LITERARY FICTION
QUICHOTTE by Salman Rushdie (Cape £20, 416 pp)
WHAT windmills might Cervantes’ 17th-century incurable romantic Don Quixote tilt at were he to find himself crossing Trump’s America?
Salman Rushdie has a few ideas in this Booker-longlisted, post-modernist picaresque caper, in which a slightly barmy Indian former travelling salesman, inspired by the fact he lives in ‘the age of anything-can-happen’, sets out through a fearful, bigoted nation in the midst of an opioid crisis to capture the heart of a reality TV star.
Anything can happen in fiction, too, it turns out, as Rushdie splices Cervantes’ classic with Moby Dick and Pinocchio, and then pulls out another rabbit by revealing Quichotte and his dreamedinto-life son Sancho are the creations of a down-on-his-luck hack novelist.
Rushdie’s fans will find much to love in this hyperactive, technicolour satire of a cultural moment in which the permeation of junk TV, fake news, social media and Trump himself have so disrupted the borders between fiction and real life. Many balls are juggled here, but, somehow, Rushdie keeps them all gloriously in the air.
GIRL by Edna O’Brien (Faber £16.99, 240 pp)
NOT many writers well into their 80s would travel to Nigeria to research the Chibok girls, abducted by Islamic militants in 2014 and forced to convert, bear children and far worse.
But not many writers are Edna O’Brien, who scandalised her native Ireland by daring to suggest in her 1960 debut The Country Girls that young girls have sexual agency, and who, in her 19th novel, confirms that her fury with the violations committed against women in the name of religion remains as strong a pulse as ever in her writing.
Girl is narrated by Maryam, a mere child herself when she delivers a daughter after ‘marrying’ a militant, but who eventually escapes the camp, only to find her former life no longer offers the sanctuary she dreamed of.
O’Brien strangles at birth any potential accusations of cultural appropriation through the sheer violent beauty of her writing, which often depicts a desperate Maryam in a sort of fugue state, her grip on time and events feverish, and lends her story imaginative authenticity.
THIS IS HAPPINESS by Niall Williams (Bloomsbury £16.99, 400pp)
IN FAHA, a colourful village in Fifties Ireland, telling stories is a way of life. So is getting wet, the rain in this part of the world falling practically every day.
But, one day, the rain stops, a harbinger, perhaps, of imminent change, since it’s also the day the electricity board arrives to connect this vibrant little community to the modern world.
For young Noel, however, the world changes that day for another reason: his grandparents have taken a lodger, Christy, a charismatic itinerant looking for the woman he abandoned at the altar 50 years before and whose story will expose Noel to the stranger workings of the human heart.
Williams has the eye of a poet and the raconteur’s knack for finding a tale in the most unpromising nook of everyday life, as a now-adult Noel, summoning the Faha of his nostalgic imagination, narrates an elegiac novel that’s careful always to offset the antic rural eccentricity with darker notes of loss.