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There is a sense of history from the opening pages of Kressmann Taylor’s Address Unknown (1938), mixing the echoes of the Great War, still vivid in its characters’ memories (”Fourteen years since the war! Did you mark the date? What a long way we have traveled, as peoples, from that bitterness!”), with their deeper personal connection. Told in letters between Jewish American, Eisenstein, and his business partner, the German Schulse, this (very) short novel spans fifteen months in the early 1930s during the Nazi machine’s rise to power.

In the first few exchanges the friends are genial, talking shop, Germany (”the breadth of intellectual freedom, the discussions, the music, the light-hearted comradeship”), and mentioning Griselle, Eistenstein’s headstrong sister and former fling of Schulse, who is traveling Europe as an actress. Liberal politics abound, then darkness descends as Eisenstein asks  (”Who is this Adolf Hitler who seems rising toward power in Germany?”)

What is initially frightening about Address Unknown is how Schulse, privileged in Germany following his economic success in America (”we employ now ten servants for the same wages of our two in the San Francisco home”) makes the rapid volte-face from declaring Hindenburg “a fine liberal whom I much admire” to a scathing attack on liberalism:

A liberal is a man who does not believe in doing anything. He is a talker about the rights of man, but just a talker. He likes to make a big noise about freedom of speech, and what is freedom of speech? Just the chance to sit firmly on the backside and say that whatever is being done by the active men is wrong. What is so futile as the liberal? I know him well because I have been one. He condemns the passive government because it makes no change. But let a powerful man arise, let an active man start to make a change, then where is your liberal? He is against it. To the liberal any change is the wrong one.

The powerful man that arises needs no introduction, and it’s not so much Hitler who features in the novel but the poison that his Fascist tenets instills in a man’s mind. From an early observational capacity Schulse describes him (”the man is like an electric shock, strong as only a great orator and a zealot can be”) but it’s soon obvious that any impartiality is slain by the sword of oratory:

As for the sterm measures that so distress you, I myself did not like them at first, but I have come to see their painful necessity. The Jewish race is a sore spot to any nation that harbors it. I have never hated the individual Jew — yourself I have always cherished as a friend, but you will know that I speak in all honesty when I say I have loved you, not because of your race but in spite of it.

Although the change in relations between the two men seems rapid, with the letters following each other as the pagination insists, its the long gaps between these in the story’s time, often months, that add to the book’s power. We are left to wonder what has been happening in these unwritten periods. How has Schulse allowed himself to secede and convince himself of the efficacy of Hitler’s regime? Have Eisenstein’s nights been sleepless as he anticipates the next reply? And what of their common bond, Griselle, travelling between Vienna and Berlin, especially when her brother notes about the letter he has sent her?

…it has been returned to me, the envelope unopened, marked only address unknown, (Adressant Unbekannt). What a darkness those words carry! How can she be unknown? It is surely a message she has come to harm.

Into its minimal pages Address Unknown packs an incredible wealth of content, describing through one man Germany’s “hysteria of deliverance” under the auspices of a doer —

The whole tide of a people’s life changes in a minute because the man of action has come. And I join him. […] I am a man because I act. Before that I am just a voice. I do not question the ends of our action. It is not necessary. I know it is good because it is so vital. Men are not drawn into bad things with so much joy and eagerness.

— and showing how words are just as much a weapon as armaments, perhaps even more so with their power to control people that will readily renounce who they truly are to follow a crazed destiny they would otherwise never consider. When Schulse talks of German destiny —

If I could show you, if I could make you see — the rebirth of this new Germany under our Gentle Leader! Not for always can the world grind a great people down in subjugation. In defeat for fourteen years we bowed our heads. We ate the bitter bread of shame and drank the thin gruel of poverty. But now we are free men. We rise in our might and hold our heads up before the nations. We purge our bloodstream of its baser elements. We go singing through our valleys with strong muscles tingling for a new work — and from the mountains ring the voices of Wodan and Thor, the old, strong gods of the German race.

— the words of the Nazi doctrine are evident, for this is a man who has lived comfortably in the United States, and never suffered the hardship of post-war Germany.

If the compact nature of Address Unknown is powerful itself for Schulse’s journey, Taylor strengthens it further by working the idea of words’ power to a wonderful twist that plays on the paranoid, censorious nature of the regime it successfully lambasts. Taylor could not have known what horrors were yet to come from Nazi aggression, but in this tale she rallies against its rise, and the results, when they arrive, are both satisfying, abrupt, and apt.

Colombia has, for some time now, been plagued by all manner of violence, starting with La Violencia in the late forties, through the rise of guerilla groups, and continuing to this day with the sprawling narcotics industry. Sixty years of bloodshed, naturally, will hang heavy on the national consciousness, and it’s this that Evelio Rosero turns to in his novel, The Armies (2007), which won the Premio Tusquets Editories de Novela in 2006. (The book came out in Spanish after the prize was won, in case you’re wondering.)

It’s little surprise that, with a novel built around a situation notorious for the gross violation of human rights that the book should come recommended by PEN. The recommendation is not a one off, as they’ve recently been supporting a number of translated titles which in some way reflect the PEN Charter. It’s a worthy cause, freedom of speech, and in The Armies Rosero gives a voice to those caught up in a turmoil not of their making, who have no voice.

Ismael is a seventy year old man, a retired teacher, living in the sunny mountain town of San José with his wife, Otilia. There’s not much to his days, now that he’s retired. He feeds the fish, takes walks, and climbs the ladder to pick from the orange tree as a subterfuge to spying on his neighbour’s wife, something which his wife tells him he should at least try and be subtle about. All in all, the pace Rosero opens his novel with is an enjoyable, breezy read, where you just want to take your time and admire the view:

The Brazilian’s wife, the slender Geraldina, sought out the heat on her terrace, completely naked, lying face down on the red floral quilt. At her side, in the refreshing shade of a ceiba tree, the Brazilian’s enormous hands roved astutely along his guitar, and his voice rose, placid and persistent, between the sweet laughter of the macaws; this is how the hours proceeded on their terrace, amid sunlight and music.

While San José sounds almost paradisial, there are hints that all is not well with the world. Explosions and gunshots are heard, first far off, then nearer. Rosero casually mentions coca fields located near the town, which clue the reader in to the proximity of the drug trafficking trade, and by proxy the guerrillas who fund themselves through it. People disappear, sometimes never to be heard of again. Despite all these intrusions on daily life, the author deals not with the people who threaten the village but how the lives of those resident are affected, not just in San José, but all over Colombia:

Years ago, before the attack on the church, displaced people from other towns used to pass through our town; we used to see them crossing the highway, interminable lines of men and children and women, silent crowds with neither bread nor destinations. Years ago, three thousand indigenous people stayed for a long while in San José, but eventually had to leave due to extreme food shortages in the improvised shelters.

Now it is our turn.

While the majority of the population flees, Ismail stays. His wife has gone missing and, having nothing to live for, sees no reason to run. He spends the time looking for her, asking people returning with ransom notices if she was with the taken. Added to his desperation is the fact his age is not so much creeping up on him but gaining: his memory is not what it used to be, he finds himself more and more confused by events going on around him. Sadly, the confusion that Rosero generates in the character transfers to the reader. Not the understanding of the man’s increasing disorientation, but actual confusion brought about by vague passages the book sometimes becomes guilty of. At times like this Ismail’s narration never runs as deep as it could, never quite giving a good account of his inner turmoil, and leaving the surface with few tangible scratches.

There are occasions when being vague works. The title, for example. San José represents any old town in Colombia, its streets home to the full set of stock trades: the doctor, the priest, the pastry seller. From time to time the towns find themselves the target of kidnappings, murders, rapes, and other atrocities. It’s so commonplace that the victimes don’t even know who their aggressors are this time. Are they guerrillas? Paramilitaries? Perhaps even the national armed forces? What makes it all the more shocking is the government’s attitude:

The contingents of soldiers, who while away their time in San José, for months, as if it were reborn peacetime, have been  considerably reduced. In any case, with them or without them the events of war will always loom, intensifies. If we see fewer soldiers, we are not informed of this in an official way; the only declaration from the authorities is that everything is under control; we hear it on the news - on small battery-operated radios, because we still have no electricity - we read it in the delayed newspapers; the President affirms that nothing is happening here, neither here nor anywhere in the country is there a war; according to him Otilia is not missing…and so many others of this town died of old age, and I laugh again, why do I laugh just when I discover that all I want to do is sleep without waking?

In The Armies Rosero does his nation a service, bringing the plight of its innocent people to the forefront of others’ imaginations. Issues of prolongued abduction, unnecessary murder, and child soldiers all brought under the spotlight. The biggest issue is in the telling, Ismail’s failing mind ultimately failing to wrench a huge roar back at the world, leaving him whimpering for the most part about how he’d rather be dead than alive. Surely there’s more to be said?

When the soldiers of whatever army to come down to San José they always come with a list of names.

Why do they ask for names? They kill whoever they please, no matter what their names might be. I would like to know what is written on the paper with the names, that “list”. It is a blank sheet of paper, for God’s sake. A paper where all the names they want can fit.

Between the lines of The Armies is a list of names, unprinted, and non-fictional. It’s an eye-opener of a book, and in this respect it’s certainly important. But the narration of Ismail, in his confusion, is quite capable of closing a few eyes too.

When it comes to writing a novel, there are two approaches: doing it for the art and doing it for the money. In James Meek’s novel, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent (2008), Adam Kellas is doing it for the money. And why not? His career as a warzone reporter is fraught with danger and journalists in his line of work go from one contract to the next. Writing a commercial thriller and the subsequent sales would give him the security he needs in order to sit down and write the books he really wants.

And security is what he needs, what with a divorce behind him, adding to a history of relationships which never work out and he finds difficult to get over. One such affair was with an American journalist, Astrid, during his time in Afghanistan. Yet one day, while boarding a helicopter, she jumps out as it’s taking off and he never sees her again. It’s no surprise that such a lack of closure should play on his mind. That he should let it guide him, well that’s another matter.

So when he receives an email from Astrid asking him to come and see her, he doesn’t think twice about boarding a plane, without even so much as a coat. (”He had wanted to see her for a year and now she asked to see him, and he was coming.”)

The subsequent journey fills the greater portion of the novel, although little of the journey is described. Not because it would be boring, but because Kellas is too busy wrestling with recent events to notice what’s going on. Women have left him, he’s quit his job (the book advance is a six figure sum), the war is getting to him, and in one explosive set piece, he lays waste to his best friend’s house. It’s no surprise, therefore, to hear the announcement of ‘we are now beginning our descent’ as the plane comes into New York. But for Adam Kellas, he has already begun, casting off partners, his job, and friends along the way.

That Kellas was inadequately dressed for the season marked him as a loser. The suit and shoes were plain enough warning in themselves that here was someone in themidst of their descent from security to insecurity, a man yet to settle in his new location on the bottom.

Like Kellas, Meek is no stranger to reporting from undesirable countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. So, with the benefit of experience, the sense of place brought to the novel’s locations is impressive and feels authentic. One can almost imagine the half-buried Soviet machinery “digested by the tissue of the road” and the feeling of being there, as it happens, with other journalists pushing for stories in the face of tragedy really shines through:

A barefooted Afghan man in grimy grey clothes and a gold cap squatted in the dirt in fron of the bombed house. it was his house. The explosion had killed his wife while she was sewing clothes for a wedding, and wounded his two children, his mother and brother. He squatted near the ruins, with his long clay-stained red hands resting on his knees, and reporters came to ask him questions. He answered, although he could not meet their eyes. For hours he had a changing little group of people standing awkwardly in front of him in western clothes, taking his picture, writing down his words and filming him. The same set of questions would be asked, and the Afghan man, whose name was Jalaluddin, would answer, and when that group of journalists was halfway through, another set would arrive and get him to start again from the beginning.

The authenticity of the Afghan landscape is never in question. Meek has lived and breathed it. But there are occasions in the novel where he let’s his grip on the narrative slip and intrudes on the story. Dialogue is usually spot on but is sometimes guilty of pushing ideas rather than relaying believable statements and sentiments. And a couple of events are implausible, even if they do get the story back on track. And going off track, even if it mirrors Kellas’ descent, his mind a maelstrom of regrets, is the hardest part of reading the novel. That and regular passages of lengthy paragraphs that can be suffocating in their relentlessness.

Where it picks up - or takes off, should that be? - is when the ideas behind the novel come to the fore. At its core it’s a novel about love and friendship, and about how people are never - and never can be - who we make them out to be. Layered over this, using Kellas’ novel as its emblem, is a criticism of modern society that has dumbed down and gone in search of the dollar; that has, like Adam Kellas, been seduced by America.

It would subvert the genre by making America the enemy - not a group with America, but the American government, the American majority, and the American way…Readers would be made to believe in a limited war to save civilization…

With the current political climate involving efforts to bring “the American way” to nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq, Meek is perhaps right that culture has begun its downward flight. But We Are Now Beginning Our Descent is not the novel to combat it, being a lesser novel to Meek’s previous effort. One wonders if The People’s Act Of Love was him doing it for the money, allowing him the leisure of writing what he wants to write. And while he slips in some remarkable imagery and turns of phrase, and proves himself more than capable of penning effective set pieces, these are lost in an abundance of prose, forcing indigestion on the tissue of the page.

It’s a mistake to subtitle Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without A Country (2005) with “a memoir of life in George W. Bush’s America” since a) it’s not much of a memoir; and b) its range is wider. What it is, then, is a collection of essays covering a range of topics, most of which initially appeared in the In These Times magazine. I did have reservations in reading this since I’d read Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and didn’t enjoy his style at all. But with non-fiction I was willing to take another chance.

A Man Without A Country is a book that deals tangentially with aspects of Vonnegut’s life - his humour, his creativity, and his humanism - but the larger canvas centres on the issues of the day, namely the environment, politics, and war. As a swansong it’s perhaps not the greatest contribution to American letters, being a cobbled together collection of essays that seemingly Vonnegut wasn’t up to the task of editing, but it has its moments.

The first couple of pieces focus solely on the man, about how being the youngest in the family makes humour the way to be appreciated. Then Vonnegut moves on to the arts, discussing how he want to be a writer, noting, with his trademark humour:

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts.

Beyond the personal, Vonnegut moves on to a thin creative writing lesson accompanied by some amusing graphs showing events in the works of Shakespeare and Kafka, amongst others. But where the book is most enjoyable is when discussing issues that matter to others. On the subject of cigarettes, for example, he jokes about suing the American tobacco companies for not giving him cancer and, at the time of writing, he was eighty-two, saying:

The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Vonnegut’s disdain for the Bush administration is clear but A Man Without A Country doesn’t really hit new ground, being much in line with public sentiment. Nor does it offer any persuasive reasons for others to change their ways in the wider world, as regards the planet’s state. His pot shots here and there are effective but his kindly tone soon soothes their blow and undermines there seriousness.

In one chapter Vonnegut tells of letters receieved and his replies to the questions therein, one of which sums up his attitude to life, on the being asked for reassurance that everything will be okay:

“Welcome to Earth, young man,” I said. “It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, Joe, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of: Goddamn it, Joe, you’ve got to be kind!”

It’s the balance of optimism and pessimism that make Vonnegut’s writings here enjoyable and while he jokes for the most part, he makes it clear that he has lost faith in humanity (”I think the planet should get rid of us. We’re really awful animals.”) and the future looks bleak thanks to the mass indifference shown, pushing it to the point that we are not so much facing a man without a country as a planet without man. And I think Kurt, who’s up in Heaven now, would quite like that.

If the unnamed narrator of Andreï Makine’s The Woman Who Waited (2004) was of the same era as the titular woman he would have been packed up and sent off to war and learnt a bit about the harsh realities of life. But the war was thirty years ago and in the Russia of the 1970s, under Brehznev, this young man has instead been packed up and sent off to university, only to have his disdain for the government shaped by the enclave of of writers, artists, and other liberals he finds himself amongst.

That’s all backstory, however, to The Woman Who Waited, which begins years later, looking back at those years and, for the narrator, the event that lingers on in his memory. Back then he was an arrogant young writer who takes up an opportunity to head out from Leningrad to a desolate village in the rural north - where a handful of old woman and just enough childen to run a single room school live - to research the folklore of the people.

The village, however, has little folklore to share, any tradition it once had now in ruins due to the war:

For it was this that had erased all other legends from the popular memory. To these elderly inhabitants of Mirnoe it was becoming the one remaining myth, a vivid and personal one, and one in which the immortals, both good and evil, were their own husbands and sons, the Germans, the Russian soldiers, Stalin, Hitler. And more specifically, the soldier Vera was waiting for.

Vera, a woman in her mid-forties, is the woman our narrator becomes fixated by. Thirty years before her husband-to-be went off to war and never returned. Through all this time there’s little in her loss to suggest she has given up the ghost or that her unflinching hope has slipped into ritual:

At this crossroads there was a small sign fixed to a post bearing the name of the village, Mirnoe. A little below this a mailbox had been nailed to it, empty for most of the time but occasionally harbouring a local newspaper. Vera went up to the post, lifted the box’s tin flap, thrust her hand inside it. Even from a long way off I sensed that the gesture was not automatic, that it had still not become automatic.

To our narrator, she’s a simple person. Indeed all these village types are. While Vera continues the wait for her husband, she spends her time teaching the children, looking after the women of Mirnoe, and, when she allows herself time, taking off to the train station to wait once more. There’s nothing in their lives, from what he can intuit, that makes them his equal. On first meeting Vera, having heard about her story, he stupidly assumes that there is nothing about her that can surprise him:

I followed her with my eyes for a long time, struck by a simple notion that made all other thoughts about her destiny pointless: ‘There goes a woman,’ I said to myself, ‘about whom I know everything. Her whole life is there before me, concentrated in that distant figure walking beside the lake. She’s a woman who’s waiting for the man she loves for thirty years, that is, from time immemorial.’

But as the two spend more time together Vera continues to surprise our narrator, consistently challenging his every preconceived idea about village life, village people, and herself. When it was once thought fit for satire , it becomes clear that “these villages were quite simply abandoned or dying, reduced to a mode of survival not very different from the stone age”. He even finds himself, in relation to the world in which he grew up, coming to understand how irrelevant some things are:

‘I also realized that up here in Mirnoe all those debates we had in Leningrad, whether anti-Soviet or pro-Soviet, meant nothing. Coming here, I found half a dozen very old women who’d lost their families in the war and were going to die. As simple as that. Human beings getting ready to die alone, not complaining, not seeking someone to blame.’

Makine’s telling of the story is beautifully translated and eminently readable, the prose often lyrical, always engaging, the lightness of its meditations hiding the weight of their message which, like its haunting tone, echo long after the last page has been turned. To the narrator, by capturing Vera in prose “a kind of murder occurs” in the way that his attempt to portray her words prove a barrier to “this being of infinite and inexhaustible potential” - but it’s Vera who is able to move on by burying her past, while the reader just sits there, reflecting.

It sometimes seems that there’s a precocious streak running through French literature with authors garnering literary respect at young ages. Françoise Sagan springs to mind, publishing Bonjour Tristesse in 1954 at the age of eighteen. As does Florian Zeller who has novels and plays to his name despite still being in his twenties. Now, much to my delight, there’s Raymond Radiguet who, between the ages of sixteen and eighteen wrote The Devil In The Flesh (1923) , having it published when he was twenty, the age at which he would die of typhoid, leaving one other novel, a play, and some poetry to his name.

That The Devil In The Flesh has an air of the autobiographical adds a further layer of tragedy to the life of Radiguet, as this is a novel where, for all the love and happiness the narrator professes within, the wheels are set in motion so that it couldn’t end anywhere else but on a tragic note.

The story opens during the final year of the Great War, with our unnamed narrator, a fifteen year old schoolboy, whose parents “disapproved of relationships between the sexes” and so he finds himself drawn to similary precocious schoolmate, René, due to their “common contempt for the other boys of [their] age” as they “regarded [themselves] as men”. But this friendship soon falls by the wayside when our narrator meets Marthe Lascombe, an eighteen year old woman with a fiancé on the front line:

…since I was sure I would never see Martha again I tried hard not to think about her, with the result that I thought of nothing else.

They do see each other again, however, and a friendship develops, although the narrator openly admits to having designs on Marthe:

I asked her to show me a photograph of her fiancé. I thought he looked handsome enough. But sensing already the importance she attached to my opinions, I was hypocritical enough to say that he was very handsome, but in such a way as to give her the impression that I was not very convinced and was saying so only out of politeness. This, I thought, would plant a seed of doubt in her mind, and at the same time win me her gratitude.

With time, Marthe’s fiancé becomes her husband and the more time he spends away allows the narrator to usurp his home, manipulating Marthe until, the closer they become, and unsavoury thoughts soon pervade:

At any other time to desire the death of her husband would have been little more than a childish piece of wishful thinking; it now became almost as criminal as killing him. I owed my new found happiness to the war; I hoped the war would now complete its task. It must commit the crime for me, like a hired assassin.

But regardless of their love, it makes them miserable, Marthe reproaching the narrator for allowing her to marry so that she could be with him, although their coupling would never have happened without the marriage as he’d never be able to call upon her at her parents’ house where she’d otherwise be living. And as their relationship - a badly kept secret in itself - rolls along, things take a turn for the scandalous when Marthe falls pregnant and all around them support and friendship dwindles, eventually leading the narrative to a final, tragic conclusion.

For one so young, Radiguet displays a mature understanding of love and relationships and the twisted logic that underpins them, the likes of which only first hand experience could bestow. His prose captures his narrators concerns from his position on the verge of maturity, growing up before his time; the inner conflict mirrored in the confusion of a world on the verge of peace. And despite all the morals of the age, Radiguet’s paean to love shines and inspires empathy regardless of what one feels is right or wrong about the situation.

The Devil In The Flesh is an accomplished piece of fiction, its all too believable story enhanced with a remarkable wisdom and punctuated with images that capture the essence of a doomed relationship as it makes the slide from happiness to tragedy. And that its author was so young when it was written makes one wonder how far, with more years and novels under his belt, Radiguet could have taken his legacy.

Given that I had read ten of the thirteen Booker longlistees over a few weeks I didn’t expect Tan Twan Eng’s debut, The Gift Of Rain to take too long to read. Animal’s People, for example, is almost similar regarding page count. But this novel was so dense with luscious prose that it’s taken well over a week to get through. And it’s been an enjoyable journey, though not without its lows.

Narrated by Philip Hutton (an elderly man of Chinese and British parentage) The Gift Of Rain looks back to Penang in 1939. While his family is taking an extended trip to England, the sixteen year old Philip meets a Japanese diplomat named Hayato Endo who offers to teach him the art of aikido. Thus Philip and Endo enter into a relationship of sensei and student. But, when the Japanese enter World War II with attacks on Malaya and Pearl Harbour, Philip is left to question where his loyalties lie: to his sensei or to his people.

Operatic in scope The Gift Of Rain follows Philip’s journey from an innocent sixteen year old boy to a mature twenty-something knowledgable in the ways of the world. Along the way he encounters friendship and loss; strengthens his bond with his family, notably his father; and finds a sense of purpose. He gets caught up in the workings of the Japanese, all the while working against them: a hero to some, a traitor to others. As his mixed parentage suggests, he’s always going to be a conflicted soul.

At one point Philip Hutton says “the most rewarding way to see the place one lives in is to show it to a friend” and it almost seems as if these are the words of Eng himself - with the reader as friend - as The Gift Of Rain is awash with descriptions of Malaya, whether it be the sampans floating off the coast, street peddlars selling their wares, or the landscape all around. And if all this description was a feast for the eyes, the other senses get teased too:

And there were the smells, always the smells that remain unchanged to this day - the scents of spices drying in the sun, sweetmeats roasting on charcoal grills, curries bubbling on fiery stoves, dried salted fish swaying on strings, nutmeg, pickled shrimp - all these swirled and mixed with the scent of the sea, fusing into a pungent concoction that entered us and lodged itself in the memory of our hearts.

With each description the historical Malaya comes to life on the page and the pride that Hutton takes in it is never in doubt:

I have never seen the light of Penang replicated anywhere else in the world - bright, bringing everything into razor-sharp focus, yet at the same time warm and forgiving, making you want to melt into the walls it shines on, into the leaves it gives life to. It is the kind of light that illuminates not only what the eyes see, but also what the heart feels.

It would be a spoiler to say too much about the story of The Gift Of Rain, given its many twists and turns. The pacing of the novel, however, is relaxed. Where there is much happiness in early scenes the mood darkens in the second section and Malaya, under Japanese occupation, becomes a much darker place, one where rebels fight the intruders to a stalemate and suspected criminals dig their own graves:

There was not even an order to cease digging. Goro gave a hand signal and the guards started shooting. The gunshots exploded like a string of firecrackers set off during the Chinese New Year and the bodies tumbled into the wet, exposed earth.

The problem I had with The Gift Of Rain is that I got lost amongst the description. While I had made a good start to it, it soon become a struggle to read. It felt like little was happening in the story and while the prose sustained my interest, it felt like it was failing to sustain the narrative. But, once the second section began, it became a joy to read again and I was won over. And while the novel seeks to explain its title, I wonder if the rain can be a metaphor for emotional tears, for the shedding of these makes us human.

Overall it’s an enjoyable book, weaving a rich tapestry of honour, deceit, and loss that captures a time and place lost to history with skill. It also looks at World War II from an angle not usually explored, giving it an air of originality. It features a large cast of characters who felt real although I often wonder, with snippets of wisdom lacing sentences, if people of the Orient speak that way. Or ever did. The boring parts (to me, anyway) are a small price to pay for the whole package, because it’s worth getting swept away on.

The good thing about wanting to read all Booker nominees is that it introduces you to new authors who you may never have thought to read, and A.N. Wilson definitely falls into that list. However, there’s a downside, and that’s not every novel is going to be to your taste. Wilson’s Winnie And Wolf amply fills that category, for, if there were two topics that could have me breaking the land speed record to escape their mention, it’s opera and politics. How was I meant to live through this?

Relatively easy, it seems. That’s not to say I was overly engaged by much of the content which felt, at times, more like a lecture on Wagner’s operas than a real narrative and I often had to come up for air given how abundant in information the prose is. It’s not fair to blame Wilson for my own ignorance of its subjects and, again me, stubborness to remain slightly ignorant, but there’s just so much to take in, most of which is mere garnish, although the themes of several Wagnerian operas do harmonise with the sections of the novel.

Winnie And Wolf takes as its story the years of friendship between Winifred Wagner, daughter of composer Richard, and Adolph Hitler, referred to throughout, in private scenes, as Wolf, or otherwise H, “the polite German convention of referring to him merely by the initial letter of his surname.” It begins wonderfully, presenting an engaging scene where Wolf (Uncle Wolf, to Winnie’s four children) demonstrates some of the qualities he later became known for (his charisma and oration, his magnetism) in the telling of a fairy tale:

If he had cleverly impersonated the fisherman and his wife, he did more than convey the storm. He became it. I think everyone in the room sensed Wolf’s tempest, his elemental powerfulness. When the fisherman had to shout against the noise of the billowing ocean, Wolf himself bellowed, and it was as if we heard in that cry, not only the noise of the man, but of the elements themselves against which he contended. For, of course, this time the flounder cannot answer the wife Ilsebill’s outrageous request, and replies, “‘Go home, man! She is back sitting on her pisspot…’ And there they sit to this very day!”

And from here we’re off into character studies of both title characters, the private Wolf of the Wagners’ house in Beyreuth, and the public H of a depressed Germany, flitting backwards and forwards in time, as told by the Wagners’ secretary. Winnie is a woman who is fully enchanted by the man she believes will improve Germany’s lot and H is the astute Wagnerian, loyal friend to the family of the composer he idolises. Through H’s early dabblings in politics through his rise to Chancellor and onwards to the declaration of war, Wilson’s narrative tells the story of a benevolent woman who can see no wrong in H’s atrocities, for he was always Wolf to her.

Winnie And Wolf, begins with an introduction from Hermann Muller, assisant pastor at a Seattle church, who received a manuscript from a woman named Winifred Heidler, now deceased. Upon translating it he believes her to be the daughter of Adolph Hitler, although he doesn’t rule out the notion that it may all be fantasy. From there, the manuscript tells all in manner similar to Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, an extended letter from beyond the grave explaining the intricacies of the writer’s life (a man known only as Herr N—) and the truth of the addressee’s circumstances.

There’s certainly parts to enjoy in Winnie And Wolf, notably scenes that pop up every now and again, whether they be imagined by the author or engrained in the history books. Emotions are evoked from scenes of brownshirts recklessly attacking Jews, of the public turning a blind eye to it, and, given that history tells us all we need to know of H, just how human monsters can be. It’s just the sheer volume of knowledge that Wilson (or should that be Herr N—?) wants to share that bogs it down, a problem I rarely get when reading someone like Umberto Eco. But overall it’s a fair novel taking a look back at the differences of the last two centuries (of Wagner; of Wolf) and proving itself a:

…reminder that art outlasts politics, that the sordid and cruel things we human beings have been doing to one another in the last century in Europe are not the last word, that music outsoars it and is stronger than it: that Bach outlasts Frederick the Great and that Wagner, too, outlasts his more outlandish patrons and admirers.

Ah yes, Wagner! He may outlast them, but in Winnie And Wolf he more than stays his welcome.

When it comes to fiction I tend to have a preference that excludes novels revolving around war. No real reason - it’s just a topic that has never interested me. But, looking back at some of the novels I’ve read, it’s hard not to see that I’ve read my fair share (Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains Of The Day, for example, or John Steinbeck’s The Moon Is Down), even if the war element appears tangentially. So it seems ludicrous that I should have, despite glowing recommendations, wanted to bypass The Welsh Girl, the debut novel from Peter Ho Davies. I’m glad I didn’t.

The Welsh Girl is a universal tale told within a wartime setting and it does so with such ease that it’s hard not to be swept away at the joyous prose and warm to its memorable cast of characters. To add to this, there’s depth to be had in the novel’s exploration of love, nationality, identity, and loyalty, as it braids the lives of its three main characters until they all come together in a single strand.

Set in rural Wales in 1944, The Welsh Girl opens with Captain Rotheram, a German Jew working for British Intelligence, interviewing Rudolph Hess in an attempt to assess his sanity for trial. After a time he gets orders to go north to a village where the staunchly nationalist population haven’t taken too kindly to the English soldiers on their turf and are further enraged that there’s a prisoner of war camp being built on their doorstep:

…the sappers are still called occupiers to some. It’s half in jest, but only half. The nationalist view is that it’s an English war, imperialist, capitalist, like the Great War that Jack fought in and from which he still carries a limp (not that you’d know it to see him behind the bar; he’s never spilled a drop).

In this prisoner of war camp there’s Karsten Simmering, a German soldier with some English at his disposal, who suffers the weight of his decision to surrender, believing it cowardice and wondering whether it would have been better to die. There, through the wire fence, he befriends Jim, a young evacuee from Liverpool, their regular exchanges his one connection with the outside world.

And then there’s Esther Evans, the Welsh girl of the title. At seventeen years, she’s the interest of many a boy’s eye, notably the postmistress’s son, Rhys, who has gone off to fight and Colin, an English sapper who her staunchly nationalist father would object to. While she works at the local bar, Esther’s dreams reach beyond the Welsh valleys to the romance of the world beyond:

She has her own dreams of escape, modest ones mostly - of a spell in service in Liverpool like her mother before her, eating cream horns at Lyons Corner House on her days off - and occasionally more thrilling ones, fuelled by the pictures she sees at the Gaumontin Penygroes.

These three characters, by virtue of the war, are brought together in the tangle of wartime drama. Questions are asked: on the nature of what it means to be Welsh, British, German, or Jewish; on whether surrendering is an act of cowardice; and on whether love truly knows no barriers. And surrounding them all as Davies narrative gets to the heart of these matters, is a supporting cast that flesh, but by no means pad, the story out, given it further depth and instilling equal parts humour and pathos.

The author’s prose, while seemingly dense, is actually light to read, and has a way of capturing a scene that with a few strokes, lets you know what’s happening, what people are thinking, in addition to colouring it with wonderful observations and attention to detail:

She settles herself, and he puts his hands in the small of her back and shoves firmly to set her off, and then as she swings he touches her lightly, his fingers spread across her hips, each time she passes. ‘Go on!’ she calls, and he pushes her harder and harder, until she sees her shiny toe tops rising over the indigo silhouette of the encircling mountains. When she finally comes to a stop, the strands of dark hair that have flown loose fall back and cover her face. She tucks them away, all but one, which sticks to her cheek and throat, an inky curve. He reaches for it and traces it, and she takes his hand for a second, then pushes it away. He’s on the verge of something, but she doesn’t want him to come out with it just yet, not until it’s perfect.

With The Welsh Girl being a debut novel (after two short story anthologies), it’s a huge surprise how assured and confident the author is with his material, with his characters, and with the questions he asks of his novel. It’s no surprise that Granta in 2003, despite not having a novel to his name, labelled Davies as one of Britain’s best young novelists, a tag he has surely delivered on. And with The Welsh Girl being on the Booker longlist, further plaudits and success must surely beckon for this fantastic writer. I certainly will be looking into his previous work - one promise I won’t be welshing on.

For months now, a number of people have been reading Patrick McGrath and talking him up. The novel they’ve usually read is Asylum but, just to be contrary, I thought I’d try a different introduction to the man. Thus I chose Dr Haggard’s Disease, McGrath’s third novel.

Set in pre-war London, the novel is based around a monologue from the eponymous Dr Haggard. Haggard, a general practitioner living in a house on the southern coast of England, is a man who has loved and lost. But, when the son of his former lover pays him a visit old feelings are renewed, former loves remembered, and madness begins to show from beneath the cracks.

Crucial events in Dr Haggard’s Disease, being those that shape the later narrative, happened years before in Haggard’s life when he was a promising young surgeon under the tutelage of Vincent Cushing - a nod perhaps to a couple of actors well known for playing doctors in low-budget horror movies - and under the spell of the senior pathologist’s wife. But it’s the events now, as recalled by Haggard, that drive the narrative on. And, being just ever so slightly mad, there are many moments in which you doubt his version of events, if not everything he has to say. And rightly so. He’s crazy! But ever so poetic with it.

The tone is a modern take on the Gothic, so while there are no clanking chains, ghostly castles, and other supernatural happenings as in previous centuries, there are grim hospitals and dark, rugged coasts with waves crashing against the cliffs. The language here is exemplary and showcases McGrath’s ability to turn a phrase. As an example, one only has to look at the novel’s opening:

I was in Elgin, upstairs in my study, gazing at the sea and reflecting, I remember, on a line of Goethe when Mrs Gregor tapped at the door that Saturday and said there was a young man in the surgery to see me, a pilot. You know how she talks. ‘A pilot, Mrs Gregor?’ I murmured. I hate being disturbed on my Saturday afternoons, especially if Spike is playing up, as he was that day, but of course I limped out onto the landing and made my way downstairs. And you know what that looks like - pathetic bloody display that is, first the good leg, then the bad leg, then the stick, good leg, bad leg, stick, but down I came, down the stairs, old beyond my years and my skin a grey so cachectic it must have suggested even to you that I was in pain, chronic pain, but oh dear boy not pain like yours, just wait now and we’ll make it all - go - away -

It’s testament to McGrath’s ability that he manages to continue this style for nigh on two hundred pages, right up to the gruesome denouement, making the book an absolute delight to read despite the dark subject matter. The characters, while we only have Haggard’s account of them, are strong and easily envisaged - both as the doctor sees them and as we, looking between his words, see them. But however certain Haggard is about his story, as readers our reflections upon them will always be cast in doubt.

As a portrait of a man falling into madness brought about by the ignition of past passions, Dr Haggard’s Disease does no wrong (and if it did, I was too busy enjoying the prose) and its dark tone, tinged with erotica and horror, create an almost perfect novel. Almost, because there were times when I did find the lengthy paragraphs overwhelming, despite their quality. But, now that I’ve joined the ranks of those gushing over McGrath, I know that the next time I need to get away from my usual fare, I’ll be running for Asylum.