Thomas Harris does not bother with secrets; we know the infamy we face on the first page. Special agent Will Graham is cooling things off in Miami with his wife and stepson, after being sliced up by Lecter with a linoleum knife. Lecter, in prison, still manages to emit a miasma of iniquity and malignity by letter and phone — almost by osmosis. When Graham comes out of retirement to track down a serial killer who loves to kill families — husband, wife, children and family pet with attendant disagreeable rituals — he encounters a new psychopath, Frank Dolarhyde. Lethally similar, Lecter and Dolarhyde literally savour human flesh. Harris uses meticulous knowledge of forensic science, and domestic detail conveyed with precision and affection. His psychological insight — best illustrated by an account of Dolarhyde’s childhood with his glacial grandmother, which is utterly believable, yet beyond belief — brings this intricate thriller to a brilliant climax.
Harris is a master craftsman with a particular talent for inserting horror into the ordinariness of the everyday, as the starting point for incidents of gigantic terror; he is one of a tiny band of popular novelists whose works are in a class and genre of their own.
Thomas Harris was born in Jackson, Tennessee, and lives in New York. This novel was filmed (as Manhunter) in 1986 as was, famously, Silence of the Lambs (1988), in 1990. A third novel featuring Hannibal Lecter, Hannibal, was published in 1999 and made into a film in 2002. A fourth, Hannibal Rising, came out in 2006 and was filmed in 2007.
Age in year of publication: forty.
Wilson Harris 1921–
1964 Heartland
This is a strange, haunting novel; it reads as though Conrad and Kafka had come together and studied the style of the late Henry James. It is set in a thick jungle close to a waterfall along Guyana’s border with Venezuela and Brazil. Zachariah Stevenson is alone in this place: he has time to go over his father’s financial ruin and death and then his lover and her husband’s disappearance, the husband having embezzled money. He meets several figures in this remote outpost and has strange, portentous conversations with them. The sense of the jungle in the novel is overwhelming; the sense of rot and danger, heat and darkness takes over; the dank, menacing atmosphere is unforgettable; and the closeness of the waterfall lends power to the aura of claustrophobia. The prose is sinewy and dense, with strange twists and turns. In this heartland, habitation and pathways are tentative, so Stevenson’s journey from one hut to another is full of uncertainties and odd possibilities. It is therefore not surprising that he should see a half-decomposed dead man and watch a baby being born.
It is impossible to place this novel, or indeed most of Harris’s other work, in any tradition. Heartland, which is less than a hundred pages, is the sort of book you want to pick up and start again when you have finished it; it is infinitely mysterious and memorable.
Wilson Harris was born in New Amsterdam, British Guiana. He was a land surveyor before moving to London in 1959 where he still lives. His other novels include Palace of the Peacock (1960), Carnival (1985) and The Ghost of Memory (2006).
Age in year of publication: forty-three.
L. P. Hartley 1895–1972
1953 The Go-Between
This is one of the great English novels of the post-war period, with, also, one of the most famous opening lines: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’
Leo Colston recalls the hot summer of 1900. A schoolboy then, an only child of a widowed mother of modest means, he shyly joins his friend Marcus Maudsley at Brandham Hall in Norfolk, where he confronts the cold conventions of the late Victorian upper classes. Struggling to please the family, he carries messages for Marcus’s older sister Marian to the local farmer, Ted Burgess. On the periphery is the charming Hugh, Viscount Trimingham, face scarred by war, attendant on Marian. In the heat of summer Brandham Hall shimmers with deceptions as Leo grapples with crippling loyalties and secrets which, when revealed, are to maim him for life.
The perfection of The Go-Between lies in its subtlety, its atmosphere and in its elegiac style. It is one of those books which reveal layer upon layer of meaning with each rereading, so that the anxiety for love and the agony of betrayal as experienced by young Leo open windows to England’s larger tragedies: the deathly embrace of the class system, the imminence of the First World War.
L. P. Hartley was born in Cambridgeshire. In later life he divided his time between London and a house near Bristol. His reputation also rests on the Eustace and Hilda trilogy: The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944), The Sixth Heaven (1946) and Eustace and Hilda (1947). The Go-Between was filmed by Joseph Losey in 1970.
Age in year of publication: fifty-eight.
Shirley Hazzard 1931–
1980 The Transit of Venus
Novels about obsessive love are always absorbing; this one adds intriguing analyses of serious moral issues. Two sisters, Caro and Grace, come to England from Australia in the 1950s. Cook’s discovery of Australia is said to be a by-product of travelling to Tahiti in 1769, to watch the transit of Venus. Caro’s trajectory across the old world encompasses a cast of interlocking characters and a galaxy of moral predicaments. In this ambitious narrative, science, politics, international affairs and corrupt American governments contend with a particularly felicitous selection of venal bureaucrats and tedious academics.
Caro loves and is loved by three very different men, and so her transit becomes a study first of obsessive love, and then of passion in all its forms. Overarching these human concerns Hazzard places the unwilled determinations of an ironic fate and the importance of truth in private love and in public life. Although this rich mix can sometimes teeter on the edge of excess, the classic structure of the novel, and Hazzard’s piercing eye, fixed on the treacheries of people behaving badly, always give her moral puzzles charm. Most characteristic is her way with words, ranging from the constant staccato of witty epigrams to the lambent notes of those professing love, an accompaniment to a romantic melodrama on the grandest scale.
Shirley Hazzard was born in Sydney, Australia, and lives mainly in New York. Other novels include The Evening of the Holiday (1966). The Transit of Venus won the US National Book Critics Circle Award in 1980. The Great Fire (2003) won the American National Book Award and the Miles Franklin Award.
Age in year of publication: forty-nine.
Roy A. K. Heath 1926–2008
1978 The Murderer
The Murderer is a powerful novel in which murder and mental breakdown are dealt with coldly and dispassionately. It tells the story of two brothers, Galton and Selwyn Flood, in contemporary Guyana. It is told through the eyes of Galton, who seeks independence and is uneasy with friends and family and crowds. Selwyn has no difficulty settling down with his wife, whom Galton slowly grows to hate. Galton is always watchful and uncertain; it is only after much hesitation that he marries Gemma, whose father owns the boarding house where he stays when he leaves home. He takes her to live first with a friend, with whom he falls out, and then in a tiny, dark room in a crumbling building.