LITERARY FICTION
IN novelist audacious WIDE Jean Sargasso — Rhys and outstanding pulled Sea, off the an — act of literary revisionism, imagining how Bertha, the prototype madwoman in the attic, ended up locked in Rochester’s mansion in Jane Eyre.
In a novel full of echoes of Wide Sargasso Sea, Caryl Phillips imagines the story of Rhys herself, who came to England from Dominica in 1906 to live with an aunt before going to study acting in London.
Just like Bertha, his Rhys is trapped: in a dank, depressing city of cheap bedsits and predatory men, through which she drifts like a tattered leaf on the breeze.
Dependent on various men for money and, more and more, booze, she exists in scenes that often feel more like a series of painterly tableaux, becoming increasingly a passive onlooker to her own unhappy life. Phillips’s novel ends before Rhys discovers her voice as a writer, yet in this curiously inert, colourless novel, you struggle to hear her voice at all.
THE SHEPHERD’S HUT by Tim Winton (Picador £14.99)
TWO this themselves almost stand-out year cosmic have in hostility the novels immersed punishing, already of the Australian Long Way From landscape Home — and Peter Jane Carey’s Harper’s A Force Of Nature. Now comes the latest novel from Tim Winton, the story of Jaxie Clackton, a teenager on the run through the outback.
Convinced he’ll be blamed for the death of his brute of a dad, and with his beloved mother also recently deceased, he has nothing to lose.
Armed only with an old gun, a butter knife and his wits, he sets off on a possibly hopeless journey across Australia.
Clackton is an absolutely wonderful creation, with the unpredictable aggression of an adult stuffed into the soul of a child and a voice as hardscrabble and jagged as the bush itself.
As the novel unfolds, he meets and forges a tentative friendship with a priest living by himself in the middle of the outback for reasons that can only have terrible repercussions. The result is an uncompromising novel that’s as tender as it is savage.
CRUDO by Olivia Laing (Picador £12.99)
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So where does that leave this novel? I’m not sure — it’s sometimes hard to get past its determined clever-cleverness.
But it’s also a piece of electrifying writing that captures absolutely the daily headline-bombarded, social media-refracted atmosphere of modern life, in which, as Laing’s Acker says, ‘it was becoming increasingly hard to feel real’.