Fay Weldon, the immensely popular British author of twenty-nine previous novels, creates an unusual variation of metafiction in this largely satiric novel from 2010, about Britain’s twenty-first century issues as she sees them. Here, an elderly author is sitting on the stairs behind the closed front door of her house in Chalcot Crescent, evading the bailiffs who want to talk with her about her debts. The beleaguered author is Frances Prideaux, whose life parallels that of Fay Weldon in almost every key issue. Frances, however, says she is the sister of Fay, an author she claims is now reduced to writing cookbooks. Frances herself has written dozens of successful novels before losing her audience and spending more money than her novels are earning, and she has now decided to write “a fantasy about alternative universes…There are an infinite number of universes, too many to contemplate.” The alternative universe of the novel Frances is writing in 2010 exists in the not-so-distant future of 2013, a time in which Frances sees Britain in even more dire straits financially and socially. Her novel-in progress, a broad satire of the issues she sees dominating British life in the immediate future, alternates her social commentary with observations on her own life and that of her family and how they are affected by the changes.
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Jim Crace’s powerful and dramatic new novel, set in an unnamed rural farm community in England in an unstated year, wastes no time in shifting the atmosphere from the “jollity” and feeling of community resulting from the hard work of the harvest to the kind of mindless hysteria, based on fear, which American readers will instantly recognize as similar to that which existed during the Salem witch trials (as is seen in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible). Working for Master Kent, whose wife inherited a large portion of land from her family, the farmers who work the Master’s land are all too aware that theirs is a tenuous life, one in which they have a small cottage in which to live and a small portion of the harvest for their own use in exchange for back-breaking work under uncertain weather conditions, with most of the harvest going to Master Kent. On the last day of the harvest, two plumes of smoke are seen—one from a hearth fire outside a hut newly built by three strangers. An ancient ruling allows the right of settlement and a portion of the harvest for any “vagrants who might succeed in putting up four vulgar walls and sending up some smoke before we catch them doing it.” Three people, two men and a woman who resembles a sorceress have staked out a claim on the Master’s land and, with it, a right to a portion of the meager harvest the community of workers has just worked so hard to bring in. The second plume of smoke proves to be the roof of the Master’s haylofts, where his doves live. As the situation continues to deteriorate, Jim Crace quickly advances the novel from its initial feeling of foreboding to a feeling of terrible inevitability, adding details and events which horrify the reader for what they portend. Guilt vs. innocence, the use of raw power to control outcomes, the callous manipulation of resources (such as land) at the expense of human beings who are dependent upon it for their very survival, the question of one’s responsibility to a community as opposed to one’s responsibility to uphold the truth, the question of vengeance, and ultimately, the question of how it is possible to define “right” in a community which has no religion and no legal system are all important themes in the development of the novel.
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Reading something fun by Daniel Silva always seems to be connected with my summer reading, and this novel is no exception – though not as interesting or challenging as his previous novel, The Fallen Angel, which dealt with on-going Arab-Israeli conflicts, a planned terrorist attack on an Israeli site in Europe, and the possibility that there is a very early Jewish temple built underneath the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount. The English Girl, by contrast, feels much more “domestic,” concerning itself for much of the book with the kidnapping of a young woman who has been the lover of the Prime Minister of England, a circumstance which the prime minister’s political friends want resolved privately and as quietly as possible. Gabriel Allon, an Israeli art restorer who also works for the Israeli secret intelligence agency, has connections to intelligence services throughout the world as a result of his international work, and when he is contacted by the deputy director of MI5 in England, he agrees to try to find and free Madeline Hart, the woman being held hostage in some unknown place. The novel divides into two parts In the second part, and the novel becomes more complex and more relevant to present day international relations. When, during his investigations, Allon finds evidence that the Russians are interested in drilling for oil in the North Sea, he calls on Viktor Orlov, once one of the richest oligarchs of the Russian oil industry, for more information. The maneuvering for the European oil market becomes the main plot in the second half of the novel.
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With its quick narrative pacing, its unusual story lines filled with ironies, its wounded characters (appealing in their vulnerability), and the novel’s inherent charm, this newly reprinted novel from 1975 may be the perfect answer for lovers of literary fiction looking for a great book to read on a hot summer day. Russell Hoban is in fine fettle here, creating a novel which raises big questions while focusing on two quiet characters whose lives are about to change in significant ways. The “ends” they have been seeking have been present in their “beginnings,” as the review’s opening sentence (from T. S. Eliot) indicates, though until now these characters have not recognized this, spending their middle age dreaming and second-guessing – and ruing the fact that they have missed their chances for happier, more satisfying lives. In their separate narratives, William G. and Neaera H. share their lives and their thoughts. William G., the divorced father of two, now works in a bookshop and lives in a small room. As the novel opens, he is at the zoo, but he concludes, petulantly, that “I don’t want to go to the Zoo anymore.” Neaera H., a writer of children’s stories, is sick of writing about Gillian Vole and birthday parties, and has been contemplating using a predator as her next character. As her first commentary opens, she has just purchased a home aquarium, not for fish, but for a Great Water-beetle, which she has ordered by mail. Eventually, both speakers come together in a plan to release the sea turtles into the ocean, an event which changes their lives. A great book for a book club.
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Whenever art lovers see “The Center of the World,” J. M. W. Turner’s masterpiece, for the first time, all are stunned by its power. Some of these viewers come close to venerating the painting in a religious sense, as they spend hours staring into it and experiencing the waves of pleasure that accompany every viewing. Because of its very nature and the powerful sexuality it exudes from within, however, it is a painting that the patron and the artist never expected to be shown publicly. A mysterious painting which vanished almost immediately after it was finished, the ‘The Center of the World’ is indeed the hub of this novel’s wheel, drawing everything else into it as the novel unfolds through several different points of view. On its surface, Thomas Van Essen’s debut novel is a quest to find the missing painting, but the novel is more than that. It is also a study of ecstasy, what creates it, and what enhances it, in art and literature (and even, indirectly, religion) and in real life. The novel’s various points of view, in time periods extending over the course of one hundred fifty years, illustrate the history of this (probably) mythical painting from its creation to the present, convincing the reader that it is both real and as powerfully seductive as was Helen of Troy herself.
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