CLAIRE ALLFREE
THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW by Alice Hoffman (Scribner £20, 384 pp)
FANTASY-PHOBIC readers might break out in hives on reading the first few chapters of Alice Hoffman’s latest, in which rabbinical mysticism and enough cod-epic dialogue to rival Game Of Thrones lurk in the dark shadows of Nazi-riven Berlin in 1941.
But stick with it and it soon takes off, as Lea, a young Jewish girl, and her golem (or magical guardian) Ava — created at the behest of Lea’s mother in a last, desperate act of love to protect her — escape to France and fall in with the underground resistance working to help hide orphaned Jewish refugees and, in some cases, transport them to safety.
Magic realism takes a back seat to history, as a whirlwind, multi-strand plot honours real-life atrocities and everyday heroism, including the successful efforts of a French mountain village to conceal thousands of Jews from the occupying Germans.
The prose is over-perfumed and the pace breathless, but the emotional power of Hoffman’s storytelling is rarely in doubt.
TWO FOR THE ROAD by Roddy Doyle
(Vintage £8.99, 112 pp) FROM Vladimir and Estragon to Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan, there is a distinct comic pathos to be enjoyed in two men simply chewing the fat.
This is the third novella from Roddy Doyle to feature his two anonymous boozers in Dublin and their meandering thoughts on football, ‘fillums’, Irish republicanism and the grandchildren. As before, it takes the form of short, dated transcripts of their conversations over the past five years.
It’s often surreally funny — each time a pop or film star dies, one of them invariably mentions how a certain song or film by said singer or actor was in the air when he first met the missus — but Doyle also takes care to make his two codgers politically sound; the sketch on Barry Manilow’s marriage to a man called Garry is priceless.
These two chaps — Irish everymen with witty, colloquial perspicacity — don’t display much obvious emotion, but when they do, it’s deadly. On the death of Irish playwright Tom Murphy, one says: ‘Come here, you’re sad, aren’t yeh?’ To which the other simply says: ‘I am, yeh.’
STILLICIDE by Cynan Jones
(Granta £12, 192 pp) CYNAN JONES’S highly compressed novels always stake out a starkly uneasy territory in which love and survival battle it out amid extreme environmental conditions. His latest, read on Radio 4, was commissioned as a sequence of interlocked 15-minute stories.
If you heard it, it’s likely the narrative thrum of falling rain has seeped into your brain — precisely the effect of reading it. Water is, however, in short supply in this novel’s future world, so much so that the train that brings it into the city each evening is heavily guarded.
One police marksman, though, can’t think straight; his wife lies dying in a nearby hospital, and while Stillicide is on one level a novel about a climate-change emergency, it impresses most as a tense and moving love story.
Yet Jones’s trademark rhythmic poeticism also feels under strain here, as though he has striven hard to write against the constraints of radio, and many of the ancillary tales are barely more than fragments. The book-ending stories are unforgettable, though — high-stakes miniatures that expertly convey the impression of time moving and somehow also staying still.