The Modern Library (20 page)

Alice Munro territory is the Ottawa Valley, in the small harsh Munro towns of Logan or Whalley. These are the towns people leave and come back to, but the place and time hardly matter with Alice Munro because she writes about apparently ordinary folk and therefore all of us, wherever. Alice Munro’s people are careful souls, you
think
. But here she skewers those moments when change comes about because of one incident which, taken at the flood, leads on to divorce, another husband, another wife, a different town, a different life.

Simply told, these gossipy, wise stories are full of recognitions: ‘One evening Raymond had said to Ben and Georgia that it looked as if Maya wasn’t going to be able to have any children. “We try our best,” he said. “We use pillows and everything. But no luck.”’ ‘I used to sneak longing looks at men in those days. I admired their necks and any bits of their chest a loose button let show.’ A wife leaves her husband: ‘He said he was giving her a week to decide. No more drinking. No more smoking … Karen said don’t bother with the week.’

Each story is as rich as a novel. Her characters stand next to you, about to engage you in conversation, their lives laid bare with slashing accuracy so that reading about them, the heart is stopped as something familiar, hopefully hidden, surfaces in a sudden, illuminating way.

Iris Murdoch had an extraordinarily rich if uneven career as a novelist. She published more than twenty-five novels, and of these the one that we would most recommend readers to begin with is
The Nice and the Good.

Most of the novel takes place in a large old house beside the sea in Dorset where Octavian Grey, a civil servant, his wife Kate, their daughter Barbara, and an infinite number of friends, servants, house guests and hangers-on spend the summer. The novel has Montrose, the best cat in any of the novels listed in this book (Graham Greene’s
The Human Factor
has the best dog): ‘a large cocoa-coloured tabby animal with golden eyes, a square body, rectangular legs and an obstinate self-absorbed disposition’. The writing is elegant; Murdoch handles the large cast of characters with great clarity and skill – the children are especially good. She carefully surrounds some events in the novel with echoes of myth and magic, while leaving others as undisturbed pieces of social realism. Her characters are both vividly drawn and credible, but they also operate on other levels, as forces in a field of energy.

Nymphet: a young girl just past puberty; beautiful, semi-divine. Humbert Humbert, born in Paris, comes to the New England countryside in 1947 and encounters Lolita, twelve years old, ‘with an impact of passionate recognition’. To take possession of his beloved, he marries her mother. Sex with his dream-child, urgently longed for by Humbert, knowingly accepted by Lolita, becomes more than child abuse – as Lolita pertly points out, it’s incest.

Humbert sweeps up his Lolita and for two years lives in heaven and hell, travelling with her through America. Humbert’s festering soul chronicles every moment of lust and play, always creating more trouble, inventing dangers. Lolita grows up, the outside world encroaches. There is separation and death – both the same for Humbert.

In
Lolita
Nabokov’s imagination is that of a magician puppeteer. Humbert Humbert is a monster, yet we do not always feel so; Lolita the abused girl-child alternately startles and beguiles us. Their story is not sordid but full of yearning, wordplay and jokes – ironic and biting, often erotic. Lolita is one of the immortal love stories. For its fabulous language, its wit, its revolutionary portrait of a different kind of moral monster (not a political one), and because it brilliantly cocks a snook at all known taboos, Lolita is one of the most influential novels of our time.

The expectations of Mohun Biswas are not great. Assured at birth of a miserable life by the village pundit, the curse of his life proves to be the community into which he is born: the Hindus of Trinidad. Overpowering in their vociferous insistence on conformity and control, this swarm of venal, fighting tragicomedians is vividly and preposterously alive. Most ebullient is Mr Biswas, a template of indignation and ambition, albeit modest: all he wants is a house of his own, some dignity, some privacy, where the irritations of his in-laws can be viewed from afar.

Out of this simple wish Naipaul created this masterpiece, and in Mr Biswas, with his stomach powders and fluent Trinidadian English, one of those characters who becomes a part of life. We follow him through a plethora of jobs, from sign painter and sugar-cane overseer – Mr Biswas miserable – to hilariously inventive journalist – Mr Biswas happy. We are with him as son, husband, father and testy family man until his final triumph: a peculiar house of his own.

A House for Mr Biswas
is also a history of, and a farewell to, Naipaul’s own people, written as the old ways were disappearing. Its greatness lies in its laughing testimony to the frustrations and humiliations of the poor, expressed with magnificent humour and invention, without the bleak despair which marks much of his later work.

V. S. Naipaul’s most brilliant novels are
In a Free State
(1971),
A Bend in the River
and
The Enigma of Arrival
(1987), with their sombre tone and grave, melancholy wisdom. Of the three,
A Bend in the River
is the best.

The novel takes place in a country very like Zaire, where the narrator, Salim, a Muslim whose family is of Indian trader origin, moves during a time of conflict and sets up shop. The novel deals with history not as a rich legacy full of ancestral voices, but as a set of erasures, and this makes the tone very dark indeed. Against this vision of the past as a void is the deep richness of the present; the minor characters who impinge on Salim’s life, such as the servant Metty, the sorceress Zabeth and her son Ferdinand, are wonderfully and vividly drawn, as are the dramatic changes which take place in our narrator’s life in the village, and the slow eruption – this is after all Conrad’s territory – of civil strife. There is a scene where the President – clearly a version of Mobutu – speaks on the radio, which is utterly electrifying, as are the later scenes of catastrophe in the book.

Narayan’s great novels are set in his fictional town of Malgudi, in southern India. There is something particularly engaging about the stumblings of Margayya, the hero of this one, who luxuriates in an anxious love of money. He begins his financial endeavours sitting under a banyan tree with a tin box, extorting rupees out of any simple soul who comes his way. Fate, in the shape of a sex manual at first called
Philosophy and Practice of Kissing
and later more timidly entitled
Domestic Harmony
, makes him an entrepreneur. An enslaved wife, a house symbolically partitioned from his brother with whom he is forever scratchily at war, and a son, Balu, so loved and so unworthy that he proves to be Margayya’s worst investment, complete Margayya’s world.

Narayan has been attacked for presenting the miseries of India – poverty, the caste system, etc. – too benevolently. This politically correct position fails to see that Narayan’s lightness of touch and unruffled irony reveal a thousand trenchant truths. The bombastic Margayya, with his vanity, his large ambitions and small
meannesses
and his manoeuvrings around the gods and Mammon, lives the harsh life of those at the bottom of the heap. This is all the more apparent for the vigour, laughter and buoyancy Margayya uses to combat the weaknesses of his pinched soul. That is the real genius of Narayan.

This is the first of Patrick O’Brian’s sequence of novels about life in the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. For those who entertain dismal notions of the sea and all who sail on it, it is important to know that naval paraphernalia and perfect period detail are only two of the splendours of O’Brian’s writing, superseded by the vice-like grip of his storytelling and the instant charm of his characterization and dialogue.

Lieutenant Jack Aubrey, RN, meets Stephen Maturin, a penniless physician, during the performance of Locatelli’s C major quartet at the Governor’s House in Port Mahon, Minorca, on 1 April 1800. They fall out. Thus begins one of the great literary friendships, as these two very different men – Aubrey a cheerful bulldog Englishman and true man of the sea, and Maturin an enigmatic Irish-Catalan – begin a lifetime of adventure together. Though there are battles aplenty, how men live together, the capering, petty and sometimes lonely qualities of a male society, rather than the tedious brutalities we associate with war, is the subject here. There is nothing monastic or uncultivated about their experiences. Music flows through the novels, which, in turn, are like a series of illustrations, each telling a different story, each one illuminating, through a tiny community on a wooden ship, the confusions and glories of the human condition.

(renamed
Girl with Green Eyes
in 1964)

The idea that the Republic of Ireland moved from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century in five or ten years has proved very fruitful for Irish novelists. All Edna O’Brien’s work is concerned with the drama between freedom and restriction, between old-fashioned values, and possibilities which are new and untested. In later novels such as
Time and Tide
(1992) or
Down by the River
(1996) she presents this conflict as tragedy, but in her early work, especially her first three novels known as ‘The Country Girls Trilogy’, she uses a lighter tone.