Barker is in full control of her materiaclass="underline" she understands her characters and their dilemmas, she has an enormous sympathy with people, and an astonishing range. These three books establish her as one of the most talented English novelists of her time.
Pat Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees and lives in Durham. Regeneration was made into a film by Gillies Mackinnon; The Eye in the Door won the Guardian Fiction Prize; The Ghost Road won the Booker Prize.
Age in years these books were published: forty-eight — fifty-two.
Julian Barnes 1946–
1984 Flaubert’s Parrot
In this book Julian Barnes turns his attention to the great French writer Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880), author of Madame Bovary. The result is a novel like no other, in which Barnes himself jostles with Flaubert and with the narrator of the novel, a fussy sadsack called Dr Braithwaite, for centre stage. Braithwaite is a widower; his wife has committed suicide — she was unfaithful to him. Flaubert advances and retreats before our eyes: in France, in Damascus where he eats dromedary, on trains, at home, in love or not as the case may be, unfaithful, syphilitic, affectionate, writing with a stuffed parrot on his desk.
Braithwaite’s biographical pursuit of Flaubert alternates between the ponderous, the comic and the revealing — ‘Louise is puzzlingly unable to grasp that Gustave Flaubert can love her without ever wanting to see her’ — presenting us with an intriguing if elusive Flaubert, a man who issues pensées which crack the heart. Behind both Flaubert and Braithwaite lurks Barnes himself, playful and astute, his encyclopedic intelligence always surprising the reader into laughter or astonishment. Flaubert’s Parrot is a novel to be read again and again for its sardonic wit and biographical eccentricities, for the precision of Barnes’s use of language and for its enigmas. It is, as was Flaubert’s parrot, ‘a fluttering, elusive emblem of the writer’s voice’.
Julian Barnes was born in Leicester and lives in London. A prizewinner in England, France and Germany, among his other acclaimed novels are A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989), Talking it Over (1991), England, England (1998) and Arthur and George (2005).
Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.
Samuel Beckett 1906–1989
1955–1958 The Molloy Trilogy
Molloy (1955), Malone Dies (1956), The Unnameable (1958)
Samuel Beckett’s trilogy, published first in French in the early 1950s, and then translated by the author (with Patrick Bowles as a collaborator on Molloy) and published in English some years later, remains his monumental achievement in prose fiction, although some of his later short prose fiction is magnificent.
Beckett is concerned in his prose, and in his plays, to deal once and for all with the idea of narrative and character and plot. His characters think and remember, but this does not help them; they are sure that Being is a sour joke inflicted on them. They know they are alive because their bodies tell them so, and they are constantly humiliated by their bodies. The drama is between action and inaction, between the possibility that the next sentence will lead us nowhere, or further back, or forward into a joke, or a snarl, or a nightmare, or a terrible darkness. Some of the writing — the sentence construction, the rhythms, the pacing and timing, the voice — is exquisitely beautiful, not a word out of place, but at the same time every word out of place, every word (and, indeed, action and memory) open to constant interpretation, revaluation, negation. The tone in the last volume becomes more dense and difficult, and at times more simple and stark. ‘This silence they are always talking about, from which supposedly he came, to which he will return when his act is over, he doesn’t know what it is, nor what he is meant to do, in order to deserve it.’
Samuel Beckett was born in Ireland. He lived most of his life in France. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969.
Age in years these books were published: forty-nine — fifty-two.
Sybille Bedford 1911–2006
1956 A Legacy
‘I spent the first nine years of my life in Germany, bundled to and fro between two houses.’ This is the voice of seven-year-old Francesca, recounting the story of the life of her father and his two German families before the beginning of the First World War.
The first are the von Feldens, Bavarian Catholic barons in Baden in southern Germany, culturally more French than German. The story of her uncle, Johannes von Felden, forced into the German army, and of how his fate affects his three brothers, is one which Bedford uses to shocking effect to reveal the chasm between old Bavaria and the brutality of northern militaristic Prussian ways. The other family are the Merzes, Jewish upper bourgeoisie, living in Berlin on money made from banking and trade. The lives and marriages of these two dynasties provide the rococo structure of this history, always presaging German terrors to come.
A Legacy is unique. Sybille Bedford’s recollections of the houses, travels, animals and eccentricities of these excessively wealthy people are perfectly matched with her style, which is elegant, evocative, even dispassionate. The quizzical tone of this novel, too, is entirely individual. Sybille Bedford takes us within the bosom of these families, teasing them out of hiding, providing a witty elegy to — and a celebration of — a world long gone, and in English little recorded.
Sybille Bedford was born in Charlottenburg, Germany, and lived in London. Biographer, novelist and travel writer, she drew on the experiences of her family for this famous novel.
Age in year of publication: forty-five.
Sam Hanna Bell 1909–1990
1951 December Bride
In the second half of the century, a few writers continued to work as though the modern movement in fiction — Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner — and the Industrial Revolution had never existed, as though they were still living in the eighteenth century. Yet there is a strange beauty and intensity about some of these books, as though the authors were well aware that they were working against the grain, telling old-fashioned stories with a dark Freudian self-consciousness.
December Bride is set on the coast of County Antrim in Northern Ireland in a small, tightly knit Presbyterian community. After their father’s death in a drowning accident, two brothers, Hamilton and Frank, continue to employ Sarah Gomartin and her mother as servants. When the mother leaves, Sarah stays on, and to the horror of those around her she begins to consort with both brothers; no one knows which of them is the father of her children. She is an immensely selfish and bigoted woman — her hatred of a local Catholic family is extraordinary — but there’s a sort of innocence about her in the book, and her involvement with the brothers is so lovingly described, so slow and uneasy in its development, that she becomes oddly sympathetic, her independence and stubbornness seem like gifts. There are scenes towards the end of the book, when the new generation has grown up, that are heartbreaking. The writing is plain, deliberate and flawless. This is a book which everyone interested in modern fiction should read: it shows what can still be done.