Spring Reads by iON’s Bookworm, Warwick Yolks

Mary Cavanagh A Man Like Any Other (Matador, 2008 paper)

A local novel, self-printed and published, is the way to make many hearts sink; whatever we think of agents and the big publishing houses, surely they must be reasonably reliable filters of quality? Well, no. Here is one that slipped through: it is an excellent novel, and not the author’s first.

To say it is a Murdochian mix of unusual sex and religion is meant as a compliment. More importantly the main characters are interesting, well-realised and you want to know what happens to them. And what more can you say about any novel?

Kate Summerscale The Suspicions of Mr Whicher (Bloomsbury, 2008, paper and hardback)

You may think at first this is a novel, but it isn’t. It’s the original country house murder: someone in this mid-Victorian pile slits the throat of a sleeping three-year-old and pushed his body down the outside privy. The interest is not just the meticulous presentation of the trials and the newspapers, but the way the case gripped both the public, and also novelists. Mr Whicher, one of Scotland Yard’s first plainclothes detectives, and the whole case itself, were transformed into Dickens’ Inspector Bucket and Wilkie Collins’ Sergeant Cuff. A great blend of fact, literature, the courts, Anglo-Catholicism and the mob.

Paul Theroux The Elephanta Suite (Hamish Hamilton, 2008, paper and hardback)

Here are three long short stories about Americans in India, related by the thinnest thread of coincidence. They all contain some version of what Theroux calls ‘the Indian surprise’: that India is much more different from us than it seems, at least if you see only big luxury hotels and shiny new technology parks. One could say the same of many traditional societies, but Theroux shows real feeling for what makes up Indian sensibility.
This book is a return to the early Theroux, a man with an extraordinary sense for the exotic, and for familiar people placed in, and deeply disconcerted by, the exotic. Then came the sour middle-aged Theroux, tired of travel and steeped in marital self-pity. He seems to be coming out the other side.

Howard Jacobson The Act of Love (Cape, 2008, hardback)

A very peculiar and intense novel about a man irresistibly drawn to sexual suffering in the form of the involvement of his wife with other men. It is a strange but plausible portrait and, this being Jacobson the former literature don, we pass by all the great writers with similar tendencies, most notably Joyce. With another author we might simply be in www.cuckoldfantasies.com but this is a harsh and gripping book.

J.G. Ballard Miracles of Life (Harper Perennial, 2008, paperback)

The subtitle is ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton’, which says it all. Ballard is undoubtedly one of the major stylists of modern English, but shuns the literary world, and is still living in the Shepperton semi he bought half a lifetime ago before Crash, The Drowned World, Empire of the Sun, The Atrocity Exhibition, and Vermillion Sands. He began to write this autobiography very quickly for his family, having just been diagnosed with a rapidly advancing cancer, though fortunately he is still with us. The key to it all is his childhood in Japanese-occupied China, which occupies almost half the book, and his move as a young man to an utterly foreign post-war England. His fiction springs from the perpetual strangeness of his surroundings: he has never got used to being here, and Shepperton seems as good to him as anywhere else.