Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh in Victoria and now lives in New York. His award-winning novels include Bliss (1981), Illywhacker (1985) Jack Maggs (1997), Theft (2003) and His Illegal Self (2006). Oscar and Lucinda won the 1988 Booker Prize and True History of the Kelly Gang won the 2001 Booker Prize.
Age in year of publication: forty-five.
Angela Carter 1940–1992
1991 Wise Children
Dora Chance, a seventy-five-year-old ex-hoofer, is the leading lady of Wise Children. Clustered round her, as in a Busby Berkeley musical extravaganza, is the theatrical dynasty of Hazards and Chances, artistes and entertainers. Everything comes in twos in this novel. Twins are everywhere, born on both sides of the blanket. Dora and Nora Chance are the illegitimate twin daughters of the great thespian Sir Melchior Hazard. Living in Bard Road, Brixton, they are ‘two batty old hags’ now, but they were not always thus, and Dora is writing her reminiscences, a garrulous account of their theatrical ups and downs — a ‘history of the world in party frocks’. Wise Children turns a hundred cartwheels as it introduces its entertainments. One of them is about fathers, known and unknown — for, as Dora says, ‘You can’t fool a sperm.’ Another is a rapturous homage to the theatre of Shakespeare and the bawdy cheer of showbusiness. Most of all, this is a ribald satire on Britain’s enduring class system. It speaks for the popular and for the people, celebrating the incivilities and trash culture of those who live with vim and vigour on the wrong side of the tracks.
Angela Carter was a trailblazer. She made British the idea of magical realism and injected her glittering version of it into the work of many of her contemporaries.
Angela Carter was born and lived in London. An admired critic, short-story writer and polemicist, her fiction includes The Bloody Chamber (1979) and Nights at the Circus (1984).
Age in year of publication: fifty-one.
Raymond Carver 1938–1988
1988 Where I’m Calling From
Raymond Carver chose this selection of his stories before he died, a permanent deterrent to the rash of imitators who have since appeared. Fortunately his writing is inimitable.
His voice is that of contemporary America. Carver man is mostly out of work, at home with the vacuum cleaner and the family cat, a bottle too near to hand. Carver woman, with stretch marks, heart of steel and that extra pound of flesh, is keeping herself together with a fixed grin and the nearest beer.
These are gutsy lives full of regret, opportunities lost, luck that should have been just a little better: but there is love too — all the more real because it grows in arid soil. Carver’s home patch is modern marriage, of which he is the official recorder: ‘Once I woke up in the night to hear Iris grinding her teeth’, and ‘There was a time when I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now, I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that?’ Only Raymond Carver can. His style, economic, unadorned, emphasizes the tough realities of his domestic themes. He has been called the laureate of the dispossessed and he is, but he packs much more than that into the ten or twenty pages of each of these life-changing stories, a classic of modern American writing.
Raymond Carver was born in Oregon and lived in various cities in America, finally settling in New York. Some of these stories come from his collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) and many were used by Robert Altman in the film Short Cuts.
Posthumous publication.
Raymond Chandler 1888–1959
1953 The Long Good-Bye
Raymond Chandler’s original style, the dry humour of his wisecracking private eye, Philip Marlowe, instantly created a milieu perfectly suited to the ways of the late twentieth-century world. ‘I hear voices crying in the night and I go see what’s the matter.’ Grief is Marlowe’s business.
Marlowe is not a trusting man: too much alcohol, too many lies have given him a hide of iron. But he takes to Terry Lennox, a scarred war hero, a drunk, like so many Chandler heroes, who is married to Sylvia, the daughter of a power-obsessed multimillionaire. Brilliantly constructed around the brutal murder of Sylvia Lennox, Marlowe’s disillusioned despair is matched by the drunken writer Roger Wade, married to another of Chandler’s extraordinary women — these women are always half-crazed, beautiful, angelically so: in Chandler’s jungle it’s a moot point whether beauty masks good or evil. Chandler’s importance and influence are more than a matter of his taut writing style. His genius lies behind the personas of the great Hollywood film stars — Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Lauren Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck and others — who portrayed the characters he invented. Chandler’s novels originated Hollywood film noir, not the other way around. In this, the sixth of his seven Marlowe novels, his immortal private eye engages with murder and betrayal in his meanest and most moving crusade.
Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago, educated in England and lived in California, the setting for most of his work. Other great Marlowe novels are The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940).
Age in year of publication: sixty-five.
Bruce Chatwin 1940–1989
1982 On the Black Hill
This is a brooding, dark novel which has conscious echoes of Hardy and Lawrence. It opens at the turn of the century on a hill farm in Wales when the twin boys Lewis and Benjamin Jones are born to Mary, who has married beneath her, and Amos, a fiercely independent spirit.
Chatwin makes the love which binds these four people into something taut and hard which maims them and haunts them, and is under constant pressure. The twins behave as one person and can feel each other’s pain; Chatwin manages to make their behaviour credible and interesting. The novel is full of detail about farming, weather, animals, nature, furniture, clothes, mood swings, auctions, feuds between neighbours, social changes.
The arrival of the First World War makes Amos even more sour than he is already; one of the twins is forced to join the army, and then Chatwin makes them both even more inwardlooking and strange when the war is over. All the main characters in the book are motivated and controlled by forces which they do not understand, nothing comes easy to them, and the reader becomes totally involved then in the great battles which go on within each of them and between all of them, and between all of them and the world outside. Although this is an old-fashioned family saga, it is not a piece of pastiche. It is a deeply felt and deeply moving novel about complex characters and relationships.