LITERARY FICTION
CLAIRE ALLFREE
THE Z OO by C hristopher W ilson
(Faber £12.99) IT’S a perverse quirk of history that dictatorships are good for literature: the world would be a poorer place without Kafka and others who have wrested extraordinary novels from the bleakest of political circumstances.
In a nod to the way many of these novels adopted surrealism as the only reasonable response to regimes that defy reality, Christopher Wilson, who incidentally lives in North London, has imagined life inside Stalin’s inner circle from the offkilter perspective of a 12-year-old boy.
Yuri has a unique worldview, thanks to a childhood head injury, but has become an unlikely confidant of the Great Leader, after he and his veterinary dad were dragged from their beds one night to tend to Stalin’s worsening health.
Pretty much everyone around him, apart from his dad, dismisses Yuri as an idiot, but like Lear’s Fool, Yuri has an unerring ability also to see the truth.
Wilson mines great power from the contrast between Yuri’s faux naif voice and the horror of what he is invariably describing and, even if this novel isn’t in the same league as its literary forebears, it’s still shockingly funny.
WHAT W E L OSE by Z inzi C lemmons
(Fourth Estate £12.99) THIS debut novel is a memoir trying hard to pass itself off as fiction. The narrator, Thandi, is an academically gifted young woman living in Philadelphia with her father and caring for her South African mother, who is dying of cancer.
Her thoughts and experiences as she navigates the contours of grief, sex, pregnancy, identity and love are narrated in scrapbook form, with the occasional entry veering off into events in recent South African history, such as the Oscar Pistorius trial or the complicity of Winnie Mandela in acts of violence.
Clemmons, who shares a lot of biography with her narrator, has a bracingly clear-eyed view on racial politics and the psychological dissonance of living between two cultures, and the tension between her steady prose and turbulent emotions is beautifully sustained.
Yet I found it frustrating. Where writers such as Rachel Cusk and Elena Ferrante have produced dazzling books by blurring the boundaries between fiction and autobiography, Clemmons has yet to make this territory her own.
THE H EARTS O F M EN by N ickolas B utler
(Picador £12.99) THIS sumptuous, desperately sad novel is just the thing to lose yourself in on a soporific beach holiday. Over the course of several decades, it scrutinises the hearts of four men: Nelson, who we first meet as a lonely teenager, his friend Jonathan, who is popular and confident, Jonathan’s son Trevor and Trevor’s son Thomas.
Linking their stories is the scout camp at Camp Chippewa, where, as a young boy, Nelson starts to grasp the complexities of masculine behaviour and where, in later years, he takes over as scout master, even though boys of Thomas’s generation would much rather be on their phones than learning orienteering.
War, sex, marriage, what it means to prove yourself or to fail: Butler maps out with a deceptively light touch a violent, tragic and rich landscape of modern manhood through his characters’ unfolding fortunes, while also exploring what competing ideas about being a man invariably mean for the women caught in their slipstream. Tremendously good.