Sebastian Faulks was born in Newbury and lives in London. Birdsong was his fourth novel, one of a French trilogy which began with The Girl at the Lion d’Or (1989) and concluded with Charlotte Gray (1998). His other novels include On Great Dolphin Street (2001), Human Traces (2005), Engleby (2007) and the James Bond novel Devil May Care (2008).
Age in year of publication: forty.
Penelope Fitzgerald 1916–2000
1995 The Blue Flower
This is a novel about the illogicality of love, and much else: dialectics, philosophy, food, medicine, eighteenth-century surgery (fatal), mathematics and gossip. It fairly hums with absorbing personal and philosophical considerations. The impoverished young nobleman Friedrich (Fritz) von Hardenburg, later known as Novalis, the great eighteenth-century German Romantic poet and philosopher, falls in love with Sophie von Kuhn. She is twelve when Fritz falls in love with her, fifteen when she dies of tuberculosis. Sophie is silly and uninteresting but Fritz’s love is not. Embedded in a German world of family and food notable for its unquestioning brutishness — geese, for example, were killed after being plucked alive, twice — Sophie inspires Fritz’s writing, philosophy and his Romantic quest, symbolized by his book, The Blue Flower. The scene in which Fritz reads the opening chapter of this early work to the uncomprehending Sophie is only one of the episodes in which absurdity and heartbreak cannot be separated.
Penelope Fitzgerald was a writer with an ironic, dry wit, and an exquisite, elliptical prose style. Everything she wrote seemed effortless: her timing, her obliquity, her knowing way of telling us little but implying much. This conciseness nevertheless produced a tumultuous and convincing effect, so that whilst Death stalks its pages, The Blue Flower, crowded with seductive personalities, glows with laughter and fizzles with interest and ideas.
Penelope Fitzgerald was born in Lincoln and lived in London. The Blue Flower won the US National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 1998. Her other novels include The Beginning of Spring (1988), The Gate of Angels (1990) and Offshore, which won the 1979 Booker Prize. A story collection The Means of Escape appeared in 2000 and her selected writings A House of Air in 2003.
Age in year of publication: seventy-nine.
Thomas Flanagan 1923–2002
1979 The Year of the French
In 1798 the people of County Mayo rose up to join the small force sent by the French Revolutionary government to support Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen in their fight to liberate Ireland from English rule.
To the Irish, the English were ‘Big Lords’, the absentee landlords, Protestant persecutors; to the English, the Irish were savages, traitors, Catholics. It is a rare writer who can project dispassion into this gruesome relationship. Flanagan does so, his vast knowledge of the period pouring through the voices of a handful of men of the time: we see what happened through their eyes, their passions and suffering. They in turn reveal to us a cast of thousands, so that every sound and vision of 1798 erupts before us — the battles, the beddings, the slaughter, the boozing, the poetry, the hangings, the generals and the English at war, and at their ease.
For the Irish, ease is their music and poetry, which flows through the dramatic pages of this great epic. Even in the thick of battle Thomas Flanagan has a remarkable way of using the particular eloquence of Irish English so that we understand why, two hundred years later, few remember Cornwallis’s victory over the rebels at Ballinamuck (the place of the pig), whilst the Irish songs about the year of the French are still sung today.
Thomas Flanagan was born in Connecticut, and lived in both Ireland and America. He won the 1979 US National Book Critics Circle Award for this novel.
Age in year of publication: fifty-six.
Richard Ford 1944–
1986 The Sportswriter
Richard Ford has a special ability to create complex moments in his narrative where something difficult — a feeling, a memory, a desire or an action — is explained and understood, and then he allows the explanation not to be enough, he preserves a sense of mystery and strangeness about what his characters feel and how they are motivated.
Frank Bascombe is the narrator of both The Sportswriter and Independence Day (1995); he lives in New Jersey. His life is, on the face of it, ordinary. He is divorced, he had a child who died, he thinks about women and work, he has friends. Ford surrounds him — both novels take place over a short space of time — with a sort of halo as he meditates on his life and days, tries to come to terms with those around him. He is calm, nothing is exaggerated, the scale of his emotions remains small, and yet — and this is the genius of The Sportswriter — his feelings are rendered with such sympathy and complexity, such a sense of wonder and careful, thoughtful prose that he burns his way into the reader’s imagination as a modern Everyman. The novel uses time with particular skilclass="underline" the three days in which it takes place contrasted with a lifetime in flashback and memory. The events of these three days — meetings with close family and friends — are brilliantly and memorably rendered.
Richard Ford was born in Mississippi and has lived in Princeton and Michigan. He has written a number of excellent short stories — collected in Rock Springs (1988) Women with Men (1997) and A Multitude of Sins (2002) — and four important novels: The Sportswriter, Wildlife (1990), Independence Day (1995) and The Lay of the Land (2006). Independence Day won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996.
Age in year of publication: forty-two.
Frederick Forsyth 1938–
1971 The Day of the Jackal
Everybody knows that General de Gaulle died in his bed and all attempts to assassinate him failed. Therefore, any novel which focuses on an attempt to assassinate him must lack one central tension: excitement about the outcome. How is it, then, that this book, almost thirty years old, remains powerful and exciting?
It is written in the style of investigative journalism, or indeed a police report. There are hardly any flourishes, and there is a great deal of technical information. The narrative hardly ever enters anyone’s mind, and this gives the novel a strange, chilling tone: things are described as from a distance, as though someone later managed to piece together what had happened, and this makes the events of the novel very convincing indeed.