LITERARY FICTION
THE TEMPEST by Steve Sem-Sandberg
(Faber £12.99, 256pp) YES, echoes of Shakespeare’s late, great play sound throughout this potent, hypnotic novel by awardwinning Swedish author Steve Sem-Sandberg.
But you might also be reminded of the work of the legendary German-born W. G. Sebald — in the questions of wartime guilt and complicity, the fascination with the textures and tricks of memory, the sentences that blur the boundary between present and past.
Our narrator, Andreas, is returning to the small Norwegian island of his childhood following the death of his foster-father.
The island’s Prospero figure, a passionate botanist who accepted a position in the collaborationist government of Vidkun Quisling, is dead, too, while Andreas’s parents are missing, having vanished inexplicably one day.
And then there’s Andreas’s absent sister Minna, a dangerously wild child whose terrible fate only slowly emerges.
Sinister mysteries thicken and swirl like the island’s mist as this densely atmospheric novel progresses, culminating in a conclusion that avoids easy answers.
NIGHT THEATRE by Vikram Paralkar
(Serpent’s Tail £12.99, 224pp) MEDICAL memoirs are a fixture of the bestseller lists, but physician Vikram Paralkar has turned to fiction to explore the life-anddeath dramas of his profession.
The setting for his gruesome but striking fable is a cockroach-infested clinic in rural India, where an unnamed surgeon struggles to perform even basic first aid.
But perhaps more fatal even than the lack of resources and rampant corruption are the exhausted surgeon’s failing reserves of compassion.
Then one night a family arrive at the clinic begging for help — the twist being that they’ve already died from their wounds.
There’s some clunky descriptive prose, but Paralkar deserves full marks for imagination when it comes to the impossible physiology of the undead.
His vision of a Kafkaesque afterlife is involving, too, but I was less compelled by the abstract philosophising than the agonising choices and forbidden thoughts that torment his central character, which seem both raw and disturbingly authentic.
GRACELAND by Bethan Roberts
(Chatto £14.99, 432pp) BETHAN RO B E R T S ’ S obsession with Elvis apparently dates to a childhood spent poring over her mother’s scrapbooks. And it’s the star’s relationship with his own adored, and adoring, mother Gladys that’s fictionalised here.
We begin in 1957, with Elvis sulkily absorbing the news of his military call-up in his mirrored Graceland bedroom.
It’s an episode that sets the tone for a portrait of the King that’s more interested in the intimate, Oedipal drama of his childhood than his public persona — although Roberts, moving backwards and forwards in time, proves herself an adept chronicler of the singer’s evolution from shy choirboy to global superstar.
As Elvis finds his feet, however, so Gladys becomes increasingly unsteady on hers, uncertain of her place and ever more reliant on swigs of vodka.
Roberts has done her research and is a loving curator of the legend, but she’s strong, too on the tiny sensual details, which intensify the up-close feel of this sensitive, measured novel.