Fiction

The shattered narrative of Evie Wyld’s second novel returns to themes of violence and its aftermath that were central to her first, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice (2009). Its protagonist, Jake Whyte, remembers just one moment of pure beauty. At fifteen, waiting after school for her sister, she is confronted by bullies Hannah and Nerrida. Into the exquisite torture of prods, yanks, and taunts – dyke, homo, Brick Shit House – comes Denver Cobby, a boy so self-possessed that when he smokes outside school, the teachers leave him alone. Jake’s chief tormentor thinks Denver’s invitation ‘You want me to walk you home?’ is intended for her. It isn’t, and Jake knows that she will pay for her triumph, even as she relishes the charge of Denver’s body close to hers and his arm around her waist. Jake’s response to the moment’s undoing is the pivot that alters her life.

In The Asylum, the latest dark suspense novel from John Harwood, the author manages to walk a fine line between Gothic romance and contemporary psychological thriller. Or rather, he gambols gleefully along it, delighting his reader with familiar Gothic tropes while deftly interrogating his protagonist’s sense of her own self. There are mirrors here, an insane asylum, and enough startling coincidences to make you think Harwood was actually writing this in late Victorian England, where the novel is set. There are even a dark, brooding hero and a diabolical villain, assuming they are who they appear to be. But at its heart this novel concerns one woman’s struggles with her own identity, one she is only barely aware of herself. That woman’s name is Georgina Ferrars. Or is it?

This novel comes to us some forty years after it was written. Janet Frame (1924–2004) did not allow it to be published during her lifetime. Very probably she was anxious not to be seen as savaging the hands that had fed her: and it is indeed a gleeful, glorious savaging.

If, hardy reader, you make it through the 667 pages of Joyce Carol Oates’s The Accursed, you will see, on page 669, that she prefaces her acknowledgments with this gnomic utterance: ‘The truths of Fiction reside in metaphor; but metaphor is here generated by History.’

The Victorian era has gripped the collective imagination of speculative fiction writers in much the same way the medieval period influenced our forebears. The nineteenth century gave us the Penny Dreadful, Dracula, and Frankenstein, and the melding in fiction of fantasy and reality, superstition and science. A spike in child labour was followed by its marked decline as society began associating childhood with innocence.

‘If you don’t like movies, I’m not sure you will like these stories.’ So warns Ron Elliott in his introduction to Now Showing, after having explained that the five stories in this collection are unproduced screenplays repurposed as novellas. It may be useful to clarify Elliott’s warning: unless you are a cinéaste who appreciates screenplay structure and enjoys seeing new variations on the same old Hollywood themes, you may find these stories lacking.

Yvette Walker’s remarkable début novel is told in a series of letters that cross time and continents, tracing the intimate lives of three couples, one straight, one lesbian, one gay. Starting in 1969 in an artist’s studio in Cork, where a Russian painter and his Irish novelist wife exchange love letters, it moves to 2011 and a lesbian bookseller in Western Australia and her estranged girlfriend, and finally to 1948 and a retired English doctor mourning his German lover.

The Drinker, by Hans Fallada – first published in Germany in 1950, translated by Charlotte and A.L. Lloyd into English in 1952, unearthed for an Anglophone audience in 2009 by Melville House, and now published by Scribe – is the story of Erwin Sommer, who drinks himself, almost unaccountably, to death. It counts for everything, of course, to know that the novel was written in 1944 in a Nazi insane asylum. 

The nub of this first novel is a good one. Even those who weren’t alive in the early 1950s will have heard of Joseph McCarthy. Fired by the tensions of the Cold War but with scant regard for hard evidence, the US Republican senator made his reputation by accusing numerous individuals of communist sympathies, possible disloyalty, and/or treason. Intellectuals of every kind were a particular target; the so-called Hollywood blacklist led to many actors and writers being hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was assiduously supported by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.