LITERARY FICTION
THE CANDY HOUSE by Jennifer Egan
(Corsair £20, 288 pp) PUBLISHED in 2010, Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad was a phenomenon, widely cited as one of the books of the decade. Now there is a sequel of sorts — The Candy House in fact bills itself as a ‘sibling novel’.
While the title of the earlier novel referred to time, here the reference is to the virtual realm where, we are reminded, nothing comes free. And so Egan immerses us — after a lot of exposition — in a world where ‘eluders’ strive to escape their online identities even as their data is mercilessly mined; where memories can be uploaded and where imagination can be substituted for an online ‘Collective Consciousness’.
The action zigzags around in familiar style, reaching forward as far as the 2030s, and revives Goon Squad cast members. With debates on authenticity and stories versus information thrown in, all the ingredients are there for a triumphant reprise … only the alchemy is absent.
THE SCHOOLHOUSE by Sophie Ward
(Corsair £16.99, 304 pp) SOPHIE WARD’S ambitious debut, Love And Other Thought Experiments, earned her a Booker prize longlisting and comparisons to Doris Lessing and Milan Kundera. So it comes as something of a surprise that this follow-up resembles nothing so much as a run-of-the mill police procedural.
In 1975, Isobel is a regular pupil at the progressive Schoolhouse, which also caters (desultorily) for children with special needs. In the novel’s second
strand, we meet Isobel in 1990 — now profoundly deaf as the result of a terrible ‘accident’.
And when a local girl goes missing, the trauma of her schooldays comes back to haunt her in terrifying — and deadly — fashion. Charged with connecting the dots is DS Sally
Carter, whose own troubled past gives her a particularly keen insight into the case.
Ward is an interesting writer but sadly here her themes — institutional failures; the slipperiness of the truth — all feel well-worn, even as the drama becomes increasingly outlandish.
NETTLES by Adam Scovell (Influx £9.99, 162 pp)
ADAM SCOVELL has an eclectic portfolio, having previously collaborated on short films with Robert Macfarlane and written a scholarly study of the folk horror genre. Which might give you an idea of what to expect here.
Armed with a Polaroid camera, our unnamed narrator is making a nostalgic pilgrimage back to his childhood home on the Wirral to face down some unquiet ghosts. Chief among these is the memory of the sadistic schoolyard bully who once whipped his legs with nettles — and who, we learn early on, met a sudden and shocking end.
The mystery of this death forms the backbone of this muted, unsettling and unsettled tale, but it’s Scovell’s psychogeographic interests that are to the fore as his protagonist returns to the places — a motorway flyover, a disused quarry — that once offered both literal and psychological sanctuary, and that flavoured the fantastical hinterlands of his adolescent mind.