‘It was 1972 and I was eighteen years old. I had jumped ship and watched while she sailed away.’

The narrator’s account of his decade in Uruguay gets off to a running start. A young man in a remote country is a recipe for picaresque adventures, and Montevideo is seething with political violence and sweating with the tango. On his very first day young Frederick runs into Tupamaros member Julio, gets a job washing dishes, and accepts the name Ramon Bolio. ‘That day in 1972 I was up for change,’ he tells us.

Ramon is in the privileged position of being able to mingle at all levels of society. He teaches English to a Capitan of the military regime, yet frequents the bars where revolutionary politics is discussed. Those around him are more or less born into their situation, but he has the choice of whether or not to engage with this world. He walks up to the most beautiful girl among the tango dancers and tells her if she doesn’t come home with him he’ll spend the night howling at the moon. You wouldn’t have done that back home in York, the reader can’t help thinking.

There is something unsettling about this young Ramon – a man with no fixed beliefs who is so easily able to cast aside his English habits. He tells us he has wrestled to reconcile the need for a credo with the conviction that life is just a flash in the pan. Events proceed with an hallucinatory clarity. The reader can picture the action of each scene perfectly, but the emotive layer is often elusive. ‘I had embraced a new life and new friends and commitments and my emotions and feelings were not repressed in any obvious way. I was a dancer. I was not a camera,’ he assures us, though the reader is right not to take the narrator at face value.

This tale of an adventurous youth is being typed up by the Ramon of three decades later. He is back living in York, in the house where he grew up. But the events in Uruguay have defined who he now is: his name is still Ramon Bolio, and he teaches the tango with a passion. His sixteen-year-old niece has gone missing. A dual plot drives the novel forward. Questions are thrown up about how the past has made him what he is today.

Ramon’s brother Stephen is intellectually a little slow. It is up to Ramon to take the lead in dealings with the police as they investigate the young woman’s disappearance. He confronts them as they commence digging up Stephen’s lawn. ‘Stephen, Debbie, they don’t have the nous for this kind of thing. If they’d killed her they’d sit down and cry. They wouldn’t hide the body.’ It’s a rather odd thing to say of his brother, and betrays a familiarity with violence. This attention to detail runs through the story and only slowly becomes apparent.

The characters, and in particular the narrator, are created with perfect psychological coherence. For example Ramon mentions on the first page that a slim volume of Gurdjieff was in his backpack. Sure enough, a hundred pages later he borrows a technique from the wily thinker. And after his first encounter with violence, Ramon’s narrative proceeds with the same manifest confidence as before, yet the new relationships he forms come across as increasingly erratic and unsound.

Montevideo and its dance bars, checkpoints, and growing atmosphere of fear is conjured up with great immediacy. All the while tango features as a recurring metaphor. ‘Tango is about memory, abandonment, love, defeat, death, sorrow and it is about standing before a beloved object and remembering that object as a living presence.’

John Baker’s novel is suffused with existentialist concepts: attachment, nothingness, the instability of the human being. His style owes more perhaps to Camus’ essays on Algeria than it does to the classic English novel. His prose achieves the almost impossible task of being as plot-driven as a thriller yet steeped in philosophy; an adventure story yet a sustained reflection on how to live life more fully. It is beautifully written, a tango of thought and action, its true power not apparent at first sight. It is imbued with a deep sense of mystery: not just the mystery of where the disappeared have gone, but the mystery of what connects an individual to be one person through time.

When I read this novel I was in the enjoyable position of knowing nothing about the author or his previous work, and resolved to keep things that way until I finished. ‘One of Britain’s most talented crime writers,’ declares a blurb on the back. Delete the word ‘crime’ and it hits the mark. This novel deserves a place in every backpacker’s pocket and on every thinking man’s bookshelf.

Reviewed by Aiden O’Reilly in Dreamcatcher 24.

You catch yourself thinking, well, we could always put it off to another time – it’s not as if we’re going anywhere. That moment of wanting gets more . . . fragile, I think. You’re watching a TV programme, half thinking about going to bed, then you change channels, watch some rubbish and within twenty minutes you’re both yawning and the moment’s gone. Or one of you wants to read and the other one doesn’t and he/she lies there in the half-dark waiting for the light to be put out, and then the waiting, the hope, turns to mild resentment, and the moment goes, and that’s it. Or, a few days go past – more than usual, anyway – and you find that time works both ways simultaneously. On the one hand you miss sex and on the other you begin to forget about it. When we were kids we used to think that monks and nuns must be secretly randy all the time. Now I think: I bet they don’t worry about it at all, most of them, I bet it just goes away.

Don’t get me wrong. I like sex; so does Oliver. And I still like sex with Oliver. He knows what I like and what I want. Orgasm is not a problem. We know the best way to get there, for both of us. You could say that was almost part of the problem. If there is one. I mean, we almost always make love in the same way – same amount of time, same length of (horrid word) foreplay, same position, or positions. And we do it like that because that’s what works best – that’s what experience has told us we like best. So it becomes a tyranny, or obligation, or something. In any case, impossible to get out of. The rule about married sex, if you’re interested – and you may not be -is that after a few years you aren’t allowed to do anything you haven’t done before. Yes, I know, I’ve read all those article and advice columns about how to spice up your sex life, about getting him to buy you special underwear, and sometimes just having a romantic candlelit dinner for two, and setting aside quality time to be together, and I just laugh because life isn’t like that. My life, anyway. Quality time? There’s always another load of washing.

Our sex life is . . . friendly. Do you know what I mean? Yes, I can see that you do. Perhaps all too well. We’re partners in the act. We enjoy one another’s company in the act. We do our best for one another, we look after one another in the act. Our sex life is . . . friendly. I’m sure there are worse things. Much worse.

Have I put you off? He or she beside you has had their light out for some time now. They’re doing that breathing which is meant to sound like sleep but doesn’t really. You probably said, “I’ll just finish this bit,” and got a friendly grunt in reply, but then you read on a bit longer than you thought. But it doesn’t matter now, does it? Because I’ve put you off. You don’t feel like sex any more. Do you?

In a previous novel (Talking It Over, 1991), Gillian and Stuart were married. Feckless Oliver was Stuart’s best friend and he seduced Gillian and stole her away.

Now they are ten years older, and only a little wiser. Stuart has become a businessman and regards himself as a success. Pretentious Oliver has fallen on hard times and seems unable to get his life together. And Gillian, the sensible but pedestrian one, is still in the middle.

Each character, in turn, tries to seduce us with a personal version of the truth. But in the end we are left with the suspicion that there is no truth, that the truth does not exist as an objective entity. I was left with the same feeling I get from exposure to a Beckett script; that we wait for something that happens or doesn’t happen and then we die. We don’t connect, not really.

Having said that, one should not under estimate Julian Barnes’ wry humour. He has the capacity to hear and communicate the despair which underlays laughter and is always ready to give the nod of recognition to our absurdities.

Intelligent and moving, this is a book to seek out.

Aunt Evelyn was triumphant but my father was stymied, said almost nothing, and at the dinner table that evening looked especially glum when Sandy got around to reporting on what a paragon Mr. Mawhinney was. First off Mr. Mawhinney had graduated from the College of Agriculture at the University of Kentucky, while my father, like most other Newark slum children before the World War, hadn’t been educated beyond the eighth grade. Mr. Mawhinney owned not just one farm but three – the lesser two rented to tenants – land that had been in his family going back nearly to the days of Daniel Boone, and my father owned nothing more impressive than a six-year-old car. Mr. Mawhinney could saddle a horse, drive a tractor, operate a thresher, ride a fertilizer drill, work a field as easily with a team of mules as with a team of oxen; he could rotate crops and manage hired men, both white and negro; he could repair tools, sharpen plow points and mowers, put up fences, string barbed wire, raise chickens, dip sheep, dehorn cattle, slaughter pigs, smoke bacon, sugar-cure ham – and he raised watermelons that were the sweetest and juiciest Sandy had ever eaten. By cultivating tobacco, corn, and potatoes, Mr. Mawhinney was able to make a living right out of the earth and then, at Sunday dinner (where the six-foot-three-inch, two-hundred-and-thirty-pound farmer consumed more fried chicken with cream gravy than everyone else at the table combined), eat only food that he himself had raised, and all my father could do was sell insurance. It went without saying that Mr. Mawhinney was a Christian, a long-standing member of the great overpowering majority that fought the revolution and founded the nation and conquered the wilderness and subjugated the Indian and enslaved the negro and emancipated the negro and segregated the negro, one of the good, clean, hard-working Christian millions who settled the frontier, tilled the farms, built the cities, governed the states, sat in Congress, occupied the White House, amassed the wealth, possessed the land, owned the steel mills and the ball clubs and the railroads and the banks, even owned and oversaw the language, one of those unassailable Nordic and Anglo-Saxon Protestants who ran America and would always run it – generals, dignitaries, magnates, tycoons, the men who laid down the law and called the shots and read the riot act when they chose to – while my father, of course, was only a Jew.

Roth’s political novel is a fable of an alternative universe in which America has gone fascist. Roth imagines that Charles A.Lindbergh, a friend and admirer of Hitler, aviation pioneer and popular hero, defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election.

The Plot Against America was first published in 2004. At once mesmerizing and unsettling, it views Lindbergh’s presidency through the knowing eyes of a six-year-old Jewish boy in Newark. A child who is seriously scarred by the developments to which he is a first-hand witness: ‘Our incomparable American childhood was ended . . . never would I be able to revive that unfazed sense of security first fostered in a little child by a big, protective republic and his ferociously responsible parents.’

The novel is about disenchantment and is the work of a novelist entering the final period of his career. It is also unrepentantly nostalgic for both writer and reader. Roth enters history and fiction and takes us by the hand. It is a wonderful excursion, passing landmarks which we may have imagined but which may also have been real. It is a journey into terror and into the unimaginable, and although we enter a recognizable period of history, we are always close to our own time. And the historic events, the fictions we visit, have their counterparts in our own contemporary history and fictions and facts.

‘I have not analysed myself in any other way than by creating in my books hundreds of characters – each one spun out of myself – with the advantages and disadvantages of all imaginary persons. The so-called naturalistic period, Emile Zola and his contemporaries, wrote about people with so-called main characteristics. They had no use for the nuances of psychology, their persons had a ‘dominating quality which determined their character. Dostoevsky and others taught us something else about human beings. From my earliest writings I don’t think there exists in my entire production any person with such a straight dominating quality. They are all without so-called ‘character’, they are split and divided, they are not good or bad but both. They consist of many parts, there are nuances, they change in mind and actions.
‘And that is the way I am myself, without a doubt. It is quite possible that I am aggressive. I may have some of the characteristics hinted at by the professor – vulnerable, suspicious, egotistical, generous, jealous, judicious, sensitive, cold – all these qualities would be human. But I don’t know that I could give any of them supremacy in my nature. Whatever I consist of, whatever I am, came to me as a gift of grace which has made it possible for me to write my books. It is a gift I cannot analyse, Georg Brandes called it the divine folly.’

It is more than thirty years since I first read Knut Hamsun’s Pan. I had few memories of it, though I remembered the language, the poetry, and the mystery surrounding Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, the central character.

Glahn is a Pan-like man. He has rented a shack up in the woods in the far north of Norway where he lives by hunting and fishing. He has a dog, but otherwise lives alone, communing with trees and the sea, telling the time of day by the sun and bird-song, feeling the closeness of God around him. The opening pages show us Glahn’s absolute association of nature with divinity and there is an expectation of the tale becoming a kind of pastoral romance.

Hamsun said, “My new book will be beautiful; it takes place in Nordland, a quiet and red love story. There will be no polemics in it, just people under different skies.”

Into Glahn’s world, and attracted by his charisma and his ‘animal look’, come two women; the passionate teenager, Edvarda, who is stimulated almost entirely by the chase; and simple, tragic Eva, the wife of the local blacksmith.

Hamsun gives us a kind of Pan, a character who is half man, half goat; someone who can easily live alone and survive in nature, but who is completely incapable of life in the social realm. The novel is accomplished, astoundingly, by the subtle use of lyrical language and attention to what Hamsun described as the life of the mind.

This second visit to Hamsun’s novel showed me a picture of masculinity that I had not identified in my first reading. And although it may well contain elements of truth, the picture is a disturbing one and has left me with more questions than conclusions.

Nevertheless, Pan is a great novel, beautifully written and executed, and worth the time of anyone who appreciates good literature.

‘Hamsun has the qualities that belong to the very great, the completest omniscience about human nature.’ Rebecca West.

I believe I can read something of the minds of those about me; perhaps it is not so. Oh, on my good days I feel as though I can gaze deep into the minds of others, even though I am not particularly clever in other ways. We sit in a room, a few men, a few women and I, and I seem to see what goes on within these people and what they think of me. I read something into every fleeting glance of their eyes; at times the blood rises to their cheeks and they flush, at other times they pretend to be looking elsewhere, but they observe me out of the corners of their eyes. There I sit watching it all, and nobody suspects that I see through every mind. For many years I have supposed that I could read in the minds of everyone I met. Perhaps it is not so. . . .

”How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate?”

JM Coetzee’s honest, compelling and brave novel reminded me of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger, and it reminded me of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The writing has the same kind of quality of these other novels, in that it takes a simple story about a simple man and elevates it by way of language into a terrifying masterpiece. Huckleberry Finn is in there, too, of course, watching the river flow.

This was the beginning of his life as a cultivator. On a shelf in the shed he had found a packet of pumpkin seeds, some of which he had already idly roasted and eaten; he still had the mealie kernels; and on the pantry floor he had even picked up a solitary bean. In the space of a week he cleared the land near the dam and restored the system of furrows that irrigated it. Then he planted a small patch of pumpkins and a small patch of mealies; and some distance away on the river bank, where he would have to carry water to it, he planted his bean, so that if it grew it could climb into the thorntrees.

For the most part he was living on birds that he killed with his catapult. His days were divided between this form of hunting, which he carried on nearer the farmhouse, and the tilling of the soil. His deepest pleasure came at sunset when he turned open the cock at the dam wall and watched the stream of water run down its channels to soak the earth, turning it from fawn to deep brown. It is because I am a gardener, he thought, because that is my nature. He sharpened the blade of his spade on a stone, the better to savour the instant when it clove the earth. The impulse to plant had been reawoken in him; now, in a matter of weeks, he found his waking life bound tightly to the patch of earth he had begun to cultivate and the seeds he had planted there.

There were times, particularly in the mornings, when a fit of exultation would pass through him at the thought that he, alone and unknown, was making this deserted farm bloom But following on the exultation would sometimes come a sense of pain that was obscurely connected with the future; and then it was only brisk work that could keep him from lapsing into gloominess.

The borehole, pumped dry, yielded only a weak and intermittent stream. It became K’s deepest wish for the flow of water from the earth to be restored. He pumped only as much as his garden needed, allowing the level in the dam to drop to a few inches and watching without emotion as the marsh dried up, the mud caked, the grass withered, the frogs turned on their backs and died. He did not know how underground waters replenished themselves but knew it was bad to be prodigal. He could not imagine what lay beneath his feet, a lake of a running stream or a vast inner sea or a pool so deep it had no bottom. Every time he released the brake and the wheel spun and water came, it seemed to him a miracle; he hung over the dam wall, closed his eyes, and held his fingers in the stream.

He lived by the rising and setting of the sun, in a pocket outside time. Cape Town and the war and his passage to the farm slipped further and further into forgetfulness.

When the novel opens Michael K is thirty-one years old and living with his mother. His is the story of an innocent who wants to be left alone a survivor in a world gone bad. Coetzee describes a social and political environment which can never be redeemed. Our only hope is to abandon it.

Michael K is treated as a criminal by the State, in fact by almost everyone he meets. He has a hare lip and is regarded as slow. As an infant he is not nourished at his mother’s breast, he is interned in a special school for simpletons, later he gets to know prison camps, he is hunted and harassed by the police, the army, and passing thugs. He learns to starve. His crime was being born.

This morning without notice, a convoy of trucks arrived bringing four hundred new prisoners, the batch held up first at Reddersburg for a week and then on the line north of Beaufort West. All the time we were playing games here, and spending time with girlfriends, and philosophizing about life and death and history, these men waited in cattle trucks parked in sidings under the November sun, sleeping packed against one another in the cold of the highland nights, let out twice a day to relieve themselves, eating nothing but porridge cooked over thornbush fires beside the tracks, watching cargoes more urgent than themselves rumble past while the spider spun his web between the wheels of their home.

This is not a happy or easy novel, but a rewarding one, and certainly worth spending time with.

When I heard his thin voice answer the telephone, I dreaded saying my name, imagining that he would be utterly dismayed at the sound of it, but at once he began to apologize, saying: “I should have written, just a note even, I should have written to thank you for the lunch.”

“Oh, no, Gerald!” I said relieved, “it was a terrible lunch and I think I should have written to you really. You see, I was brought up in India, Gerald, and I’m afraid I’ve never quite lost it, the habit of never saying anything that’s helpful. No one in India seemed to have a feeling for helpfulness, only a feeling for what is right, and it took me a long time to see that almost everything they thought was right was actually not all that right, but in fact rather wrong. And this deficiency in helpfulness, I mean, I’ve had it all my life and I blame India, but who can say if it was India or if it wasn’t born in me, because it’s a long time since India now and thank goodness all those feelings of rightness have been swept away . . .”

“If you were ringing to ask me to lunch again,” Gerald said quietly, “I’d love to come. You were right about no one helping. They don’t.”

So he came round the next week. Over a rather tasteless lamb casserole, which he didn’t seem to enjoy and I didn’t either, he began to knead away, gently at first, then more firmly, at his own misery until the pain of the kneading doubled him up and he began to cry. He kept apologizing, through his tears, for this crying, but it seemed to me that if you can cry over lunch with a fat woman that you hardly know, then your need to cry is probably very strong and your tears might feel like a balm. So I said: “Oh, no, Gerald, you’re quite wrong to apologize. Don’t even try to stop crying. Cry as much as you like.”

“You can’t imagine,” he said at last, “what it’s like to lose someone you knew was all you ever wanted. All, you see. I used to think, she’s one of the wonders of the world, my Sarah. You can’t imagine what it’s like to lose one of the wonders of the world, to lose her in a single day!”

“Well, I can’t Gerald, I know. But I can try. I mean, I know if anything happened to Leon – not that he’s a wonder of the world, far from it really with his co-respondents and everything – I’d feel dreadfully lost. I don’t know how I’d take root again. I might never.”

“I never will,” wept Gerald. “I shall never be strong or patient or anything at all for the children. I feel I can’t give them anything and of course it’s terrible for them too, to lose a mother.”

“I’d say they might be your salvation, Gerald. I mean, they love you, don’t they, and you love them.”

“I feel as if I love no one any more. Not even the children. I feel as if I was born just to love one person.”

Gerald blew his nose and dabbed at his eyes. Between his elbows, his helping of lamb casserole was congealing. I felt empty of words, but wanted to put my arms round Gerald, imagining that since Sarah had left, no one had touched him. But then I remembered that because I am fat I sweat quite a lot and I thought, my heavy sweating arm will disgust him and he will want to tear out of the flat and never come back, thinking, even longing to cry and not crying is better than that, if that’s the price. I stayed motionless and Gerald, getting no more help from me, no word or movement, faded back into silence and very soon left.

That night Leon went out to dinner with a client and I got into bed early, not bothering to make myself a meal and glad that I wasn’t in the restaurant with Leon and his client and their bottles of wine and glasses of brandy and cigars. I lay back in a clean nighty, having bathed and powdered my body so that there was no trace of sweat on it, and after a while thought up one of my poems about Gerald which went like this:

Today for the first time
Gerald wept.
I’ve never heard him weep before
But now I know
that while the world’s been weeping,
I have slept.

There is more to say, Sister, about my comforting of Gerald Tibbs, but I feel tired out by the thought of him at the moment . . .

In a Letter to Sister Benedict, Rose Tremain gives over the narrative to her protagonist, Ruby Constad. Ruby has been abandoned by her children, and her husband has suffered a stroke and lies in a nearby hospital on his death bed. Wealthy middle-class Ruby is overweight, her money and her lifestyle have combined to make her silent, and now loneliness is added to her burden.

But in writing letters to her childhood teacher and mentor, long dead Sister Benedicta, Ruby begins to find her voice together with a quite wicked wit, and, eventually, a will to live. She is a woman quite devoid of self-pity and as such, will steal your heart away.

Letter to Sister Benedicta was published in 1979, and Tremain has published several novels since then. She told The Times:

“Time is catching up with me now. I’m 60 in August and this looming birthday has made me think. My life seems to have gone by so fast I can’t believe it, but I don’t believe it’s over. I feel full of ideas and power.”

Here’s one reader who is very glad to hear it.

The very next night, Chubb had a ‘vision.’ He was not drunk; he’d taken a single glass of McWilliams Burgundy. He was not overtired; the event occurred a little after nine o’clock on a spring evening. He had washed his plate and his knife and his fork, then carried his chrome and vinyl chair from the kitchen to his desk, an army trestle table he’d positioned in the bow window at the front of the living room. In daylight he might have looked out to where the jacarandas, although they never found a way into his poetry, dropped their loaded petals in a luminous, lilac carpet on the avenue. It was dark and he could see no more than his reflection. For a long while the scratching of his post-office pen was the only sound in the room.

He heard rustling in some leaves outside but the poem was one of his beloved double sestinas, a form in which the last words of each stanza are repeated though in a new order. It is never an easy endeavour, and as he proceeded the difficulty grew exponentially, a context in which he was not interested in rustling leaves.

Then came a loud rapping on the glass, and his immediate response was anger. Cheh! I imagined it was that littler bugger Blackhall, nagging me to close the gate.

He flung open the window in some exasperation. There was no Blackhall.

Boys, he decided. Scabby-kneed boys, boys with erections in their pockets and heads filled with ignorant opinions. He returned to work, back to the beginning, like one of Malarmé’s sacred spiders whose web has been broken by a cow. Ten minutes later he was going very well and when he looked up again, in the eighth stanza the last piece of the puzzle was hovering on the edges of his cerebrum.

It was then Chubb saw it. You must not laugh at me, he said.

I promise.

It was a bloody horror, he said in a voice turned suddenly hollow, his hooded eyes challenging me.

I felt the hairs rise on my neck. Boys?

No, no. A ghastly snotty epidermis, sticking to the glass, like a human squid in an aquarium. I will never forget it – whiskers on the lips, the red maw stretched wide open. You are laughing at me?

McCorkle was kissing you?

It was not funny. Besides, how had he found me?

Noussette . . .

Of course not.

He paused. It was not like that, he said, and with his fingertips he brushed away the dry white spittle in the corners of his mouth. I finally understood, he said quietly. I had brought him forth.

Imagined him?

Brought him forth.

From where?

Choy! How do I know from where? From hell, I suppose. How would I know where I brought him forth from? I imagined someone and he came into being.

Based on a case which was widely reported in Australia, Carey presents us with Christopher Chubb, a poet who, out of sorts with the literary establishment, decides to invent Bob McCorkle, an unknown genius of a poet, together with McCorkle’s unpublished works. The hoax misfires, however, when McCorkle, hitherto a figment of Chubb’s imagination, now begins to stumble forth into the real world, seven foot tall, dressed in black, bereft of personal history and filled with loathing for his creator.

Without a doubt a brilliant idea for a novel. But the execution of the narrative doesn’t live up to the initial promise.

Carey’s wit is in tact, and there’s nothing wrong with his writing; the guy knows how to turn a sentence. But the waters are muddied by a host of different narrators, multiple framing devices, leaps in time and space, and a journey through Malaysia which has little to do with the central thrust of the story.

In addition I found myself with little empathy for the characters or their plights, and by the end of the narrative I was grateful to be relieved of more of the same.