NEW FICTION
THE ARTIST’S WIDOW by Shena Mackay (Vintage)
Now out in paperback, this is Shena Mackay’s first novel since her Booker- shortlisted The Orchard on Fire (1996). Though perhaps not quite as gripping, The Artist’s Widow has some interesting ideas and amusing characters.
Through a private viewing of paintings by the recently deceased husband of Lyris Crane, the widow of the title, Mackay introduces her cast and conveys the Zeitgeist of a certain social strata of 1997 London.
As Lyris contemplates creativity, she confronts her submerged resentment at the subordination of her own artistic endeavours to those of her husband. In contrast, the awful work of her nephew, Nathan Pursey (a talentless conceptual artist), is matched by his social ineptitude.
Nathan’s discarded girlfriend, Jacki, is equally ham-fisted; in fact, no one in the novel is a really whole human being, which leads to some comic situations. The action closes pensively, however, as Lyris and Jacki watch the funeral of Princess Diana, making this one of the first novels to comment on the strange atmosphere which overcame London at the death of “the People’s Princess”.
THE COLONY OF UNREQUITED DREAMS by Wayne Johnston (Doubleday)
This epic novel rivals E Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News in its evocation of the austerity of Newfoundland life and the harshness of its landscape.
The novel’s central figure is Joseph (“Joey”) Smallwood, the real-life first premier of the island on its confederation with Canada in 1949. This fictionalised account of Smallwood’s unlikely rise from poverty to power is related by Smallwood himself, and his voice alternates with that of satirical journalist Shelagh Fielding, his lover and “lifelong distraction”.
Through this dual commentary Johnston unfolds the often unfortunate history of Newfoundland – with its “bleak beauty of sparsity, scarcity and stuntedness” – and its hard-pressed inhabitants, as well as the personal tales of Smallwood and Fielding.
A CRIME IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD by Suzanne Berne (Penguin)
This exceptionally accomplished debut novel has been widely lauded. Suzanne Berne, an American, sets the action in a quiet Washington suburb and uses Marsha, a woman in her thirties, as first-person narrator.
Marsha thinks back to the summer of 1972 when she was 10 and when her father absconded with a sister of her mother’s. This event coincides with the arrival of a new neighbour – the strange and solitary Mr Green – and with the rape and murder of a boy she knows.
The local drama plays out against the background of the Watergate hearings, and this charged atmosphere seems to edge the narrator into spying and unfounded suspicions. It is as if the damage done to Marsha by her father’s desertion ripples outward from her in a cruel and harmful way. The adult woman deeply regrets her childish destructiveness, but, as she says, “At least you have the rest of your life to be more careful.”
This is a controlled and thoughtful book which richly deserves the Orange Prize conferred on it earlier this year.
OCEAN SEA by Alessandro Baricco (Hamish Hamilton)
This novel, by the author of the bestselling Silk, is set at the edge of an unnamed sea in “a place that does not exist”. The writing has a dreamlike quality, as do the strange residents of a lonely inn, among them an obsessive painter and a man who writes endless love letters to a woman he is yet to meet. Odd and whimsical, the novel is part philosophical and part playful enquiry into art and reality.