The Modern Library (13 page)

This is a strange, haunting novel; it reads as though Conrad and Kafka had come together and studied the style of the late Henry James. It is set in a thick jungle close to a waterfall along Guyana’s border with Venezuela and Brazil. Zachariah Stevenson is alone in this place: he has time to go over his father’s financial ruin and death and then his lover and her husband’s disappearance, the husband having embezzled money. He meets several figures in this remote outpost and has strange, portentous conversations with them. The sense of the jungle in the novel is overwhelming; the sense of rot and danger, heat and darkness takes over; the dank, menacing atmosphere is unforgettable; and the closeness of the waterfall lends power to the aura of claustrophobia. The prose is sinewy and dense, with strange twists and turns. In this heartland, habitation and pathways are tentative, so Stevenson’s journey from one hut to another is full of uncertainties and odd possibilities. It is therefore not surprising that he should see a half-decomposed dead man and watch a baby being born.

It is impossible to place this novel, or indeed most of Harris’s other work, in any tradition.
Heartland
, which is less than a hundred pages, is the sort of book you want to pick up and start again when you have finished it; it is infinitely mysterious and memorable.

This is one of the great English novels of the post-war period, with, also, one of the most famous opening lines: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’

Leo Colston recalls the hot summer of 1900. A schoolboy then, an only child of a widowed mother of modest means, he shyly joins his friend Marcus Maudsley at Brandham Hall in Norfolk, where he confronts the cold conventions of the late Victorian upper classes. Struggling to please the family, he carries messages for Marcus’s older sister Marian to the local farmer, Ted Burgess. On the periphery is the charming Hugh, Viscount Trimingham, face scarred by war, attendant on Marian. In the heat of summer Brandham Hall shimmers with deceptions as Leo grapples with crippling loyalties and secrets which, when revealed, are to maim him for life.

The perfection of
The
Go-Between
lies in its subtlety, its atmosphere and in its elegiac style. It is one of those books which reveal layer upon layer of meaning with each rereading, so that the anxiety for love and the agony of betrayal as experienced by young Leo open windows to England’s larger tragedies: the deathly embrace of the class system, the imminence of the First World War.

Novels about obsessive love are always absorbing; this one adds intriguing analyses of serious moral issues. Two sisters, Caro and Grace, come to England from Australia in the 1950s. Cook’s discovery of Australia is said to be a by-product of travelling to Tahiti in 1769, to watch the transit of Venus. Caro’s trajectory across the old world encompasses a cast of interlocking characters and a galaxy of moral predicaments. In this ambitious narrative, science, politics, international affairs and corrupt American governments contend with a particularly felicitous selection of venal bureaucrats and tedious academics.

Caro loves and is loved by three very different men, and so her transit becomes a study first of obsessive love, and then of passion in all its forms. Overarching these human concerns Hazzard places the unwilled determinations of an ironic fate and the importance of truth in private love and in public life. Although this rich mix can sometimes teeter on the edge of excess, the classic structure of the novel, and Hazzard’s piercing eye, fixed on the treacheries of people behaving badly, always give her moral puzzles charm. Most characteristic is her way with words, ranging from the constant staccato of witty epigrams to the lambent notes of those
professing
love, an accompaniment to a romantic melodrama on the grandest scale.

The Murderer
is a powerful novel in which murder and mental breakdown are dealt with coldly and dispassionately. It tells the story of two brothers, Galton and Selwyn Flood, in contemporary Guyana. It is told through the eyes of Galton, who seeks independence and is uneasy with friends and family and crowds. Selwyn has no difficulty settling down with his wife, whom Galton slowly grows to hate. Galton is always watchful and uncertain; it is only after much hesitation that he marries Gemma, whose father owns the boarding house where he stays when he leaves home. He takes her to live first with a friend, with whom he falls out, and then in a tiny, dark room in a crumbling building.

The novel is closer to certain French classic novels such as Camus’
The Outsider
or Sartre’s trilogy The Age of Reason than any English or American novels. Part of the novel’s power comes from its spare existentialism, but the other part comes from the prose style, which is graceful, old-fashioned, almost Latinate. The dialogue, on the other hand, is pure Guyanese vernacular, and the gap between the two, between the sense of distance in the prose and intimacy in the dialogue, makes the novel chilling and tense and deeply original.

‘It was a vile and muddy war, and Yossarian could have, lived without it, lived forever, perhaps. Only a fraction of his countrymen would give up their lives to win it, and it was not his intention to be among them.’

This novel is set among the American forces in Italy in 1944. Most of the troops are completely insane as well as lazy, greedy, bureaucratic, thieving, bossy, venal and mad for power. All of the generals and colonels are utterly incompetent. The enemy is barely contemplated, nor the effects of the bombing missions. The enemy is sleeping beside you in the tent. Heller explains the meaning of Catch-22: Catch-22 means that if you ask to be let off the bombing missions because you are crazy, so you must be sane, and therefore you can’t be let off the bombing missions. The writing is seriously funny, the jokes often intricate and absurd. Everyone has a story to tell – for instance, a Native American whose family, no matter where they go, manage to camp on a valuable oilfield, so that the oil companies begin to follow them around. The novel combines a comedy that is often slapstick and throwaway and at times silly, with images of soldiers who go on bombing missions screaming through the night, and images of a moral universe which has been turned on its head.
Catch-22
is a dark and disturbing anti-war book as well as a great comic novel.

The style is taut, laconic and yet infinitely expressive. There is an emotional depth somewhere in between the words. Within Hemingway’s simple sentence construction and his diction, which can seem innocent and naive, like an early Miro painting, there are odd, disturbing silences.

The story of
The Old Man and the Sea
is simple: an old fisherman in Cuba has had a run of bad luck. One day he goes out alone and catches a giant marlin; he holds it for two days and nights, letting it pull him out into the open sea and then slowly reining it in, letting it circle, and then killing it and tying it to the boat. On the way back to dry land, the marlin is attacked by sharks who eat its flesh, so that the old man arrives on shore exhausted with nothing except the fish’s skeleton attached to the boat. There is a great deal of very convincing and not too technical information about the process of fishing; the famous terse style is ever terser as the story proceeds, so that the narrative grips you, every turn the fish makes holds your attention, it feels as though it is happening right in front of you.

The ideas of endurance and futility behind the story are so elemental and stark that the novel has a simplicity and a power which overcome any lingering sentimentality. It remains one of Hemingway’s masterpieces.

Georgette Heyer was a stern realist. She wrote romantic comedies, entertainments set in the Regency period in England, when women concentrated entirely on the essential business of getting married, hopefully for love, preferably with rank or money attached. Immersed in the world of Jane Austen – for whom similar considerations ruled the day, influenced too by Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
, Georgette Heyer was also a fine Regency scholar. Her novels are a meticulous recreation of that world of manners down to the smallest detail of social code, dress, food, conveyance and language.

In Heyer’s milieu lack of looks is always a disadvantage, but Wit and Style make up for it. Requiring an eligible husband, Sophy arrives in London in a chaise drawn by four steaming horses, accompanied by two outriders, a groom, a splendid black horse, a monkey, a parrot and an Italian greyhound. This arrival is impressive, but how can Sophy find a husband when she lacks beauty and has a mind of her own, a wretched thing in a woman?

The resolution of such predicaments was always Heyer’s subject matter; her originality lay in the precision and charm of her writing style and in her taste for the wit and frivolities of the period. She was a phenomenon. Widely imitated, within the genre of romantic comedy she was unequalled, and one of the best
entertainers
of her time.

Florida produces a variety of miscreants that surpasses anything else in the United States. Carl Hiaasen is the chronicler of this Miami world, the Damon Runyon of its language, circumstances and astounding way of life.

In
Double Whammy
we enter – deeply – the world of competitive bass fishing, a territory of strange clothes, much swearing, companies such as the Happy Gland Fish Scent Company and the flotsam and jetsam of men at fishy sport, which in this case means cheating and murder. An episode with a dog, its head, a wrist, and a man named Thomas Curl begins on page 224 and continues, an inspired running sore of a gag, to the end of this marvellous thriller. Hiaasen is a highly moral writer. His heroes, private eye R. J. Decker and the raw-squirrel eating giant, Skink, are twentieth-century Crusader knights who take on American
capitalism
in all its glory – the lust for the last dollar, the pollution of the towns, the pollution of the waters, the corruption of politicians and TV shows, particularly those featuring fundamentalist religious crooks such as the repetitive fornicator the Reverend Charlie Weeb, of the Outdoor Christian Network.