The Modern Library (6 page)

This is a virtuoso performance, an eloquent love story and an epic account of mid-nineteenth century life in England and Australia, interweaving a mercurial adventure story with the intimate, the comic and the fanciful.

Oscar Hopkins is born in Devon, the frail and red-headed son of a fundamentalist member of the Plymouth Brethren: his escape first into Anglicanism and then into gambling takes him to Australia in the 1850s to bring the word of Christ to New South Wales. Lucinda Leplastrier is an orphaned heiress, daughter of an early feminist, and she scandalizes Sydney by wearing rational dress, owning a glass factory and gambling compulsively. One of Carey’s triumphs in the novel is to make us care fervently about these two odd misfits; another is to surround them with an explosion of clergymen, glass-blowers, explorers, villains, a profusion of
idiosyncratic
characters galvanized into vigorous pursuit of the vagaries of chance by Carey’s singular genius. Equally admirable is his ferocious caricature of Imperial Britain and of nineteenth-century Australian history, and of the bigotry and intolerance of
Christianity
, particularly in its extreme Nonconformist modes. But it is Carey’s fertile imagination and quirky curiosity about all manner of things that give
Oscar and Lucinda
its special quality. This is a most sympathetic novel, full of ideas, endearing, full of gusto.

Dora Chance, a seventy-five-year-old ex-hoofer, is the leading lady of
Wise Children
. Clustered round her, as in a Busby Berkeley musical extravaganza, is the theatrical dynasty of Hazards and Chances, artistes and entertainers. Everything comes in twos in this novel. Twins are everywhere, born on both sides of the blanket. Dora and Nora Chance are the illegitimate twin daughters of the great thespian Sir Melchior Hazard. Living in Bard Road, Brixton, they are ‘two batty old hags’ now, but they were not always thus, and Dora is writing her reminiscences, a garrulous account of their theatrical ups and downs – a ‘history of the world in party frocks’.
Wise Children
turns a hundred cartwheels as it introduces its entertainments. One of them is about fathers, known and unknown – for, as Dora says, ‘You can’t fool a sperm.’ Another is a rapturous homage to the theatre of Shakespeare and the bawdy cheer of showbusiness. Most of all, this is a ribald satire on Britain’s enduring class system. It speaks for the popular and for the people, celebrating the incivilities and trash culture of those who live with vim and vigour on the wrong side of the tracks.

Angela Carter was a trailblazer. She made British the idea of magical realism and injected her glittering version of it into the work of many of her contemporaries.

Raymond Carver chose this selection of his stories before he died, a permanent deterrent to the rash of imitators who have since appeared. Fortunately his writing is inimitable.

His voice is that of contemporary America. Carver man is mostly out of work, at home with the vacuum cleaner and the family cat, a bottle too near to hand. Carver woman, with stretch marks, heart of steel and that extra pound of flesh, is keeping herself together with a fixed grin and the nearest beer.

These are gutsy lives full of regret, opportunities lost, luck that should have been just a little better: but there is love too – all the more real because it grows in arid soil. Carver’s home patch is modern marriage, of which he is the official recorder: ‘Once I woke up in the night to hear Iris grinding her teeth’, and ‘There was a time when I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now, I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that?’ Only Raymond Carver can. His style, economic, unadorned, emphasizes the tough realities of his domestic themes. He has been called the laureate of the dispossessed and he is, but he packs much more than that into the ten or twenty pages of each of these life-changing stories, a classic of modern American writing.

Raymond Chandler’s original style, the dry humour of his
wisecracking
private eye, Philip Marlowe, instantly created a milieu perfectly suited to the ways of the late twentieth-century world. ‘I hear voices crying in the night and I go see what’s the matter.’ Grief is Marlowe’s business.

Marlowe is not a trusting man: too much alcohol, too many lies have given him a hide of iron. But he takes to Terry Lennox, a scarred war hero, a drunk, like so many Chandler heroes, who is married to Sylvia, the daughter of a power-obsessed
multimillionaire
. Brilliantly constructed around the brutal murder of Sylvia Lennox, Marlowe’s disillusioned despair is matched by the drunken writer Roger Wade, married to another of Chandler’s extraordinary women – these women are always half-crazed, beautiful,
angelically
so: in Chandler’s jungle it’s a moot point whether beauty masks good or evil. Chandler’s importance and influence are more than a matter of his taut writing style. His genius lies behind the personas of the great Hollywood film stars – Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Lauren Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck and others – who portrayed the characters he invented. Chandler’s novels originated Hollywood
film noir
, not the other way around. In this, the sixth of his seven Marlowe novels, his immortal private eye engages with murder and betrayal in his meanest and most moving crusade.

This is a brooding, dark novel which has conscious echoes of Hardy and Lawrence. It opens at the turn of the century on a hill farm in Wales when the twin boys Lewis and Benjamin Jones are born to Mary, who has married beneath her, and Amos, a fiercely independent spirit.

Chatwin makes the love which binds these four people into something taut and hard which maims them and haunts them, and is under constant pressure. The twins behave as one person and can feel each other’s pain; Chatwin manages to make their behaviour credible and interesting. The novel is full of detail about farming, weather, animals, nature, furniture, clothes, mood swings, auctions, feuds between neighbours, social changes.

The arrival of the First World War makes Amos even more sour than he is already; one of the twins is forced to join the army, and then Chatwin makes them both even more inwardlooking and strange when the war is over. All the main characters in the book are motivated and controlled by forces which they do not understand, nothing comes easy to them, and the reader becomes totally involved then in the great battles which go on within each of them and between all of them, and between all of them and the world outside. Although this is an old-fashioned family saga, it is not a piece of pastiche. It is a deeply felt and deeply moving novel about complex characters and relationships.

‘Sandeep, meanwhile, had come to the conclusion that the grown-ups were mad, each after his or her own fashion. Simple situations were turned into complex dramatic ones; not until then did everybody feel important and happy.’ Sandeep is a small Indian boy, an only child who lives in a Bombay high-rise and in this book makes two long visits to his extended family in Calcutta. The novel tells the story of the atmosphere in the small house where they live. He watches his relatives, their servants and their neighbours, alert to everything – sounds, smells, domestic habits, moods, weather, plants. He is vastly amused by tiny details such as his uncle’s car, which breaks down, and his uncle’s bustling morning rituals. He loves the women in the family, their clothes and perfumes, their voices. He plays with his cousins.

Chaudhuri writes precisely, carefully, trying to capture in the rhythms of his prose the faded happiness of things, the strange, pure remembered moments. The boy is curious and intelligent, and Chaudhuri is clever enough and talented enough to let his observations stand for a lot, to let what he sees and hears become the drama of the book, rather than twists of fate or plot. There are moments of pure evocative beauty such as the family’s visit to the elderly relatives, the presence of a new baby, a rainstorm, Chhotomama’s illness, his time in hospital, his recovery.

John Cheever is best known for his comic and ironic short stories, for his quiet, careful, sometimes satirical, often gently unsettling observation of American suburban life. This novel is not like that at all, although it resembles Cheever’s other work in its depiction of isolation and broken families.

In just over two hundred pages Cheever constructs a dark, tough, relentless universe. It is the prison called Falconer in which Farragut has been incarcerated for killing his brother, striking him with a fire iron. The novel is written in stark, clear prose; the darkness of the vision is unlike any work produced by Cheever’s American contemporaries. There is a blunt, deadpan edge to the sentences and observations; the absence of daylight is in the prose as much as in the prison. Every scene in the book is set up with a mastery and control: the visit of Farragut’s wife would break your heart and chill your bones. It seems that things cannot get any worse until you come to the cat-killing scene, the descriptions of drug addiction, the violence, the sheer quality of the despair.

The novel offered Cheever a way to dramatize his own circumspect homosexuality: the homosexual love affair in the book is remarkable and unexpected for its tenderness, and for the quality of the love and longing between Farragut (who has been heterosexual in the outside world) and Jody, a fellow inmate. This book is a serious work of American fiction and deserves to be better known.