Family and Friends includes some of Anita Brookner’s finest writing — and some of her most trenchant. Her fiction is noted for its subtlety and technical skill but this can be deceptive, and has indeed deceived the odd ghetto of English critics who greet her novels with delighted misunderstanding. Elsewhere it is recognized that, in ambush behind her classically beautiful prose, rooted in her territory of small lives, is a devilry that works on her stories like lemon zest. Family and Friends, in Alfred’s final revenge, provides a finale so delicate and precise that you can almost see the keen eye of the author slowly blinking at you.
Anita Brookner, the daughter of Polish parents, was born and educated in London, where she lives. Her fourth novel, Hôtel du Lac, won the 1984 Booker Prize.
Age in year of publication: fifty-seven.
Anthony Burgess 1917–1993
1980 Earthly Powers
Anthony Burgess wrote a thousand words a day — journalism, reviews, criticism, autobiography, verse, short stories, novels. He never repeated himself. He wrote science fiction and a thriller, he wrote A Clockwork Orange (1962), he wrote novels about Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Beethoven, and many comic novels.
His most ambitious novel and the work in which he combines his comic talent, his sense of history and his nose for a good story is Earthly Powers. It is narrated by one Kenneth Toomey, an octogenarian celebrity writer, a cross between Burgess himself, Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, a man capable of producing the following first sentence: ‘It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.’ The archbishop wants to talk about Carlo, Toomey’s brother-in-law who became Pope and could work miracles. The novel explores the cruelty of the century watched through Toomey’s decadent and world-weary eyes. It is a gripping, exhilarating and often melodramatic book which plays with ideas of good and evil, and combines moments from history — the Holocaust, the death of the followers of Jim Jones, changes in the Catholic Church — with strong characters and moments of pure theatre.
Anthony Burgess was the pseudonym of John Anthony Burgess Wilson. He was born in Manchester of a Catholic family and lived for many years in Monaco. He was also a composer. In 1984 he produced a book which listed his ninety-nine favourite novels. People suspected this was the hundredth.
Age in year of publication: sixty-three.
William Burroughs 1914–1998
1959 Naked Lunch
This is a novel of dreams and nightmares, hallucinations and sudden moments of crystal clarity. Nothing connects, except an uncompromising tone, an attitude, and the constant presence of the body in all its ugly manifestations, and the state, or organized society, in all its brutality. This is not to forget the narrator’s relish in offering further images of pure disgust, setting scenes of cruelty and violence and drug-induced craziness and laughing at the good of it all. If there is a pregnancy, then there will be a bloody miscarriage; if there are teeth, then they will fall out; if there is a passenger plane, then someone is chopping the floor out of the lavatory. Blood, semen, pus, gangrene, venereal diseases, all types of drugs, belches, farts, hangings, shit, toilet paper, condoms, are everywhere. There is some marvellous surgery, including a scene in which a live monkey is sewn into the patient. There are sick jokes about ‘niggers’ and Jews; there are some good one-liners: ‘May all your troubles be little ones, as one child molester says to the other.’ The tone is often deadpan, matter of fact, like a movie script; the book is full of a morbid energy and rhythm; the method, which is fast-moving, aleatory and jumbled, holds your attention and makes the novel oddly riveting, relentlessly dark and crazed.
William Burroughs was educated at Harvard. He lived for many years in Central and South America and Morocco. His other books include Junkie (1953), Cities of the Red Night (1981) and Queer (1987).
Age in year of publication: forty-five.
A. S. Byatt 1936–
1990 Possession
This feast of a novel, accurately subtitled ‘A Romance’, is replete with love stories both passionate and fateful, with high comedy, languishing tragedy, poetry, mystery and adventure.
The time is now — and then. Now tells the story of an array of scholars of varying levels of greed or goodwill, anxiety and envy, who pursue the literary and emotional pasts of the Browningesque poet Randolph Henry Ash, and Christabel LaMotte, poet and muse. Then is the story of the Victorian liaison between Ash and LaMotte which is dramatic and obscure, and — as is slowly revealed — thoroughly heartwrenching. The present-day lovers-to-be, Ash research assistant Roland Michell and LaMotte scholar Maud Bailey, are inheritors of and act in counterpoint to the lovers from the past.
A. S. Byatt is remarkable for the abundance and richness of her storytelling gifts. She offers robust drama — and a hundred other pleasures: myth and fairytale mingle with the poetic works of Ash and LaMotte and with journals, letters, mishaps, discoveries and farcical absurdities. Possession is a romance and a detective story which combines all the entertaining virtues of popular fiction with those qualities A. S. Byatt shares with George Eliot: prodigious narrative, imaginative energy and intelligence. Reading Possession is a mesmerizing experience; it becomes a happy addiction, one of those rare novels that lingers in the mind.
A. S. Byatt was born in Sheffield and lives in London. Amongst her novels, criticism and short stories are the Frederica Quartet: The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and The Whistling Woman (2002). The Children’s Book came out in 2009. Possession won the 1990 Booker Prize.
Age in year of publication: fifty-four.
Peter Carey 1943–
1988 Oscar and Lucinda
This is a virtuoso performance, an eloquent love story and an epic account of mid-nineteenth century life in England and Australia, interweaving a mercurial adventure story with the intimate, the comic and the fanciful.
Oscar Hopkins is born in Devon, the frail and red-headed son of a fundamentalist member of the Plymouth Brethren: his escape first into Anglicanism and then into gambling takes him to Australia in the 1850s to bring the word of Christ to New South Wales. Lucinda Leplastrier is an orphaned heiress, daughter of an early feminist, and she scandalizes Sydney by wearing rational dress, owning a glass factory and gambling compulsively. One of Carey’s triumphs in the novel is to make us care fervently about these two odd misfits; another is to surround them with an explosion of clergymen, glass-blowers, explorers, villains, a profusion of idiosyncratic characters galvanized into vigorous pursuit of the vagaries of chance by Carey’s singular genius. Equally admirable is his ferocious caricature of Imperial Britain and of nineteenth-century Australian history, and of the bigotry and intolerance of Christianity, particularly in its extreme Nonconformist modes. But it is Carey’s fertile imagination and quirky curiosity about all manner of things that give Oscar and Lucinda its special quality. This is a most sympathetic novel, full of ideas, endearing, full of gusto.