LITERARY FICTION
WINTER by Ali Smith
(Hamish Hamilton £16) WINTER, the second in Ali Smith’s post-Brexit quartet, follows hot on the heels of her Booker- shortlisted Autumn and is a bleaker, better book.
A family has gathered for Christmas at the elderly, and possibly senile, Sophia’s sprawling pile in Cornwall, except it is a family barely worthy of the name: Sophia and her activist sister Iris haven’t spoken for years, while Sophia’s son Art, a nature blogger, has paid a Croatian girl to pass herself off as his ex-girlfriend Charlotte, rather than admit the truth of their break-up to his mum.
If the family are a loose metaphor for Britain, a disunited bunch who don’t fully understand each other, but who are irrevocably connected, even if only through affectionate nostalgia, then the story of the nativity, threaded throughout the novel, is a loose allegory for the global refugee crisis.
Smith combines her state-of-themoment themes with a preoccupation found in nearly all her novels — namely how to behave in a meaningful way in an increasingly technocratic world — and she does so with an effervescent seriousness none of her peers can match.
THE STANDING CHANDELIER by Lionel Shriver
(Borough Press £9.99) WITH her past few novels, Shriver has positioned herself as a novelist who writes about the big subjects of the day, be it the American health industry or the future of global economics.
But she’s actually best when detailing the minutiae of human relationships, and this early stocking filler of a novel — only 122 pages long — is a brutal treat.
Baba and Jillian are old friends, former lovers and long-standing tennis partners. Yet when Baba meets, and eventually proposes to, his girlfriend Paige, it doesn’t occur to Jillian that anything needs to change — until Paige issues an ultimatum to Baba: either she goes or I do.
This is an age-old story, of course, but in Shriver’s hands, it feels bracingly new, not least because of the fairness with which she characterises both women, each of whom believes their behaviour to be entirely reasonable.
A lesser novelist might have been tempted to cast the man as the villain, but Shriver is too clever for that: the spineless Baba gets off pretty scot-free.
THE IMPOSTOR by Javier Cercas
(MacLehose £20) IN THE month ‘fake news’ was named Collins Dictionary’s word of the year comes this book by Spanish novelist Cercas, tackling one of the biggest fake news stories in Spain in recent years.
In 2005, Enric Marco was revealed as an imposter when his story of having been in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II after being deported to Germany was exposed as a lie.
The scandal gripped the imagination of Cercas, who has long been preoccupied by Spain’s struggle to properly remember its own fascist history, and, while he initially set out to write about Marco, this resulting book is mainly concerned with the moral, philosophical and intellectual challenges of doing so.
An awful lot here resonates — not just the buzzy issues of myth-making that dominate much of contemporary politics, but more enduring questions about the nature of truth and storytelling.
But it would be fake news to suggest this book isn’t also a bit of a slog, with Marco the tail to Cercas’s dog — always in sight and out of reach.