by Colm Toibin
Frank Bascombe is the narrator of both The Sportswriter and Independence Day (1995); he lives in New Jersey. His life is, on the face of it, ordinary. He is divorced, he had a child who died, he thinks about women and work, he has friends. Ford surrounds him – both novels take place over a short space of time – with a sort of halo as he meditates on his life and days, tries to come to terms with those around him. He is calm, nothing is exaggerated, the scale of his emotions remains small, and yet – and this is the genius of The Sportswriter – his feelings are rendered with such sympathy and complexity, such a sense of wonder and careful, thoughtful prose that he burns his way into the reader’s imagination as a modern Everyman. The novel uses time with particular skill: the three days in which it takes place contrasted with a lifetime in flashback and memory. The events of these three days – meetings with close family and friends – are brilliantly and memorably rendered.
Richard Ford was born in Mississippi and has lived in Princeton and Michigan. He has written a number of excellent short stories – collected in Rock Springs (1988) Women with Men (1997) and A Multitude of Sins (2002) – and four important novels: The Sportswriter, Wildlife (1990), Independence Day (1995) and The Lay of the Land (2006). Independence Day won a Pulitzer Prize in 1996.
Age in year of publication: forty-two.
Frederick Forsyth 1938–
1971 The Day of the Jackal
Everybody knows that General de Gaulle died in his bed and all attempts to assassinate him failed. Therefore, any novel which focuses on an attempt to assassinate him must lack one central tension: excitement about the outcome. How is it, then, that this book, almost thirty years old, remains powerful and exciting?
It is written in the style of investigative journalism, or indeed a police report. There are hardly any flourishes, and there is a great deal of technical information. The narrative hardly ever enters anyone’s mind, and this gives the novel a strange, chilling tone: things are described as from a distance, as though someone later managed to piece together what had happened, and this makes the events of the novel very convincing indeed.
At the beginning the OAS decide, after many botched attempts, to hire an outsider to assassinate de Gaulle who has, in their opinion, betrayed Algeria. We learn very little about the Jackal, the man they hire: he has no thoughts and hardly any past, he is English, blond, efficient and ruthless. As his plans – perfect weapon, several new identities, perfect location – are made, the police in Paris slowly realize that the danger this time is real. Once this happens you cannot put the novel down, and there are moments when you almost want the Jackal to succeed. The narrative is fast moving, tense, supremely confident and makes this book a classic of its kind.
Frederick Forsyth was born in Kent and now lives in Hertfordshire. His other books include The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974).
Age in year of publication: thirty-three.
John Fowles 1926–2005
1966 The Magus
This novel follows in the great tradition of island stories in which our hero, Nicholas Urfe, innocent, raw and English, arrives in a strange and foreign place full of strange and foreign people. He is rational, intelligent and civilized and suddenly now is forced to grapple with dark and hidden forces.
The Magus is set in the years after the Second World War; Nicholas, an Oxford graduate, finds work as a teacher in a school on a remote Greek island. Fowles is brilliant at establishing the island’s topography, its bareness and its isolation. He also allows history and myth to hover over the book, so that at times Nicholas seems to be acting out an older story as he comes, like a moth to flame, to the house of Maurice Conchis on the island. Conchis is a conjuror, a story-teller, an art collector. His house is filled with ghosts, strange noises, odd music. And Nicholas is both frightened by what he finds there, and deeply drawn to and intrigued by it.
Fowles is fascinated by the darker aspects of male desire, and by the compulsive and the irrational. He manages to make his island both a real place, rugged and beautiful, and an imaginary place, as though Prospero and Caliban had recently walked these shores. Just as the protagonist is dragged deeper and deeper into the enigma of his host, so too the reader is constantly jolted and surprised by the drama in the novel between the rational and the mysterious.
John Fowles was born in Essex and lived in Lyme Regis. His other novels included The Collector (1963) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). The Magus was reissued with a revised ending in 1977.
Age in year of publication: forty.
Janet Frame 1924–2004
1957 Owls Do Cry
Janet Frame’s gift is to use a lucid, often comic view of her own experiences as the touchstone for her distinctive work. Owls Do Cry fictionalizes her childhood in New Zealand as one of the siblings of the impoverished Withers family. The father is Bob, a shiftworker; the mother the gentle Amy, always wearing a damp pinny; Francie is the eldest, destined for the woollen mills and worse; then comes Toby who is ‘a shingle short’; and Daphne, Frame’s alter ego, who like Frame herself is given a leucotomy for little reason except as a curb on an excess of imagination. Finally there is Chicks, the youngest, who plunges into the best – or worst – that New Zealand has to offer.
Childhood for the Withers children revolves around scarcity; they are dirty, they are poor. For pleasure they loiter around the town rubbish dump, long to go to the cinema and know the words of every Forties and Fifties popular song. These childhood memories echo with tragic clarity through the adult lives each chooses.
Janet Frame has a relish for words, and for the small details that identify an incident or an event. In Owls Do Cry the language shimmers with her poetic sensibility, but there’s a toughness too, fortified by her gentle fierceness and her angry calm.
Janet Frame was born in Oamuru, near Dunedin, and lived in that city. She is also famous for her autobiographical trilogy To the Is-Land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984) and The Envoy From Mirror City (1984) which was filmed by Jane Campion in 1991, under the title of its second volume: An Angel at my Table.
Age in year of publication: thirty-three.
Charles Frazier 1950–
1997 Cold Mountain
This is an epic historical romance set against the backdrop of the American Civil War. Inman is a wounded Confederate soldier. As his recovery is near completion, his despair at the futility of the fighting and his desire to be reunited with his love Ada lead him to abandon his fellow soldiers in a makeshift hospital and journey home to Cold Mountain in the hills of North Carolina.
Ada’s tale of her own heroism in managing a small farm and of the stubborn friendship she cements with her new helper, Ruby, is interspersed with Inman’s Odyssean voyage in which he saves the lives of two women, buries a child, is left for dead and is rescued by a slave, and fights off the Home Guard who are looking for deserters.
Frazier has captured the cadences and quotidian miseries of the time and his descriptions of the landscape fully echo the heroic nature of the tale. As the dual narratives converge, the suspense and tension increase along with Ada’s and Inman’s yearning for each other. They know they have both been changed by their circumstances and wonder if their love can still blossom. The climax is superbly handled and turns a potential saga into a genuine work of literature.
Charles Frazier was born in North Carolina. Cold Mountain, his first novel, won the National Book Award in 1998. His second novel Thirteen Moons appeared in 2006.
Age in year of publication: forty-seven.
William Gaddis 1922–1998
1955 The Recognitions
Readers wishing to enter the strange, dark, rich and difficult world of William Gaddis should probably start with the shortest of his four novels, Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), but The Recognitions is the real masterpiece and repays much rereading and close attention.
The central motif concerns the conflict between the genuine and the fake: one of the main characters is a forger, anot
her character has written a play which may or may not be a forgery. Many of the conversations held at New York gatherings in the novel are also deeply false; religion and consumerism, too, are rendered inauthentic in the novel’s vast thousand-page panorama. But it is the texture of the writing which holds the novel together and makes it genuinely exciting: the sheer panache of the parody and satire, the sudden beginnings and endings, the quality of the jokes, the density of the narrative, the weirdness of the characters. Only in Scotland (Kelman, Gray, Welsh) and in the United States (Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo) has the true torch of modernism in fiction been carried. The Recognitions is one of the great novels of the century.
William Gaddis was born and lived in New York. His other novels include JR (1975) and A Frolic of His Own (1994).
Age in year of publication: thirty-three.
Mavis Gallant 1922–
1979 From the Fifteenth District
Mavis Gallant’s range is astonishing. It is hard to make any generalizations about her work because her stories – she has written altogether more than one hundred – are so different in tone and content. In her world people are distant from each other, and the closer they come – in families, in love – the more remote and fraught and strange their behaviour and the more exciting and funny and interesting her story. Her writing is impeccable. Sentences are often startling. In ‘The Remission’, one of her masterpieces of this collection, a family has moved to the Mediterranean so that Alec can die. His wife is puzzled by the locals: ‘Barbara expected them to be cunning and droll, which they were, and to steal from her, which they did, and to love her, which they seemed to.’ Alec, of course, doesn’t die, at least not for a long time, which gives Barbara the chance to find a new companion. In almost all of the stories, people live in exile. The Anglo-Saxons are bossy and half-impoverished, some of them are truly dreadful people. There is a marvellous story about a German boy who comes home late from the war; there is an extraordinary account of a Polish exile in Paris, and another of a Hungarian mother whose son lives in Scotland. And the last story, ‘Irina’, has a deeply unsettling version of an old woman (‘In loving and unloving families alike, the same problem arises after a death: What to do about the widow?’). In this volume, Gallant writes with wit and intelligence and a unique sort of sharpness.
Mavis Gallant was born in Montreal and has lived in Paris since 1950. Her Collected Stories came out in 1996.
Age in year of publication: fifty-seven.
Helen Garner 1942–
1984 The Children’s Bach
The late twentieth century is Helen Garner’s stamping ground. Her novels, short stories and brilliant journalism are marked by an incisive intelligence and an exact command of language. Her writing is spare and sharp, like a sequence of photographs of sour city streets, her characters snatched in celluloid for just one second. In a line or two she captures intimately the habits of the young in the city, and the disorders of adult love. She is at her best in this mordant tale of urban family life in which her wit and singular dialogue are imbedded in an elegant threnody of Bach, Mozart, and a tangy mix of rock and soul.
Athena is married to Dexter, a man who wants to ‘live gloriously’ and who wears shirts that look like pyjama tops. They have two children, Arthur, and Billy, who is not quite right in the head and about whom Athena, at least, nurses no delusions. Elizabeth erupts from Dexter’s past, bringing with her Philip, the cool rock musician, and her younger sister Vicki. Matters and persons rearrange themselves, to the accompaniment of Philip’s rock rhythms, Dexter’s curly whistling and Vicki’s cacophony of vomiting after too much Campari and orange. But really this is the story of Athena’s search for her own music, for more than the city sounds, the burble of children and the distant chatter of neighbours. Through it all, Helen Garner’s offbeat humour adds wonderfully and contrapuntally to this story of the encounters, adjustments and confrontations of ordinary life.
Helen Garner was born in Geelong and lives in Melbourne. Her award-winning fiction includes Monkey Grip (1977), Honour & Other People’s Children (1980), Cosmo Cosmolino (1992), The Spare Room (2008) and short stories, Postcards from Surfers (1985). Her classic reportage on political correctness in action, The First Stone, was published in 1995.
Age in year of publication: forty-two.
William H. Gass 1924–
1968 In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
(revised edition 1981)
The five stories in this book have different themes and settings, but there is something distinctive about the tone and the voice; Gass’s signature in these stories sets them apart. The style is poetic and at times gnarled. The sentences are worked on and sculpted. Gass is clearly as interested in language as he is in things; he gives the impression that the words he uses were cut out of stone. Yet he manages in the first long story, ‘The Pedersen Kid’, to give the reader a vivid sense of the fierce cold and the fierce distrust between the characters, to give a sense of danger and mystery to the journey the boy has to take across the freezing landscape with his father and the farm help. In another story, ‘Icicles’, the tone is more manic, close to William Gaddis perhaps, or even Virginia Woolf. And then the title story is a piece of pure, calm, poetic writing.
It is told in short sections. The narrator is alone in a small town in Indiana: he describes the town and the weather (Gass is brilliant on weather): ‘Sometimes I think the land is flat because the winds have levelled it, they blow so constantly.’ He writes about houses and neighbours and cats, the mood is meditative and oddly dislocated, as though this was a brilliant translation from the French. And all the time, in stray references, but stitched carefully into the fabric of the story, is an absence, a missing loved one, longed for, loathed (in one section), remembered, brought to mind.
William H. Gass was born in North Dakota and has lived in St Louis since 1969. His novels include Omensetter’s Luck (1966) and The Tunnel (1996). He is also a well-known critic.
Age in year of publication: forty-four.
Maurice Gee 1931–
1978 Plumb
‘I have never wished for comfort, but for thorns, for battle in the soul’s arena. I have had what I wished for.’ So speaks George Plumb, a stiff-necked New Zealand clergyman whose story begins in the 1890s and continues through the first half of this century.
Plumb’s fanaticism leads him by the nose from Presbyterianism to Unitarianism to pacifism until no religion is good enough for him. But he’s a worthy soul and a loving man, one of those men who are always right and like other such paragons considers constant impregnation of his slaving wife Edie ‘– in her weariness, in her pain, she praised: scouring pans, mopping floors’ – to be his Christian duty. And so the novel reaches out to trace the erosive effect of mindless righteousness on their ten children, centring most of all on the homosexual Alf. George’s fundamentalism, pinched and sour, placidly overshadows and shrivels all those in his care.
There is a tenderness and charm about Gee’s writing, and an understanding in his onslaught on the Puritan tradition – flourishing vigorously in New Zealand – which manages to be compassionate yet deadly. Redolent with the atmosphere of an antipodean world reconstructed with fidelity and warmth, this is a novel thoroughly satisfying in the traditional manner, engraved with the lore of family life.
Maurice Gee was born in Whakatane, North Island, New Zealand. Plumb won the New Zealand Fiction Award and the Wattie Book of the Year Award, and was followed by two sequels: Meg (1981) and Sole Survivor (1983).
Age in year of publication: forty-seven.
Kaye Gibbons 1960–
1987 Ellen Foster
There is music in the language of the American South. The sounds come from the words Southerners choose, the dialogue, the laying down of words in a particular order – the nearest to it, when listened to, is Irish.
Kaye Gibbons writes in the cadence of the South, which she puts into the voice of Ellen Foster, whose opening words, ‘When I was little
I would think of ways to kill my daddy’, drop us into the company of a terrified little girl who knows too much about what’s going on. Daddy drinks, Mummy is sick to dying; Daddy likes to beat up both of them. Her only place of safety is the coloured house down the road with her friend Starletta, but how can she eat a coloured biscuit or walk down a coloured pathway? She can though, and more, as she is soon to learn.
Ellen has a way of getting through: she must love, and she sets out to find someone to do it with. Her story tells us more about race in the South than any social history, for as we listen to Ellen, we are told Starletta’s story too. Kaye Gibbons is a clever writer with an ear for the rhythm and beauty of language, and a way of conveying the fragility of life which is direct and fresh, keen-witted, always original.
Kaye Gibbons was born in North Carolina where she still lives. Amongst her award-winning novels are A Virtuous Woman (1989) and Sights Unseen (1995).
Age in year of publication: twenty-seven.