The Modern Library (12 page)

Rosa Burger is the daughter of Marxist parents who have been martyred for the cause of a new South Africa. The novel tells the story of her desire to be true to her parents’ legacy and her efforts to escape it. It is written in her own voice and the dry voice of a reporter; it takes us through her childhood and her parents’ lives, through the years after their deaths, followed by a wonderfully described sensuous sojourn in France, and then the inevitable return. Even though much of the novel deals with cool surfaces, scenes viewed from afar, moments snatched from memory, Rosa Burger, like many of Gordimer’s characters, seems desperately real and exact, alive and memorable.

No great Scottish novel emerged from the First World War, nor from the Second. It seems to have taken the unlikely figure of Margaret Thatcher to fire, and perhaps infuriate, the Scottish novelists’ imaginations.

Lanark
seethes with political rage and is jammed with surrealist invention. It tells the interconnected stories of Duncan Thaw, a young Glasgow artist who draws, and is drawn, in the realist tradition, and the figure Lanark, his science fiction doppelgänger, who comes to the page in full Borgesian dress. Thaw’s Glasgow is a place of tenements, canals, middens, Catholics and Protestants, and the man himself is common and depressed, a Fifties lad filled with civic wonder. Lanark’s vision of Glasgow is called Unthank, a fiery, darkened, collapsing industrial nightmare, like an illustration from William Blake. Lanark is given to odd skin complaints and strange encounters, and his travels through the underworld give vent to some of the best thinking about citizenship ever to appear in a novel.

Gray is a master of shade and counterpoint. Thaw’s world and Lanark’s world open on to each other in the most dazzling ways in this novel. At the end of the book, as Lanark contemplates the destruction of the city from his vantage point on the old merchant Necropolis, we are left with nothing less eccentric than a boisterous lament for Gray’s native Glasgow and all its past glories.
Lanark
is a circus, and a milestone in contemporary Scottish writing.

If there is a ball in literary heaven, Henry Green will be waltzing with Ivy Compton-Burnett; masters of dialogue both, it is difficult to imagine which of the two would lead the dance.

In
Nothing
Henry Green gazes upon the English moneyed classes, deprived of wealth by the Second World War and the taxes of the Labour government which followed it. For the first time in their lives, after doing nothing much, they must work. John Pomfret is such a man and Jane Weatherby, his former
amour
, a woman of just that class. Their offspring are quite other: children of the welfare state, they go to work while their parents lunch weekly at the Ritz, making much moan.

In this world no one wishes another well; it is parents first, children second; the rest of the world is there to dance attendance. When John’s daughter falls in love with Jane’s son, only the accumulated vinegar of many years enables Jane to put her towering self-esteem to good use, and, manipulating malice like a sten gun, lay waste those who stand in her way.

This is a model comedy of manners, lyrical and graphic, rising and falling in perfect tempo to the accompaniment of dialogue at once vivacious and viciously funny. Henry Green had access to wells of wit and caustic perception denied other writers.

It is difficult to decide which of the six wonderful novels that Graham Greene wrote between 1950 and his death is the best:
The End of the Affair
(1951);
The Quiet American
(1955);
Our Man in Havana
(1958);
The Comedians
(1966);
The Honorary Consul
(1973) or
The Human Factor
. There are moments in each of the books which are superb; and there are characters in each book who, in their isolation and shambling struggle with themselves, are among the most memorable in contemporary writing. Greene is certainly the finest English writer of the second half of the century.

The
Human Factor
, the most perfect and poignant of Greene’s post-1950s novels, deals with the Secret Service; Maurice Castle, in his sixties, is back in London at the Africa desk. He is a mild man who lives quietly, good with files, as one of his superiors says; he is deeply in love with Sarah, his wife, who is a black South African. He has rescued her once and now he seeks to protect her and her son Sam. The novel, as one would expect from Greene, has some marvellous minor shady characters, and deals brilliantly with the chilling, ruthless nature of Castle’s superiors. (It also has the best dog of any novel mentioned in this book; see Iris Murdoch’s
The Nice and the Good
for the best cat.) But it is Castle himself who emerges most painfully in the novel: obsessive, driven, haunted, uneasy.

The West Pier
is a study in pure, unmitigated perversity. The novel is set along the seafront and pier in Brighton in the early 1920s; there are only five characters who matter in the plot: three young men who were in school together, and two young women whom they meet on the pier. There are no murders and no violence, and yet there is an atmosphere in the book of constant menace and malevolence.

This book, the first in the Gorse trilogy, explores the mind of one Ernest Ralph Gorse as he takes advantage of one of the young women and makes a fool of her. With all its macabre plots and evil intentions, it has the tone of a very dark psychological thriller. The writing, which is elegant and slightly arch, is also at times world-weary and oddly wise, as though the book were written by the retired headmaster of an old, posh public school. It is full of petty snobberies and dramatic versions of the English class system. Slowly Hamilton allows Gorse to take over the book, and the twisted workings of his agile mind become fascinating; the idea that he wants to cause grief and humiliation and pain for their own sake gives the book a sort of horror that you can only find in other books by Hamilton and certain films by Hitchcock.

Elizabeth Hardwick sits at her New York table one June ‘listening to the birdsong of rough, grinding trucks in the street’ and decides to transform memory into fiction. Her ‘clever, critical, bookish’ heroine – herself – remembers episodes from her childhood in West Virginia in the company of her large family whose destinies ‘are linked by a likeness of forehead and nose’. Then there are the bohemian years in New York living at the Hotel Schulyer ‘within walking distance of all those places one never walked to’, playing games of love with a cherished homosexual friend.

This period includes a portrait of Billie Holiday as Hardwick knew her, drenched in music and drugs; and then come years in America and Europe with the shadowy figure of her real husband, the poet Robert Lowell. All this and more is wrapped around the true heroines of her memories, the ‘store clerks and waitresses, those ladies cast off with children to raise’, the Idas and Josettes and Angelas whose small women’s lives allow Hardwick to conjure up large truths. These splinters of memory, confessions of an insomniac, are recalled in words lovingly and precisely chosen. Hardwick has almost created her own literary form to write this novel; its other originalities lie in its zest for life, for epigram – and in the siren voice of its narrator.

Frank Hardy, an Australian Communist and gambler, wanted to write a fictional exposé of John Wren, the corrupt business magnate who controlled Melbourne – its sporting, gambling and political life, its police force and its Catholic Church – in the decades before 1950. Hardy spent years collecting material and secretly writing the novel, always one step ahead of Wren’s machine. With no money, no printer, no publisher and a libellous seven-hundred-page manuscript, bit by bit the book became famous by word of mouth, a triumph of self-publishing.

The result was uproar: Hardy was arrested for criminal libel, and so began the most notorious case in Australian history – which Hardy won.

But above all, this is a passionate work of fiction, with a Balzacian vigour fuelled by Hardy’s intense dedication to his epic cause. John Wren – renamed John West – stands before us, rising from his poor Irish immigrant beginnings, discarding family, friends, wife and children – if need be – in his ruthless quest for control of his city. This is not a one-dimensional novel nor is it a political tract. We feel for West: we know what made him what he is, and it is in Hardy’s understanding of the evil grandeur of the man and the tangled forces that explain him and bring him down that the value of this novel lies.

Hannibal Lecter, who dominated Harris’s bigger bestseller
Silence
of the Lambs
, began his career in this thriller of masterly horror that quietly refrigerates the blood.

Thomas Harris does not bother with secrets; we know the infamy we face on the first page. Special agent Will Graham is cooling things off in Miami with his wife and stepson, after being sliced up by Lecter with a linoleum knife. Lecter, in prison, still manages to emit a miasma of iniquity and malignity by letter and phone – almost by osmosis. When Graham comes out of retirement to track down a serial killer who loves to kill families – husband, wife, children and family pet with attendant disagreeable rituals – he encounters a new psychopath, Frank Dolarhyde. Lethally similar, Lecter and Dolarhyde literally savour human flesh. Harris uses meticulous knowledge of forensic science, and domestic detail conveyed with precision and affection. His psychological insight – best illustrated by an account of Dolarhyde’s childhood with his glacial grandmother, which is utterly believable, yet beyond belief – brings this intricate thriller to a brilliant climax.

Harris is a master craftsman with a particular talent for inserting horror into the ordinariness of the everyday, as the starting point for incidents of gigantic terror; he is one of a tiny band of popular novelists whose works are in a class and genre of their own.