LITERARY FICTION
HOUSE OF NAMES by Colm Toibin (Viking £14.99) TOIBIN is a writer deeply attuned to the psychology of families and, here, he turns to one of the most infamous — and oldest — in the Western canon, the house of Agamemnon, whose implosion over two generations is recounted in Aeschylus’s trilogy The Oresteia.
In Toibin’s careful hands, the story of Clytemnestra, who avenges her daughter after her husband Agamemnon sacrifices her to secure safe passage from Troy, is told with such a vivid grasp of the emotional pulse that even those who know the story well will be transfixed.
Toibin retains the ancient Greek setting, but shifts the emphasis from a world determined by the gods to one where faith has been replaced by scepticism, so that, as the bodies pile up, themes of personal responsibility take centre-stage.
Of all the tormented characters in this tremendous story, it is Orestes who bears the greatest strain — a young man unwillingly caught up in a pitiless web of family and sectarian conflicts that, in Toibin’s discomforting version, feel all too horribly resonant and modern.
PECULIAR GROUND by Lucy Hughes-Hallett (Fourth Estate £16.99) THE ground beneath Hughes-Hallett’s debut work of fiction (she’s best known for her award-winning biography The Pike) is peculiar, but in a good way.
It’s a teeming, heaving whirligig of a novel that opens in Restoration England just after the Civil War, before accelerating forward to various points in the 20th century. Throughout the plot, the one constant is the setting — an enchanted, grand old English country pile, which, when we first encounter it, is in the process of being concealed behind a large wall at the behest of its owner.
Several centuries later, it becomes the site of a skirmish between locals insisting on their right to ramble and the owner, who is holding a private rock concert.
Ideas of control and power, refuge and rebellion, run through this story like minerals through rock, with a key section set in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down.
The sheer abundance of character and incident here would break most writers, but Hughes-Hallett retains terrific control of her subject matter in a novel beautifully alert to the repeating patterns of personal and political history.
SYMPATHY by Olivia Sudjic (Pushkin Press £14.99) OLIVIA SUDJIC’S hotly tipped debut offers a shrewd examination of how love stories are transformed by the distorting filter of the internet.
Alice is a newly uprooted English millennial in New York who has become obsessed with Mizuko, an older Japanese writer. Mizuko’s willingness to record a plethora of daily detail about her life allows Alice to construct a virtual intimacy with her idol, although she develops a largely chaste, physical relationship with Mizuko, too, driven partly by the feeling that Mizuko is an answer to the many questions Alice, adopted as a baby, has about her own missing identity.
Sudjic’s super-smart, hard-to-follow novel emulates the distracting experience of browsing the internet, with new plot windows opening up in non-linear fashion and with Alice’s version of events persistently feeling slippery.
Intriguing themes of connections, creation myths and the molecular nature of selfhood haunt this novel, but the reader’s sympathy for its self-absorbed characters is, in the end, in short supply.