LITERARY FICTION
FALLING ANIMALS by Sheila Armstrong (Bloomsbury £14.99, 240pp)
TO THIS day no one knows the identity of the man found dead on a Sligo beach in 2009, his purple rucksack sitting close by among the marram grass.
Armstrong doesn’t offer any answers to the mystery either in this lovely novel; instead she uses the discovery of his body, by an elderly woman visiting the beach with her grandson, to imagine the lives of those who might have seen or spoken to him before he died.
There’s a woman struggling with MS, a desperately unhappy teenager, a widower and a deep sea diver; their stories rove as far afield as England and Australia, and all are marked in various ways by sorrow and by loss.
Armstrong’s prose is as invigorating and restless as the sea itself, and while this book resembles a short story cycle more than it does a novel, it movingly suggests that the lives of all its lonely characters are, to some extent, as unknowable from the outside as that of the dead man himself.
THE SLEEPING CAR PORTER by Suzette Mayr (Dialogue £16.99, 224pp)
ITS 1929 and Baxter is working as a sleeping car porter, one of the few jobs available to black men in North America, on a long-distance train service that crosses most of Canada.
His job is to be as invisible as possible, in order to ensure his white, frequently demanding, passengers have everything they need at any point.
Baxter depends on their tips as he is saving up to go to dental school, while knowing that they have the power to get him fired over any perceived misstep; to make things even more precarious, he is also privately gay.
Mayr’s quirky, chirpy prose style gets a bit bogged down at times in strenuously eccentric portraits of characters, and the pace of her story can drag. But she conveys the intensely closeted, time-bending surrealism of a longdistance train journey with immersive, cinematic flair, not to mention the hallucinatory fantasies of an increasingly sleep-deprived Baxter who, as a character clinging to his dreams, is impossible not to get behind.
A DECENT WORLD by Ellen Hawley (Swift £14.99, 208pp)
THE death of her beloved grandmother Josie — an activist and communist who largely brought her up — has sent Summer into a tail spin.
Her feelings of grief, coupled with her determination to carry on Josie’s work, force Summer into a reckoning with her own future and her relationships with others. This includes her mother, who essentially abandoned her to pursue a singing career, and her estranged brother David, whose wealth-encrusted life and strained acquaintance with Josie is full of mysteries.
Then there are her feelings for the members of a non-monogamous household she hooked up with while caring for Josie. Hawley is interesting on America’s wider history of activism and its legacy, but she isn’t a great writer — there’s far too much confected wisdom and wordy descriptions of feelings, not to mention an awful lot of smug millennial political worthiness.
‘If we can’t learn to love one another,’ says one character, ‘how can we build a better world?’ Eek!