LITERARY FICTION
THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO by Jussi Valtonen
(Oneworld £16.99) WITH a many-tentacled storyline shuttling from Nineties Helsinki to modern-day Baltimore, this prize-winning Finnish family saga parks its tanks on the kind of turf favoured by the big beasts of U.S. fiction — there’s even a minor character called Franzen.
Joe is an American neuroscientist who abandoned his baby son, Samuel, 20 years ago when he divorced Alina, a Finnish student he romanced at a conference.
The book starts with their disastrous attempt to settle in Helsinki — Alina is in post-natal freefall while Joe, an ambitious careerist with a roving eye, angles for a return to the U.S.
It then fast-forwards to Joe, long remarried and now on the hit-list of animalrights activists on account of pioneering brain research providing the basis for the ‘iAM’, the alarming digital device his 15-year-old daughter is hooked on.
This is classy and engrossing drama but Valtonen’s plot jams together his various threads with sledgehammer bluntness, not least in how it forces Joe to face his past.
THE BROKEN MIRROR by Jonathan Coe
(Unbound £9.99) YOU could see Coe’s teenytiny new book, illustrated by the Italian artist Chiara Coccorese, as a scaled-down retread of the themes from his 1994 Thatcher-era satire What A Carve Up!
It follows small-town schoolgirl Claire, whose better-looking, richer classmate Amanda bullies and cheats with impunity, thanks to the clout wielded by her father, a construction tycoon eyeing a big-bucks bulldozing of the factory where Claire’s dad works.
Meanwhile the public libraries are closing down and xenophobic vandals have forced Claire’s best friend Aggie to flee the country.
Claire’s only solace is a scavenged shard of a magical looking glass that makes things appear as she would wish them to. Clearing up her acne isn’t a bad start — but can it do more?
In this fable, aimed partly at younger readers, coming-of-age woes symbolise larger Brexit-era anxieties in a rallying cry urging us to question the status quo. But the writing lacks nuance and I missed Coe’s usual comic brio.
THE WRONG CHILD by Barry Gornell
(Orion £12.99) GOD, this novel is dark — so dark you almost have to laugh. We’re in a remote Scottish village where, seven years earlier, all but one of its 22 children perished in a catastrophe kept teasingly obscure until the novel’s end.
All we know is that the surviving child, Douglas, or ‘Dog’, was left to fend for himself by his parents, who left the village in shame.
But the novel has barely begun when he’s savagely beaten to death by bereaved members of the community, in a murder orchestrated by the local bobby and also overseen by the parish priest.
No one comes out of this well — the first thing the postman does is break into the dead boy’s digs to pinch his savings.
He gets more than he bargained for, with layer upon layer of skulduggery excavated as Gornell toggles between the aftermath of Dog’s murder and the village’s ugly history. This is a crazy novel that somehow works as a study of guilt and grief as well as a ghoulish gorefest.