Recent first novels
Lucy Beresford
Iselected Overnight to Innsbruck by Denyse Woods (Sitric Books, £9.99, pp. 255, ISBN 1903305063) by chance from the reviewing shelf and discovered a real treat of a read. It is pleasantly old-fashioned in having a strong, page-turning plot, and credible characters who panic and fret in recognisably authentic ways, yet bristling with smart, contemporary dialogue and psychological insight. If only chance had been similarly benevolent to the novel's protagonists ...
When inveterate traveller Fran wakes up from a snooze on the Nile Valley Express, after a monumental row with her fellowIrish boyfriend Richard, she discovers he has disappeared. Stranded in the heat of Wadi Haifa (the only reason people come here is to leave'), and enlisting the help of two hilariously drawn Australians, she has to decide whether to find him, or give in to the fear that he has abandoned her, just when she'd committed herself to giving up her nomadic inclinations for a life of domesticity. By chance, four years later, they bump into each other on the Rome-to-Innsbruck night-train, and Fran demands an explanation. Their subsequent respective versions of events (overheard by a third passenger) — of hitched rides in the desert, missed telexes, delayed ferries and altered plans — leave both doubting the other's honesty. As the train pulls finally into Innsbruck, both must consider the price paid for wavering between pride and a desire for intimacy. I read it in one sitting, holding my breath, such is Woods' skill in building up tension. As a thriller, this is, as Richard would say, great craic.
At the heart of Indra Sinha's playfully sprawling novel, The Death of Mr Love (Scribner, £16.99, pp. 584, ISBN 0743206983), is a scandal from 1950s Bombay — the murder by Captain Nanavati of his English-born wife's Indian Lothario-like lover, But in a novel exploring the very nature of storytelling and myth-making an equally shocking fictional tale (of abortion, blackmail, revenge and mental disintegration) seeps out, begging to be told. That the task of giving it voice falls to Bhalu, naïve adult son of talented scriptwriter Maya, raises questions about destiny and the importance, or feasibility, of fictional truth.
As children, Bhalu and Phoebe (the coquettish daughter of Maya's English friend Sybil) are inseparable. Sadly, they are parted after the suspicious death of Phoebe's ayah, and do not meet for 40 years when, at the London funeral wake for Bhalu's mother, Phoebe embroils him in the hunt for a missing volume of Sybil's diaries (thought to contain the identity of the man who 'ruined things for all of us'), an erratic quest which takes them from swanky London hotel bedrooms to the downtown opium dens of what is now called Mumbai.
Anyone familiar with India will marvel at Sinha's skill in depicting the teeming, glorious, feculent city of Mumbai, and be amused to note how the Dickensian narrative mimics the larger-than-life plots of many Bollywood `fillims'. By alluding to interracial conflicts (1857 Mutiny, Partition, the 1993 Mumbai riots), Sinha also examines the notion of truth; as fantasies and echoes from Bhalu's childhood surface in the narrative, his possible unreliability as a narrator adds a post-modern twist to this exploration.
Jon McGregor is an exemplary archivist of the humdrum. Raising curtain-twitching to a new level, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (Bloomsbury, £12.99, pp. 275 ISBN 0747568337, long-listed for the Booker Prize) tells, in rich, slow-motion detail, the events one summer's day leading up to a shocking moment in time as experienced or witnessed by a group of city neighbours: an Indian couple who suffered years of infertility before their children arrived; two mates trying to light a barbecue; young friends back from a heavy night partying; students; a house-painter; an elderly couple celebrating their anniversary; and a shy lad at No. 18 who tries to distil his experience of the world by collecting rubbish and taking photographs, and whose intervention in the day's pivotal event will have far-reaching repercussions. Jump-cut (as is the modern way) into this descriptive kaleidoscope is the subsequent story of one particular neighbour, whose unplanned pregnancy prompts her to examine her own family history in similarly minute detail.
No drop of rain is left unexamined, no glance or kiss undissected and, along with numerous empty metaphors, a certain humourlessness to this relentless scrutiny becomes irritating_ Yet, touching on the whole cycle of life and breaking down the molecules of experience, McGregor invests the human condition with a dignity which is almost painful to consider. In an age of frenetic multi-tasking and MTV sound-bites, it is intriguing to read such a celebration of the ordinary, written by someone who detects so passionately the remarkable in the everyday.
In The Edge of Pleasure by Philippa Stockley (Abacus, £10.99, pp. 325, ISBN 0349115443) timing is all. Gilver Memmer is now a middle-aged wreck, his sparkling youth as a precocious painter and sartorial icon obliterated by drink, women and general Eurotrash excess. Nearing bankruptcy, he is provided, by a fortuitous fire at his Knightsbridge house, with the excuse to trade down to a former squat in Ladbroke Grove, go into hiding and evade social death. A chance meeting with delicate Alice will rudely shake them both out of the emotional torpor which has gripped them for too long, but not before Alice's sometime friend Juliette, spiky editor of the gossip magazine Rogue, has set about exacting public revenge on Gilver for a traumatic episode from her own carefully concealed past. In this, she is helped unwittingly by Hal (who has worshipped Gilver from afar since school) and the ghastly Grishers. Gilver's erstwhile gallery-owning champions from New York.
Stockley's writing and imagery are voluptuous, and (despite a mild obsession with describing skies) remain on the right side of pastiche, so that the world of art and the competing forces surrounding its composition are strikingly realised. Her teasing treatment of the novel's 'big' themes (revenge, redemption, the durability of hatred and the capacity for forgiveness) invests the book with a delicious ambiguity: that both rapist and revenger command our sympathy says much about Stockley's ability to suspend judgment and write with an admirable lack of sentimentality. And with one well-publicised episode from Ulrika Johnsson's recent publishing sensation possibly still buzzing around one's consciousness, the catalyst for half the plot may strike some readers as nothing if not propitious.
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