Shirley Kossick
new fiction
Periodically a debut novel bursts onto the scene with loud fanfares one recalls The Secret History (1993), The God of Small Things (1997) and White Teeth (1999). Now it is the turn of The Last Samurai (Chatto & Windus) by Helen De Witt, already sold in 13 countries.
Completely original, this novel’s single mother protagonist, Sibylla, is erudite, intellectual and an eccentric tutor to her son Ludo, a child genius. Obsessively showing Kurosawa’s classic movie, The Seven Samurai, Sibylla believes it will provide the fatherless boy with suitable role models.
Ludo himself masters an amazing range of knowledge and is determined both to become the youngest student at Oxford, and to find his father. Full of verve, innovation and conundrums of various kinds, The Last Samurai is a long and demanding book, but well worth the challenges it offers.
Playwright Willy Russell’s first novel, The Wrong Boy (Doubleday), gives us a child’s-eye view of a hypocritical society in northern England. Eleven-year-old Raymond reveals his inner feelings in a series of letters addressed to his pop idol, Morrissey. As in his plays, Russell successfully blends humour and pathos even misery with sharp characterisation, though at times the coincidences stretch credulity.
Like Knowledge of Angels, Jill Paton Walsh’s new novel, A Desert in Bohemia (Doubleday), has a whimsical, fairy-tale quality. Intended as a political allegory of post-war displacement and oppression, the narrative fails to reconcile its fanciful and realistic elements. In contrast, Ursula Hegi’s The Vision of Emma Blau (Simon & Schuster) is a lucid and convincing multigenerational epic. This is the promised companion piece to Hegi’s successful 1994 Stones from the River, which was set in Burgdorf, Germany, the home town of paterfamilias Stefan Blau in the new novel.
The two other novels chronicling family histories have recently been released in trade paperback. Nomi Eve’s very readable debut, The Family Orchard (Little, Brown) is a semi-autobiographical saga set mainly in the Middle East of a Jewish family over five generations.
A Good House (Doubleday), on the other hand, opens soon after World War II and concerns three generations of a small-town Ontario family. This is Bonnie Barnard’s first novel, but she is already established as a short-story writer. Winner of Canada’s Giller Prize, A Good House is described by Carol Shields as the “finest novel published in some years in our country”.
In even colder climes, True North (Macmillan) by Kimberly Kafka (a great niece of Franz) involves a lone white woman among the Alaskan Ingelik tribe. As one might expect from such a lineage, Kafka’s writing is forceful, but the plot is more reminiscent of Jack London than her illustrious forebear.
Another first-time novelist already established in other genres is TV and children’s writer Sandi Toksvig. Whistling for the Elephants (Black Swan) centres on 10-year-old Dorothy’s adventures at Sassaspaneck zoo. Witty and wry (“America Land of Therapy”), Toksvig is both informative about animals and imaginative.
Paperback reissues include Margaret Forster’s intriguing The Memory Box (Penguin) about a woman’s slow and at first reluctant quest for the mother who died shortly after her birth. A similar theme informs Cleave (Picador), Nikki Gemmel’s second novel, which follows a young girl’s journey from Sydney into the powerfully evoked Australian wilderness in pursuit of her absentee father.
In Local Girls (Vintage), Alice Hoffman also concentrates mainly on one central character, Gretel Samuelson, who is growing into young adulthood. Told in a series of 15 linked stories and seen largely from Samuelson’s viewpoint, Local Girls cleverly conveys the huge emotional cost of familial disintegration.
Last but far from least of the paperbacks is Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy (Bloomsbury), which won the 1999 National Book Award. Abrilliantly structured novel, its gradual revelations bring Irish and American experiences together in an unsentimental but moving way.