GILEAD
by Marilynne Robinson
Virago, £7.99
Robinson’s novel — published 24 years after her prize-winning debut, Housekeeping — won the Pulitzer Prize last year. Given the sanctimony at present pervading the US political scene, one hopes that this was on account of its fine writing, not its pious — some might say preachy — tone. But sermonising is to be expected from the protagonist, an elderly clergyman, whose letter to his young son forms the substance of the book.
It is 1956 in the little Iowan town of Gilead, but time hardly seems to have moved since the days of the narrator’s grandfather, his namesake John Ames, whose fiery sermons during the Civil War inspired young men to give their lives for the abolitionist cause. Reflecting on his grandfather’s bellicose sentiments, John Ames the younger, a pacifist, considers the morality of sending men to fight in God’s name — still an entirely apposite debate. The novel is full of musings of this kind, most ostensibly addressed to Ames’s seven-year-old son, who he knows he will not see grow up.
Adding dramatic tension to what might otherwise be an uneventful tale, is the reappearance in Gilead of the clergyman’s godson, the blackguardly Jack Broughton, who Ames fears may threaten the virtue of his beautiful and much younger wife. Robinson has succeeded admirably in portraying that most difficult of fictional constructs — a good man — never allowing her discourse on good and evil to become unduly sententious.
Advertisement
LEAVING HOME
by Anita Brookner
Penguin, £7.99
Brookner’s latest book is almost indistinguishable from its twenty or so predecessors, set in the familiar twilight zone of Kensington streets — alternated this time with those of one of the duller Parisian arrondissements — and concerns the usual self-effacing masochistic protagonist, in this instance, Emma Roberts, an art historian in her twenties. It is 1976, but you would not guess it from anything Emma herself says or does, nor from the description of either city, both seemingly untouched by political change or even fashion — punk rock, anybody? London is darker and gloomier than Paris, where Emma breaks free of her stiflingly correct upbringing and meets a boy, with whom she engages in platonic conversations about nothing in particular, and makes a friend — the vivacious Françoise, another familiar Brookner type: large-bosomed and sexually voracious, with a penchant for bossing her friend around. But even Françoise succumbs to a conventional marriage — which Emma congratulates herself on having escaped from, even though her love life is far from exciting.
Emma’s chief occupation is travelling. she shuttles back and forth on the train between London and Paris so often that one can only assume that the Channel Tunnel has been built during the intervening years, even though — like so much else — it is never mentioned. For diehard fans this will be a must; everyone else might as well read Hotel du Lac again.
DEAD SIMPLE
by Peter James
Pan, £6.99
Advertisement
Peter James’s superior thriller opens with a stag-night prank gone wrong: buried alive in a stolen coffin, the prospective groom, a property developer named Michael Harrison, is left with no food or water and diminishing air when the pranksters are wiped out in a freak accident.
Leaving aside the question of what kind of friends would come up with such a scheme, what follows is gripping. Michael is left to ponder his fate for a nail-biting number of chapters while Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, of the Brighton police, has to unravel a satisfyingly complex puzzle in his quest to find him. The arrival of Michael’s business partner, Mark Warren — who was to have been best man at the wedding — seems likely to be able to provide the clue to Michael ‘s whereabouts; but he claims to know nothing about the disastrous prank. Equally unhelpful is the beautiful Ashley, Michael’s fiancée, who seems more interested in maintaining her perfectly groomed appearance than in finding her future husband. Then there is the sadistic Vic, who knows more than he should about Michael’s offshore accounts; eventually all these threads are drawn neatly together.
Brighton — described with a sharp appreciation for its mixture of stylishness and squalor — has been a good backdrop for murder and mayhem since Graham Greene’s day. This isn’t quite up to the standard of Brighton Rock, but it does have some agreeably chilling moments and some entertaining twists.