LITERARY FICTION
THE LAST MAN IN EUROPE by Dennis Glover
(Black Inc. £10.99) GEORGE ORWELL’S Nineteen Eighty-Four recently became a bestseller once more — thanks, possibly, to fear over America’s future under a post-truth presidency.
Uncannily timed to ride this revival of interest, Dennis Glover’s pacy novelisation of Orwell’s life takes its title from the one Orwell first had in mind for his totalitarian dystopia, written while ravaged by tuberculosis after World War II.
From the bullet he took in the neck while fighting Franco in Spain, to his dismay that his anti-Stalin satire Animal Farm was sold as a children’s book, we dash through Orwell’s last decade in broad-brush scenes that have a whiff of made-for-TV biopic.
But as the end draws near, with Orwell desperate to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four before the ultimate deadline, Glover magically wrings high-stakes drama from the fundamentally undramatic scene of the writer at his desk as he hesitates over his chilling final page, of which there are two subtly different versions in existence.
A printer’s blooper? Or — Glover wonders — was it Orwell’s last-gasp U-turn, letting a chink of light into his terrifying vision?
SUGAR MONEY by Jane Harris
(Faber £14.99) AFTER two well- received mysteries set in Victorian Scotland, Harris’s latest novel takes us to the colonial-era Caribbean for a wrenching tale of derringdo, told by a slave caught in the crossfire between warring imperial powers.
In French Martinique, 12-year-old Lucien and his older brother are the property of a priest, who sends them on a hazardous secret odyssey to recapture slaves taken by British invaders based in Grenada — home to a regime even more barbaric than the one in which the pair have been raised.
Based on a true story, the drama — which turns on an audacious Christmas Eve bid for escape — supplies rip-roaring adventure and unspeakable tragedy, while airing dirty laundry from Britain’s imperial past.
However, it’s Lucien’s voice that steals the show — a mix of raw vigour and highflown poetry peppered with cleverly deployed creole.
If Lucien’s charm sweetens a bitter pill, this is ultimately a shaming story of wicked injustice to leave your heart heavy.
DUNBAR by Edward St Aubyn
(Hogarth £16.99) THIS 21st-century reboot of King Lear is the latest in the Hogarth series in which literary A- listers write a novel based on a Shakespeare play.
The brutal family tragedy of Lear would seem ideal inspiration for Edward St Aubyn, best known for novels about a wildly dysfunctional clan from the English upper-crust.
He recasts Dunbar as an 80-year-old Canadian media baron on the run from the north-of-England care home, where he’s been sent by the double-crossing heiresses currently in charge of his empire.
The novel crackles whenever this justifiably paranoid patriarch takes centre-stage, but sags when the focus turns to his daughters, scheming in the company of a pill-popping quack plotting a power grab of his own.
As an amusing, if overfamiliar, send-up of the super-rich, spliced with a piercing portrait of existential agony, it has savagely acute moments.
However, like other titles in this series, always tantalising in prospect, it seldom feels fully-fledged — as if it can’t quite pull free of its own all-powerful father figure.