The Modern Library (26 page)

This book caused considerable controversy when it was first published. It is based on the true story of Nat Turner, who led a slave revolt in Virginia in 1831; it is narrated in the first person. Styron, who is white, took considerable liberties with the historical context; he also – and this caused the greatest offence – invented a black consciousness and an African–American voice and sensibility at a time when black intellectuals no longer thanked white liberals for inventing their voices. Thirty years later, however, read as a novel,
The Confessions of Nat Turner
has great emotional impact; as a psychological portrait, it is credible and complex and unexpected.

Styron’s Nat Turner is not a typical slave: he learns to read, he knows the Bible and he is, at one point, offered the possibility of freedom. Thus the drudgery and misery of his later years are rendered all the more sharply painful, and make his coldness and calculating determination to exterminate ‘all the people in
Southampton
County and as far beyond as destiny carried me’
understandable
. The narrative is beautifully written, with echoes of the Bible; the mind which is dramatized here is educated and sophisticated, capable of subtle analysis and careful discrimination. Styron’s triumph is to make this voice convincing and absorbing and to make Nat Turner’s actions plausible and dramatic.

Vic and Ray, Lenny and Vince set off in a car from Bermondsey in the East End of London to throw into the sea off Margate Pier on the Kent coast the ashes of their friend Jack, the butcher. In their laconic voices – memories expressed in the vernacular of South London – secret histories are revealed so that the journey becomes a Chaucerian pilgrimage with every character placed before us as in a lost medieval fresco in some old English church.

Among Swift’s accomplishments as a novelist are his great technical skill and his imaginative intimacy with his characters: we hear the accents in which they speak and think. Jack, Ray, Mandy, Amy – all their separate voices, talking to us, give them living shape. These are ordinary English human beings who live on an island surrounded by sea, battered by wars and plagued by institutions distinguished for their lack of concern for lesser lives and vanishing ways. Their dense little world is crammed with the grief of families, but also with the jokes, popular songs, boozers, betting shops and the sad ‘things that do and don’t get told’.

Last Orders
is an inspired novel about love, patience and redemption, about great events remembered in the tiny bits and pieces of memory and feeling which make up a people’s history.

One of the most fascinating aspects of emigration is that moment when the last generation to remember the old country gives way to the next. The Chinese who fled the invading Japanese in the Second World War and escaped to San Francisco are Amy Tan’s emigrants. Turn and turn about, four Chinese mothers and their Chinese–American daughters tell us their stories. Their meeting place is the Joy Luck Club, source of all laughter and news from the past and present: here the mothers meet, eat, play mah-jong and boast about their Chinese–American daughters. The women expect every achievement from their American-educated offspring, but illogically continue to demand Chinese obedience and compliance. This conflict, together with their vibrant misuse of the American language, give the battles between mother and daughter an irresistible tang, as, gradually, past catastrophes are revealed that make their anxious bullying entirely understandable. How can mother not always know best when she has survived arranged marriages, concubinage, abandonment and worse?

Amy Tan is a natural entertainer, her Joy Luck ladies emitting a quickness of wit and a particularly attractive and Chinese kind of inquisitiveness and gossipy good sense. She writes simply, with laughter always on the tip of her pen. And she is wise: through her eyes intolerable tragedies become part of life, to be accepted, remembered and honoured.

Richard Papen recalls in solitude his years as an impressionable student amongst a small but gilded group at Hampden College, Vermont, a hermetically sealed place of education in the chilly north-east of the United States. In that longed-for but exclusive world he becomes infatuated with Henry, Bunny, Francis and the twins Charles and Camilla, privileged and self-confident youths studying classical Greek under the effete care of Julian Morrow, Svengali of this elite coterie. The Dionysian murder these five have already committed is as far from ancient truth and beauty as you can get: their second murder, to conceal the first, gradually reveals how flimsy an edifice the life of the intellect can be. This is a bravura performance, a novel of high ambition fully achieved. Tartt elaborates the style and tone of this favoured world with chilling control, making the arrogance and snobbery of her chosen few seem almost innocent. Vermont itself and the habits of college life are so solidly created that whether munching cream cheese and marmalade sandwiches, gobbling alcohol and drugs or declaiming in ancient Greek, the charm and individuality of each member of the group are firmly established. These are only a few of the secrets of this unusual literary thriller. Others lie in Tartt’s clever
manipulation
of suspense and the sardonic note she injects into these confessions, final touches of literary magic.

Elizabeth Taylor is one of those English novelists who choose small parameters in which to work upon the monumental fragilities of life. Of her eleven novels, models of graceful prose and sharp humour,
Angel
is her magnum opus. This story of the life and times of Angelica Deverill – Angel – is told with ironic elegance. Angel, prickly, vain and deluded, writes popular novels notable for their romantic asininity and for their vast sales. She uses her money to discard her humble beginnings, to buy a beautiful husband – Esme Howe Nevinson, minor painter, major rogue – and to live in Paradise House, ultimately only with her sister-in-law Nora and an assembly of cats.
Angel
is resolutely single-minded but Elizabeth Taylor, always an emotional wizard, so cleverly insinuates the isolation behind her cranky misbehaviour that when Angel dies we are loath to see her go. In the Taylor world, lives that seem uneventful prove quite otherwise. She has an iron-like but delicate way of disinterring maggots of egoism, self-deceit and hypocrisy, for which sins she has much compassion, moving on, an expert observer of the vagaries of desire and love, to reveal the small cruelties we inflict upon those nearest to us, wryly pointing out where real love often lies.

This novel is written in a style which is deceptively languid and effortless. The story it tells is tangled and disturbing even though it is set in a world of good manners and considerable comfort in the South of the United States in the years between about 1930 and 1970. The Carver family come from old money; old Mr Carver’s rebellion consisted of going to Vanderbilt University instead of Princeton, and marrying slightly above himself. He, however, did not allow his four children to rebel at all;
A Summons to Memphis
tells the story of what they did to him in return. The central event in their childhood was a move from Nashville, where they were happy, to Memphis after their father was half-ruined by a colleague. They never got used to the new city. Their father broke up central love affairs in three of their lives; the fourth was killed in the war. The two girls never married; they run a business now and move around Memphis like teenagers. The narrator Philip is the one who got away. He lives uneasily in Manhattan, but in the months after his mother’s death he is constantly summoned to Memphis where his father, aged eighty-one, is also acting like a teenager and is planning to get married. That is, until the two sisters, brilliant creations both, pounce on him and his intended and then move in on top of him and set about making his life a misery. Taylor steers between a Southern Gothic and a deeply civilized, deadpan and almost distant style, all the more to inspire the reader with awe and fascination. This book can be read in one sitting without once looking up.

This subtle, melancholy novel is set on the eve of Kenyan independence; its characters include a number of British
administrators
, but the narrative focuses mainly on a group of characters who have been involved in one way or another in the struggle for independence. They are Karanja, who worked for the British and is now in great danger; Gikonyo, who was detained by the British and whose wife had a baby with Karanja while he was away; and Mugo, who was viewed as a hero for his resistance to torture and beatings while in detention, and has been asked to make the main speech on Independence Day in his village. But Mugo was, in fact, the one who betrayed Kihiki, a man who was hanged by the British.

There is a very sharp portrait in this novel of the British as irrational and defeated, misguided idealism mixed with vicious cruelty. But the violence of the Mau Mau years has defeated everybody, has left a legacy of treachery and fear and poison. There is no disillusion, because there was no illusion in the first place. Courage is shown as a form of hatred or a form of passivity. In all the accounts we have of a national liberation, this is the most sober and clear-eyed, and the most angst-ridden, even though it allows the characters, even the British, golden moments which are rendered with great beauty and affection. But, it is clear, nothing has been solved by independence.

This book, set in New Orleans, is written with an enormous flawless comic flair, an eye for the absurd detail and an ear for the perfectly placed non sequitur. It tells the story of the truly dreadful Ignatius Reilly, vastly overweight, an intellectual bully, constantly burping and deeply unpleasant in every possible way. Other characters include his long-suffering mother and several of her acquaintances and a policeman whose job it is to sit in the public toilets of a bus station seeking out suspicious characters when he is not made to dress up in absurd costumes by his superior. Ignatius’s mother wants him to get a job; she has spent a fortune on his education. He is so arrogant and smelly and rude that no one, it seems, will employ him until he approaches Levy Pants, whose employees are even more wildly insane than our hero; later he works selling hot dogs, but eats more than he sells. His views on the question of race do not bear repetition: ‘I do admire the terror which Negroes are able to inspire in the hearts of some members of the white proletariat and only wish … that I possessed the ability to similarly terrorize.’ The writing is always controlled, and brilliant and pointed. This is Southern Gothic at its most complete and perfect.