Fiction: Chris Power
CLOUD ATLAS
By David Mitchell
Sceptre, £7.99
A 19th-century seafarer’s journal; letters written from 1930s Belgium by a composer’s amanuensis; a 1970s American thriller; a comic account of a cowboy publisher fleeing contemporary London only to wind up imprisoned in a Hull nursing home; the final confession of an insurrectionary clone in a dystopic 23rd-century “corpocracy”; a post- apocalyptic fireside tale in which the “pre-Fall” history of the world is known to a mere handful of human beings. These are the constituent parts, sheathed one inside the other like matryoshka dolls, of Mitchell’s brilliant but disappointing third novel. Let it be said that many will find my complaint cavillous, and Cloud Atlas should indeed be plunged into; for at least half its length it provided one of my most enjoyable reading experiences. But the intellectual paydirt promised by Mitchell’s ingeniously hung web of leitmotivs is never hit, dissolving instead into a fudge of Mammon, Malthusianism and reincarnation, the resultant gap between craftsmanship and content akin to finding a Kinder Surprise nestling inside a Fabergé egg.
THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS
By Justin Cartwright
Bloomsbury, £7.99
With the release from prison of its eldest daughter, imprisoned for art theft, the English Judd family teeters between reconciliation and collapse, Cartwright’s division of his narrative between all five Judds creating a complex interplay of familial politics. His flowing back and forth across the generation divide covers swaths of emotional terrain, many passages bearing such a surfeit of wisdom and resonance that one wants immediately to clip them out and stick them on the wall.
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CONTEMPT
By Alberto Moravia
NYRB, £8.99
It has come to light that Moravia was never awarded the Nobel prize because the judges, led by a disapproving Dag Hammarskjöld, thought his books filthy. This is a great shame because, filth aside, Moravia was a writer of genius, a claim which Contempt, first published in 1954, confirms. From the turbid mind of the impoverished screenwriter Molteni, who worries his wife into hating him, Moravia conducts a brilliantly fevered clash between intellect and emotion.
PURPLE HIBISCUS
By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Perennial, £7.99
Kambili, 15, lives in Enugu, Nigeria, with her brother and mother, under the oppressive aegis of her deeply religious father, Eugene. His hardline Catholicism, violent abuse of his family, charitable works and courageous outspokenness against the military regime make him far more than a one-dimensional monster, while Kambili’s maturation is handled with great subtlety. There is a timeless quality to Adichie’s prose, a certitude and moral purpose that makes this novel a remarkable debut.
THE INSATIABLE SPIDERMAN
By Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
Faber, £6.99
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More scenes from the life of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez’s seemingly not really very fictional alter ego, the Cuban bard of booze, food shortages, power outages, and ageing, but defiantly unwithered, satyromania. Whether it is the crumbling townhouses or infrastructure of Havana, Pedro Juan’s common-law marriage or just his pickled liver, these terse, vivid stories are awash with terminal decline. At his best Gutiérrez barges into a space of his own between Hemingway and Bukowski.
Non-fiction: Iain Finlayson
WHO RUNS THIS PLACE? An Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century
By Anthony Sampson
John Murray, £7.99
Since 1962, when the first edition of this book was published, Sampson has been blowing away the smoke that obscures British democracy and the operations of the Establishment. Behind the political fictions and the economic theories there are institutions — governmental, financial and industrial — that implement policies and people who take decisions, most of them connected by direct or tangential interests, and tending to cohere in concentrations of power not always accountable to those they profess to serve. Confessing to an increasing impatience and intolerance of “the humbug and deceptions of democracy”, Sampson worries about increased centralisation of power under new Labour. He is conscious of writing post 9/11 when “the limitations of British democracy appeared more starkly . . . when British foreign policy and defence became more closely dependent on Washington, and the fear of terrorism strengthened the hands of all governments”. This anatomy dissects an old organism still alive and diseased with new secrets.
MADNESS VISIBLE: A Memoir of War
By Janine Di Giovanni
Bloomsbury, £7.99
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For most of the 1990s, Janine di Giovanni reported on the war in former Yugoslavia. The place names are notches on a totem in hell — Kosovo, Pristina, Srebrenica, Goradze, Sarajevo — and di Giovanni has good cause to remember them because she was there to observe the dire reality behind the political posturing and diplomatic duplicity. She has an eye for fearful detail and a peripheral vision that gives a compassionate context to her unremitting reportage.
DICK TURPIN: The Myth of the English Highwayman
By James Sharpe
Profile, £8.99
It’s important to set the record straight, but usually historical truth is grim. Sharpe, an academic and a “historian of crime”, blames the novelist W. Harrison Ainsworth for creating the popular image of Dick Turpin in Rookwood, a novel that largely invented the image of the dashing English highwayman. Sharpe tries to portray Turpin as the most famous Essex Man, but he sheds too much light on a tinselled divinity of the collective imagination.
SOLDIERS OF LIGHT
By Daniel Bergner
Penguin, £7.99
Chapter one opens with an unforgettable scene worthy of a James Buchan novel, set in present day Sierra Leone, where the “British had come to ‘sort out’ their former colony”. There were sadistic and corrupt bad guys who were to be stomped on, whereupon a grateful nation could be rebuilt. Bergner introduces missionaries, mercenaries, mechanics, medics and regular military, whose innocent optimism to do good in the aftermath of ten years of horrific conflict is heartbreakingly moving.
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VALVERDE’S GOLD: A True Tale of Greed, Obsession and Grit
By Mark Honigsbaum
Pan, £7.99
Disarmingly, Honigsbaum gives us what we need upfront: a map of the Llanganati, a remote, mountainous area of Ecuador where a great quantity of ancient treasure is said to be buried. Off he goes on a paper trail of documents guarded by elderly, suspicious treasure hunters and, unfazed by the Curse of Atahualpa, on a rocky exploration of Ecuador in quest of Inca gold. A good, if baffling, time is had by all who happily come out of it wiser but not richer.