Like John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, this charismatic novel follows the adventures of a man in search of the meaning of his existence. Our hero lives in the United States, where most people are white: white people can be seen. He is black, part of an amorphous mass, and he comes to see that, black, he is invisible. He tells us his story, and as one event follows another we watch him being led deeper and deeper into a realization of just how angry a black man in America should be.
In his travels as a black man in a white land, his idealism encounters all the temptations of his generation, and as each one comes his way, it is found to be a fraud — ‘white’ education, Communism and other radical ‘isms’, gambling, drink, sex, crime, adapting to a white society, fighting white society — all these ploys and distractions are shown to be deadly. Ellison plays with every myth about the black man — rape, for instance — and dismisses each one. He brings this about by concealing his message in a narrative as compelling and engaging as all the great storytelling novels. Picaresque in its vision, and in its insistence, finally, on the necessity for acceptance if not forgiveness, this profound, angry book is one of the great American novels of the post-war period, still resonant today.
Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma and lived mostly in the USA. This, his only published novel, won the National Book Award in 1953.
Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.
Jeffrey Eugenides 1960–
1993 The Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, The Virgin Suicides, is exciting, accomplished and beautifully written. The style is rich, the sentences are carefully modulated, the tone is relaxed and knowing, cynical and humorous, as though F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nabokov and the Coen Brothers had met on the lawns of some grand American suburb.
The novel, narrated by a man in early middle age, tells the story of the five Lisbon sisters, teenagers much sought after by the local youths, who commit suicide in the same year. The narrator becomes a sort of detective, or historian, gathering details about the lives and deaths of the girls, going over and analysing certain encounters with them, or glimpses of them. This is a novel alive with desire, with memories of desire, with fading desire. The mating rituals of white suburban America become, in a superbly controlled narrative, both infinitely sad and infinitely funny. The intensity of the dissection of each detail, as though the antics of the Lisbon family were of immense national importance, gives the novel’s dark laughter a manic edge. The novel is full of asides and minor digressions, all of them fascinating and perfectly chosen, some of them funny enough to make you laugh out loud.
Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and lives in New York. The Virgin Suicides was his first novel, his second Middlesex (2002) won the Pulitzer Prize.
Age in year of publication: thirty-three.
J. G. Farrell 1935–1979
1973 The Siege of Krishnapur
There is, in J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, an odd and original mixture of melancholy and hilarity. He is interested in the comic possibilities of the English character abroad as the colonists try to create order from chaos but instead create only further chaos. In The Siege of Krishnapur our heroes find themselves in India in the years after the Great Exhibition when the Victorians believed that they could spread progress. The Indians, however, are getting ready to revolt in the Mutiny.
Farrell loves set scenes: the mad sermon during the siege, the fallen white woman to whom no one dare speak, the natives gathering daily on a nearby hill to watch the trouble, love and poetry in a hot climate, knives and forks and spoons in a cannon. There is a sensational argument between two doctors about the cure for cholera; one dies from his own remedy. Farrell’s sense of detail never fails him, and his research into Victorian beliefs, or methods of warfare, to give just two examples, offers the novel credibility without overburdening it. He manages a light tone while remaining alert to the weight of his subject; this novel is a brilliantly dark comedy.
J. G. Farrell was born in Liverpool and lived in London until a few months before his death. He was working on his novel The Hill Station (1981) when he was drowned off the south coast of Ireland. The Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker Prize in 1973. He also wrote Troubles (1970), which won the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010, and The Singapore Grip (1978).
Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.
William Faulkner 1897–1962
1962 The Reivers: A Reminiscence
This book was written at the end of Faulkner’s life, but there is no sign of any loss of energy, or flaws in narrative skill, or waning of sheer enthusiasm. It uses a rambling style full of parentheses and subordinate clauses, as though someone were telling a story and constantly interrupting himself.
It is clear that the story is being told in the early 1960s about events in the early years of the century when old systems of manners and morals and landholding still obtained in the Southern states. Enter a motor car which is purchased by our narrator’s grandfather. The narrator is eleven years old, but he is wise even then, and watchful. The car is driven by Boon, his grandfather’s black servant, and when all the adults in the family go away for a funeral, our narrator, Boon and a man called Ned travel without permission to Memphis. The roads are appalling, and Ned is not entirely sane. Slowly, we realize that our narrator is telling the story of a few crucial days in his own education, when he mixed with people — including a number of prostitutes — outside his own class, when he witnessed confusion, nights in strange beds, homesickness, possible disaster, a racism which was new to him and an extraordinary amount of highjinks. When he gets home to his ordered upbringing, full of old patrician values, he has changed. The style, however, for all its rambling, has a sharpness and a sophistication, and the reader has a right to feel that as Faulkner lay dying, he must have taken pleasure in creating this novel.
William Faulkner was born in Mississippi and divided his time between there and Hollywood. His novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950.
Age in year of publication: sixty-five.
Sebastian Faulks 1953–
1993 Birdsong
This novel, one of the most popular of the 1990s, received the most nominations from our readers as their favourite novel of the last fifty years.
An elegiac, romantic work, it is both a heart-breaking evocation of life in the killing fields of the First World War, and a passionate account of an anguished love affair. Faulks interweaves these two central narratives with the love stories of generations of one family, the birth of children, and the power of love, sexual and otherwise, so that hope flutters through the story like the thin but exquisite song of the birds from which this poignant novel takes its name.
Faulks’ hero, Stephen Wraysford, is an unwilling survivor: through his sad eyes the agonizing years of battle follow, one after another, and he sees every man with whom he has shared this holocaust blasted to oblivion. Most powerful is the recreation of the underground tunnels which lay beneath the battlefields, constructed at terrible cost, and which Faulks, with consummate skill, presents as an underground Hell, the inevitable punishment for humanity so fruitlessly at war. ‘Jack saw part of Turner’s face and hair still attached to a piece of skull rolling to a halt where the tunnel narrowed … there was an arm with a corporal’s strip on it near his feet, but most of the men’s bodies had been blown into the moist earth.’ And thus Birdsong is also a testament to the millions of men who were slaughtered in the abattoir of Flanders Fields, a reminder to later generations never to forget ‘the pity of the past’.