Tag: contemporary fiction

The Girls (2016): Emma Cline

2 Comments

★★★★

Following Gone Girl, I switched my attention to Emma Cline’s sun-drenched, twisted slice of 1960s Californian life, which is inspired by the case of the Manson Family (a story, I should stress, that I knew nothing about beforehand). Unfolding at the dreamy pace of a marijuana trip, it doesn’t match Gone Girl’s urgency, but it offers more relatability, in its tale of a fourteen-year-old girl who just doesn’t fit in, and the seductive gang of dreamers who capture her imagination. Few of us, thank God, will have gone as far as our protagonist Evie Boyd, but I suspect that many of us can remember the pain of teetering on that brink between childhood and adulthood, feeling eternally divorced from either place and, somehow, feeling so much older than all the adults around us. Cline manages to produce a book that’s compelling, compassionate and wise, as well as plumbing some of the darker places in the human soul.

Continue reading →

Gone Girl (2012): Gillian Flynn

5 Comments

★★★★

Better late than never, hmm? As an intense period at work came to a close, I decided it was time to welcome the advent of summer with a couple of good, old-fashioned, white-knuckle thrillers. The first of those was a book I’ve managed to avoid having spoiled for me: quite an achievement, considering that it’s a publishing phenomenon, a film, and has been read by everyone else on the planet except my neighbour’s cat. Finally, it was my turn to meet Nick and Amy Dunne, the picture-perfect couple whose marriage begins to go sour when they lose their jobs in the recession, and move from Amy’s native New York to Nick’s native Missouri. When Amy disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary, leaving signs of a struggle and traces of blood on the kitchen floor, everyone thinks they know how this story ends. Only they don’t. Only one person has even an inkling of what’s about to happen… and Nick Dunne is in no position to protect himself.

Continue reading →

The Serpentine Cave (1997): Jill Paton Walsh

Leave a comment

★★★½

There’s always a frisson of excitement when you come across a ‘new’ book by an author you like. Jill Paton Walsh’s Knowledge of Angels is one of my all-time favourite novels, as many of you will probably know, and so I was excited to come across The Serpentine Cave, which I’d never heard of before. It’s very different in spirit – a tale of quiet, private truths rather than the epic resonances of Knowledge of Angels – but it’s a moving tale of a woman trying to piece together her identity from the fragments left behind on her mother’s death. Marian has always defined herself in opposition to her mother Stella. While artistic Stella moves through life like a whirlwind, bringing chaos and uncertainty, ignoring bills and flying in the face of convention, Marian lives modestly, to balance out by her own placidity her mother’s turbulent progress. When Stella has a stroke, Marian leaves her home and her job in Hull and comes down to the rambling house near Cambridge where her mother lives. Presently her two grown-up children, Toby and Alice, join her from London. They come to nurse, but a different kind of duty soon falls on their shoulders: that of sorting out, paying off, tidying up the detritus of a life suddenly snuffed out. For Marian, this is also a time of coming to terms with her past.

Continue reading →

The Jealous One (1976): Celia Fremlin

3 Comments

★★★½

Celia Fremlin’s works have recently been reissued by Faber Finds, in neat little ebooks with come-hither pricing. I hadn’t heard of her before, but was intrigued by her themes of suburban unease and mystery, and chose The Jealous One as my introduction to her novels. First published in 1964, it occasionally shows its age, but its essential story is one that doubtless remains painfully familiar in the present world. Rosamund and Geoffrey have been married for years, united by their gossiping about their London neighbours and by shared despair over their feckless teenage son. But when the exuberant Lindy moves in next door and inches her way into their lives, Rosamund discovers how painful jealousy can be. And then, one day, she wakes from a feverish sleep and a dream of murder… to find that Lindy has vanished.

Continue reading →

The Standing Chandelier (2017): Lionel Shriver

2 Comments

★★★★

This is the first book I’ve read by Lionel Shriver (except, of course, for We Need To Talk About Kevin) and so I came to it without many preconceptions. More novella than novel, it impressed me a great deal with its incisive and unsentimental view of human nature. We may not like the picture that Shriver reflects back at us, but her characters all feel so very convincing. It’s a story that many of us can easily imagine, even if we don’t have direct experience of it, because it starts with a friendship: an old friendship, of twenty years’ standing, between a woman, Jillian Frisk, and a man, Weston Babansky, and how their easy dynamic is challenged by the arrival of Weston’s girlfriend Paige.

Continue reading →

The Last Romeo (2018): Justin Myers

1 Comment

★★★

Some people say that most first novels are thinly-described autobiography. In this particular case, the disguise is as robust as the Emperor’s New Clothes. Justin Myers, author of the popular Guyliner blog, is probably best known for his ruthless takedowns of the Guardian’s weekly Blind Date column (an occasional guilty pleasure on a Friday afternoon). But he started out as a cataloguer of the gay dating wilderness: a mission shared by the protagonist of his first novel. Blending acerbity with vulnerability, this is a rom-com for the online dating generation, told with panache in Meyer’s distinctive voice, but it rarely convinces as a novel rather than a memoir with names changed.

Continue reading →

Fever Dream (2014): Samanta Schweblin

Leave a comment
Photo: Alejandra Lopez

★★★

Sometimes you feel you’ve completely missed something. You end up suspecting there was a big revelation in the final pages that you completely overlooked and which would have made everything make sense. I feel that may have been the case here, so I’m hoping we can get into a discussion in the comments about exactly what was going on. Schweblin’s novella unfolds in the course of a single unbroken, breathless dialogue. Here is Amanda, lying in the dark in a hospital bed, running out of time. Here, at her side, is David, a young boy who keeps probing her with ruthless questions. They have to find something among the confused tangle of Amanda’s memories: a clue; a moment that will bring everything into focus. But what has happened to Amanda? And who is David?

Continue reading →

Under the Skin (2000): Michel Faber

Leave a comment
Photo: David Rose

★★★½

Every day, Isserley spends hours driving along the A9, the arterial road which runs like a backbone through Scotland. She’s always on the lookout for hitchhikers, but she has a few ground rules. She only stops for the tall, well-muscled ones. And she loses interest pretty quickly if it turns out that they’re married, or have a girlfriend. You see, Isserley’s very careful. She’s only really interested in the ones no one would miss. The twisted offspring of a sci-fi novel, a murder mystery and an urban legend, Michel Faber’s story plays with expectations in a way that’s fascinating – but deeply disturbing.

Continue reading →

Hotel Silence (2016): Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir

3 Comments

★★★½

Jónas has decided to kill himself. He’s divorced, his ex-wife has revealed that his beloved daughter is actually the child of another man, and his mother is swiftly sinking into senility. Nothing in his life has meaning any more. Even his chats with his neighbour Svanur only confirm his sense of middle-aged male superfluity. And so he decides it’s time to put an end to it all. How and when, of course, are another question. Jónas decides that, to avoid his daughter finding his body, he will have to kill himself abroad and so he decides to seek out the most dangerous place in the world. And so he arrives at the Hotel Silence, in a grim postwar town, where he will discover – much to his surprise – that, with a little effort, many things that are broken can in fact be mended.

Continue reading →

The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night (2017): Jen Campbell

Leave a comment

★★★½

Some of you might already be familiar with Jen Campbell, the compiler of Weird Things Customers Say In Bookshops. Although I haven’t yet read these compendiums of the odd, I’ve seen snippets here and there and they’ve made me laugh out loud. So I was curious to see how Campbell’s talents would translate to the short story medium. The answer is: extremely well; although these unsettling stories aren’t at all what one would expect from this tongue-in-cheek observer of human nature. Or… on the other hand… perhaps they are, for they reach deep inside us to the darker corners of the psyche, and their unifying feature is that these miniature worlds seem so straightforward, so simple, until you look between the lines and realise that something, subtly, is out of kilter.

Continue reading →