At the beginning the OAS decide, after many botched attempts, to hire an outsider to assassinate de Gaulle who has, in their opinion, betrayed Algeria. We learn very little about the Jackal, the man they hire: he has no thoughts and hardly any past, he is English, blond, efficient and ruthless. As his plans — perfect weapon, several new identities, perfect location — are made, the police in Paris slowly realize that the danger this time is real. Once this happens you cannot put the novel down, and there are moments when you almost want the Jackal to succeed. The narrative is fast moving, tense, supremely confident and makes this book a classic of its kind.
Frederick Forsyth was born in Kent and now lives in Hertfordshire. His other books include The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974).
Age in year of publication: thirty-three.
John Fowles 1926–2005
1966 The Magus
This novel follows in the great tradition of island stories in which our hero, Nicholas Urfe, innocent, raw and English, arrives in a strange and foreign place full of strange and foreign people. He is rational, intelligent and civilized and suddenly now is forced to grapple with dark and hidden forces.
The Magus is set in the years after the Second World War; Nicholas, an Oxford graduate, finds work as a teacher in a school on a remote Greek island. Fowles is brilliant at establishing the island’s topography, its bareness and its isolation. He also allows history and myth to hover over the book, so that at times Nicholas seems to be acting out an older story as he comes, like a moth to flame, to the house of Maurice Conchis on the island. Conchis is a conjuror, a story-teller, an art collector. His house is filled with ghosts, strange noises, odd music. And Nicholas is both frightened by what he finds there, and deeply drawn to and intrigued by it.
Fowles is fascinated by the darker aspects of male desire, and by the compulsive and the irrational. He manages to make his island both a real place, rugged and beautiful, and an imaginary place, as though Prospero and Caliban had recently walked these shores. Just as the protagonist is dragged deeper and deeper into the enigma of his host, so too the reader is constantly jolted and surprised by the drama in the novel between the rational and the mysterious.
John Fowles was born in Essex and lived in Lyme Regis. His other novels included The Collector (1963) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). The Magus was reissued with a revised ending in 1977.
Age in year of publication: forty.
Janet Frame 1924–2004
1957 Owls Do Cry
Janet Frame’s gift is to use a lucid, often comic view of her own experiences as the touchstone for her distinctive work. Owls Do Cry fictionalizes her childhood in New Zealand as one of the siblings of the impoverished Withers family. The father is Bob, a shiftworker; the mother the gentle Amy, always wearing a damp pinny; Francie is the eldest, destined for the woollen mills and worse; then comes Toby who is ‘a shingle short’; and Daphne, Frame’s alter ego, who like Frame herself is given a leucotomy for little reason except as a curb on an excess of imagination. Finally there is Chicks, the youngest, who plunges into the best — or worst — that New Zealand has to offer.
Childhood for the Withers children revolves around scarcity; they are dirty, they are poor. For pleasure they loiter around the town rubbish dump, long to go to the cinema and know the words of every Forties and Fifties popular song. These childhood memories echo with tragic clarity through the adult lives each chooses.
Janet Frame has a relish for words, and for the small details that identify an incident or an event. In Owls Do Cry the language shimmers with her poetic sensibility, but there’s a toughness too, fortified by her gentle fierceness and her angry calm.
Janet Frame was born in Oamuru, near Dunedin, and lived in that city. She is also famous for her autobiographical trilogy To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984) and The Envoy From Mirror City (1984) which was filmed by Jane Campion in 1991, under the title of its second volume: An Angel at my Table.
Age in year of publication: thirty-three.
Charles Frazier 1950–
1997 Cold Mountain
This is an epic historical romance set against the backdrop of the American Civil War. Inman is a wounded Confederate soldier. As his recovery is near completion, his despair at the futility of the fighting and his desire to be reunited with his love Ada lead him to abandon his fellow soldiers in a makeshift hospital and journey home to Cold Mountain in the hills of North Carolina.
Ada’s tale of her own heroism in managing a small farm and of the stubborn friendship she cements with her new helper, Ruby, is interspersed with Inman’s Odyssean voyage in which he saves the lives of two women, buries a child, is left for dead and is rescued by a slave, and fights off the Home Guard who are looking for deserters.
Frazier has captured the cadences and quotidian miseries of the time and his descriptions of the landscape fully echo the heroic nature of the tale. As the dual narratives converge, the suspense and tension increase along with Ada’s and Inman’s yearning for each other. They know they have both been changed by their circumstances and wonder if their love can still blossom. The climax is superbly handled and turns a potential saga into a genuine work of literature.
Charles Frazier was born in North Carolina. Cold Mountain, his first novel, won the National Book Award in 1998. His second novel Thirteen Moons appeared in 2006.
Age in year of publication: forty-seven.
William Gaddis 1922–1998
1955 The Recognitions
Readers wishing to enter the strange, dark, rich and difficult world of William Gaddis should probably start with the shortest of his four novels, Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), but The Recognitions is the real masterpiece and repays much rereading and close attention.
The central motif concerns the conflict between the genuine and the fake: one of the main characters is a forger, another character has written a play which may or may not be a forgery. Many of the conversations held at New York gatherings in the novel are also deeply false; religion and consumerism, too, are rendered inauthentic in the novel’s vast thousand-page panorama. But it is the texture of the writing which holds the novel together and makes it genuinely exciting: the sheer panache of the parody and satire, the sudden beginnings and endings, the quality of the jokes, the density of the narrative, the weirdness of the characters. Only in Scotland (Kelman, Gray, Welsh) and in the United States (Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo) has the true torch of modernism in fiction been carried. The Recognitions is one of the great novels of the century.
William Gaddis was born and lived in New York. His other novels include JR (1975) and A Frolic of His Own (1994).
Age in year of publication: thirty-three.
Mavis Gallant 1922–
1979 From the Fifteenth District
Mavis Gallant’s range is astonishing. It is hard to make any generalizations about her work because her stories — she has written altogether more than one hundred — are so different in tone and content. In her world people are distant from each other, and the closer they come — in families, in love — the more remote and fraught and strange their behaviour and the more exciting and funny and interesting her story. Her writing is impeccable. Sentences are often startling. In ‘The Remission’, one of her masterpieces of this collection, a family has moved to the Mediterranean so that Alec can die. His wife is puzzled by the locals: ‘Barbara expected them to be cunning and droll, which they were, and to steal from her, which they did, and to love her, which they seemed to.’ Alec, of course, doesn’t die, at least not for a long time, which gives Barbara the chance to find a new companion. In almost all of the stories, people live in exile. The Anglo-Saxons are bossy and half-impoverished, some of them are truly dreadful people. There is a marvellous story about a German boy who comes home late from the war; there is an extraordinary account of a Polish exile in Paris, and another of a Hungarian mother whose son lives in Scotland. And the last story, ‘Irina’, has a deeply unsettling version of an old woman (‘In loving and unloving families alike, the same problem arises after a death: What to do about the widow?’). In this volume, Gallant writes with wit and intelligence and a unique sort of sharpness.