LITERARY FICTION
A STATION ON THE PATH TO SOMEWHERE BETTER by Benjamin Wood (Simon & Schuster €18.10)
BENJAMIN WOOD gained a growing reputation with The Ecliptic, his twisty 2015 novel set in an artists’ retreat.
The disturbing events of his propulsive new book take place in 1995, when the child narrator, Daniel, is hooked on an TV fantasy show on which his father, Francis, is a set-builder.
Daniel is agog when his mother lets him take a trip north to see the studio with his dad, an unreliable womaniser with a barely veiled temper. But things start to go wrong when a security guard won’t let them in — the fallout from sexual misconduct allegations that Daniel grasps only dimly.
As the scales fall from Daniel’s eyes after one letdown too many, a story that begins as a poignant, coming-of-age tale spirals almost imperceptibly into harrowing terror.
Wood’s brutal exploration of toxic masculinity urges you on to the bloody climax — and leaves you grateful for the palate-cleansing coda, offering a closing note of redemption.
CLOCK DANCE by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus €22.90)
TYLER, 76, said her previous novel, the Booker-longlisted A Spool Of Blue Thread, would be her last, but here she is again, gilding her status as the queen of multi-generational family sagas.
Clock Dance trots through the life of Willa, a Pennsylvanian woman who weds a college classmate, Derek, to escape her warring parents in the 1970s.
The next thing, it’s 20 years later and Derek is dead, as Tyler cuts briskly through the decades in trademark style.
It’s all a teaser for the novel’s big curveball, when someone rings Willa saying an ex-girlfriend of her son, Sean, has been shot in Baltimore and needs help looking after her young daughter.
Actually, the child isn’t Sean’s — but to the bafflement of Willa’s new husband, Peter, she plays grandma by jumping on a flight anyway, plunging them into the dramas of lone parent Denise and her precocious nine-year-old, Cheryl.
Accept the crazy set-up, and this is a smart, touching exploration of altruism and the nature of a meaningful life.
SO MUCH LIFE LEFT OVER by Louis de Bernieres (Harvill Secker €16.90)
FANS of Louis de Bernieres will know what to expect from this globe-trotting follow-up to 2015’s The Dust That Falls From Dreams, set in the years between the two World Wars.
Centre stage among a sprawling cast of characters is given to a philandering ex-fighter pilot, Daniel, now running a tea factory in 1920s Ceylon and expecting a second child with his wife, Rosie.
The child is stillborn — a rawly depicted event in a multi-threaded storyline that generally proves more light-hearted as it cuts between Rosie’s three sisters and Daniel’s Ceylonese lover, with whom he has another child.
There are also letters from Daniel’s brother, a soldier in Pakistan, and segments following a gardener named Oily Wragge, whose cheeky-chappy narration revisiting the First World War gives the uneasy sense of de Bernieres slumming it.
It’s uneven and perhaps overlong, but this tragicomic romp has a winning glint in its eye, delivering oodles of Downtonesque entertainment as it portrays a changing England poised uneasily on the brink of modernity.