LITERARY FICTION
CENSUS by Jesse Ball
(Granta £14.99) CORMAC McCARTHY’S The Road comes to mind when you read this pared-tothe-bone tale of a widower and his son on a northward journey to chart the population of an unspecified America-like country.
The narrator, a former surgeon who knows he’s dying, fears for the future of his son, who has a mental disability.
As they visit the diverse (and not always hospitable) inhabitants of a hollowed-out landscape shorn of detail — proceeding from town A to town Z — the father remembers his wife, a professional clown.
If the stiff language of this strange novel sometimes makes tricky reading, the payoff is a powerful reflection on what constitutes selfhood.
Ball — a rising star of U.S. fiction — explains in a foreword that the book was inspired by his brother, who had Down’s syndrome and died aged 24.
I confess, I worried that this was a kind of special pleading for the book, but I defy anyone not to read its final pages through tears.
HAPPINESS by Aminatta Forna
(Bloomsbury £16.99) WAR and its aftermath have long preoccupied Aminatta Forna’s prizewinning fiction. She revisits the theme in this big — perhaps too big — book about widowed Ghanaian psychiatrist Attila, who is a world expert on how post-traumatic stress affects civilians caught up in conflict.
Attila is in London for a conference when he encounters Jean, a divorced American scientist who is studying urban foxes.
At heart a slow-burn love story, Happiness also offers much, much more. The novel bristles with subthreads, from the early-onset dementia suffered by one of Attila’s old colleagues, to the disappearance of his niece’s ten-year-old son, Tano, following an immigration raid.
The search for Tano lets Forna write pungently about the chanciness of London life, as well as providing a mechanism for bringing Attila and Jean closer together.
Overall, it’s a serious, satisfying treatment of meaty themes, but you do have to accept a certain degree of stage-setting as the various elements of the plot rumble into place.
HOW TO RULE THE WORLD by Tibor Fischer
(Corsair £16.99) ONCE lauded as a leading light of British fiction, Tibor Fischer’s new book is a knockabout comedy about a down-at-heel documentary maker, Bax, venting spleen at all and sundry in middle-age.
Full of survivor’s tales of producing films in troublespots worldwide, he’s now grubbing for work as an old-media relic adrift in a digital age.
And, boy, is he bitter, with little that doesn’t get his goat, as he decries everything from wheelie suitcases to former polytechnics. He’s always ready with an off-colour quip about any nation or creed you care to name.
While the sense of mischief about Fischer’s enterprise is infectious, some slushier moments near the end — in which Bax is kidnapped tailing smugglers in Turkey for a new film — suggest he didn’t intend to write a scabrous rant-fest so much as a between-the-lines portrait of someone whose relentless fronting masks real pain.