The Modern Library

by Colm Toibin

  Angela Carter was a trailblazer. She made British the idea of magical realism and injected her glittering version of it into the work of many of her contemporaries.

  Angela Carter was born and lived in London. An admired critic, short-story writer and polemicist, her fiction includes The Bloody Chamber (1979) and Nights at the Circus (1984).

  Age in year of publication: fifty-one.

  Raymond Carver 1938–1988

  1988 Where I’m Calling From

  Raymond Carver chose this selection of his stories before he died, a permanent deterrent to the rash of imitators who have since appeared. Fortunately his writing is inimitable.

  His voice is that of contemporary America. Carver man is mostly out of work, at home with the vacuum cleaner and the family cat, a bottle too near to hand. Carver woman, with stretch marks, heart of steel and that extra pound of flesh, is keeping herself together with a fixed grin and the nearest beer.

  These are gutsy lives full of regret, opportunities lost, luck that should have been just a little better: but there is love too – all the more real because it grows in arid soil. Carver’s home patch is modern marriage, of which he is the official recorder: ‘Once I woke up in the night to hear Iris grinding her teeth’, and ‘There was a time when I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now, I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that?’ Only Raymond Carver can. His style, economic, unadorned, emphasizes the tough realities of his domestic themes. He has been called the laureate of the dispossessed and he is, but he packs much more than that into the ten or twenty pages of each of these life-changing stories, a classic of modern American writing.

  Raymond Carver was born in Oregon and lived in various cities in America, finally settling in New York. Some of these stories come from his collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976) and many were used by Robert Altman in the film Short Cuts.

  Posthumous publication.

  Raymond Chandler 1888–1959

  1953 The Long Good-Bye

  Raymond Chandler’s original style, the dry humour of his wisecracking private eye, Philip Marlowe, instantly created a milieu perfectly suited to the ways of the late twentieth-century world. ‘I hear voices crying in the night and I go see what’s the matter.’ Grief is Marlowe’s business.

  Marlowe is not a trusting man: too much alcohol, too many lies have given him a hide of iron. But he takes to Terry Lennox, a scarred war hero, a drunk, like so many Chandler heroes, who is married to Sylvia, the daughter of a power-obsessed multimillionaire. Brilliantly constructed around the brutal murder of Sylvia Lennox, Marlowe’s disillusioned despair is matched by the drunken writer Roger Wade, married to another of Chandler’s extraordinary women – these women are always half-crazed, beautiful, angelically so: in Chandler’s jungle it’s a moot point whether beauty masks good or evil. Chandler’s importance and influence are more than a matter of his taut writing style. His genius lies behind the personas of the great Hollywood film stars – Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Lauren Bacall, Barbara Stanwyck and others – who portrayed the characters he invented. Chandler’s novels originated Hollywood film noir, not the other way around. In this, the sixth of his seven Marlowe novels, his immortal private eye engages with murder and betrayal in his meanest and most moving crusade.

  Raymond Chandler was born in Chicago, educated in England and lived in California, the setting for most of his work. Other great Marlowe novels are The Big Sleep (1939) and Farewell, My Lovely (1940).

  Age in year of publication: sixty-five.

  Bruce Chatwin 1940–1989

  1982 On the Black Hill

  This is a brooding, dark novel which has conscious echoes of Hardy and Lawrence. It opens at the turn of the century on a hill farm in Wales when the twin boys Lewis and Benjamin Jones are born to Mary, who has married beneath her, and Amos, a fiercely independent spirit.

  Chatwin makes the love which binds these four people into something taut and hard which maims them and haunts them, and is under constant pressure. The twins behave as one person and can feel each other’s pain; Chatwin manages to make their behaviour credible and interesting. The novel is full of detail about farming, weather, animals, nature, furniture, clothes, mood swings, auctions, feuds between neighbours, social changes.

  The arrival of the First World War makes Amos even more sour than he is already; one of the twins is forced to join the army, and then Chatwin makes them both even more inwardlooking and strange when the war is over. All the main characters in the book are motivated and controlled by forces which they do not understand, nothing comes easy to them, and the reader becomes totally involved then in the great battles which go on within each of them and between all of them, and between all of them and the world outside. Although this is an old-fashioned family saga, it is not a piece of pastiche. It is a deeply felt and deeply moving novel about complex characters and relationships.

  Bruce Chatwin was born in Sheffield and died in the South of France. His other books include In Patagonia (1977), The Songlines (1987) and Utz (1988). On the Black Hill (1982) won the Whitbread First Novel Award.

  Age in year of publication: forty-two.

  Amit Chaudhuri 1962–

  1991 A Strange and Sublime Address

  ‘Sandeep, meanwhile, had come to the conclusion that the grown-ups were mad, each after his or her own fashion. Simple situations were turned into complex dramatic ones; not until then did everybody feel important and happy.’ Sandeep is a small Indian boy, an only child who lives in a Bombay high-rise and in this book makes two long visits to his extended family in Calcutta. The novel tells the story of the atmosphere in the small house where they live. He watches his relatives, their servants and their neighbours, alert to everything – sounds, smells, domestic habits, moods, weather, plants. He is vastly amused by tiny details such as his uncle’s car, which breaks down, and his uncle’s bustling morning rituals. He loves the women in the family, their clothes and perfumes, their voices. He plays with his cousins.

  Chaudhuri writes precisely, carefully, trying to capture in the rhythms of his prose the faded happiness of things, the strange, pure remembered moments. The boy is curious and intelligent, and Chaudhuri is clever enough and talented enough to let his observations stand for a lot, to let what he sees and hears become the drama of the book, rather than twists of fate or plot. There are moments of pure evocative beauty such as the family’s visit to the elderly relatives, the presence of a new baby, a rainstorm, Chhotomama’s illness, his time in hospital, his recovery.

  Amit Chaudhuri was born in Bombay and brought up in Calcutta where he now lives. A Strange and Sublime Address (1991) won the Commonwealth Prize for best first book. It was followed in 1993 by Afternoon Raag, which won the Encore Award for the best second novel of the year, and Freedom Song (1998). A New World came out in 2000, Real Time in 2002 and The Immortals in 2009.

  Age in year of publication: twenty-nine.

  John Cheever 1912–1982

  1977 Falconer

  John Cheever is best known for his comic and ironic short stories, for his quiet, careful, sometimes satirical, often gently unsettling observation of American suburban life. This novel is not like that at all, although it resembles Cheever’s other work in its depiction of isolation and broken families.

  In just over two hundred pages Cheever constructs a dark, tough, relentless universe. It is the prison called Falconer in which Farragut has been incarcerated for killing his brother, striking him with a fire iron. The novel is written in stark, clear prose; the darkness of the vision is unlike any work produced by Cheever’s American contemporaries. There is a blunt, deadpan edge to the sentences and observations; the absence of daylight is in the prose as much as in the prison. Every scene in the book is set up with a mastery and control: the visit of Farragut’s wife would break your heart and chill your bones. It seems that things cannot get any worse until you come to the cat-killing scene, the descriptions of drug addiction, the violence, the shee
r quality of the despair.

  The novel offered Cheever a way to dramatize his own circumspect homosexuality: the homosexual love affair in the book is remarkable and unexpected for its tenderness, and for the quality of the love and longing between Farragut (who has been heterosexual in the outside world) and Jody, a fellow inmate. This book is a serious work of American fiction and deserves to be better known.

  John Cheever was born in Massachusetts. His other novels include The Wapshot Chronicle (1957) and The Wapshot Scandal (1964). The Stories of John Cheever (1978) won a Pulitzer Prize and a US National Book Critics Circle Award.

  Age in year of publication: sixty-five.

  Agatha Christie 1890–1976

  1950 A Murder is Announced

  Of the novelists chosen for this book Agatha Christie is the most popular entertainer. In a hundred languages or more, she provides millions of readers with a view of England complete with afternoon teas, vicars, colonels and a dead body – in the library, in the watersplash, in bed, on trains, at sea and in every innocent seeming English village street.

  She created two eccentric detectives – Hercule Poirot, who exercised his little grey cells and fingered his moustache through some of her best novels (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, 1926 and Murder on the Orient Express, 1934) – and she wrote brilliant stories in which neither appeared (Ten Little Niggers, 1939 and Death Comes as the End, 1944). Her second detective, Miss Jane Marple, was Christie’s alter ego in the guise of a fluffy, elderly spinster, conservatively opinionated and sharp as a tack beneath her grey curls and woolly mufflers. Miss Marple is the genius at work in A Murder is Announced in which, in the wonderfully named village of Chipping Cleghorn, the local newspaper startles its inhabitants with an announcement of the precise date, time and location of a murder; thither wend the village worthies; the murder occurs on time, every clue is presented to us, but as ever only the ingenuity which is the hallmark of a Christie detective story makes the solution, perfectly obvious once revealed, utterly baffling until that moment. She fools us every time.

  Agatha Christie was born in Torquay, Devon. The acknowledged Queen of Crime, she published seventy-nine mysteries of which over sixty were novels. Many were, and continue to be, filmed and televised.

  Age in year of publication: sixty.

  Jonathan Coe 1961–

  1994 What a Carve Up!

  (US: The Winshaw Legacy)

  This novel is an octoped. First, for those who experienced them, it emits a wonderful blast of indignation about the Thatcher years; secondly, for those spared that experience, it provides a hilarious and potent send-up of any political party driving its people round the bend at any given moment. Thirdly, it is a most satisfactory family saga, telling the story of the Winshaw dynasty, a gaggle of persons of the kind that owned, bought or ran Britain in the 1980s and 1990s.

  Fourthly, its hero, Michael, biographer of the Winshaw family, is addictively engaging in the David Copperfield manner, the sort of young man who, sensitive, vaguely inept in a business sense, kind, embodies everything the Thatcher years most hated. Fifthly, Coe is a writer who uses the movies in magical ways, the title itself being a 1960s British film comedy which becomes crucially important as mysteries unfold. Sixthly, this is a mystery story too. Seventhly, Coe laces his satire with compassion, pointing the finger at the blusterers who tell us what to do and at us for our patience in putting up with same. Eighthly, What a Carve Up! is an incisive and funny polemic and a perfectly pitched satire that succeeds triumphantly in everything it attempts. Reading it is like watching Citizen Kane crossed with Singing in the Rain: we are left bouncing with laughter and admiration.

  Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham and lives in London. The author of several novels, including The House of Sleep (1997), The Closed Circle (1998). He has also written a prize-winning biography of B.S. Johnson Like A Fiery Elephant (2004).

  Age in year of publication: thirty-three.

  J. M. Coetzee 1940–

  1990 Age of Iron

  Three novels by J. M. Coetzee could easily have made this list. They are Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life and Times of Michael K (1983) and Age of Iron (1990). Coetzee is a master of tone and colour, subtleties and ironies. His novels are full of echoes of other work – Shakespeare, the Bible, Kafka, Dostoevsky – and are at times harrowing.

  Age of Iron demonstrates Coetzee’s skill at using voice: Elizabeth Curren, who is dying of cancer in the old South Africa, writes to her daughter, who lives abroad. From the first page, you can feel the tension in her voice, her sense of right and wrong, how frightened she is, how frail and vulnerable.

  In Coetzee’s work, the public world becomes a sort of darkness, constantly encroaching, threatening to take over. Here we have the drama of the last years of the apartheid regime: riots, schoolchildren on strike, white liberals like our narrator deeply shocked by the savagery of what is going on around them. The sentences are perfect, the tone is relentless and unforgiving, and the sense of despair, both public and private, fills the book with a grief which is almost overwhelming.

  J. M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town and now lives in Australia. His novel Life and Times of Michael K won the Booker Prize and the Prix Femina étranger in 1983. Disgrace won the Booker Prize in 1999. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003.

  Age in year of publication: fifty.

  Ivy Compton-Burnett 1884–1969

  1959 A Heritage and its History

  ‘“I hope Father will drop down dead on his way home,” said Ralph Challoner. “I really do hope it.”’ This ferocious request is customary within the families of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s imagination. Simon Challoner longs to inherit the estate of his Uncle Edwin, one of those men who malevolently enters a room just in time to hear ill of himself. Widowed, Edwin marries the young Rhoda, whom Simon impregnates in an idle moment. Edwin accepts the ensuing son as his own, and the distressed Simon, having lost his inheritance, marries Fanny and begets five vocally omnipresent children whom he rears tyrannically, in fear of the workhouse and the orphanage. Simon saves himself and his heritage in a manner so unimaginable that we are left to imagine it.

  Written predominantly in dialogue, in devastating conversational exchanges, this high comedy is so biting and acerbic, and so clever, that discussions of potential incest seem much the same as comments on the carving or the state of the nursery. Ivy Compton-Burnett presented her mordant novels of family passions and decay in matchless, clipped prose, revealing beneath the prim surface of English upper middle-class life the presence of sin, the absence of charity and the necessity for suspicion, cunning and revenge – in that order. She is incomparable.

  Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in Middlesex and lived in London. Of her nineteen novels, the best-known are More Women Than Men (1933), A House and its Head (1935) and Manservant and Maidservant (1947).

  Age in year of publication: seventy-five.

  Jim Crace 1946–

  1997 Quarantine

  Sometimes in a writer’s life one book seems to crystallize a talent, seems to fulfil all of the promise of the earlier books, seems to deal with themes and obsessions and tones which have appeared before, offering them a new simplicity and seriousness and sense of perfection. Jim Crace’s Quarantine, which tells the story of Jesus’s forty days in the desert, does just this. Crace has always been interested in how society emerges from the primitive, in landscapes which are bleak and deserted, in the intricacies of trading and bonding. His writing has always been stark and poetic, beautifully crafted.

  In this novel, Jesus is a chimera, he barely appears. The novel dramatizes his absence and the presence of four other pilgrims in the desert, each carrying a burden of fear and desire. It focuses on Musa, a trader who has been left for dead by his family and who believes that Jesus has healed him; on his wife Miri, who is pregnant; and on their relationships with the pilgrims. The novel is written in a style of calm perfection, full of echoes of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens, with a
remarkable number of sentences in iambic pentameter. The physical sense of the desert is superb; Crace’s telling of the drama between the characters makes the book the masterpiece that his earlier books had presaged.

  Jim Crace was born in north London and lives in Birmingham. His other books include Continent (1986), winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, The Gift of Stones (1988) and Arcadia (1992). Quarantine won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1997, and was followed by Being Dead (1999), The Devil’s Larder (2001), Six (2003) and The Pesthouse (2007).