LITERARY FICTION
THE ONLY STORY by Julian Barnes
(Cape £16.99) WRITER Gabriel Josipovici once caused a brouhaha by saying that Julian Barnes’s novels made the world feel ‘smaller and meaner’.
Barnes’s latest is cunningly crafted and sharply observed, but could also be Exhibit A for that eye-catching claim.
It follows Paul, a student whose keenness to slough off a stuffy upbringing in Fifties Surrey leads him to embark on an affair with Susan, a married woman old enough to be his mother.
Flirting over tennis at the village club soon blooms into a perilous menage a trois as Susan’s apparently oblivious husband simmers with rage.
Like the narrator of Barnes’s Bookerwinning The Sense Of An Ending, Paul is mulling over these events later in life.
What starts as a coming-of-age tale of stolen caresses and goaded curtain twitchers shades into tragedy, as our sense grows that the real story here isn’t his so much as Susan’s.
While her alarming fate steals the reader’s breath, you do feel Barnes rather relishes the chilliness of it all.
WALKING WOUNDED by Sheila Llewellyn
(Sceptre £14.99) THIS two-hander set in a military psychiatric hospital is the debut novel from a writer acclaimed for short stories.
Drawing on Llewellyn’s professional experience of treating victims of posttraumatic stress disorder, it comes over a little like Pat Barker’s Regeneration retold for World War II.
David, once a messenger boy at the Manchester Guardian, abandoned hopes of becoming a foreign correspondent when called to fight in Burma in his teens. Now demobbed, he’s haunted by visions of battle — an agony that his doctor, Daniel, seeks to allay without recourse to the prevailing view that traumatised veterans should go under the knife for a lobotomy.
We alternate between the two men in a richly researched tale that stars cameos of the real-life medics who advocated brain surgery as a cure for the psychic scars of service.
If that seems an outrage today, Llewellyn’s achievement in this tender period piece is to evoke an incendiary sense of scandal, while avoiding all trace of we-know-better-now smugness.
THE DEVIL’S HIGHWAY by Gregory Norminton
(4th Estate £12.99) HOW’S this for ambition? Gregory Norminton’s fifth novel spans some four millennia and tackles nothing other than our looming ecological ruin, all in just over 200 pages.
Taking its title from the nickname for a Roman-built road through the south of England, the book toggles between three action-packed storylines that hop from a boy in pre-Christian Britain, to a post-apocalyptic wasteland, via the present-day story of a teenage girl drawn into the fatal orbit of a damaged Helmand veteran.
At times, it’s so-so, but it sparks to life in the dystopian segment, populated by a band of nomadic youths who aren’t above resorting to cannibalism to survive.
Ultimately, you feel the novel’s shortcomings stem from Norminton’s bid to cram so much into a book that could easily have been three times as long: far from outstaying its welcome, it rather leaves you hanging.