LITERARY FICTION
THE REDEEMED by Tim Pears
(Bloomsbury £16.99, 400pp) YOU don’t need to have read the preceding novels in Tim Pears’s acclaimed West Country trilogy to relish this final instalment — but if you haven’t, it will almost certainly send you scuttling to seek them out.
It’s 1916 and taciturn, working-class Leo is with the Royal Navy while Lottie, daughter of a wealthy landowner, is secretly pursuing her dreams of becoming a vet.
As the years roll, the gap widens yet further between these former childhood friends: Leo joins a private salvage operation at Scapa Flow, then returns to the West Country in search of some land to call his own. Lottie, after an abusive encounter with her veterinary mentor, goes it alone, running a practice from a cottage on the estate.
Pears’s style is methodical rather than exciting (although there are some cracking set pieces) but the steadfast rhythms of his prose are an integral part of his Hardyesque design, which is to honour ideas of continuity, the elemental relationship between man and beast and even the very soil itself. It’s so deeply, pleasurably wholesome it should be prescribed on the NHS.
VIRTUOSO by Yelena Moskovich
(Serpent’s Tail £14.99, 256pp) THIS second novel from the Ukrainian author of The Natashas isn’t so much a Marmite novel as a Schrodinger’s Cat one, meaning you’ll likely admire it and find it tiresome at the same time. Jana and Zorka are childhood friends in communist Prague during the Eighties; years later they meet again, at a house party in Paris.
Interwoven with their separate experiences of the diaspora is the story of Aimee and Dominique, the former a young medical assistant, the latter an older, depressive actress who, when the novel begins, has taken a fatal overdose.
The novel lurches about like a drunk, sometimes out of focus, sometimes startlingly sharp, as it switches between perspectives, time frames and ideas of reality itself to explore sexual politics and personal identity forged against a background of intense political instability.
Moskovich’s often stunningly beautiful, artfully cinematic style is deliberately divisive, as perhaps befits a novel seeking to replicate the emotional experience of otherness and late 20th-century dislocation, but I found myself a mite more confounded than I did intrigued.
FOR THE GOOD TIMES by David Keenan
(Faber £12.99, 368pp) THIS will blast away lingering January cobwebs: a nastily funny, ultra-violent account of Belfast in the Seventies by the author of the acclaimed This Is Memorial Device.
The narrator, Samuel, is an IRA footsoldier with a psychopathic dedication to the cause, which makes him right at home in the febrile atmosphere of the Ardoyne at the height of the Troubles, where men mutilating, torturing and blasting each other to smithereens has become a sort of daily Grand Guignol.
Delivered retrospectively from a Maze prison cell, Samuel’s hyper-adrenalised narrative blends hallucinatory visions, paranoid delirium and graphic descriptions with a Martin McDonagh-style feel for farce, as he repeatedly bungles executions while out on the rampage with his best mate Tommy, a Perry Como aficionado with a fine line in cultural malapropisms.
Samuel’s voice is shockingly alive and entertaining and, as the body count rises to preposterous levels, almost entirely desensitised to the bloody mayhem.
But then, and as Keenan makes grimly clear, for the perpetrators, exceptional violence is never a means to an end but the thing itself. Good times indeed.