The novel is closer to certain French classic novels such as Camus’ The Outsider or Sartre’s trilogy The Age of Reason than any English or American novels. Part of the novel’s power comes from its spare existentialism, but the other part comes from the prose style, which is graceful, old-fashioned, almost Latinate. The dialogue, on the other hand, is pure Guyanese vernacular, and the gap between the two, between the sense of distance in the prose and intimacy in the dialogue, makes the novel chilling and tense and deeply original.
Roy A. K. Heath was born in British Guiana, where most of his novels are set. He lived in London. The Murderer won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979.
Age in year of publication: fifty-two.
Joseph Heller 1923–1999
1961 Catch-22
‘It was a vile and muddy war, and Yossarian could have, lived without it, lived forever, perhaps. Only a fraction of his countrymen would give up their lives to win it, and it was not his intention to be among them.’
This novel is set among the American forces in Italy in 1944. Most of the troops are completely insane as well as lazy, greedy, bureaucratic, thieving, bossy, venal and mad for power. All of the generals and colonels are utterly incompetent. The enemy is barely contemplated, nor the effects of the bombing missions. The enemy is sleeping beside you in the tent. Heller explains the meaning of Catch-22: Catch-22 means that if you ask to be let off the bombing missions because you are crazy, so you must be sane, and therefore you can’t be let off the bombing missions. The writing is seriously funny, the jokes often intricate and absurd. Everyone has a story to tell — for instance, a Native American whose family, no matter where they go, manage to camp on a valuable oilfield, so that the oil companies begin to follow them around. The novel combines a comedy that is often slapstick and throwaway and at times silly, with images of soldiers who go on bombing missions screaming through the night, and images of a moral universe which has been turned on its head. Catch-22 is a dark and disturbing anti-war book as well as a great comic novel.
Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn and was still living in New York when he died. His other novels include Something Happened (1974), Good as Gold (1979), and the sequel to Catch-22, Closing Time (1994).
Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.
Ernest Hemingway 1899–1961
1952 The Old Man and the Sea
The style is taut, laconic and yet infinitely expressive. There is an emotional depth somewhere in between the words. Within Hemingway’s simple sentence construction and his diction, which can seem innocent and naive, like an early Miro painting, there are odd, disturbing silences.
The story of The Old Man and the Sea is simple: an old fisherman in Cuba has had a run of bad luck. One day he goes out alone and catches a giant marlin; he holds it for two days and nights, letting it pull him out into the open sea and then slowly reining it in, letting it circle, and then killing it and tying it to the boat. On the way back to dry land, the marlin is attacked by sharks who eat its flesh, so that the old man arrives on shore exhausted with nothing except the fish’s skeleton attached to the boat. There is a great deal of very convincing and not too technical information about the process of fishing; the famous terse style is ever terser as the story proceeds, so that the narrative grips you, every turn the fish makes holds your attention, it feels as though it is happening right in front of you.
The ideas of endurance and futility behind the story are so elemental and stark that the novel has a simplicity and a power which overcome any lingering sentimentality. It remains one of Hemingway’s masterpieces.
Ernest Hemingway was born in Chicago and in later years lived largely in Cuba. His other novels include The Sun Also Rises (1926) (UK: Fiesta 1927), A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.
Age in year of publication: fifty-three.
Georgette Heyer 1902–1974
1950 The Grand Sophy
Georgette Heyer was a stern realist. She wrote romantic comedies, entertainments set in the Regency period in England, when women concentrated entirely on the essential business of getting married, hopefully for love, preferably with rank or money attached. Immersed in the world of Jane Austen — for whom similar considerations ruled the day, influenced too by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Georgette Heyer was also a fine Regency scholar. Her novels are a meticulous recreation of that world of manners down to the smallest detail of social code, dress, food, conveyance and language.
In Heyer’s milieu lack of looks is always a disadvantage, but Wit and Style make up for it. Requiring an eligible husband, Sophy arrives in London in a chaise drawn by four steaming horses, accompanied by two outriders, a groom, a splendid black horse, a monkey, a parrot and an Italian greyhound. This arrival is impressive, but how can Sophy find a husband when she lacks beauty and has a mind of her own, a wretched thing in a woman?
The resolution of such predicaments was always Heyer’s subject matter; her originality lay in the precision and charm of her writing style and in her taste for the wit and frivolities of the period. She was a phenomenon. Widely imitated, within the genre of romantic comedy she was unequalled, and one of the best entertainers of her time.
Georgette Heyer was born and lived in London. Amongst the best of her fifty-seven novels are These Old Shades (1926), Cotillion (1953) and Venetia (1958).
Age in year of publication: forty-eight.
Carl Hiaasen 1953–
1987 Double Whammy
Florida produces a variety of miscreants that surpasses anything else in the United States. Carl Hiaasen is the chronicler of this Miami world, the Damon Runyon of its language, circumstances and astounding way of life.
In Double Whammy we enter — deeply — the world of competitive bass fishing, a territory of strange clothes, much swearing, companies such as the Happy Gland Fish Scent Company and the flotsam and jetsam of men at fishy sport, which in this case means cheating and murder. An episode with a dog, its head, a wrist, and a man named Thomas Curl begins on page 224 and continues, an inspired running sore of a gag, to the end of this marvellous thriller. Hiaasen is a highly moral writer. His heroes, private eye R. J. Decker and the raw-squirrel eating giant, Skink, are twentieth-century Crusader knights who take on American capitalism in all its glory — the lust for the last dollar, the pollution of the towns, the pollution of the waters, the corruption of politicians and TV shows, particularly those featuring fundamentalist religious crooks such as the repetitive fornicator the Reverend Charlie Weeb, of the Outdoor Christian Network.
Carl Hiaasen is an acerbic thriller writer, inventive and bizarre. His chilling black comedies, with their split-second timing, off-beat dialogue, raging laughter and death, are knowing and provocative records of the way we live now.