Two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey, one of Australia’s most honored contemporary writers, creates his most dazzling novel yet with this send-up of the art world, filled with satire about dealers, auction houses, compulsive collectors, forgers, conservators and technicians, art researchers, catalogue writers, those who crate and ship paintings, and even the artists themselves. At the same time, he creates two splendid characters through whose limited vision this world is viewed—Michael “Butcher” Boone, a successful avant-garde artist from Australia, now experiencing hard times, and his “slow” brother Hugh, a 220-pound giant with little control over his emotions and a penchant for breaking the little fingers of people who get in his way. The story of how Butcher is drawn into a complex scheme to defraud is told in alternating chapters by Butcher himself and by Hugh, who sees himself as his brother’s “helper.” The action ratchets up as the financial stakes in the art market increase, and a murder, filled with shocking details, draws the complexity of the art fraud into the open for the reader—and for Butcher. The final chapter, almost an Afterword, gives new meaning to the word “irony.” (On my Favorites List for 2006)
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Chasing after her rowdy dog-pack one day, the Queen discovers them barking at a “removal-like van,” a bookmobile, parked outside the kitchen at Windsor. Entering the mobile library to apologize for the din, the Queen meets Norman Seakins, a young man from the kitchen whose primary interest is in gay books and photography. Feeling obligated to take a book, the Queen borrows a novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, intending to return it the following week. Almost immediately, her life changes. That night, when the President of France arrives, she abandons her usual safe conversation and, addressing the president, remarks, “I’ve been longing to ask you about the writer Jean Genet…Homosexual and jailbird, was he nevertheless, as bad as he was painted?” In this wickedly wry novella, Alan Bennett explores reading, writing, and their effects on our lives as he develops this imaginative and warmly humorous scenario. (A Favorite for 2007)
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Casting a satiric eye on the publishing business, author Elise Blackwell shows the agonies and excitements of several young authors as each tries to find the magic formula for getting a book published, publicized, and sold to the public. Most have been successful with a first novel—at least to the extent that it has been published—and all now have second novels which they are trying to “place” with a publisher. Trying to support themselves with contributions to small literary journals while looking for the “right” connection for their next novel, they must negotiate literary minefields filled with agents, editors, publicists, manuscript “fixers,” sponsors of writing conferences, and influential bookstore chains, all of which affect their sense of mission and, ultimately, their self-worth. Delightful, thought-provoking, and full of rapier-sharp insights into the tenuous connections between writing and publishing, the novel is assured, perceptive, and often hilarious. The glimpses Blackwell provides of the strange, literary world she inhabits are unforgettable. (On my Favorites list for 2007)
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The bloody Siege of Krishnapur in 1857 is the pivot around which the action revolves in this Booker Prize-winning novel by J. G. Farrell, but Farrell’s focus is less on Krishnapur and the siege than it is on the attitudes and beliefs of the English colonizers who made that siege an inevitability. He puts these empire-builders under the microscope, then skewers their arrogant and superior attitudes with the rapier of his wit, subjecting them to satire and juxtaposing them and their narrowly focused lives against the realities of the world around them. Remarkably, he does this with enough subtlety that we can recognize his characters as individuals, rather than total stereotypes, at the same time that we see their absurdity and recognize the damage they have done in their zeal to spread their “superior” culture. From the opening pages, Farrell builds suspense as the English colony ignores reports of unrest in Barrackpur, Berhampur, and Meerut. The flirtations of the single women, the amorous attentions of the young men, the boorish and insensitive behavior of the officials, the gossipy whispering of their wives, and the unrelenting efforts to maintain the same society they enjoyed at home–with tea parties, poetry readings, and dances–all attest to their degree of isolation from the world around them.
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Originally published in 1970 and newly reprinted by The New York Review of Books, J. G. Farrell’s Troubles, the story of Ireland’s fight for its independence from England, from the close of World War I through 1922, illuminates the attitudes and insensitivities that made revolution a necessity for the Irish people. Farrell also, however, focuses on the personal costs to the residential Anglo-Irish aristocracy as they find themselves being driven out of their “homes.” Major Brendan Archer, newly released from hospital where he has been recovering from the long-term emotional effects of his wartime experience, arrives at the ironically named Majestic Hotel on a bleak and rainy day to reintroduce himself to his fiancée Angela, daughter of the proprietor, and, if they agree to marry, to return with her to a home in England. The Major, however, is greeted by no one upon his arrival at the hotel desk, and he must find his own way to the Palm Court, “a vast, shadowy cavern in which…beds of oozing mould supported banana and rubber plants, hairy ferns, elephant grass and creepers that dangled from above like emerald intestines.”
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