Fiction

There is nowadays the new criticism and the old, and among the practitioners of both methodologies there are good and bad critics. Lauric Clancy makes no attempt or claim to ‘re-read’ (shorthand for applying various post-structural approaches to canonical works) Nabokov’s oeuvre and hence falls four-square (puns arc de rigueur when dealing with Nabokov) amongst the Bayleys rather than the Eagletons. While this position must inevitably indicate where Clancy stands in the wider debate, there may also be historical reasons for this stance in relation to a writer like Nabokov, whose work has received comparatively little attention despite – or perhaps because of– his globally provocative reputation.

Inside Jan McKemmish there is a good short story writer trying to get out. A Gap in the Records is a novel about an international female intelligence apparatus. At its heart is the story of an assassination of a crook, Crane, by an agent of the apparatus, Mary Stevens.

McKemmish wastes no space – not a line, not an adverb – in getting Mary Stevens to Hong Kong and into the confidence of Crane. She is at the races, at the ballet, swimming in his pool, dancing at his club. Her life is ascetic (minimum alcohol, yoga, no sex) and dedicated.

In a marvellous spider’s-web conversation she lures Crane to accompany her on a shopping expedition. So she tricks the criminal into Graeme Wong’s hidden shop at the back of Mud Lane. A gun is waiting for her there in one of the jade cases. Her accomplice is there too, playing the part of shop assistant!

C.J. Koch in this powerful and evocative novel, The Double Man, has applied a psychoanalytic model of human personality to fairytales and the fantastical world of myth: the pursuit of illusion as reality. Its ingenious double life is that of a modern-day fairy tale coupled with the face of 1960s man, paralysed with the despair of his era: its inability to cope with the breakdown of shared values and beliefs. Richard Miller is both the prince of the archetypal fairytale and the prototype of modern man trying to create a private reality out of ancestral beliefs. The Double Man recalls W.B. Yeats’s dread of the ‘rough beast…its hour come round at last’, and the warnings of Goethe who foresaw a time of such chaos: when odd spiritual leaders would emerge and man would turn full circle to find popular truth in ancient myths and legends.

I’d wager that if you offered men the opportunity when they died, of being reunited with their deceased father, many would find the prospect unattractive. A surprising number of men fear their father and spend most of their life coming to grips with the complex. Hardie, the protagonist of this story was a bad father. He meant no evil nor was he evil by his own lights, yet he did systematically, emotionally at least, destroy every member of his family.

Randolph Stow’s latest novel, The Suburbs of Hell, may be read as a simple whodunit: a simple allegorical Whodunit. Like Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, like David Lodge’s Small World, this novel sets out to intrigue the reader. The new genre, nouvelle critique, teases the reader’s vanity, the reader’s erudition at the same time as it engages with questions of a metaphysical kind – the nature of truth, reality, and for those concerned with literature – the purpose of writing today.

I must declare an interest. Dickins was once a student of mine and is still a friend. Readers of this review are invited to exercise their reservations.

I believe The Crookes of Epping is in the tragi-comic tradition of Charlie Chaplin which reaches back to one of the world’s greatest books, Don Quixote. In it pathos is as important an element as humour, wit and absurdity. It also has a connection with the earliest Greek Comedy in which the celebration of the God Dionysus was an important element.

Serpent’s Tooth is a massive, sprawling novel. It is panoramic in its vision of twentieth century social and political history, and meticulous in its rendering of one man’s struggle to sustain the mighty ideal his father has inspired in him.

The name of this collection, with its pastoral associations, is ironic. Here we have no neat opposition between the country and the city; instead the lyrical evocation of the countryside serves merely to emphasise the brutality that women suffer there as men exercise their economic power through sexual cruelty. This is particularly obvious in the first six stories, set in the previous generation, which lead up to the experience of the central character, Anne. Bella, for instance, of the story ‘Isabella’, has degenerated under the tyranny of her father from the proud Edwardian beauty in the parlour photographs to a ‘lazy fat slag’ (his words). Her ‘lair’ is a rural slum, her brain a swamp into which every scandal scarcely percolates: ‘… the pinpoint gleams of interest receding into the sluggish brain where she will mumble at the information for the rest of the day.’ Her death from gangrene parallels her mental decay. Mrs Scarr of ‘That Woman’, let down by her ‘gutless’ lover Lennie – ‘Usually he climbed through the rough orchard just after lunch and came to her back door red in the face and breathing hard. Today he came late …’ – must now find a new home for herself and her children. The child Danuta of ‘A Bad Influence’, pregnant at ten, having been exploited by all her male relatives – uncles, fathers, brothers – mimes her nocturnal experience to her school friend: