SLOW MAN
by J. M. Coetzee
Vintage, £7.99
Admirers of Coetzee’s Booker prize-winning Disgrace — or indeed of any of the Nobel prize-winner’s novels — will know that his work is not always easy to read. Its lucid style and dry humour notwithstanding, Slow Man makes few concessions to conventional notions of plot and character; it is a novel about novel-writing — a sequel to its predecessor, Elizabeth Costello.
That character appears midway through the story, which has up until then been about Paul Rayment, a retired photographer in his sixties, who lives alone in Adelaide, and from whose point of view events are seen. After being knocked off his bike by a careless teenage driver, Paul has to have his leg amputated. Refusing a prosthesis, he resigns himself to a life even more isolated than before — without family, friends or mobility. But all this changes when Paul takes on a fulltime carer, Marijana Jokic, newly arrived with her family from Croatia. Paul becomes increasingly dependent on, then besotted with, Marijana and her three children, whom he regards as substitutes for the family he never had.
Then Costello, an elderly Australian novelist, shows up, seeming to know more about Paul than he does himself — and events become extremely strange. The result is an unsettling mix of realistic novel and surreal fable. In focusing as it does on disability and death, it further demonstrates Coetzee’s propensity for finding humour in even the most unpromising material.
ARTHUR & GEORGE
by Julian Barnes
Vintage, £7.99
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Julian Barnes is one of those writers who prefers not to write the same book over again, and this novel — although every bit as engaging as its predecessors — is no less experimental in form than, say, Flaubert’s Parrot. Alternating the points of view of its two main characters, it concerns a miscarriage of justice during the early years of the 20th century which became a cause célèbre.
George Edalji, a young solicitor of Anglo-Indian parentage, living with his parents in a quiet Staffordshire village where his father was vicar, is accused of a series of vicious assaults on livestock and of writing the poison-pen letters that accompanied them. On his release from prison after serving three years of a seven-year sentence, his case is taken up by the eminent writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — then at the height of his fame as the author of the Sherlock Homes stories. With the single-minded flair displayed by his detective-hero, Doyle investigates the affair, getting at the truth of what really happened and exposing the case against the unfortunate George as the farrago of lies and prejudices that it undoubtedly was.
In portraying the contrasting worlds of the jobbing solicitor and the famous author, the novel builds up a wonderfully dense and detailed portrait of the Edwardian age, and of the imperialist assumptions on which it was founded. The result is utterly compelling — funny, disturbing and thought-provoking.
THE WAVE THEORY OF ANGELS
by Alison MacLeod
Penguin, £7.99
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MacLeod’s novel ingeniously combines medieval theology with 21st-century physics. Her plot links two families from different periods: the first section, set in Beauvais in 1284, concerns Giles, a woodcarver, whose work adorns the new cathedral. Giles’s beautiful elder daughter, Christina, falls into a death-like trance from which neither he, nor his younger daughter, Marguerite, can wake her.
Moving forward eight centuries to 2001, the story is that of Giles Carver, a physicist specialising in wave theory at a research centre in Chicago. His daughter Christina is also in a coma; her sister, Maggie, struggles, like her 13th-century counterpart, with her sibling’s withdrawal from life, and with their father’s neglect. A shadowy male figure, called Angel in the American sections, flits in and out of the dream in which both girls are caught up.
Parallels are drawn between the medieval and modern worlds, and even the religious fanaticism of the former is echoed in the American episodes. A cathedral tower falls in one story, the twin towers in the other, without seeming glib or contrived. Less satisfying is the explanation for the girls’ comas, with the suggestion of something unwholesome in Giles’s relationship with his daughter offered almost as a sop to contemporary readings of aberrant female behaviour. Read as a case study of hysteria, The Wave Theory of Angels leaves something to be desired; as a quirky, updated fairytale, it is highly enjoyable.