LITERARY FICTION
THE HIGH MOUNTAINS OF PORTUGAL by Yann Martel (Canongate £16.99)
YANN MARTEL’S new book consists of three linked stories. The first is set in 1904, where a young man travels in a borrowed motorcar to the eponymous mountains — where such a previously unseen vehicle is treated with wonder, suspicion and even violence — in search of a unique religious artefact, a crucifix bearing not the figure of Christ, but a chimpanzee.
The journey becomes as tedious and frustrating for the reader as for its hero; a series of unfunny slapstick incidents culminating in unexpected tragedy.
The second story begins with a lengthy discussion between an elderly pathologist and his dead wife, in which the life of Jesus is compared to the novels of Agatha Christie.
Then an elderly woman arrives with the corpse of her husband in a suitcase and demands an autopsy. Reluctantly, the pathologist agrees and finds a dead chimpanzee inside the body.
In the final tale, on a whim, a widowed Canadian politician buys a chimpanzee from a research centre and emigrates to his ancestral Portuguese village, where he and his simian companion find peace and tranquillity among the peasants.
The latter two stories are engagingly readable, but that doesn’t prevent the book as a whole being bafflingly batty.
THE STOPPED HEART by Julie Myerson (Cape £12.99)
DRIFTING apart couple Mary and Graham move to an old house in a Suffolk village to escape reminders of a terrible bereavement. Mary, depressed and inert, senses a presence in the house and catches glimpses of a strange red-haired man in the garden.
Reluctantly, but encouraged by Graham, she agrees to socialise with a friendly local couple, Eddie and Deborah. Gradually, she finds herself drawn to the importunate Eddie who is a shoulder to cry on, though he obviously would like to be more than that.
In an alternating narrative, set 150 years earlier in the same location, 14-year-old Eliza is unwittingly being groomed by an insistent would-be lover James Dix, a new and mysterious arrival in the area. Somehow the two eras overlap, with Mary increasingly experiencing flashes from the past and she herself is a shadowy presence in Eliza’s life.
The ever enjoyable Julie Myerson has produced a haunting story of love and loss, whose mystical theme is that extreme tragedy leaves a stain that never truly dies.
It takes a while to get going, and the historical narrative isn’t as absorbing as the contemporary until its latter stages, but it all builds to a gripping and moving climax.
SHYLOCK IS MY NAME by Howard Jacobson (Hogarth £16.99)
ALTHOUGH he wanted Hamlet, Howard Jacobson got The Merchant Of Venice in Hogarth’s series of Shakespeare plays retold by modern writers, and as Britain’s foremost Jewish novelist, he would seem the perfect fit.
Updating the setting to contemporary stockbroker-belt Cheshire, Jacobson has the resurrected Shylock meet wealthy art collector Simon Strulovitch, who seeks advice on how to deal with a wilful, rebellious daughter.
What follows is mainly an argument about what it means to be Jewish today and the resilience of post-Holocaust anti-Semitism.
The plot, such as it is, has a clever twist on the original, where Strulovitch demands from the airhead playboy footballer who has seduced his teenage daughter far less than a pound of flesh: his circumcision.
In the denouement it is Shylock who defines anew for us the true nature of mercy. Jacobson was apparently wary of taking on this commission and rightly so. Both this — witty and at times intellectually engaging though it is — and Jeanette Winterson’s take on The Winter’s Tale do their authors’ reputations no favours.
The Hogarth Shakespeare enterprise probably sounded good at a brainstorm, but is based on a lack of understanding of the creative process and the way novels get written.