by Colm Toibin
Mulk Raj Anand was born in Peshawar and after many years in England, returned to India at the end of the Second World War. Untouchable (1935) and Coolie (1936) are amongst his famous novels.
Age in year of publication: forty-eight.
Jessica Anderson 1916–2010
1978 Tirra Lirra by the River
‘Tirra Lirra’ was the song Sir Lancelot sang as he rode by the river on his way to Camelot. Nora Porteous discovers this in a book of her father’s, who died when she was six. Camelot becomes a region of her mind, a retreat for her artist’s imagination from the dismal gentility of Australian suburbia. Seventy years later, after adult life in Sydney and London, Nora returns to the now empty family home and stretches her memory not only to recall, but to understand the past. In seven flashbacks she contemplates her marriage to the repulsive Colin – ‘Look, just lie still, will you? That’s all you have to do’; her artistic life as a skilled dressmaker and embroiderer; her female life – love, the lack of it, the presence of it in unexpected places, the trauma of an illegal abortion, acutely rendered. Jessica Anderson transforms this superficially simple story of an eighty-year-old woman’s quest for a sense of self into a fine novel. Often laconic, and very often funny, her intuitive understanding of the reek of futility that seeps through most people’s lives produces a telling account of the nobility of the everyday. Nora, ‘a woman of no consequence’, becomes a heroine in one of the very few novels in which an old woman is such a memorable character.
Jessica Anderson was born in Queensland and lived in Sydney. She also wrote short stories, and her novel The Impersonators (1980) was highly praised. Tirra Lirra by the River won the 1978 Miles Franklin Award.
Age in year of publication: sixty-two.
Margaret Atwood 1939–
1996 Alias Grace
Grace Marks was imprisoned in 1843 as an accomplice to the murder of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his mistress, the housekeeper Nancy. Grace is a mysterious person, young, defenceless, not at all stupid, given to the odd remark that keeps her watchers guessing. Her sentence of death is commuted to life imprisonment, at which point she becomes fair game for the doctors and do-gooders who wish to analyse good and evil and women in general, and Grace in particular.
Muffled ambivalences surround Grace, her life, her minders and her betters. The medical absurdities the professionals perpetrate, and the potent contribution of sex, greed and ambition, illuminate the manners of those times, and contrast piteously with the wretched condition of the lower orders in eighteenth-century Canada – as everywhere else.
Alias Grace has the sharp flavour of Margaret Atwood’s formidable intelligence; her ability to control form and structure is always remarkable. Within her easy mastery of social realism she accommodates serious matters, crucial ideas. The battle for power represented by enigmatic sexual encounters shows men manipulating women, and vice versa, in all the ways that flourished then and linger now. Reading this novel is both a gleeful and an exciting experience, because Grace herself is the perfect subject for Margaret Atwood’s talents, embroidering intricate patterns of mystery, wit and paradox on the rough fabric of her story.
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa and lives in Toronto. Among her internationally successful novels are Surfacing (1972), The Handmaid’s Tale (1986), Cat’s Eye (1989) and The Blind Assassin which won the Man Booker Prize in 2000. She is also a poet and critic.
Age in year of publication: fifty-seven.
Beryl Bainbridge 1934–2010
1977 Injury Time
Simpson thought ‘how unfair it was that the nicer moments of life – a few drinks under the belt, good food, a pretty woman seated opposite – were invariably spent in the company of one’s wife’. This selflessness sets the scene for Injury Time, in which Simpson and his wife Muriel trot off to have dinner with Binny, Simpson’s mistress of several years, and with Edward, Simpson’s accountant. This is Binny’s first public dinner party; Edward has a wife, Helen, whose presence is always felt. All of them are in the injury time of life; little do they know that they are also about to enter the last chance saloon. Into Binny’s party, a dinner party from hell, erupts a gaggle of gunmen. Marriages and affairs, topsy-turvy before, disintegrate in the chaos that follows. One of Bainbridge’s specialities is her close inspection of women who are in love with useless men, generally also of dubious physical attraction. Binny is one of Bainbridge’s happiest creations, and Edward a prince of poltroons. There is a wonderful boldness about the works of Beryl Bainbridge, ably assisted by her conjuror’s timing and an enviable ear for the way people talk. Sentimentality withers under her ironic, detached gaze, but canniness and black comedy flourish, as does laughter in this wily account of the ungovernable precariousness of love.
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 a
utobiographical 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.
Barker is in full control of her material: 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, w
hich 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.