LITERARY FICTION
FROM A LOW AND QUIET SEA by Donal Ryan
(Doubleday £12.99) THE plight of a Syrian refugee moved Ryan to write this novel about empathy and its absence: a brain surgeon who lost his family at sea but who continued to practise his profession on the Greek island where he eventually found himself.
To fictionalise such terrible suffering is, as Ryan has acknowledged, to take an enormous risk, but his character’s ordeal as he flees to Europe is, tragically, all too convincing.
The book’s other protagonists are equally strong — heartbroken Lampy, a minibus driver employed by a care home in rural Ireland, and John, a dying man and former fixer and lobbyist whom tragedy has poisoned.
The thoughts and testimony of each spill urgently on to the page, carrying the reader along on a surge of confession that could be, but never is, overwrought. And how do their stories converge?
It would be unforgiveable to let slip, but suffice to say they do, and to devastating effect.
THE LONG FORGOTTEN by David Whitehouse
(Picador £14.99) WHAT makes us, us? Our parents, our pasts, our memories? The questions that this novel poses are intriguing, but get somewhat lost amid the weirdness of its globetrotting, timewarping plot.
The ‘Long Forgotten’ of the title is a plane, missing for 30 years until its black box turns up in the belly of an illfortuned whale. And with it, a flood of memories resurface.
Memory is also an issue for London ambulance call dispatcher, Dove.
An orphan, his early years are a blank, though he’s sure his uncontrollable temper is an unwelcome genetic inheritance. Lately, however, Dove has had flashbacks — the twist being that it’s not his own past he remembers, but that of New Yorker Peter Manyweathers in the Eighties.
Inspired by a letter in a library book, Peter took off on a mission to locate some of the planet’s rarer plants, discovering rather too late that his travelling companion, womanising Dutch botanist Dr Hens Berg, was also his nemesis. Somehow the much- praised Whitehouse manages to pull his strands together, but the suspicion remains that his various ideas might have worked better in separate books.
OF MEN AND ANGELS by Michael Arditti
(Arcadia £16.99) THE City of Sodom and its infamous wickedness is the focus of Michael Arditti’s epic novel, which excels in its lively and intimate portrait of lives separated by millennia.
Its five sections, each introduced by no less a figure than the angel Gabriel himself, take us from ancient Babylon via mediaeval York, Renaissance Florence and 19th-century Palestine to — where else? — the city of angels, Los Angeles, in the Eighties.
Here we encounter an ageing gay film star cast as Lot in a biblical big screen spectacular, but whose fame serves to throw into sharp relief the secrecy surrounding the new AIDS virus that caused his lover’s death.
It’s a moving finale, but throughout Arditti’s characters lust and yearn, spar and pun their way vividly off the page.
The subject matter may seem forbidding but Arditti unfailingly animates his extensive research with humanity and wit.