LITERARY FICTION
EDEN by Jim Crace (Picador £16.99, 272 pp)
I SUSPECT few writers could pull off the gambles taken by Crace in his latest novel, set in a quasi- biblical garden run by angels who order its mortal groundskeepers never to leave unless they wish to die.
It starts when a gardener, Tabitha, disappears, with consequences for two male peers who harbour feelings for her — one innocent, the other sinister (there’s an angel who’s sweet on her, too).
A kind of otherworldly chase narrative ensues, as Crace generates exquisite tension from our uncertainty regarding the rules of his mystical universe.
Much of the book’s pleasure lies in the sheer vigour with which he conveys the physicality of its ethereal elements — and as an allegory for power, love and ultimately nothing less than life itself, the book is endlessly suggestive.
All in all, it makes you glad, yet again, that Crace didn’t keep his word when he said he would quit writing after his Booker-shortlisted Harvest back in 2013.
HAVEN by Emma Donoghue (Picador £16.99, 272 pp)
ALTHOUGH Donoghue is best known for the bestselling Room, drawn on the Josef Fritzl case, she previously made her name as a writer of historical fiction.
That’s the mode she returns to here, yet it’s not hard to detect a crossover with Room’s central theme of authority and control.
We’re in 7th-century Ireland in the company of Artt, a priest who sets sail with two monks, Trian and Cormac, in search of a sinless existence on an uninhabited island across the water.
The reality is more survivalist hell than promised land, and soon the monks are privately nursing mutinous thoughts about their master’s increasingly dogmatic diktats.
Amazingly, Donoghue wrings unlikely psychodrama from such everyday chores of monastic life as copying a manuscript or building a drystone wall. But if that doesn’t grab you, rest assured that the devastating denouement amply repays the reader’s patience — and has a thing or two to say about modern-day moral panics, too.
THE QUEEN OF DIRT ISLAND by Donal Ryan (Doubleday £14.99, 256 pp)
RYAN, twice longlisted for the Booker, including for his refugee story From A Low And Quiet Sea, has made a speciality of deceptively unassuming portraits of small-town Irish life.
His latest is an episodic tale made up of bittersweet vignettes about four generations of women in a Tipperary household — above all Saoirse, who becomes pregnant at 17 after a torrid night out that has even starker consequences for her schoolmate.
Regular outbreaks of jeopardy and disaster pockmark the novel’s tender, comic observation, as if Ryan dreads us getting too cosy. There’s also an odd left turn when Saoirse beds a would-be novelist out to write a book mining her life story — a subplot that feels somewhat tacked-on to make a grandstanding point about narrative ethics and the ills of appropriation.
Yet despite a glib finale, there’s bags of incident along the way to sweep the reader along the book’s topsy-turvy emotional rollercoaster.