immensely popular writings of Arthur Hailey, whose implausible, best-selling yarn
Airport (1968) was also made into a blockbusting film. Shute and Hailey, in.
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Good Fiction Guide edited by Jane Rogers Consultant Editor
Hermione Lee Assistant Editors Mike Harris, Douglas Houston Assistant Editor on the paperback edition Daniel Hahn
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&
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Introduction ••••••••••••••••••••••••
Jane Rogers This is a book for anyone who likes reading fiction. The aim behind it is to offer information—and enthusiasm—about over a thousand authors, and over five thousand books. We’ve set out to do this in two ways; first, in thirty-four short essays introducing different areas or genres of fiction, each by a different writer with a special interest in that field. And secondly, in the longer part of the book, by one thousand-plus individual author entries which aim to give a flavour of each writer’s work, recommendations of which books to read, and suggestions about other writers whose work is similar. Books are promoted to us endlessly, through adverts, reviews, adaptations, through glossy attention-grabbing covers in bookshops, and wild claims on jacket sleeves. They are set texts for exams; they are hyped by prizes and awards; or they are written by celebrities. But in the end, every reader knows, probably the single most compelling reason for picking up a book which is new to you, is when a friend tells you, ‘Read this, it’s really good.’ This guide sets out to do exactly that. Each of the essayists has picked out their twelve favourite fiction books (in all the world) in their particular area—in order to explain and pass on their passion for those books. Many of the essayists are themselves novelists in the field they describe—Michael Dibdin writes on Crime, Nigel Williams on Humour, Michèle Roberts on France, E. A. Markham on the Caribbean, Aritha van Herk on Canada; others are novelists writing about branches of fiction which they know and love as readers rather than practitioners (Livi Michael on Science fiction, Robert McCrum on Adventure). In all the essays, and indeed the individual author entries, the notion of one reader recommending books to another is central. I should make it clear from the start that this is a fiction guide, encompassing both literature and popular fiction. There are a number of excellent literature guides already in existence; the best of course being Margaret Drabble’s peerless Oxford Companion to English Literature. There are several good guides to contemporary literature available, my personal favourite being Peter Parker’s
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Adventure ••••••••••••••••••••••••
Robert McCrum The classic adventure story is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Stevenson’s thrilling first paragraph, an exquisitely crafted single sentence, which could profitably adorn the seminar rooms of any number of American campus writing schools, is a model of how to hook the reader’s attention with the promise of drama to come. Squire Trelawney, Dr Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17—, and go back to the time when my father kept the ‘Admiral Benbow’ inn, and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof. I remember . . .
Treasure Island was published in 1883. Victorian England was then the centre of the greatest, most far-flung empire the world had ever known, covering almost a quarter of the globe. Its newspapers were full of imperial adventure stories (many of them featuring the activities of heroic Scots) in exotic parts of the world, from ‘darkest Africa’ to the uncharted Antipodes. It’s somehow apt that Treasure Island, which was originally entitled ‘The Sea Cook’, should have been written by a young Scot whose family had designed lighthouses to protect seafarers navigating the rocky seas around the British Isles. Stevenson understood that a first-class adventure story needed a cast of credible, but also lovable, villains. In addition to the gripping tale young Jim Hawkins has to tell of the recovery of Captain Flint’s treasure, Stevenson populates his tale with a cast of extraordinary characters, some of whom passed straight into the culture: Long John Silver, Blind Pew, Israel Hands, and Ben Gunn. Stevenson said that his book was ‘for boys’. Many of these came from the great Victorian public schools, Rugby, Marlborough, Winchester, Eton, and Harrow, harsh private educational institutions set up to supply classically trained young men for colonial service. For many years, until the turn of the century,
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4 Adventure Robert McCrum the greatest ‘adventure stories’ found an enthusiastic audience in these schools because the adventure novel reflected the drama of empire quite explicitly. Some splendid examples of late-Victorian adventure are to be found in the works of Rider Haggard, a fine, once-popular writer now unjustly neglected. Haggard, who was a close friend of Rudyard Kipling, had a worldwide readership for his adventure stories which were notable chiefly for weird invention and spellbinding narrative. The most famous are She (1887) and King Solomon’s Mines (1886) which combine story-telling verve with Haggard’s fascination for African landscape, primitive society, wildlife, and the mysterious tribal past. Haggard was a literary craftsman with many imitators. Another lateVictorian adventure writer, now almost forgotten, was G. A. Henty, a former journalist whose military-historical series, which includes With Clive in India (1884) and Under Drake’s Flag (1883), dramatize the imperial saga through the eyes of a series of young English boys who find themselves caught up in a decisive historical moment. Henty did not flinch from expounding the virtues of empire and his adventures rely on the glorification of mainly male, historical figures, backed up by a strong narrative, and a good line-up of supporting characters spiced with plenty of historical verisimilitude. Both Henty and Haggard came from a metropolitan world of amateur public school imperialists. Another fin de siècle adventure writer, Anthony Hope, in real life the successful lawyer A. H. Hawkins, represents the last gasp of the Victorian adventure story. Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894) is set in ‘Ruritania’ with splendid villains, a virtuous heroine, and a swashbuckling English gentleman-hero. By the turn of the century, the adventure story had become sufficiently established as a genre to attract the attention of serious novelists. Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) is, from this perspective, an imperial adventure story with a high moral purpose. Jim, who might have stepped from the pages of a Henty novel, is the chief mate on board the Patna, a poorly manned ship carrying a party of pilgrims in Eastern waters. Jim is young, idealistic, a dreamer of heroic deeds. When, in a storm, the Patna threatens to sink, the officers decide to escape in one of the few lifeboats. Jim refuses to follow their cowardly example, but at the last minute his resolve weakens and he joins them. The ship does not sink and the pilgrims are rescued. But Jim remains haunted by his moment of weakness and searches for ways to find redemption. Much of the narrative is told by an observer, Marlow, who is also the central figure in Conrad’s masterpiece Heart of Darkness (1899). The dramas of empire lost their shine with the Boer War, but in the first decade of the new century the threat of war with Germany mesmerized people’s attention and found its way into the adventure writing of the time. Now the threat to the empire, for so long concentrated in exotic villains in faraway lands, could be located across the North Sea, in the Kaiser’s Germany and his expanding navy of fearsome battleships. Erskine Childers, who was eventually
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to be shot for his support of the Irish republican movement, was the first to capitalize on this British nationalist neurosis with his masterpiece The Riddle of the Sands (1903), in which two amateur yachtsmen sailing in the Baltic uncover German preparations for an invasion of England. Another young writer who captured the public mood and successfully dramatized the fear of a war with Germany was John Buchan who wrote The Thirty-Nine Steps while recovering from flu in 1915. Here too the plot turns on the unmasking of a dangerous invasion plot by unscrupulous foreigners, a device that came to feature in many twentieth-century thrillers. Buchan, who went on to write Greenmantle (1916) and Mr Standfast (1918), became the interwar writer of adventure stories par excellence. When the Great War actually came, the thrill of imperial adventure came to a sticky end in the mud and horror of Flanders. Once the war was over, there was no longer much taste for derring-do. In the 1920s and 1930s, then, this kind of fiction became transmuted into something more realistic and contemporary. It never lost sight of its duty to entertain. One writer, whose father was a headmaster of an English public school, whose education was full of Haggard, Henty, and Childers, and who was actually related to Stevenson, was Graham Greene. By the end of his life, Greene had been elevated (by his publisher, Penguin) to the status of ‘greatest living English writer’, but his work was always rooted in the adventure story. He acknowledged this explicitly in the novels he called ‘entertainments’, the first of which, Stamboul Train (1932), was a subtle reworking of many of the elements described so far. Greene went on to write many novels of far greater moral consequence, but adventure lies at the heart of his best work, much of which is set in former British colonies and exotic foreign parts: Sierra Leone—The Heart of the Matter (1948); Vietnam—The Quiet American (1955); the Congo— A Burnt-Out Case (1961); Mexico—The Power and the Glory (1940). Another adventure writer, almost a contemporary of Greene, but badly overshadowed by him, was Eric Ambler, who died as recently as 1998. His work is characterized by all those qualities—strong narrative drive, intelligent writing, and powerful atmosphere—that are the hallmark of the classic adventure story. The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) is among Ambler’s finest yarns, the story of a crime novelist holidaying in Istanbul who is drawn into a spiralling world of assassination and double-dealing. Ambler’s fictional world is no longer located in the outposts of the British empire, but closer to home in the Europe of the pre-Second World War dictators. Ambler’s work prefigured and certainly influenced a generation of spy-thriller writers, from Len Deighton and Philip Kerr to John Le Carré and Jack Higgins. Elsewhere, the adventure story languished. None has matched the literary imagination (or genius) of Stevenson or Haggard. The genre passed into the hands of pulp entertainers of whom the most distinguished, Nevil Shute, is remembered (and still in print) for books like No Highway (1948), a gripping
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6 Adventure Robert McCrum tale of suspense concerning the effect of metal fatigue on a mid-flight transatlantic passenger jet. Shute was always concerned with contemporary issues—his last work, On the Beach (1957), is a post-nuclear apocalyptic tale set in his native Australia—and it was this focus that also inspired the immensely popular writings of Arthur Hailey, whose implausible, best-selling yarn Airport (1968) was also made into a blockbusting film. Shute and Hailey, in turn, have many imitators, from Wilbur Smith to Desmond Bagley. Truer to the Victorian idea of the adventure story, however, are the pageturning works of Bernard Cornwell (whose ‘Sharpe’ series of historical adventures is set during the Napoleonic Wars) and the historically meticulous, comic novels of George MacDonald Fraser, whose hero, first seen in Flashman (1969), cuts a swathe through the opposite sex and imperial history alike. See also ROBERT MCCRUM See also SPY
TOP
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Robert McCrum’s Top 12 Adventure Books
Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883)
John Buchan The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915)
G. A. Henty With Clive in India (1884)
Graham Greene Stamboul Train (1932)
H. Rider Haggard King Solomon’s Mines (1886)
Eric Ambler The Mask of Dimitrios (1939)
Anthony Hope The Prisoner of Zenda (1894)
Nevil Shute No Highway (1948)
Joseph Conrad Lord Jim (1900)
Arthur Hailey Airport (1968)
Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands (1903)
Bernard Cornwell Sharpe’s Eagle (1981)
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McEwan, Ian 335 McDermid, Val (British, 1955– ) Val McDermid grew up in a Scottish mining community and read English at Oxford before working as a journalist. She has written two crime series which feature female protagonists; the Kate Brannigan novels, set in Manchester, are characterized by a witty and engaging style and the Lindsay Gordon novels feature the first ‘out’ British lesbian detective. McDermid has also published chilling, graphic, psychological thrillers pitting the policeman Tony Hill and his team against serial killers. In the award-winning The Mermaids Singing (1995) someone is killing gay men, and in Wire in the Blood (1997) Hill’s National Profiling Task Force is asked to identify any sinister link between the disappearances of young girls. His colleague Shaz Bowman has a hunch as to the killer’s identity but it seems so far-fetched that she is ridiculed, at great cost to herself and the success of the investigation. & Patricia Cornwell, Sandra Scoppettone, Linda Barnes. See CRIME CS MacDonald, Ann-Marie (Canadian, 1959– ) Ann-Marie MacDonald was already well known as an actress and scriptwriter in Canada before the publication of her first novel, Fall on Your Knees (1996, winner of the Commonwealth First Novel Prize). This beautifully written novel—in some ways a family saga—tells the story of the four Piper sisters, all of whom are unconventional, weighed down by poverty and religious uncertainty, yet determined to make their mark on a rapidly changing twentieth century. It is music that gives them hope, and ultimately takes it away, and the novel is haunted by a strangely compelling lyricism. It is difficult in places because of its breadth (it moves from turn-of-the-century Canada to New York in the 1950s), various plot-lines, and unusual narrative voice, but it is nevertheless both deeply moving and, in places, very entertaining. & Kate Atkinson, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie SB
McEwan, Ian (British, 1948– ) Ian McEwan has been at the forefront of English fiction since the mid-1970s. Known mainly as a novelist, he also writes short stories and screenplays. His pared-down style and even delivery maintain a sense of distance, and a McEwan book is typically a novel of ideas, engaging the intellect rather more than the feelings. Often he is concerned with the split between material and spiritual perceptions of life. Enduring Love (1997) tells the story of a happily married and determinedly rationalistic science writer, who falls prey to an obsessive stalker with a mission to bring him to God. The book has tremendous narrative drive and keeps the reader guessing throughout. McEwan is a master of the slow build and leans towards the macabre, a talent used to great effect in his psychological thriller, The Innocent (1990). Leonard Marnham, the innocent abroad in post-war Berlin, is part of a surveillance team involved in the making of the Berlin Tunnel. Falling in love with the enigmatic Maria, he becomes entangled in a chain of events that culminates nightmarishly in the disposal of a body. At this point backtrack to McEwan’s first novel, The Cement Garden (1978), in which four children decide to tell no one and fend for themselves when their reclusive parents die. Less thoughtful than his later books, this is nevertheless powerfully claustrophobic, zooming in on the fine detail of greasy adolescence and the urban wasteland in which the incestuous, fantasy-fuelled roles are played out. Atonement (2001) is an impressive, engrossing, and beautifully controlled novel, split between a comical but troubling pre-war story of class, sex, and false witness played out in an English country house, and a savagely unsparing treatment of Dunkirk and its aftermath in a wartime London hospital. Dominating the novel is the obsessive, self-absorbed child-writer Bryony Tallis, who grows up to learn painfully about the responsibilities of fiction—and to write this novel. McEwan’s Amsterdam (1998) won the Booker Prize; The Child in Time (1987),
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McGahern, John
a more likeable and haunting book, about a couple’s reaction to the abduction of their child, won the Whitbread award. & Jim Crace, Julian Barnes, Iain Banks. See SHORT STORIES CB
McGahern, John (Irish, 1934– ) McGahern’s novels are evocative, slow-paced stories which portray the political and social development of rural Ireland in simple, often poetic prose. Begin with Amongst Women (1990), where the three Moran sisters attempt to re-create the festive Monaghan Day, anxiously evoking, for their father’s sake, an idyllic past that never actually existed. As the narrative begins to detail the reality of that past, it develops into a close analysis of family life, centring on the tensions surrounding Moran, a complicated, unhappy man hardened by his experiences as a Republican fighter, and unable to accept responsibility for his difficult relationship with his sons. McGahern is also a prolific writer of short stories. Move on to Getting Through (1978), a diverse, observant collection, and a tolerant consideration of human frailty and love. His very fine Collected Short Stories (1992) is also available. & William Trevor, Bernard MacLaverty, James Joyce. See IRELAND SR
McGrath, Patrick (British, 1950– ) The son of a former head psychiatrist at an asylum, Patrick McGrath made his name with Grotesque (1989), a blend of the traditional country house mystery and contemporary horror. Centred on the unsettling events that surround the arrival of a new butler at a run-down manor, where the head of the house is busy reconstructing a dinosaur skeleton, the book was quickly labelled ‘New Gothic’. Dr Haggard’s Disease (1993) recounts a passionate love-affair whose end appears to have physically poisoned the narrator, and Asylum (1996) is set in the 1950s, at a bleak mental hospital where dark secrets and strange forces seem to be at work. McGrath’s fiction is exquisitely crafted, and
his novels present a veneer of civilized traditional story-telling beneath which chaotic and disturbing forces quickly make themselves felt. Blood and Water (1988) is a collection of stories, and a good introduction to his work. & Ian McEwan; Rachel Ingalls WB
Machen, Arthur (British, 1863–1947). See SUPERNATURAL McIlvanney, William (British, 1936– ) A Scottish teacher and poet, William McIlvanney’s first crime novel, Laidlaw (1977), won the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger. He had already achieved a strong reputation in mainstream writing, winning the Whitbread award in 1975 for Docherty, a son’s view of his father’s courage and endurance during the depression. Laidlaw is a dark and realistic yarn set in Glasgow, about a private eye whose rough exterior belies his own inner moral certitude and who toils in a world of grey uncertainties. Jack Laidlaw reappeared in The Papers of Tony Veitch (1983) and Strange Loyalties (1991). Both novels display powerful portraits of machismo undone and vivid descriptions of the Scottish underworld. The Big Man (1985) mines a similar social realist vein in its portrayal of a directionless man hired as a fighter by an underworld boss and the ensuing moral dilemmas and crumbling of his marriage. Some minor characters from the Laidlaw novels appear in The Big Man. & Ian Rankin, John Harvey, James Kelman MJ McInerney, Jay (US, 1955– ) McInerney’s first novel, Bright Lights, Big City (1984), became the talk of New York and an immediate best-seller. Written in a slick, fast-moving style, the book deals with a Manhattan magazine writer struggling in a whirlpool of plentiful cocaine and endless parties. The grim but funny Story of My Life (1988) stays on the same terrain and tells the story of Alison Poole, a privileged,
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MacLaverty, Bernard 337 hedonistic, and directionless New Yorker who speaks in cutting one-liners. The more substantial Brightness Falls (1992) addresses the stock market crash of 1987, but unlike its predecessors, pans beyond the ‘beautiful people’ of the yuppie set to include those who never benefited from the Reagan boom. & Bret Easton Ellis, David Leavitt BH
Mackay, Shena (British, 1944– ) Some of Mackay’s novels and stories are domestic comedies, with sharp observations of the British class system, in which women typically battle the odds. Others have an elegiac dimension in which the past is viewed critically, expressed in richly evocative prose. Redhill Rococo (1986) is of the first type: a woman struggles to keep her family together while her husband is in prison, and takes on a middle-class young lodger. Dunedin (1992) has a much larger canvas, its two narratives divided between 1909 New Zealand and contemporary London, contrasting the lives of a Presbyterian minister with his female descendant. Mackay’s best and most acclaimed novel so far is The Orchard on Fire (1995), a dark idyll of childhood set in the Kent village of ‘Stonebridge’ during 1953. It is a haunting re-creation of childhood’s fears and fantasies as seen by a returning adult, and avoids nostalgia. Her stories are frequently hilarious and poignant by turns. ‘Death by Art Deco’, in The World’s Smallest Unicorn and Other Stories (1999), concerns a successful woman author who employs an aspiring writer as a disastrous domestic. & Mavis Cheek, Candia McWilliam, Ronald Firbank JS
McKay, Claude ( Jamaican/US, 1890–1948). See CARIBBEAN Mackenzie, (Edward Montague) Compton (British, 1883–1972) Born in West Hartlepool, Mackenzie became a professional writer after graduating from Oxford. Begin with Whisky Galore (1947), his entertaining comedy about a shipload of
whisky falling into the hands of Scottish islanders. Capri, where he lived in the 1920s, is the setting for Extraordinary Women (1928), remarkable in its day for its light handling of homosexuality. The Vanity Girl (1920) tells of a chorus girl’s prudent course to fame and subsequent marriage into the aristocracy. For literary depth, Mackenzie’s most impressive work is the two-volume Sinister Street (1913, 1914), which charts a young man’s corruption after leaving Oxford. The book vividly evokes the atmosphere among Mackenzie’s generation on the eve of the First World War, his own experiences of which are recounted in Gallipoli Memories (1929). & Hugh Walpole, Eric Linklater. See SPY DH
MacLaverty, Bernard (British, 1942– ) MacLaverty was born and brought up in Belfast. He worked as a lab technician for ten years before reading English at university and becoming a teacher. He moved to Glasgow after graduation. In his novel Lamb (1980) he deals with the consequences of Ulster’s sectarian violence. Brother Sebastian, né Michael Lamb, runs away from a reformatory with a 12-year-old boy, which the press and police regard as kidnap. Lamb sees it as rescuing an abused child, however, and the pressures on Lamb drive the situation to a terrible crisis. Again, in Cal (1983) MacLaverty deals with terrorist violence in the province. Cal, a young man living with his father, is attacked as a member of the only Catholic family on their estate. The novel traces the protagonist’s tragic loveaffair and the ways in which he becomes embroiled in terrorist activities whilst trying to avoid it at all costs. Cal is a brilliant account of the ways in which the complex political and religious situation in Northern Ireland inevitably enmeshes all its citizens. MacLaverty was short-listed for the Booker Prize for his novel Grace Notes (1997). This is about a young composer, Catherine McKenna, and her relationships with her parents back in Northern Ireland and her
