The biting cold, the fear of being turned in by one’s own family, the torture and confession. Yes, it all made gripping summer reading.
Leo Demidov, a state security agent, is called in to pacify a family who are pleading that their young son has been murdered. The official line is that there was an unfortunate accident, and that murders are simply not commited in the neat and tidy climate of Communism. Leo is happy to go along with this, although the family concede through reasons of fear rather than reliable evidence. Leo returns to his day job, pursuing and apprehending the latest in a long line of suspect traitors. Although he pleads his innocence, the arrested man is routinely tortured for a confession and executed. What follows is one of the many fascinating twists of this novel, where one of the names provided by the tortured man is Leo’s own wife. Is she a suspect? Is Leo being punished for taking too much of an interest in the accidental death of the child? Is this the revenge tactics of a fellow officer? Leo is subsequently ordered to investigate his wife’s movements and what follows is a very well constructed and memorable episode, where he follows her on the network of Moscow’s underground, himself being followed by another agent. It’s pure Hitchcock, and I imagine that the film rights for this novel are already in someone’s eager hands. Just don’t cast Tom Hanks.
But what’s happened to the murder story? you may be asking , although Smith doesn’t rush with the serial killer thread and is more intent in the first half of the novel to establish character and setting. When Leo is demoted after failing to denounce his wife (although she remains at this stage an ambiguous character) and the Demidovs are relocated to a slum town outside of Moscow another victim is discovered, and Leo slowly finds out that the original death he was asked to sweep aside was a murder and was one of many. Child number 44. Cranked up to a reasonable tension, the novel then descends into more obvious territory, part James Bond escapes (a memorable one from a moving train, a less convincing one involving a car chase), part gut churning forensics (both in murder and interrogation victims). At times Smith is too keen to tie up all of the loose ends. He’s even cheeky enough to set things up for a sequel. But I found Child 44 above average for a thriller, and Smith just about gets away with the preposterous explanation for the sequence of murders and their connection with Leo. For me the book gained strength from the atmosphere of distrust and suspicion it creates, perhaps something of a cliché for a depiction of Stalinist Russia although he’s careful not to go too far with this. Leo Demidov is also interesting as the flawed lead, and Smith pulls the reader towards the plight of a man who’s done some terrible deeds, and made some awful decisions, in his past. What didn’t work so well for me was the frantic conclusion, although the final twist is delivered with some aplomb. It may be a ridiculous and far fetched premise, but Smith carries it off rather well.
So this was the novel that, albeit temporarily, broke my book buying ban. Some critics have been harsh, perhaps because of the Booker connection, but I really, really enjoyed this and recommend it for all. So there. It was a worthy relapse from the book buying, and I fully expect next year’s beaches to be awash with the paperback edition.
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