LITERARY FICTION CLAIRE ALLFREE
ENLIGHTENMENT by Sarah Perry (Jonathan Cape €23.20, 400 pp)
FANS of Perry’s best-seller The Essex Serpent will welcome her return to a fictional Essex town, Aldleigh — just up the river from the former’s fictional village setting of Aldwinter — in this dazzling fourth novel.
Starting in 1997, and spanning 20 years, it’s the story of Thomas Hart, a closeted bachelor whose job as a newspaper columnist takes on lifechanging proportions when he’s asked to write about the Hale-Bopp comet.
Hart — obsessed with the story of a 19th-century woman who lived nearby, not to mention a handsome museum director — is a Calvinist, as Perry once was, albeit in name only: tied to the faith by his paternal affection for Grace, the wild, motherless daughter of the local pastor.
Yet the way in which Perry spins together her conflicted characters is of less importance than the unhurried, transcendent nature of her prose. Look to the stars, she seems to urge on almost every page. Faith and science can inspire out-of-time cosmic wonder, but as Perry beautifully demonstrates here, so, too, can the novel.
THE HORSE by Willy Vlautin (Faber €17.40, 224 pp)
AL WARD, 65, lives alone in a shack in Nevada, in the US, eating tinned soup, reading old copies of National Geographic magazine and strumming his guitar.
One day he sees a horse outside, bruised, broken and refusing to move, eyes full of pus. So begins a gentle, sorrowful fable that could only come from musician and writer Vlautin, the author of The Motel Life and Lean On Pete.
Ward, an alcoholic, makes a hapless attempt to save the horse, offering it spaghetti to eat and eventually walking 50km to get help. Threading through, like a minor-key melody, is the story of his previous existence as a musician in a casino band, a life derailed by faithless women, liquor and the pivotal loss of his songwriting notebook. This story of a battered dreamer holds hope — and a fair bit of music — in its heart.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS by Vinson Cunningham (Riverrun €27.55, 272 pp)
IRISH readers may find this loose riff on Dickens, set on the US presidential campaign trail in 2007, too mired in American political culture.
Twenty-something David finds himself fundraising for a promising black senator (Barack Obama in all but name) and working with Beverly, a black businesswoman. Yet David, also black, is disillusioned after being forced to abandon college thanks to unplanned fatherhood, and struggles to reconcile consorting with highnet-worth individuals with the campaign rhetoric of radical change.
So far, a story of great expectation hitting reality, yet Cunningham — a culture critic for The New Yorker magazine — loads his coming-of-age tale with intellectual musings on art, music, race and faith.
It’s an impressive quasi-essayistic novel, but I wished the poised prose possessed more inner life.