Star treatment for hot list favourites
There are six brilliant page turners on the shortlist for the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize For Fiction. Our celebrity reviewers champion their personal picks
IT IS the end of the 1940s and Britain is slowly recovering from the pummelling it received during the Second World War. Attlee’s government is rolling out its socialist agenda, including the creation of the NHS, creating a social mobility never seen before or since. For some, though, the battle is just beginning.
A diverse group of tuberculosis sufferers find themselves incarcerated in a sanatorium in Kent. An ancient and deadly disease, TB treatments were crude: fresh air, so that sufferers literally lived outdoors on verandas in all weathers or the deliberate collapsing of a lung to allow the lesions to heal. It was no longer killing a quarter of the population but it remained a significant threat.
With the arrival of streptomycin and other antibiotics, the corner was turned. The Dark Circle captures the period leading up to this redemption, from drab austerity to an atmosphere of exhaustion, tension and energy.
Twins Lenny and Miriam, Jewish East Enders, are beacons of tenacity and verve among the grey, class-bound inmates of the sanatorium. Then the brashness and pizzazz of the New World erupts in the shape of another life force: rebel American Arthur Persky. The inmates’ multiple narratives are skilfully woven in a beautiful book about a dark world full of irrepressible light. Linda Grant writes with empathy and compassion not just of these battles with a deadly disease but with the battles we all face: the battle to become ourselves, to learn to love, to live with our weaknesses and our battle with our own mortality.
And her book explores society’s ongoing battle to hang on to the opportunities for greater good that the shock of war opened up. Here we are in 2017 and the re-emergence of tuberculosis feels like a rebuke. HAVING no interest in horses or horse racing, I found The Sport Of Kings to be an unappealing prospect. Many consider it to be a great American novel but even that description is off-putting. I’ve never made it to the end of Moby-Dick.
But I needn’t have worried. This is a monumental piece of work and as a writer I found myself breathless in admiration at the scope, the language and the ambition of a book that is, yes, a dynastic saga set in the American south, centring on a horse by the name of Hellsmouth but which actually goes much, much further, tackling black history in the US in a way that is challenging, shocking and urgent.
A sequence in which two slaves escape into Ohio would alone be worth the cover price. An account of the central character, the mixed-race Allmon Shaughnessy, helplessly descending into poverty and crime, is utterly convincing. But almost every sentence sings out. Horses whicker, crickets thrum and summer comes “like an Egyptian plague”.
Morgan’s gaze is universal, almost god-like. The novel is set between the 1950s and the 1980s but reaches back to the Pleistocene age. Her eye sweeps across all America but then settles on the single chromosome of a thoroughbred.
Just occasionally the novel is overwritten. I could have done with fewer tense changes, lists and author interventions. The book is at its best when its brilliantly drawn characters and narrative drive, whether a race riot or a horse race, sweep you off your feet. I’M a sucker for speculative fiction. I love books that ask: