LITERARY FICTION
A VIEW OF THE EMPIRE AT SUNSET
by Caryl Phillips (Vintage €10.25) IN WIDE Sargasso Sea, the novelist Jean Rhys pulled off an audacious — and outstanding — act of literary revisionism, imagining how Bertha, the prototype madwoman in the attic, ended up locked in Rochester’s mansion in Jane Eyre.
In a novel full of echoes, Caryl Phillips imagines the story of Rhys herself, who came to England from Dominica in 1906 to live with an aunt before going to study acting in London.
Just like Bertha, his Rhys is trapped: in a dank, depressing city of cheap bedsits and predatory men, through which she drifts like a tattered leaf on the breeze.
Dependent on various men for money and, more and more, booze, she exists in scenes that often feel more like a series of painterly tableaux, becoming increasingly a passive onlooker to her own unhappy life. Phillips’s novel ends before Rhys discovers her voice as a writer, yet in this curiously inert, colourless novel, you struggle to hear her voice at all.
THE SHEPHERD’S HUT
by Tim Winton (Picador €11.99) TWO stand-out novels already this year have immersed themselves in the punishing, almost cosmic hostility of the Australian landscape — Peter Carey’s A Long Way From Home and Jane Harper’s Force Of Nature. Now comes the latest novel from Tim Winton, the story of Jaxie Clackton, a teenager on the run through the outback.
Convinced he’ll be blamed for the death of his brute of a dad, and with his beloved mother also recently deceased, he has nothing to lose.
Armed only with an old gun, a butter knife and his wits, he sets off on a possibly hopeless journey across Australia.
Clackton is an absolutely wonderful creation, with the unpredictable aggression of an adult stuffed into the soul of a child and a voice as hardscrabble and jagged as the bush itself.
As the novel unfolds, he meets and forges a tentative friendship with a priest living by himself in the middle of the outback for reasons that can only have terrible repercussions. The result is an uncompromising novel that’s as tender as it is savage.
CRUDO
by Olivia Laing (Picador €12.75) NOVELS that deliberately play on the slippery borders between fiction and real life have been a mainstay of literature in recent years — just look at Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard.
To that list you can add Olivia Laing, known for several highly-acclaimed nonfiction books and who has now produced a novel written in real time last summer that purports to present events as they happened to her: she went to Italy, got married, became increasingly appalled at President Donald Trump.
But it’s not Laing narrating this novel, it’s the American punk poet Kathy Acker, who died in 1997 and whose life has been appropriated here in ways she would have recognised — as a writer Acker was always burgling bits from other people’s lives and passing them off as her own.
So where does that leave this novel? I’m not sure — it’s sometimes hard to get past its determined clever-cleverness.
But it’s also a piece of electrifying writing that captures absolutely the daily headline-bombarded, social media-refracted atmosphere of modern life, in which, as Laing’s Acker says, ‘it was becoming increasingly hard to feel real’.