LITERARY FICTION
WE WERE YOUNG
by Niamh Campbell (W&N £14.99, 288 pp) CAMPBELL won plenty of admirers with her debut This Happy, about the sexual tangles of a disaffected young academic in post-crash Ireland.
Her new novel confirms what an outstanding writer she is. It follows middleaged Cormac, a gadabout photographer shunning commitment while tumbling in and out of bed with a variety of women and men in Dublin’s art world.
The youngest of three brothers, he’s helping one of them through marriage problems while nursing long-held grief for the other, who died when Cormac was a child.
Although the story doesn’t really go anywhere — which is partly the point, in a book about psychological stasis — what makes the novel so endlessly rich is how patiently and sensitively Campbell evokes a complex depth of feeling and sedimented experience.
Observing her protagonist from the outside while inhabiting his selfabsorbed perspective, she writes with a deliciously refined sense of irony without ever torpedoing the book’s emotional sincerity. Superb.
IRON CURTAIN
by Vesna Goldsworthy (Chatto £14.99, 336 pp)
SET during the dog days of the Cold War, Goldsworthy’s third novel is told by Milena, the daughter of a highranking politician in a coyly unspecified Soviet satellite state.
When mourning her boyfriend’s suicide, she hooks up with Jason, an English poet who has come to town for a cultural junket. The pair swiftly end up getting hitched back in London, where government agents from Milena’s homeland are never far from view.
What follows is an enjoyable novel, though it never quite settles on the tone it wants to strike. A culture-clash comedy involving the intricacies of the English class system, it’s also a tale of sex and betrayal, with a late-arriving infidelity plot that kicks in once literary stardom turns Jason’s head.
Even if the magnetism between the two central characters isn’t always believable, this is a pacy rite-of-passage story that doubles as a portrait of the poisonous legacies of police-state paranoia.
RUN AND HIDE
by Pankaj Mishra (Hutchinson Heinemann £16.99, 336 pp) MISHRA published his only previous novel, The Romantics, 20 years ago, before making his name as a shrewd social and cultural critic.
If you didn’t know that, you might well guess from his return to fiction with this topical, cross-continental saga, seemingly rigged up as a vehicle for his typically sharp observations.
Centred on a group of young Indians who graduate from a Delhi university to become part of a global cultural elite, it’s narrated by Arun, a translator who falls for a writer, Alia.
The rise of populism and the hypocrisy of white liberalism are among the subjects of a many-pronged drama that also takes in book-world rivalries and the murkiness of international finance.
Literary trend-watchers hooked on social media may savour the fizz of Mishra’s satire, a hair’s breadth from score-settling. But it’s hard not to suspect that most other readers will find it all rather baggy and discursive to the point of dryness.