The Modern Library (7 page)

Of the novelists chosen for this book Agatha Christie is the most popular entertainer. In a hundred languages or more, she provides millions of readers with a view of England complete with afternoon teas, vicars, colonels and a dead body – in the library, in the watersplash, in bed, on trains, at sea and in every innocent seeming English village street.

She created two eccentric detectives – Hercule Poirot, who exercised his little grey cells and fingered his moustache through some of her best novels (
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
, 1926 and
Murder on the Orient Express
, 1934) – and she wrote brilliant stories in which neither appeared (
Ten Little Niggers
, 1939 and
Death Comes as the End
, 1944). Her second detective, Miss Jane Marple, was Christie’s alter ego in the guise of a fluffy, elderly spinster, conservatively opinionated and sharp as a tack beneath her grey curls and woolly mufflers. Miss Marple is the genius at work in A
Murder is Announced
in which, in the wonderfully named village of Chipping Cleghorn, the local newspaper startles its inhabitants with an announcement of the precise date, time and location of a murder; thither wend the village worthies; the murder occurs on time, every clue is presented to us, but as ever only the ingenuity which is the hallmark of a Christie detective story makes the solution, perfectly obvious once revealed, utterly baffling until that moment. She fools us every time.

(US: The
Winshaw Legacy
)

This novel is an octoped. First, for those who experienced them, it emits a wonderful blast of indignation about the Thatcher years; secondly, for those spared that experience, it provides a hilarious and potent send-up of any political party driving its people round the bend at any given moment. Thirdly, it is a most satisfactory family saga, telling the story of the Winshaw dynasty, a gaggle of persons of the kind that owned, bought or ran Britain in the 1980s and 1990s.

Fourthly, its hero, Michael, biographer of the Winshaw family, is addictively engaging in the David Copperfield manner, the sort of young man who, sensitive, vaguely inept in a business sense, kind, embodies everything the Thatcher years most hated. Fifthly, Coe is a writer who uses the movies in magical ways, the title itself being a 1960s British film comedy which becomes crucially important as mysteries unfold. Sixthly, this is a mystery story too. Seventhly, Coe laces his satire with compassion, pointing the finger at the blusterers who tell us what to do and at us for our patience in putting up with same. Eighthly,
What a Carve Up!
is an incisive and funny polemic and a perfectly pitched satire that succeeds triumphantly in everything it attempts. Reading it is like watching
Citizen Kane
crossed with
Singing in the Rain
: we are left bouncing with laughter and admiration.

Three novels by J. M. Coetzee could easily have made this list. They are
Waiting for the Barbarians
(1980),
Life and Times of Michael K
(1983) and
Age of Iron
(1990). Coetzee is a master of tone and colour, subtleties and ironies. His novels are full of echoes of other work – Shakespeare, the Bible, Kafka, Dostoevsky – and are at times harrowing.

Age of Iron
demonstrates Coetzee’s skill at using voice: Elizabeth Curren, who is dying of cancer in the old South Africa, writes to her daughter, who lives abroad. From the first page, you can feel the tension in her voice, her sense of right and wrong, how frightened she is, how frail and vulnerable.

In Coetzee’s work, the public world becomes a sort of darkness, constantly encroaching, threatening to take over. Here we have the drama of the last years of the apartheid regime: riots,
schoolchildren
on strike, white liberals like our narrator deeply shocked by the savagery of what is going on around them. The sentences are perfect, the tone is relentless and unforgiving, and the sense of despair, both public and private, fills the book with a grief which is almost overwhelming.

‘“I hope Father will drop down dead on his way home,” said Ralph Challoner. “I really do hope it.”’ This ferocious request is customary within the families of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s imagination. Simon Challoner longs to inherit the estate of his Uncle Edwin, one of those men who malevolently enters a room just in time to hear ill of himself. Widowed, Edwin marries the young Rhoda, whom Simon impregnates in an idle moment. Edwin accepts the ensuing son as his own, and the distressed Simon, having lost his inheritance, marries Fanny and begets five vocally omnipresent children whom he rears tyrannically, in fear of the workhouse and the orphanage. Simon saves himself and his heritage in a manner so unimaginable that we are left to imagine it.

Written predominantly in dialogue, in devastating conversational exchanges, this high comedy is so biting and acerbic, and so clever, that discussions of potential incest seem much the same as comments on the carving or the state of the nursery. Ivy Compton-Burnett presented her mordant novels of family passions and decay in matchless, clipped prose, revealing beneath the prim surface of English upper middle-class life the presence of sin, the absence of charity and the necessity for suspicion, cunning and revenge – in that order. She is incomparable.

Sometimes in a writer’s life one book seems to crystallize a talent, seems to fulfil all of the promise of the earlier books, seems to deal with themes and obsessions and tones which have appeared before, offering them a new simplicity and seriousness and sense of perfection. Jim Crace’s
Quarantine
, which tells the story of Jesus’s forty days in the desert, does just this. Crace has always been interested in how society emerges from the primitive, in landscapes which are bleak and deserted, in the intricacies of trading and bonding. His writing has always been stark and poetic, beautifully crafted.

In this novel, Jesus is a chimera, he barely appears. The novel dramatizes his absence and the presence of four other pilgrims in the desert, each carrying a burden of fear and desire. It focuses on Musa, a trader who has been left for dead by his family and who believes that Jesus has healed him; on his wife Miri, who is pregnant; and on their relationships with the pilgrims. The novel is written in a style of calm perfection, full of echoes of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, with a remarkable number of sentences in iambic pentameter. The physical sense of the desert is superb; Crace’s telling of the drama between the characters makes the book the masterpiece that his earlier books had presaged.

This novel is narrated by four of its characters, and its considerable power and emotional force come from that sense of voice which governs contemporary American fiction. Here the voices of Bobby and Jonathan, old school friends; Alice, Jonathan’s mother; and Clare, who befriends both men and has a child with one of them, are compelling and haunting, full of a melancholy effort to make sense of things. There is a luxury in the writing which echoes F. Scott Fitzgerald; the narrative contains beautiful sentences,
astonishing
moments of insight and disclosure. The first half of the book, especially, has a rich perfection about it; Cunningham is
particularly
good on family attachments and entanglements. The early relationship between Jonathan and Bobby, their desire for each other, their early sexual encounters, are wonderfully described, and Jonathan’s mother’s observation of her gay son is superb. (‘I knew the bite and meanness of boys was missing from his nature.’)

In the end, as in all American fiction, the true hero of the book is America itself: its ability to change; the sudden, bright opportunities it offers to make money, to make friends; the beauty and variety of its landscapes; its ability to tempt us with hope and resolution. This is certainly one of the best American novels of the decade.

‘I shall be as brief as I can, for it is not by piling up detail that I hope to achieve my picture, but by putting the emphasis where I think it belongs.’ The novel begins with a careful, precise and striking first-person account of a boy growing up in rural Canada in the early years of the century, his sharp intelligence and narrative skills, and perhaps bitter wisdom, cutting through the dark, conservative world of his parents and their village. Our narrator, almost to spite his mother, takes part in the First World War, and his matter-of-fact version of life in the trenches, of his own injuries and time in hospital, is disturbing and convincing.

But this is not a novel about childhood, nor is it a war novel. It is a novel about what happens then, after the drama of childhood and war. It is told in the shadow of four figures from childhood: Boy Staunton, who becomes a millionaire politician; his wife Leola, our narrator’s former sweetheart; Mrs Dempster, a minister’s wife, who goes mad; her son Paul, who becomes a magician (Davies loved the idea of magic). Our narrator’s sensibility makes him a sharp chronicler of the world around him; his interest in saints and religion becomes a secret life. His account of the world and of his own life is rigorously intelligent; its stilted style is in contrast with the deep pain which is buried in the narrative, and the play between the two is often breathtaking and always engrossing.

(US:
Corelli’s Mandolin
)

Set on a Greek island during the Second World War, this novel combines narrative sweep, a mixture of tragedy and comedy, a number of extraordinary and lovable characters and the sense of a tightly knit traditional society in a changing world. It almost stands alone in contemporary English fiction for its ability to deal confidently with the outside world, for the warmth of its tone, for its breadth and scope and for its lack of cynicism.

It tells, using methods which remind the reader of both Charles Dickens and Gabriel García Márquez, the story of Dr Iannis and his daughter Pelagia living easily together on Cephalonia in the years before the war. When the Italian army invades the island, the Italian control is half-hearted and almost good-humoured. Dr Iannis and his daughter try to ignore the considerable charms of Captain Corelli, who is billeted with them. The novel moves from Iannis’s kitchen to the life of the village to the terrible cruelty of the war. Stories about music, medicine, fishing and horrific events in Greece in the Second World War are placed beside other stories about love and death. The tone moves effortlessly from the very funny to the deeply harrowing once the Germans arrive on the island. The writing is always fluid; the scenes are fast moving and varied and always interesting; the novel is fiercely readable, almost impossible to put down.