LITERARY FICTION
FOREST DARK by Nicole Krauss
(Bloomsbury £16.99) THE American writer Nicole Krauss’s impressive new novel is actually two stories for the price of one.
Retired and recently divorced, New York lawyer Jules Epstein is on a mission to divest himself of his worldly goods and wealth before he dies, and has come to the Tel Aviv Hilton in search of projects for his money.
At the same time, a novelist, having temporarily abandoned her Brooklyn home, husband and children, checks in to the same hotel, where she hopes seeing the pool in which she swam happily on childhood holidays will dissolve her writer’s block.
Jules disappears, with the only clue his briefcase found in the desert. Meanwhile, the novelist is embroiled in a story that claims Franz Kafka, far from dying of TB in 1924, secretly settled in Israel.
She is given a case full of works he supposedly wrote there, and finds herself in a baffling situation worthy of the great Czech writer himself. Brilliantly strange and utterly compelling.
ELMET by Fiona Mozley
(John Murray £10.99) DANIEL, 14, and his elder sister Cathy live in a house built in a forest by their ‘Daddy’, a huge, powerful man who makes money in illicit, bareknuckle, anything-goes fights.
The story is narrated by the slender, effeminate and bookish Daniel; Cathy takes after her father, physically and mentally strong and always looking for a fight. The three of them are constantly under threat from the crooked farmer who owns the ground on which their house is illegally built.
In the end, Daddy is forced to take on a Ukrainian giant in exchange for the deeds to the land. The fight is the best thing about the book and genuinely is nail-biting.
For the rest, debutante novelist Mozley is good at creating atmosphere but not at character development or convincing plotting, making her Man Booker long-listing somewhat baffling.
She is guilty of overwriting, too, describing someone as ‘silent as a wolf’. Don’t they usually go in for rather a lot of howling?
MADNESS IS BETTER THAN DEFEAT by Ned Beauman
(Sceptre £16.99) IN 1938, two rival U.S. expeditions head to a newly discovered Mayan temple in the remote Honduras jungle. One has been sent by a multimillionaire who wants to dismantle the building, ship it to America and put it back together. The other is a Hollywood film unit intending to use the temple as the backcloth for a screwball comedy.
A stand-off between the two teams results in them being marooned there for two decades, during which one is taken over by a German Nazi war criminal on the run.
The temple may be haunted by Mayan gods and it contains a substance that attracts the interest of the CIA.
But what starts off as a fun, madcap mystery — inspired, says the author, by Werner Herzog’s jungle-set film Fitzcarraldo — rapidly becomes overcomplicated, with too many characters and subplots, as though Beauman himself has imbibed some ancient hallucinogenic and got carried away.
His often funny and clever verbal pyrotechnics do not compensate for an overlong and stodgy story.