LITERARY FICTION
THE FRIENDLY ONES by Philip Hensher
(4th Estate £14.99) WHO are The Friendly Ones of Philip Hensher’s vast, marvellous new novel?
Is the lonely, retired English doctor, who is the neighbour of Nazia and Sharif — a couple who, years before, escaped the horrors of Bangladesh’s fight for independence and have now settled with their family in Sheffield — a Friendly One?
Or does the label apply to the members of the secret organisation in Dhaka in 1971, including Sharif’s brother-in-law, who call themselves The Friendly Ones while informing on neighbours (and family) to the Pakistani authorities?
Or what about the English themselves, who are, on the surface, decent enough, but who in the Seventies rarely allowed these new, ambitious, optimistic immigrants from the Indian subcontinent to forget how different they were?
Zipping between Oxford and Devon, Sheffield and Dhaka, Hensher’s immersive, cartwheeling narrative follows the history of two neighbouring families in a quiet suburban street and asks reverberating and powerfully resonant questions about what makes a family, a community and a country.
THE IMMORTALISTS by Chloe Benjamin
(Tinder Press £16.99) THERE is a gimmicky premise behind Chloe Benjamin’s extravagantly enjoyable new novel, but don’t let that put you off. On a hot summer New York day in the Sixties, the four Gold children visit a fortune-teller for a laugh and are haunted by what they hear for the rest of their lives.
She tells each of them the date of their death, including Simon, secretly gay, who runs away to San Francisco and breaks his mother’s heart; Klara, who dreams of being a magician, but is dogged by depression; Daniel, who becomes a military doctor; and Varya, a research scientist.
Big themes of fate and free will, superstition and rationalism, guilt and legacy bounce back and forth with the lightness of ping-pong balls through this rambunctious novel, as each vividly drawn character grapples with the question of how to live.
Benjamin crams her novel with incident, while never stinting on detail. Such is her dazzling sureness of touch that you wonder if here is a writer who is truly capable of anything.
UPSTATE by James Wood
(Cape £14.99) WOOD is an exceptional literary critic, but he’s not a very good novelist. This, his second novel, is set mostly in Saratoga Springs, New York. Alan Querry and his daughter Helen have travelled from England to be with his elder daughter, Vanessa, a philosophy teacher who may have had a breakdown.
In a mark of the novel’s general narrative aimlessness, however, no one is entirely sure of Vanessa’s actual state of mind, including her much younger American boyfriend, Josh. Alan inevitably wonders why Helen, an ambitious, efficient record company executive, finds life so straightforward and the bookish, solitary Vanessa does not.
Did the break-up of his marriage and the later death of his wife affect Vanessa more deeply, or is unhappiness innate?
Wood can produce sentences as fine as bone china, but he absolutely can’t do dialogue. This deceptively profound novel is like wet tissue, always threatening to dissolve.