The agony of the ecstasy hits hard
VANESSA BERRIDGE reviews the best new literary novels
biggest gangster, also wants information from Ryan about Dan’s new drug line.
Ryan realises that he’s made a bad career choice and there seems a way out when his music promoter friend Colm opens a nightclub and offers Ryan a job as DJ only for Dan to scupper it, needing his enforcer to keep a low profile.
Ryan, out of his mind on drugs for most of the book, is in no position to think straight, especially when Karine finishes with him. Unwisely he throws himself into the arms of Natalie, a smart accountant with a taste for rough trade. He is also semi-adopted by Maureen, a mysterious grandmother figure who knew his mother.
Between them the two women seem to offer consolation but both have dangerous connections. Cork is a small city where everyone knows everyone else and it is tough to escape.
This is a hard-edged, gritty novel with terrific tempo and good characterisation, the two feisty women in particular shining through. McInerney is a pacy storyteller at the top of her game. by Elanor Dymott Jonathan Cape, £14.99 THROUGH binoculars Ruth Hollingbourne glimpses a small girl hunched over a book and watches her from the adjacent villa. Ruth is reminded of herself at the same age and her over-identification with the girl sets in train a devastating chain of events. This snapshot image is a perfect beginning to a book in which photography plays a key role.
For Ruth is the daughter of celebrated photographer Max Hollingbourne and she has returned to his Greek villa following his death after 15 years of estrangement. Her loving and more capable elder sister Vinny attempts to help through the fabric of the novel build up to a tragic finale. by Hari Kunzru Hamish Hamilton, £14.99 ONE of the surprisingly few criticisms of La La Land was that the white Ryan Gosling character could restore the fortunes of a black jazz group.
The film was accused of cultural re-appropriation and that is a theme of Hari Kunzru’s latest and very polished offering White Tears.
Two misfit white boys, Seth and Carter, meet at college and discover a shared passion for early black jazz.
They set up a backing music business, financed by Carter’s wealthy family and do well until Seth records a snatch of song played by a busker. Carter becomes obsessed, persuading Seth to remix the song as if it were recorded in the 1930s then releasing it online.
An alcoholic collector, JumpJim, contacts Seth and Carter, convinced they have a unique recording which he tried to find in Mississippi 60 years earlier.
When this leads to Carter being so savagely beaten that he ends up on life-support, Seth finds himself shut out of his home, studio and career by the Wallaces, Carter’s family. His life spirals out of control and he goes looking for answers from JumpJim.
From thereon the narrative becomes dislocated, intercutting the journey that JumpJim took in the 1950s with Seth and Carter’s sister Leonie retracing JumpJim’s footsteps 60 years later.
When Leonie dies, the novel moves into another dimension, with Seth constantly on the move and seeking retribution from the Wallace family.
White Tears is an intriguing venture if very much a novel of two halves, with the first half giving little indication of what the second half will become. What begins as a more or less realist novel spirals into a stream-of-consciousness fantasy across different times.
This is an impressive novel which seems to lose its way, leading to a disturbing but ultimately not very satisfying conclusion.