LITERARY FICTION
VENOMOUS LUMPSUCKER by Ned Beauman (Sceptre £20, 304 pp)
IF BIOTECH future thrillers about a global extinction crisis, multimodal preservation techniques, corrupt mining corporations and an endangered species of extremely intelligent fish are your bag, you’ll be right at home with Ned Beauman’s latest caper. It’s an offbeat, high-wire satire of environmental capitalism and big tech.
Karin Resaint, a principled animal behaviour scientist, has just discovered that the elusive venomous lumpsucker is one of the most intelligent creatures on the planet.
Too bad, then, that a company has illegally mined in its last known habitat, almost certainly ensuring its extinction.
Yet so desperate is Resaint to preserve the fish, she embarks on a mad goose chase halfway around Europe, following rumoured sightings and red herrings in the company of business exec Mark Halyard. His dodgy eco trading deals mean he stands to lose a fortune if the fish is indeed extinct.
The waters get increasingly murky from a plot point of view as Beauman’s love for sci-fi detail gets the better of him, but cut beneath the antic incident and you have a deadly serious book.
THE WILDERNESS by Sarah Duguid (Tinder Press £20, 256 pp)
DUGUID’S almost indecently readable latest never fully f l owers into the psychological thriller the vertiginous opening chapter promises.
Whether this matters or not depends on the extent to which you are seduced by the creeping unease in which Duguid cloaks the story of Anna and David, who have left their comfortable London lives to look after David’s recently orphaned nieces, both in their early teens, on a Scottish island.
The girls have been home schooled, the house has barely any electricity and Anna’s fury at her new domestic burden as de facto cook and cleaner is amplified by the arrival of David’s feckless stoner friend Brendan, who is convinced the girls need healing rituals and shrines to their parents in order to deal with their grief.
Duguid keeps the tension almost at boiling point as the increasingly creepy Brendan exerts his grip, yet for all the jacked- up atmospherics this is fundamentally about the struggle to create new ways of living.
AFTER SAPPHO by Selby Wynn Schwartz (Galley Beggar Press £9.99, 288 pp)
IF NOTHING else, Schwartz has produced a highly original, practically uncategorisable novel, which consists of vignettes from the lives of feminists of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Sarah Bernhardt, Virginia Woolf, the Italian writer and lesbian Lina Poletti, plus a host of other lesser-known women who pushed against the conventions of the time — all are given fresh life in this entrancing choric collage of a novel which seems to speak both in one voice and in multitudes all at the same time.
One of my favourite fragments concerns the American writer Natalie Barney, who was hounded by the gendarmes after she and some female friends staged a play about Sappho in the garden of a house in France.
This won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but I loved it.