Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham and lives in London. The author of several novels, including The House of Sleep (1997), The Closed Circle (1998). He has also written a prize-winning biography of B.S. Johnson Like A Fiery Elephant (2004).
Age in year of publication: thirty-three.
J. M. Coetzee 1940–
1990 Age of Iron
Three novels by J. M. Coetzee could easily have made this list. They are Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Age of Iron (1990). Coetzee is a master of tone and colour, subtleties and ironies. His novels are full of echoes of other work — Shakespeare, the Bible, Kafka, Dostoevsky — and are at times harrowing.
Age of Iron demonstrates Coetzee’s skill at using voice: Elizabeth Curren, who is dying of cancer in the old South Africa, writes to her daughter, who lives abroad. From the first page, you can feel the tension in her voice, her sense of right and wrong, how frightened she is, how frail and vulnerable.
In Coetzee’s work, the public world becomes a sort of darkness, constantly encroaching, threatening to take over. Here we have the drama of the last years of the apartheid regime: riots, schoolchildren on strike, white liberals like our narrator deeply shocked by the savagery of what is going on around them. The sentences are perfect, the tone is relentless and unforgiving, and the sense of despair, both public and private, fills the book with a grief which is almost overwhelming.
J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town and now lives in Australia. His novel Life and Times of Michael K won the Booker Prize and the Prix Femina étranger in 1983. Disgrace won the Booker Prize in 1999. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.
Age in year of publication: fifty.
Ivy Compton-Burnett 1884–1969
1959 A Heritage and its History
‘“I hope Father will drop down dead on his way home,” said Ralph Challoner. “I really do hope it.”’ This ferocious request is customary within the families of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s imagination. Simon Challoner longs to inherit the estate of his Uncle Edwin, one of those men who malevolently enters a room just in time to hear ill of himself. Widowed, Edwin marries the young Rhoda, whom Simon impregnates in an idle moment. Edwin accepts the ensuing son as his own, and the distressed Simon, having lost his inheritance, marries Fanny and begets five vocally omnipresent children whom he rears tyrannically, in fear of the workhouse and the orphanage. Simon saves himself and his heritage in a manner so unimaginable that we are left to imagine it.
Written predominantly in dialogue, in devastating conversational exchanges, this high comedy is so biting and acerbic, and so clever, that discussions of potential incest seem much the same as comments on the carving or the state of the nursery. Ivy Compton-Burnett presented her mordant novels of family passions and decay in matchless, clipped prose, revealing beneath the prim surface of English upper middle-class life the presence of sin, the absence of charity and the necessity for suspicion, cunning and revenge — in that order. She is incomparable.
Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in Middlesex and lived in London. Of her nineteen novels, the best-known are More Women Than Men (1933), A House and its Head (1935) and Manservant and Maidservant (1947).
Age in year of publication: seventy-five.
Jim Crace 1946–
1997 Quarantine
Sometimes in a writer’s life one book seems to crystallize a talent, seems to fulfil all of the promise of the earlier books, seems to deal with themes and obsessions and tones which have appeared before, offering them a new simplicity and seriousness and sense of perfection. Jim Crace’s Quarantine, which tells the story of Jesus’s forty days in the desert, does just this. Crace has always been interested in how society emerges from the primitive, in landscapes which are bleak and deserted, in the intricacies of trading and bonding. His writing has always been stark and poetic, beautifully crafted.
In this novel, Jesus is a chimera, he barely appears. The novel dramatizes his absence and the presence of four other pilgrims in the desert, each carrying a burden of fear and desire. It focuses on Musa, a trader who has been left for dead by his family and who believes that Jesus has healed him; on his wife Miri, who is pregnant; and on their relationships with the pilgrims. The novel is written in a style of calm perfection, full of echoes of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, with a remarkable number of sentences in iambic pentameter. The physical sense of the desert is superb; Crace’s telling of the drama between the characters makes the book the masterpiece that his earlier books had presaged.
Jim Crace was born in north London and lives in Birmingham. His other books include Continent (1986), winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Gift of Stones (1988) and Arcadia (1992). Quarantine won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1997, and was followed by Being Dead (1999), The Devil’s Larder (2001), Six (2003) and The Pesthouse (2007).
Age in year of publication: fifty-one.
Michael Cunningham 1952–
1990 A Home at the End of the World
This novel is narrated by four of its characters, and its considerable power and emotional force come from that sense of voice which governs contemporary American fiction. Here the voices of Bobby and Jonathan, old school friends; Alice, Jonathan’s mother; and Clare, who befriends both men and has a child with one of them, are compelling and haunting, full of a melancholy effort to make sense of things. There is a luxury in the writing which echoes F. Scott Fitzgerald; the narrative contains beautiful sentences, astonishing moments of insight and disclosure. The first half of the book, especially, has a rich perfection about it; Cunningham is particularly good on family attachments and entanglements. The early relationship between Jonathan and Bobby, their desire for each other, their early sexual encounters, are wonderfully described, and Jonathan’s mother’s observation of her gay son is superb. (‘I knew the bite and meanness of boys was missing from his nature.’)
In the end, as in all American fiction, the true hero of the book is America itself: its ability to change; the sudden, bright opportunities it offers to make money, to make friends; the beauty and variety of its landscapes; its ability to tempt us with hope and resolution. This is certainly one of the best American novels of the decade.
Michael Cunningham was born in Los Angeles, and now lives in New York City. A Home at the End of the World is his second novel. His fourth novel, The Hours, appeared in 1998 and won the Pulitzer Prize. Specimen Days appeared in 2005.
Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.
Robertson Davies 1913–1995
1970 Fifth Business
‘I shall be as brief as I can, for it is not by piling up detail that I hope to achieve my picture, but by putting the emphasis where I think it belongs.’ The novel begins with a careful, precise and striking first-person account of a boy growing up in rural Canada in the early years of the century, his sharp intelligence and narrative skills, and perhaps bitter wisdom, cutting through the dark, conservative world of his parents and their village. Our narrator, almost to spite his mother, takes part in the First World War, and his matter-of-fact version of life in the trenches, of his own injuries and time in hospital, is disturbing and convincing.