LITERARY FICTION
GREAT CIRCLE by Maggie Shipstead SECOND PLACE by Rachel Cusk
(Faber £14.99, 224 pp) FANS of Cusk’s Outline trilogy will be happy to learn that Second Place continues in a not dissimilar vein. Once again, the narrator is a Cusk-like author (in this case ‘M’), who lives with her preternaturally equanimous second husband and daughter in a house on a scenic marsh.
M decides to invite L, an artist whose work fascinates her, to stay so that he can paint the spectacular landscape. But when L turns up with his much younger girlfriend, M’s plans are thrown into disarray — and not for the last time, as it turns out.
As M explains, she has spent much of her life occupying second place herself, and questions of self-realisation, freedom and will preoccupy her.
However, Cusk’s febrile, sporadically brilliant psychodrama is destabilised by comedy as L’s behaviour becomes ever more outrageous. The result is a compelling alchemy, to which the revelation that L’s antics are closely based on D H Lawrence’s adds surprisingly little.
THE RULES OF REVELATION by Lisa McInerney
(John Murray £14.99, 352 pp) LISA McINERNEY burst on to the scene in 2015 with her Women’s Prize- winning debut, The Glorious Heresies, which first introduced readers to drug dealer Ryan and the love of his life, Karine.
Its Italian mafia-featuring successor, The Blood Miracles, was no less gripping, but this final instalment of McInerney’s trilogy fails to find the higher gears.
Back in Ireland after a spell of exile, Ryan has reinvented himself as the frontman of Lord Urchin, a combo whose reality is never particularly convincing.
But his is not the only homecoming: sex worker Georgie, whom Ryan had previously forced to flee to London on pain of death, is also back in town — and out for revenge.
It’s perhaps unfair to expect a novel that’s largely about past history to quicken the pulse, and McInerney’s observations on both gender politics and Ireland’s perpetual identity crisis remain acute. But this never really transcends the sense that it exists principally to tie up loose ends.