LITERARY FICTION
JACKDAW by Tade Thompson
(Cheerio £15, 160pp) BUCKLE up for this darkly weird thunderbolt of a novella, narrated by one Tade Thompson, a BritishNigerian psychiatrist and sciencefiction writer who just happens to share a name with the author. The novel kicks off when, contracted to write about Francis Bacon, Tade finds himself compulsively drawn to photographs of one of the painter’s models.
His murky obsession plays havoc not only with his day job but his home life as a married father, as he plunges into a series of sexual experiments that rake up the painful legacy of a troubled childhood.
The sheer unpredictability of the narrative is sustained by the easy-reading clarity of Thompson’s voice, wholly disarming as it toys gleefully with the book’s autobiographical overlap.
By the end, you can practically taste the tang of scorched earth in the air, as Thompson’s acknowledgements thank his family for putting up with any discomfort the book may generate.
THE LAST CHAIRLIFT by John Irving (Scribner £25, 912pp)
IRVING’S last novel was a bit of a stinker — if you don’t believe me, look up Ysenda Maxtone Graham on how ‘John Irving Spoilt My Christmas’ (as the headline to her review ran).
The Last Chairlift isn’t his best book, but it’s no holiday-wrecker, even if its 900 pages could have used an editorial nip and tuck or two.
The U.S.-Canadian writer’s comingof-age narratives have always mixed sex, sentimentality and helter-skelter plot points pulled from a hat.
Here, a writer, Adam, intent on discovering his biological father, visits the Colorado hotel where he was conceived by his mother, a gay ski instructor with a queasily hands-on involvement in his romantic life.
While the plot up-ends sex and gender norms, its frictionlessly wellmeaning implications ultimately serve to cancel out the book’s antic energy — like someone running very, very fast on the spot.
EVERYTHING THE LIGHT TOUCHES by Janice Pariat (The Borough Press £14.99, 512pp)
ZIG-ZAGGING around the centuries, this globetrotting epic mixes fictional and real-life figures to portray four travellers in search of answers to big questions about humanity and the meaning of life.
We toggle between the 18th-century German writer Goethe and Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, as well as Evie, an Edwardian science student in the Himalayas, and Shai, a Tinder-swiping drifter seeking her roots in presentday India.
Pariat’s attempt to inhabit historical luminaries brings to mind Daniel Kehlmann’s comic bestseller Measuring The World, about two German Enlightenment thinkers. In scope and structure, though, the effect resembles a portmanteau novel à la David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. You can’t fault the ambition, but the result lacks spark — some elusive sense of humour, or vital jeopardy, as the novel delicately traces the unlikely connections between its disparate quartet.
Pariat’s sonorous lyricism is beautiful, for sure, yet her cool, slick polish ultimately serves to keep us at arm’s length from the cast.