LITERARY FICTION
THE GIRLS by Emma Cline (Chatto & Windus £12.99)
THE grim shadow of the endlessly mythologised 1969 Manson Family massacre hangs over this febrile, hotly tipped debut by 27-year-old Emma Cline.
It is narrated by Evie, who is 14 when she meets the sexually alluring, 19-year-old Suzanne, and through her feral magnetism is drawn into the orbit of Russell, the egomaniacal leader of a local cult.
In alternate chapters, the adult Evie looks back on that renegade, erotically-charged summer of 1969 which was to culminate in a horrific event at which she wasn’t present, but which several decades on has nevertheless made her a freak local celebrity.
Cline changes several key details in the Manson story and her novel, told exclusively from Evie’s point of view, is relentlessly interior, which is both its defining strength and its weakness.
Yet she is exceptionally good at capturing the fearful, conflicted sensibility of a 14-year-old girl as she encounters the darker, cultural force of a predatory male sexuality and, without passing judgment, carefully probes the question of how a group of young girls might have been coerced into something so monstrous.
The sheer poetic lyricism of her prose is remarkable, too.
THE GOOD GUY by Susan Beale (John Murray £16.99)
BEALE’S Sixties small-town America novel taps into several familiar tenets of the American dream. Childhood sweethearts Ted and Abigail, now the parents of an adored young daughter, are busy setting up house in a New England suburb.
Ted is an up-and-coming car tyre salesman whose favourite dinner party topic is his own sales figures; Abigail spends her days fretfully cleaning the house and trying, where possible, to keep up her passion for reading, having abandoned her hopes of going to law school.
Ted considers himself a dutiful loving husband but can’t help having an affair with a girl he meets on a work night out; Abigail increasingly despairs at the boredom that comes with trying to be the perfect housewife and throws her energies instead into a local history night class. It’s not long before the wheels come off.
Beale’s tale of a life where you are judged on the quality of your lemon drizzle cake is a well-trodden one, but it’s invigorated by her fresh and lively writing style and notably her canny characterisation of Ted: a weak, callous, unthinking bore whose pumped up sense of himself is at an amusing, ultimately even tragic, variance with the truth.
NO MAN’S LAND by Simon Tolkien (HarperCollins £20)
THERE must be something in the Tolkien family DNA that dissuades its writerly members from producing a 200-page novel when a near 600-page whopper will do.
Loosely inspired by his grandfather J. R. R. Tolkien’s experiences on the Somme, Simon Tolkien has produced an exhausting historical melodrama in which World War I doesn’t even break out until page 223.
Before then, his young protagonist Adam has lost two people close to him, spent time in a workhouse, almost died in a mining accident, fallen in love, been adopted by a rich benefactor and won a place at Oxford.
Steeped in an acute awareness of class tensions, this novel is particularly interested in the way relationships are forged between disparate groups of men — be it among the working-class Yorkshire community in which Adam and his father, newly moved from London, will always be interlopers, or among soldiers on the battlefield.
There are also some vivid set pieces, notably a wonderful section down a mine, while Adam is an intriguing central character: clever, sincere and, amid the turbulence of early 20th-century England, a determined survivor.
Yet for all his epic aspirations, Tolkien is not an especially arresting writer, and his smoothly written novel drips with bathos.