Beryl Bainbridge was born in Liverpool and lived in London. The Bottle-Factory Outing (1974) won the Guardian Fiction Prize, Injury Time the 1977 Whitbread Novel Award, and Every Man for Himself the 1996 Whitbread Novel Award.
Age in year of publication: forty-three.
James Baldwin 1924–1987
1953 Go Tell it on the Mountain
This is a great novel about restriction and freedom, the urge to control versus the urge to love, the battle within each person between pride and vulnerability, weakness and religious zeal. It is written with a superb rhythmic energy and flow; the rich cadences in the prose are light and effortless. It tells the story of young John Grimes, who is sensitive, clever and religious; we watch the world of fraught family life and serious sexual temptation through his eyes, much as we do through Stephen’s in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist. But then the novel moves into the consciousness of three older members of the family: his aunt, who is dying; the man he believes is his father, a preacher in Harlem; and his mother. The portraits of the older members of the family are full of complexity and heart-rending loss and regret. Both his stepfather and his mother are hauntingly aware of a deep sensuality in themselves, much more fundamental than any religious feeling. Their stories give you a sense of the weight which John must carry, how his family and his religious heritage are burdens rather than gifts. Baldwin has a brilliant range of sympathy, an ability to create an intriguing and memorable web of relationships and stories. This, his first novel, remains one of the great books about family and religious bonds.
James Baldwin was born in New York. His other novels include Giovanni’s Room (1956) and Another Country (1962). He was also an influential essayist and polemicist. He lived for many years in France.
Age in year of publication: twenty-nine.
J. G. Ballard 1930–2009
1984 Empire of the Sun
‘“It might be a bit strange,” Jim admitted, finishing the last of the weevils.’ Jim is eleven in 1941, lost in Shanghai when Pearl Harbor and invasion by the Japanese separate him from his parents. He spends the war in an internment camp and on death marches. Straightening his tattered blazer, a Just William kind of boy, he uses every means in his power — servility, deviousness, expert scrounging, ferocious negotiations for food — to survive through years of starvation, disease and physical disintegration, described mesmerically by Ballard in a novel which is one of the truly great novels about war.
As Jim gets hungrier, his open sores festering, the words Ballard chooses to describe the horrific last days of the war in Shanghai become brighter and brighter, almost incandescent. In his words of fire, the sun, the light, the sky, the beams in the air become as translucent as the human beings disintegrating into death in front of Jim. Ballard’s description of the chaos of war, the way men and women look as they wither from starvation, the way minds behave as they keep their bodies company, moves brilliantly through small human events — minutely recorded and heartwrenchingly moving — to take on large meaning. War is a young Japanese kamikaze pilot flying to death, unnoticed, unremembered; war is suicide, nothing more.
J. G. Ballard was born in Shanghai, came to England in 1946 and lived in Teddington, Middlesex. This autobiographical novel has a sequel, The Kindness of Women (1991). A prolific and apocalyptic novelist, Ballard was also widely acclaimed for his many science fiction novels which explore ‘inner space’.
Age in year of publication: fifty-four.
John Banville 1945–
1989 The Book of Evidence
John Banville is one of the best prose stylists writing in English now. His tone is aloof and mandarin, subversive and slyly comic; the voice in his work is close to that of the Beckett of the Molloy trilogy and the Nabokov of Lolita and Ada. His second novel, Birchwood (1973), represents a watershed in contemporary Irish writing: it is a novel in which history becomes a rich black comedy full of land agitation and Gothic characters, and a sense of bewilderment at the nature of the universe fills the pages.
The Book of Evidence, however, is the book where his skills as a stylist and his macabre vision come best together. It is written as a speech from the dock by one Freddie Montgomery — Banville loves playing with posh Anglo-Irish identities — who tells the story of how he came to murder a servant girl in a big house. Banville clearly relishes the voice he has created — versions of the same Freddie appear in Ghosts (1991) and Athena (1993) — which deals in perfectly crafted sentences and images, and has a narrative thrust which is dark and utterly free of guilt. Banville also loves the idea of invention, and enjoys playing with notions of evil. In this novel, all this comes together with a murder story which is moving, gripping and totally absorbing.
John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, and now lives in Dublin. He has published eleven works of fiction. The Book of Evidence won the Guiness Peat Aviation Award in 1989. The Untouchable (1997) won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The Sea (2005) won the Man Booker Prize. He has also written a series of crime novels under a pseudonym Benjamin Black.
Age in year of publication: forty-four.
Pat Barker 1943–
1991–1995 The Regeneration Trilogy
Regeneration (1991), The Eye in the Door (1993), The Ghost Road (1995)
This is a rich and complex retelling of the story of British combatants in the First World War. It uses as a focus and centre the work of a real (as opposed to fictional) character, Dr William Rivers, whose job it is to deal with men who have been traumatized by their time in the trenches at a period when little was known about trauma. Other real characters appear in the books, notably Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves.
The trilogy also dramatizes the life and times of one Billy Prior, a triumphantly buoyant and brilliant creation, working class but an officer, and bisexual. The opening of the second volume has one of the best descriptions ever of sex between men. The third, which is plainly written, using short scenes and a large number of subplots, deals with divisions within the characters themselves, including the doctors, and within the governing ideologies. Ideas of bravery, fear, recovery, madness, the unconscious, masculinity, friendship, leadership, pacifism and the class system, to name but a few, are examined in terms that are deceptively simple.