LITERARY FICTION
THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL by Anbara Salam
(Fig Tree £14.99) NEVER follow your husband to live on a rat-infested tropical island in the middle of the Pacific, particularly one in the grip of religious mania, is the moral of this excellent, blackly funny debut by ScottishPalestinian writer Anbara Salam.
Young, vulnerable Bea does indeed dutifully follow her missionary husband Max in the Fifties to Advent Island, where her face is soon weeping from mosquito bites, rats take off with discarded underwear during the night and the heat and rain battle for supremacy.
With a growing number of natives in thrall to devil-chasing practices, the arrival of an extra missionary with annoying personal habits sends the pressure gauge soaring.
The islanders are under-characterised compared to the two main protagonists — but that suits Salam’s purpose in skewering the delusions of outsiders who want to shape the environment to suit their will.
Bea remains wholly sympathetic, however, in a novel whose growing environmental and psychological horrors you can feel crawling across your skin.
PAINTER TO THE KING by Amy Sackville
(Granta £14.99) THE relationship between painter and subject is a singularly intimate one.
Here, in her third novel, Amy Sackville imagines the one between King Philip IV of Spain and the painter Velazquez, summoned to Madrid in 1622, where his restless, penetrating gaze becomes our guide to the furtive, gilded world of Philip IV’s court.
Sackville — a talented stylist — has unashamedly written a novel in which her chosen narrative technique dominates above all else: we see the world as Velazquez does, as though it’s composed of pigments or brushstrokes, and where tiny details are always as significant as the whole picture.
The king, burdened by grief and public duty, is slowly revealed in fragments, while throughout the novel is the hovering presence of a third character, Sackville herself, trying to imagine into life the lost world she is writing about, just as Velazquez is imagining his.
It’s rewarding and demanding, but if there were ever a novel composed from pictures, rather than words, this is it.
THE GLOAMING by Kirsty Logan
(Harvill Secker £12.99) THE island where sisters Mara and Islay have grown up is a strange, enchanted place. If you stay too long, it will turn you to stone.
The sea might get you before then, though: it’s always crashing on the shore, hungry to take back what rightfully belongs to it.
The sisters, who know only too well the power of the sea, thanks to a family tragedy, are desperate to escape: Islay leaves to travel through Europe, while Mara falls in love with a dancer and follows her to perform on the mainland.
But with their parents slowly ossifying in the large, decaying family house, neither can stay away too long.
As you might guess, Logan’s book flirts with, and is sometimes fully seduced by, the folky charms of magical realism.
But while the lustrous, abandoned intensity of her prose is always a joy, you can’t help but feel it’s let down by an insubstantial story about the need to balance what you want with letting go of what you cannot keep.