The Modern Library

by Colm Toibin

  William Golding 1911–1993

  1954 Lord of the Flies

  The idea behind this novel should be fatal: it tells us that within us all, eagerly waiting to be let out, lie savages. But the power of the narrative and the characterization overcomes the crudity of the idea and forces the reader to become deeply involved in the story and the fate of the small English boys who have survived an air crash on a desert island. At first they are bewildered and find it easy to pick on a boy called Piggy. They talk in a mixture of school talk and attempted adult talk, but this changes as the novel goes on. The older boys take control. ‘Apart from food and sleep, [the smaller boys] found time for play, aimless and trivial, among the white sand by the bright water. They cried for their mothers much less often than might have been expected; they were very brown, and filthily dirty.’ They try to keep a fire lit, they eat fruit, attend meetings and hunt pigs. The pig-hunting scenes are particularly graphic and bloodthirsty. Leaders emerge, and slowly a war breaks out between them; two of the older boys get killed and they begin to hunt another, just as a ship arrives.

  Golding has created the unbrave new world of these small boys so convincingly that when the first adult speaks at the end of the book, it seems like an odd intrusion.

  William Golding was born in Cornwall and was an English teacher in Wiltshire for many years. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. His other books include Pincher Martin (1956), The Spire (1964) and Rites of Passage, which won the Booker Prize in 1980.

  Age in year of publication: forty-three.

  Nadine Gordimer 1923–

  1979 Burger’s Daughter

  Nadine Gordimer is known for her implacable opposition to the enduring apartheid regime in South Africa rather than her extraordinary talent as a stylist or as a novelist who writes better than any of her contemporaries about states of sexual longing and desire. Burger’s Daughter is the work in which her talent at dramatizing the conflict between public and private life, the individual and the family, history and destiny, escape and entrapment, is best displayed.

  Rosa Burger is the daughter of Marxist parents who have been martyred for the cause of a new South Africa. The novel tells the story of her desire to be true to her parents’ legacy and her efforts to escape it. It is written in her own voice and the dry voice of a reporter; it takes us through her childhood and her parents’ lives, through the years after their deaths, followed by a wonderfully described sensuous sojourn in France, and then the inevitable return. Even though much of the novel deals with cool surfaces, scenes viewed from afar, moments snatched from memory, Rosa Burger, like many of Gordimer’s characters, seems desperately real and exact, alive and memorable.

  Nadine Gordimer was born in Transvaal, South Africa, and has always lived in South Africa. All her short story collections are wonderful and her strongest novels include The Late Bourgeois World (1966), The Conservationist, which won the Booker Prize in 1974, and A Sport of Nature (1987). She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991.

  Age in year of publication: fifty-six.

  Alasdair Gray 1934–

  1981 Lanark: A Life of Four Books

  No great Scottish novel emerged from the First World War, nor from the Second. It seems to have taken the unlikely figure of Margaret Thatcher to fire, and perhaps infuriate, the Scottish novelists’ imaginations.

  Lanark seethes with political rage and is jammed with surrealist invention. It tells the interconnected stories of Duncan Thaw, a young Glasgow artist who draws, and is drawn, in the realist tradition, and the figure Lanark, his science fiction doppelgänger, who comes to the page in full Borgesian dress. Thaw’s Glasgow is a place of tenements, canals, middens, Catholics and Protestants, and the man himself is common and depressed, a Fifties lad filled with civic wonder. Lanark’s vision of Glasgow is called Unthank, a fiery, darkened, collapsing industrial nightmare, like an illustration from William Blake. Lanark is given to odd skin complaints and strange encounters, and his travels through the underworld give vent to some of the best thinking about citizenship ever to appear in a novel.

  Gray is a master of shade and counterpoint. Thaw’s world and Lanark’s world open on to each other in the most dazzling ways in this novel. At the end of the book, as Lanark contemplates the destruction of the city from his vantage point on the old merchant Necropolis, we are left with nothing less eccentric than a boisterous lament for Gray’s native Glasgow and all its past glories. Lanark is a circus, and a milestone in contemporary Scottish writing.

  Alasdair Gray was born in Glasgow. His other novels include 1982 Janine (1984), Poor Things (1992), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Whitbread Novel Award, and Young Men in Love (2007).

  Age in year of publication: forty-seven.

  Henry Green 1905–1973

  1950 Nothing

  If there is a ball in literary heaven, Henry Green will be waltzing with Ivy Compton-Burnett; masters of dialogue both, it is difficult to imagine which of the two would lead the dance.

  In Nothing Henry Green gazes upon the English moneyed classes, deprived of wealth by the Second World War and the taxes of the Labour government which followed it. For the first time in their lives, after doing nothing much, they must work. John Pomfret is such a man and Jane Weatherby, his former amour, a woman of just that class. Their offspring are quite other: children of the welfare state, they go to work while their parents lunch weekly at the Ritz, making much moan.

  In this world no one wishes another well; it is parents first, children second; the rest of the world is there to dance attendance. When John’s daughter falls in love with Jane’s son, only the accumulated vinegar of many years enables Jane to put her towering self-esteem to good use, and, manipulating malice like a sten gun, lay waste those who stand in her way.

  This is a model comedy of manners, lyrical and graphic, rising and falling in perfect tempo to the accompaniment of dialogue at once vivacious and viciously funny. Henry Green had access to wells of wit and caustic perception denied other writers.

  Henry Green was born in Gloucestershire and lived in Birmingham and London. Living (1929), Loving (1945) and Doting (1952) are some of the best of his elliptical, enigmatic novels.

  Age in year of publication: forty-five.

  Graham Greene 1904–1991

  1978 The Human Factor

  It is difficult to decide which of the six wonderful novels that Graham Greene wrote between 1950 and his death is the best: The End of the Affair (1951); The Quiet American (1955); Our Man in Havana (1958); The Comedians (1966); The Honorary Consul (1973) or The Human Factor. There are moments in each of the books which are superb; and there are characters in each book who, in their isolation and shambling struggle with themselves, are among the most memorable in contemporary writing. Greene is certainly the finest English writer of the second half of the century.

  The Human Factor, the most perfect and poignant of Greene’s post-1950s novels, deals with the Secret Service; Maurice Castle, in his sixties, is back in London at the Africa desk. He is a mild man who lives quietly, good with files, as one of his superiors says; he is deeply in love with Sarah, his wife, who is a black South African. He has rescued her once and now he seeks to protect her and her son Sam. The novel, as one would expect from Greene, has some marvellous minor shady characters, and deals brilliantly with the chilling, ruthless nature of Castle’s superiors. (It also has the best dog of any novel mentioned in this book; see Iris Murdoch’s The Nice and the Good for the best cat.) But it is Castle himself who emerges most painfully in the novel: obsessive, driven, haunted, uneasy.

  Graham Greene was born in Hertfordshire and lived for many years in the south of France. He published his first novel in 1929 and his last in 1988. Among his most famous works are Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The End of the Affair (1951) and the film script of The Third Man (1950).

  Age in year of publication: seventy-four.

  Patrick Hamilton 1904–1962

/>   1951 The West Pier

  The West Pier is a study in pure, unmitigated perversity. The novel is set along the seafront and pier in Brighton in the early 1920s; there are only five characters who matter in the plot: three young men who were in school together, and two young women whom they meet on the pier. There are no murders and no violence, and yet there is an atmosphere in the book of constant menace and malevolence.

  This book, the first in the Gorse trilogy, explores the mind of one Ernest Ralph Gorse as he takes advantage of one of the young women and makes a fool of her. With all its macabre plots and evil intentions, it has the tone of a very dark psychological thriller. The writing, which is elegant and slightly arch, is also at times world-weary and oddly wise, as though the book were written by the retired headmaster of an old, posh public school. It is full of petty snobberies and dramatic versions of the English class system. Slowly Hamilton allows Gorse to take over the book, and the twisted workings of his agile mind become fascinating; the idea that he wants to cause grief and humiliation and pain for their own sake gives the book a sort of horror that you can only find in other books by Hamilton and certain films by Hitchcock.

  Patrick Hamilton was born in Hassocks, Sussex, and lived in London. He is best known for thrillers such as Rope (1929), on which Hitchcock based his film, and Gaslight (1938). He also wrote Hangover Square (1941). The other two books in the Gorse trilogy are Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse (1953) and Unknown Assailants (1955).

  Age in year of publication: forty-seven.

  Elizabeth Hardwick 1916–2007

  1979 Sleepless Nights

  Elizabeth Hardwick sits at her New York table one June ‘listening to the birdsong of rough, grinding trucks in the street’ and decides to transform memory into fiction. Her ‘clever, critical, bookish’ heroine – herself – remembers episodes from her childhood in West Virginia in the company of her large family whose destinies ‘are linked by a likeness of forehead and nose’. Then there are the bohemian years in New York living at the Hotel Schulyer ‘within walking distance of all those places one never walked to’, playing games of love with a cherished homosexual friend.

  This period includes a portrait of Billie Holiday as Hardwick knew her, drenched in music and drugs; and then come years in America and Europe with the shadowy figure of her real husband, the poet Robert Lowell. All this and more is wrapped around the true heroines of her memories, the ‘store clerks and waitresses, those ladies cast off with children to raise’, the Idas and Josettes and Angelas whose small women’s lives allow Hardwick to conjure up large truths. These splinters of memory, confessions of an insomniac, are recalled in words lovingly and precisely chosen. Hardwick has almost created her own literary form to write this novel; its other originalities lie in its zest for life, for epigram – and in the siren voice of its narrator.

  Elizabeth Hardwick was born in Kentucky and lived in New York. A founder and advisory editor of the New York Review of Books, she has written other novels and critical works, in particular Seduction and Betrayal (1974).

  Age in year of publication: sixty-three.

  Frank Hardy 1917–1994

  1950 Power Without Glory

  Frank Hardy, an Australian Communist and gambler, wanted to write a fictional exposé of John Wren, the corrupt business magnate who controlled Melbourne – its sporting, gambling and political life, its police force and its Catholic Church – in the decades before 1950. Hardy spent years collecting material and secretly writing the novel, always one step ahead of Wren’s machine. With no money, no printer, no publisher and a libellous seven-hundred-page manuscript, bit by bit the book became famous by word of mouth, a triumph of self-publishing.

  The result was uproar: Hardy was arrested for criminal libel, and so began the most notorious case in Australian history – which Hardy won.

  But above all, this is a passionate work of fiction, with a Balzacian vigour fuelled by Hardy’s intense dedication to his epic cause. John Wren – renamed John West – stands before us, rising from his poor Irish immigrant beginnings, discarding family, friends, wife and children – if need be – in his ruthless quest for control of his city. This is not a one-dimensional novel nor is it a political tract. We feel for West: we know what made him what he is, and it is in Hardy’s understanding of the evil grandeur of the man and the tangled forces that explain him and bring him down that the value of this novel lies.

  Frank Hardy was born in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, and spent most of his life in Australia. Power Without Glory also became a successful Australian TV series in 1976.

  Age in year of publication: thirty-three.

  Thomas Harris 1941–

  1981 Red Dragon

  Hannibal Lecter, who dominated Harris’s bigger bestseller Silence of the Lambs, began his career in this thriller of masterly horror that quietly refrigerates the blood.

  Thomas Harris does not bother with secrets; we know the infamy we face on the first page. Special agent Will Graham is cooling things off in Miami with his wife and stepson, after being sliced up by Lecter with a linoleum knife. Lecter, in prison, still manages to emit a miasma of iniquity and malignity by letter and phone – almost by osmosis. When Graham comes out of retirement to track down a serial killer who loves to kill families – husband, wife, children and family pet with attendant disagreeable rituals – he encounters a new psychopath, Frank Dolarhyde. Lethally similar, Lecter and Dolarhyde literally savour human flesh. Harris uses meticulous knowledge of forensic science, and domestic detail conveyed with precision and affection. His psychological insight – best illustrated by an account of Dolarhyde’s childhood with his glacial grandmother, which is utterly believable, yet beyond belief – brings this intricate thriller to a brilliant climax.

  Harris is a master craftsman with a particular talent for inserting horror into the ordinariness of the everyday, as the starting point for incidents of gigantic terror; he is one of a tiny band of popular novelists whose works are in a class and genre of their own.

  Thomas Harris was born in Jackson, Tennessee, and lives in New York. This novel was filmed (as Manhunter) in 1986 as was, famously, Silence of the Lambs (1988), in 1990. A third novel featuring Hannibal Lecter, Hannibal, was published in 1999 and made into a film in 2002. A fourth, Hannibal Rising, came out in 2006 and was filmed in 2007.

  Age in year of publication: forty.

  Wilson Harris 1921–

  1964 Heartland

  This is a strange, haunting novel; it reads as though Conrad and Kafka had come together and studied the style of the late Henry James. It is set in a thick jungle close to a waterfall along Guyana’s border with Venezuela and Brazil. Zachariah Stevenson is alone in this place: he has time to go over his father’s financial ruin and death and then his lover and her husband’s disappearance, the husband having embezzled money. He meets several figures in this remote outpost and has strange, portentous conversations with them. The sense of the jungle in the novel is overwhelming; the sense of rot and danger, heat and darkness takes over; the dank, menacing atmosphere is unforgettable; and the closeness of the waterfall lends power to the aura of claustrophobia. The prose is sinewy and dense, with strange twists and turns. In this heartland, habitation and pathways are tentative, so Stevenson’s journey from one hut to another is full of uncertainties and odd possibilities. It is therefore not surprising that he should see a half-decomposed dead man and watch a baby being born.

  It is impossible to place this novel, or indeed most of Harris’s other work, in any tradition. Heartland, which is less than a hundred pages, is the sort of book you want to pick up and start again when you have finished it; it is infinitely mysterious and memorable.

  Wilson Harris was born in New Amsterdam, British Guiana. He was a land surveyor before moving to London in 1959 where he still lives. His other novels include Palace of the Peacock (1960), Carnival (1985) and The Ghost of Memory (2006).

  Age in year of publication: forty-three.

  L. P. Hartley
1895–1972

  1953 The Go-Between

  This is one of the great English novels of the post-war period, with, also, one of the most famous opening lines: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’

  Leo Colston recalls the hot summer of 1900. A schoolboy then, an only child of a widowed mother of modest means, he shyly joins his friend Marcus Maudsley at Brandham Hall in Norfolk, where he confronts the cold conventions of the late Victorian upper classes. Struggling to please the family, he carries messages for Marcus’s older sister Marian to the local farmer, Ted Burgess. On the periphery is the charming Hugh, Viscount Trimingham, face scarred by war, attendant on Marian. In the heat of summer Brandham Hall shimmers with deceptions as Leo grapples with crippling loyalties and secrets which, when revealed, are to maim him for life.

  The perfection of The Go-Between lies in its subtlety, its atmosphere and in its elegiac style. It is one of those books which reveal layer upon layer of meaning with each rereading, so that the anxiety for love and the agony of betrayal as experienced by young Leo open windows to England’s larger tragedies: the deathly embrace of the class system, the imminence of the First World War.