But this is not a novel about childhood, nor is it a war novel. It is a novel about what happens then, after the drama of childhood and war. It is told in the shadow of four figures from childhood: Boy Staunton, who becomes a millionaire politician; his wife Leola, our narrator’s former sweetheart; Mrs Dempster, a minister’s wife, who goes mad; her son Paul, who becomes a magician (Davies loved the idea of magic). Our narrator’s sensibility makes him a sharp chronicler of the world around him; his interest in saints and religion becomes a secret life. His account of the world and of his own life is rigorously intelligent; its stilted style is in contrast with the deep pain which is buried in the narrative, and the play between the two is often breathtaking and always engrossing.
Robertson Davies was born in Ontario and lived much of his life in Toronto. He published three novel sequences: The Salterton Trilogy, The Deptford Trilogy and The Cornish Trilogy. Fifth Business is the first book of The Deptford Trilogy, which was completed with The Manticore (1972) and World of Wonders (1975).
Age in year of publication: fifty-seven.
Louis de Bernières 1954–
1994 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
(US: Corelli’s Mandolin)
Set on a Greek island during the Second World War, this novel combines narrative sweep, a mixture of tragedy and comedy, a number of extraordinary and lovable characters and the sense of a tightly knit traditional society in a changing world. It almost stands alone in contemporary English fiction for its ability to deal confidently with the outside world, for the warmth of its tone, for its breadth and scope and for its lack of cynicism.
It tells, using methods which remind the reader of both Charles Dickens and Gabriel García Márquez, the story of Dr Iannis and his daughter Pelagia living easily together on Cephalonia in the years before the war. When the Italian army invades the island, the Italian control is half-hearted and almost good-humoured. Dr Iannis and his daughter try to ignore the considerable charms of Captain Corelli, who is billeted with them. The novel moves from Iannis’s kitchen to the life of the village to the terrible cruelty of the war. Stories about music, medicine, fishing and horrific events in Greece in the Second World War are placed beside other stories about love and death. The tone moves effortlessly from the very funny to the deeply harrowing once the Germans arrive on the island. The writing is always fluid; the scenes are fast moving and varied and always interesting; the novel is fiercely readable, almost impossible to put down.
Louis de Bernières was born in and lives in London. His other novels include The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman (1992). Captain Corelli’s Mandolin won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 1995.
Age in year of publication: forty.
Don DeLillo 1936–
1997 Underworld
The publication of Underworld confirms Don DeLillo, if we needed confirmation, as the most exciting, original and innovative American novelist now working. He has been fascinated by what happens to language, truth and logic during a late phase of capitalism; how a society which grew around dreams of hope, of infinite optimism, deludes itself and is deluded by ritual and images and words. He loves technology, its mystery and glow, its hum and buzz; he is interested in hidden systems and codes, by the poetics of late twentieth-century paranoia.
Underworld, all eight hundred and twenty-seven pages of it, is his epic, his panoramic vision of the United States in his time. It is obsessed with waste and garbage, including the concern of J. Edgar Hoover (who has various walk-on parts in the novel) that protest groups will go through his garbage and put it on public display. The novel is also obsessed with the bomb and the Cold War, and the vast areas of the American imagination which have been filled with images of fear and destruction. In Underworld DeLillo also presents a relaxed version of ordinary life, intimate family relations, memories of childhood, tender love and sexual desire. He places these beside magnificent set scenes about public life and history, and the result is a great monument to the enduring power of the novel.
Don DeLillo, son of Italian immigrants, was born in the Bronx, New York, and still lives in New York City. His novel White Noise won the National Book Award in 1985, and Libra (1988) the Irish Times Literature Prize.
Age in year of publication: sixty-one.
Anita Desai 1937–
1984 In Custody
In India, where so many have so little, what is the use, what is the glory of poetry? Anita Desai’s answer takes shape in the person of Deven, a teacher of Hindi in a college in Mirepore, a dustbowl town near Delhi. Married to Sarla, a living pillar of pessimism, his real love is poetry, in the old language, Urdu.
Deven is a timid, put-upon soul, bullied by his friend Murad into interviewing the great but reclusive poet Nur. Deven’s visits to Delhi to see him turn into a nightmare of farcical episodes in which drink, layabouts, frenzied birds and even more frenzied wives manipulate Deven, forcing him into debt and dishonour. Nur is a splendid creation, lizard-like, rapacious; yet of the two it is Deven who, in his acceptance of the price he has to pay in the service of art, triumphs over the multitudes of self-destructions on offer.
This is a novel with many meanings, many faces. One of the most resonant is that of India itself, with its blazing heat, its preference for individualistic chaos: this is India in the early 1980s on the point of change, during that recent past when the wonders of its history were abandoned and crumbling. Placing this magnificent inheritance in safe custody, Desai exposes the dilemmas of modern India in cool and lyrical prose.
Anita Desai was born in Mussoorie, India, and lives in England and the USA. This novel became a Merchant Ivory film in 1993; other praised novels include Fire on the Mountain (1977), Clear Light of Day (1980) and Fasting, Feasting (1999), which was the runner-up for the Booker Prize.
Age in year of publication: forty-seven.
Pete Dexter 1943–
1988 Paris Trout
This is a clearly written, tightly paced novel about the Deep South in the time between the Korean and the Vietnam Wars when racial segregation was absolute, but certain actions against black people — cold-blooded murder of teenagers, for example — would not be condoned by a white jury.
Paris Trout is a moneylender, a small-time banker and a storekeeper. He is tight-lipped and ruthless. He has never paid taxes and he obeys no laws. He has recently married Hanna, an intelligent, sensitive and attractive schoolteacher, and he has made her life a misery. He has also lent money to a black man to buy a car. When the payments are not made he visits the man with a local thug and manages to shoot a young black girl, killing her, and injuring an older woman.
He is brought to trial; Harry Seagraves is his lawyer. Seagraves is a good man, but he is not a hero. He grows to loathe Trout, but he still defends him. He is sure that he can use his clout in the locality to have him released. The novel makes clear that in a society like this no one can afford to behave heroically; most people are prepared to play with the system or be bought. Trout understands this like nobody else. No one’s motives are pure except perhaps Hanna Trout’s; she remains eloquent and long-suffering and determined to survive. The last hundred pages of the novel are full of unexpected twists and turns; a wonderful addition to the contemporary literature of the South.