Already a subscriber? Log in
Robson does write well. Catch’s reflections on her world are finely teased out in his precise, poetic prose and she is a well-drawn if irritating character. As the novel progressed I could understand why everyone who came into contact with her super-sensitivity and modest high-mindedness was roused to ire. Stop mithering and just get on with things, I wanted to shout, at both Robson and his leading lady.
Another passive character, this time male, is the focus of Michael Nath’s La Rochelle. Like Catch, Dr Mark Chopra, a neurologist in a central London hospital, is stymied by overthinking. The emotional heart of his life is his intense friendship with Ian and Laura, a faintly mysterious couple he first met at a party several years earlier.
The novel opens with Laura’s sudden disappearance after an argument with Ian. Over the following week Mark and Ian meet each night in their local to discuss where she might be. Mark has not had a girlfriend for years, partly because he has always held a not-so-secret torch for Laura. After a mammoth drinking spree and the gradual discovery of Ian’s serial infidelity, Mark is finally spurred into action. Inspired by the heroes of the war films and classic novels that run through his internal monologue, he sets off to find Laura.
As with Catch, the writing is the star of the show; Nath has a distinctive style that blends a lyrical and yet chatty stream of consciousness with flashes of magic realism. A curious and original aspect to the novel is that Mark is of mixed race and yet, in defiance of current literary trends, absolutely nothing is made of this. The struggle to be heroically masculine in the modern world is the novel’s overriding theme, and Mark and Ian are amusing and depressingly recognisable portraits of ungallant metropolitan men.
There’s no such wimpishness in Alex Preston’s novel, although Charlie Wales, the central character, probably drinks in the same pubs as Mark and Ian. This Bleeding City depicts a completely different kind of contemporary man; Charlie, a trader in a Mayfair hedge fund, has suppressed his self-avowed sensitive side, and swashbuckled through his twenties, stealing friends’ girlfriends and colleagues’ jobs, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. He is the kind of banker (and yes, this is Cockney rhyming slang) who is embarrassed by his sweet suburban parents because they aren’t rich and who nicknames his closest workmate Coffee Teeth.
Despite Charlie’s ghastliness, it was refreshing to read about a confident go-getter, who wasn’t thwarted by the kind of neurasthenic angst suffered by so many characters in literary fiction. Learning about the world of high finance and its misogynist inhabitants was fascinating. Oddly, considering money matters are usually as interesting to me as watching paint dry, it was the subplot of Charlie’s lovelife that began to pall. When the action pulled away from the cut and thrust of banking, the cracking narrative pace began to falter. Charlie’s colleague, Madison, aka Coffee Teeth, is a far more nuanced character than his posh bleeding-heart liberal girlfriend, Jo, and his grand amour, the French femme fatale, Vero. Cassandra-esque Madison predicts the collapse of the banking system but nobody listens or is grateful.
Though Preston’s prose is at times glib and his dialogue weak (his characters speak with unrealistic hyper-articulacy and descriptiveness), he should be applauded for bringing to life a world that is generally only written about in terms of catastrophic but dry figures in news stories.
The most confident and accomplished of these four debuts is Rupture by Simon Lelic. Samuel Szajkowski is a gentle, highly-intelligent history teacher in a London comprehensive. One summer morning he walks into the school assembly and opens fire, killing three pupils and one teacher before turning the gun on himself.
The build-up to this tragedy is pieced together through witness interviews conducted by the young policewoman in charge of the case, Detective Inspector Lucia May. Samuel’s sad mitigating story of bullying at the hands of his pupils and fellow teachers is intercut with Lucia’s own experience of bullying by her sexist colleagues at the Met. Lelic’s economical, oblique style successfully encourages the reader to work alongside Lucia to understand what has happened. He captures the different tones of characters’ voices brilliantly and the novel is a cool, controlled view of various kinds of institutionalised cruelty and corruption.
At times I wanted more detail about both Lucia’s and Samuel’s lives, as, unlike Michael Nath, for example, Simon Lelic is not a sensual writer who revels in the fabric of experience. But, overall, his restraint is admirable and Rupture has none of the common self indulgences of debut novels. He is definitely a writer to watch.
Because you read about fiction
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in