The Modern Library (24 page)

This is written with a freedom and flow and use of vernacular and voice that make it compelling and hugely readable. It is full of dirty language and dirty longings and dirty activity in general, including the most appalling violence; it is
strictly
for maiden aunts. It is a set of loosely connected stories in which some characters reappear, in which an all-night diner called The Greek regularly features. It includes some of the most unsavoury characters in modern fiction: a crowd who hang around the bar and beat up soldiers; a ‘hip queer’ called Georgette who is in love with a man called Vinnie and gets her leg cut by a knife by the crowd from the bar; and a woman called Tralala, one of the strongest characters in the book, who does the most appalling things to a soldier, generally hangs around looking for trouble and gets badly beaten in the end. One of the longest scenes is about a strike and a man called Harry, who is lazy and drunken and bloody-minded and unhappily married. Slowly, he realizes he is gay, and there are terrible consequences. The last scene is set in a low-life housing project. The tone of the book is cold and angry; Selby moves among the damned with an urge to tell us – to yell at us, if necessary – that this is what the American dream looks like now, that this is what hell is like, and there is no possibility of redemption. Some people, including the man who owned Blackwell’s bookshop and Robert Maxwell, if you don’t mind, succeeded in having the book banned for a short while when it was first published in England.

The junkies’ group therapy session on page 175 of this novel would be its most savagely funny episode were it not for the ending, which provides the best last paragraph in modern fiction since Evelyn Waugh’s
The Loved One.

Will Self is a master of the grotesque and a pricker of conventional bubbles. In his hands the gentility of the English is hung, drawn, quartered and then incinerated for good measure. What could be more genteel than the south-coast town of Saltdean where Ian Wharton, our hero, first makes an appearance? Ian has eidesis, or photographic memory, which is good news for the Fat Controller, who descends upon Saltdean, Ian and anyone who gets in his way. He knows what to do with eidesis and how to turn the repulsive Ian into his significant other, using disgusting notions such as washing the face with semen soap as part of his regime.

This is a familiar England, where emphysemic pigeons land hacking on window sills and keel over dead, and where babies munch razor blades and happily burble blood. In this pungent Swiftian attack, using as many nasty images as possible, Self cuts to the gut and watches his subject bleed, usually to death. His writing is always elegant, his invention lurid and his mind a whirlpool of ideas.

At almost fifteen hundred pages long,
A Suitable Boy
is a sprawling, engaging and supremely confident novel set in the early years of independent India. It is essentially an old-fashioned tale of manners with a political background, as though Anthony Trollope had applied his skills to modern India. Its power and its extraordinary popularity derive from its array of characters and the real aura of warmth and glow and even love which surrounds their creation.

The main story is that of Mrs Rupa Mehra’s efforts to find a suitable husband for her daughter Lata. Mrs Mehra is bossy, emotional and ambitious, and Lata is intelligent, wilful and also ambitious, but in a different way. The novel dramatizes the clash between traditional morals and manners and the vagaries of the young. Seth loves playing off the haughty against the humble, the feckless and charming against the conservative and staid. There is an infinite number of minor characters, and long, fascinating digressions about land reforms and other aspects of political life in India. The light tone, the delight in the detail, the eye for pure comedy and drama, and the fearless use of nineteenth-century literary devices make the book easy to read, and justify its astonishing length.

(US:
Cracking India
)

From the lap of her beautiful Ayah, or clutching her skirts as Ayah is pursued by her suitors through the fountains, cypresses and marble terraces of the Shalimar Gardens, little Lenny observes the clamorous horrors of Partition. It is 1947. Lenny lives in Lahore, in the bosom of her extended Parsee family – Mother, Father, brother Adi, Cousin, Electric-Aunt, Godmother and Slavesister. Working for them, or panting after Ayah, are Butcher, the puny Sikh zoo attendant, the Government House gardener, the favoured Masseur, the restaurant-owning wrestler and the shady Ice-Candy-Man – Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, friends and neighbours – until their ribald, everyday world disintegrates before the violence of religious hatred.

No other novel catches as this one does India’s centuries-old ways of living with religious difference before Partition. Lenny is inquisitive and notices everything: clothes, smells, colour, the patina of skin, sex everywhere, and eyes – olive oil coloured, sly eyes, fearful eyes. In writing which is often lyrical, always tender and clever, with a nuance here, a touch there, Sidhwa shows us the seedbed of the Partition massacres – an abused Untouchable, the ritual disembowelling of a goat, a priest shuddering over the hand of a menstruating woman. This laughing, gentle tale, told through the eyes of innocence, is a testament to savage loss, and a brilliant evocation of the prowling roots of religious intolerance.

If this novel were written in French, it is possible that its protagonist, Arthur Seaton, would be an existentialist hero and the book an essential modern text; instead, it was written in English and it is known as a story about the antics and highjinks of the northern English working class.

In the first chapter our Arthur gets drunk, falls down the stairs, vomits all over a man and then takes a woman not his wife back to her house to bed while her husband is away. All of this is good fun, clearly written and well paced. But the novel then becomes darker and stranger.

Arthur lives at a considerable distance from his own experience. He prefers other men’s wives, and feels only slightly uneasy when he meets the husband. He barely exists during his time in the factory. He has no religion, and the idea of England for him and his family, especially his cousins, is a sour joke. Even the idea of family and community has broken down. Arthur is unusual in modern fiction: he does not use his intelligence, it is not important for him, and yet he is never stupid – his instincts and his appetites dictate his behaviour, and this gives the novel great integrity and originality.

This novel reads like an Old Testament for the east side of London. The tone is sombre and sinister, at times bitter and satirical, at times unsparing in its venom and hatred for England under Margaret Thatcher, who appears here as The Widow, and for ad-men, TV people and property speculators, not to speak of wine bars. The stories are loosely connected: there is a long interview; there are letters; characters appear, disappear, reappear, but Sinclair is at his most content when they disappear mysteriously, leaving strange traces.
Downriver
is a big
Ulysses
of a book which can contain anything and everything including echoes of and references to Conrad, Eliot (there is a newspaper-seller called Tiresias), William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Hawksmoor and many others living and dead, including the ‘author’ himself. There is an extraordinary rhythmic energy in Sinclair’s prose; he loves big, long snaky sentences; huge lists; apocalyptic moments; quotations; arcane references; titles of obscure books; newcharacters; pubs; the Irish in London; place names. For him, capitalism is a form of terrorism, with money moving across London like napalm. Sinclair is interested in layers of narrative and layers of time and experience: he allows the past to haunt the book, allows whole sections to become quests for something half-lost, half-forgotten and misunderstood. His London is a dark ghostly placewhose spirit is available only to the few; his book is one of the several enduring, playful – dare one say Modernist? – monuments to Thatcher produced by British novelists.

‘The summer of 1947 was not like other summers. Even the weather had a different feel in India that year.’ So begins Singh’s famous novel about the Partition of Pakistan from India, set in the small Punjabi frontier village of Mano Majra, where Hindu, Muslim and Sikh have lived together for thousands of years. This place of about seventy families is best known for its railway station; as the book opens a Sikh boy and a Muslim girl are making love in the fields.

But in 1947 nothing is really the same; there is quiet unease, then, dreadfully, the first train from Pakistan arrives. At first glance the train seems normal, then its ghostly silence reveals a thousand corpses, emitting the incredible stench of putrefying flesh. Soon, in the rains, comes a second train, with an even more horrific cargo. The effect is devastating; religious warfare breaks out, the Muslims of the village are evicted and put on a train for Pakistan. The massacres of Partition are just beginning.

The strength of this political novel lies in the vivacity and life Singh gives to the people of the Punjabi community. You can feel the presence of Mano Majra and hear the rhythm and laughter of its days. The loss of this, in this fine novel, is a striking testament to the devastating human cost of religious prejudice.

Zebulon County, Iowa, is the centre of the universe. Larry Cook owns one thousand acres of land there and farms it well. When the old monster suddenly decides it’s time to pass the inheritance on to his daughters, he is infuriated when the youngest, Caroline, refuses the gift, whilst the older two, Rose and Ginny, accept it with reservations. Here we have the plot of
King Lear
transferred to the American Midwest, where it flourishes embedded in a recreation of every particular of farming and family life – the crops, the technology, the strawberry rhubarb pies, the mucking-out of farrowing pens, pizza with pepperoni and extra cheese – a multitude of tiny details evoking a world in which the land and its people seem indivisible.