MEET THE WIFE
By Clive Sinclair
Picador, £6.99, 288pp
ISBN 0 330 34842 6
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IN THE first of two novellas that constitute Meet the Wife, a feckless reporter who is devoted to a totalitarian regime discovers his incipient honour when he embarks on a voyage with Odysseus and his son Telemachus. Sinclair fuses the modern world to that of antiquity with glee, his disparate tale offering great entertainment.
Even better is the second novella, The Naked and the Dead, in which a San Franciscan photographer’s wife undergoes regressive therapy and recalls a past life in which she was married to Wyatt Earp. Sinclair writes discursively on feminism, the Wild West and photography before getting back to his beloved mythology. A profoundly strange and frequently hilarious read.
Chris Power
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TEN-YEAR-OLD Christine is a disturbed tomboy whose mother reserves her affection for her live-in lover and her older son. The child vents her anger by mutilating her Barbie doll and attacking a weaker girl in her class. When a guilty secret forces her to run away during a family camping trip to Scotland, she is taken in by an elderly Dutch spinster, who fails to alert the authorities. The little girl becomes the old woman’s salvation and damnation.
For Dorrestein horror lies close to home. She smashes traditional tableaux of innocent children and loving parents in a chilling and disturbing novel in which family represents the heart of darkness: an organ pulsating with fear, guilt and violence.
Laura Peek
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RIVER THIEVES
By Michael Crummey
Canongate, £7.99, 372pp
ISBN 1 841 95417 9
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THIS BOOK explores one of the darkest episodes in Anglo- Canadian history: the extinction of the native Beothuk Indians of Newfoundland. White settlers have driven the Beothuk from their homelands and exiled them to a small valley around an ice-covered lake. Suffering twinges of guilt, the British administration sends an expedition to establish friendly relations, but two members of the party are beheaded.
Crummey sets the petty pilfering of the Indians against the plundering of a land and its people and asks: “Who are the real river thieves?” In his debut novel, Crummey evokes the wilderness of Britain’s oldest colony and the vanished lives of its inhabitants with poetic detail.
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THE COMPANY
By Arabella Edge
Picador, £7.99, 384pp
ISBN 0 330 48979 8
IN 1629 the Dutch ship Batavia foundered off the coast of Western Australia. In Edge’s fictionalised account of the disaster, the surviving seafarers are subject to the cruelty not only of the elements but of Jeronimous Cornelisz, a twisted apothecary. Jeronimous establishes a tyrannical island rule over an anti-community in which man is stripped down to his barest elements in the fight for survival.
Edge has taken the modern dystopic adventure story and developed it into a rich morality tale in which the chance to create a new society brings out man’s basest power fantasies. The Company is as much a critique of modern commercial imperialism and nationhood as it is a rollicking read.
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Melissa Katsoulis
DIRT MUSIC
By Tim Winton
Picador, £7.99, 480pp
ISBN 0 330 49026 5
PROSPERITY HAS come to the Australian fishing village of West Point, but the lawlessness of the Outback remains, spelling trouble for the local poacher Luther Fox. After his family is killed in a car accident, he goes into self-imposed exile, surfacing only to raid the nets of the local trawlers. This lasts until he begins a dangerous affair with Georgie Jutland, whose relationship with the local fisherman, Jim Buckridge, is disintegrating into a blur of vodka and despair. When, inevitably, they are discovered, Fox disappears into the Outback, with Georgie and Jim in pursuit.
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Winton’s prose, spare yet melodic, captures perfectly the raw beauty of the land in this paean to a vast continent.
Robin Ash
SPECIAL
By Bella Bathurst
Picador, £7.99, 320pp
ISBN 0 330 49101 6
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THE PREMISE of Special is familiar — adolescent girls on a school trip with their Draconian mistress argue, smoke and regurgitate. Despite the synopsis, Bathurst avoids the clichés of the genre: the fact that the solitary empathetic character, Ali, is the only one who can hold a conversation is the fault of the subject, not the author. The writing is witty, but short on jokes — ultimately so disheartening that one must keep reading to exorcise the nightmares. It seems impossible that these aliens presented to us would ever develop into human beings, but the prospect is the girls’ saving grace; all that is left between the reader and a well-meaning intention to wipe out every 13-year-old girl on the planet.
Fred Fernández-Armesto
WHAT I LOVED
By Siri Hustvedt
Sceptre, £6.99, 384pp
ISBN 0 340 68238 8
NEW YORK — sass, sex, art, money, literature and drugs — knife-edge style. Hustvedt’s novel is soaked in the spirit of her city. She explores the psychology of her fellow citizens, revelling in the bizarre internal lives that lurk beneath sophisticated exteriors.
It is hard to convey much of what is important in this book without spoiling the gradual crescendo of menace and unease. Essentially, lies and the betrayal of trust lead to murder and emotional damage on an awesome scale. Hustvedt’s characters never feel like vehicles for her ideas. As they struggle with the mess of modern urban life their thoughts and actions are those of real people. This is the best novel you will read this year.
Matthew Crockatt