LITERARY FICTION
UNSHELTERED by Barbara Kingsolver
(Faber £20, 480 pp) WOMEN’S Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver has identified her subject here as paradigm shifts. In practice, that means a split timeframe that invites us to draw parallels between 1871, when theories of evolution are turning the world on its head, and 2016, when climate change, unchecked consumption and the continuing fallout from the financial crash are causing similarly seismic tremors.
It might sound overly schematic, but Kingsolver’s sympathetically and affectionately realised characters — all residents of Vineland, New Jersey — are never secondary to her ideas.
In the 19th century, these include Mary Treat, a real-life biologist who corresponded with Charles Darwin. In 2016, the focus is the Knox family, whose crumbling house offers itself as a ready metaphor for faltering orthodoxies.
If I had a quibble with this typically substantial, satisfying novel, it would be with dreadlocked millennial Tig, whose piety I found seriously annoying.
However, her mother, Willa, is the real heart and motor of the novel and Kingsolver’s examination of the often skewed emotional economy of family life connects deeply.
FOUR SOLDIERS by Hubert Mingarelli
(Granta £12.99, 160 pp) IAN McEWAN is a fan of French writer Hubert Mingarelli’s previous novel; this new one bears Hilary Mantel’s seal of approval. It’s a simple story about simple pleasures — the smell of woodsmoke, a newly washed blanket, a secret shared.
But these everyday moments of happiness are hardened into bright and priceless diamonds by the pressure of the circumstances that surround them: the horror and misery of the Russian Civil War.
The four soldiers of the title — resourceful, peaceful Pavel; generous, easy-going Sifra; slow but loyal Kyabine; and our deeply empathic narrator — are drawn with exceptional economy.
However, their intense need for companionship is palpable to an almost painful degree and, although this is a tale that can easily be read in a sitting, I found myself having to eke it out.
THE VOGUE by Eoin McNamee
(Faber £12.99, 272 pp) MORNE, November 2000. As the chapel bells ring out for the ascension, a woman’s skeletal remains are raised from a rank, rubbish-filled pit.
The grim irony of the scene sets the tone for a tragic, swooningly bleak novel that promptly rewinds to 1945 where, in an English prison cell, a black American GI is awaiting execution for raping a Mourne girl while stationed at a military base there. The victim’s father is a member of the Elected Brethren, a creepily old-fashioned religious sect who turn out to be a central link between the two crimes.
But, for a crime novel, The Vogue springs few surprises: just as the Brethren believe themselves chosen, every development seems preordained in a way that thickens the suffocatingly claustrophobic mood. As winter sets in with an Arctic blast, the unswerving commitment to comfortlessness wavers on the edge of self-parody.
Yet there’s something deeply seductive in the dark lyricism of this incantatory noir — think James Ellroy or David Peace — that makes it hard to shake.