by Colm Toibin
Age in year of publication: thirty-nine.
Margaret Laurence 1926–1987
1966 A Jest of God
A Jest of God is a monologue written in the present tense by a teacher in her mid-thirties who lives with her mother in a fictional town in Canada. Within one or two pages Margaret Laurence creates a complete emotional landscape and a voice which is perfectly pitched, so that the material, which may seem unpromising to certain readers, becomes intensely interesting and memorable.
The progress of Rachel Cameron, her constant fear of her colleagues and her boss, her extraordinary sensitivity to what is going on around her, to each nuance of right and wrong, are described in a way which is exact and real. Her own ability to see all sides, to understand and resist each person she comes in touch with, gives the reader an extraordinary grasp of the world she inhabits. It is a mark of Laurence’s skill as a novelist that she can place Rachel and her mother in a flat above a funeral parlour with regular references to the life and death down below without the reader feeling that this has been added on to the narrative as a way of adding significance to it. Rachel’s summer love affair with an old school friend, which is the dramatic core of the book, is riveting; at times you have to put the book aside for a while, so tense is the emotional atmosphere, so full of challenges and possibilities. A Jest of God is a small masterpiece.
Margaret Laurence was born in Manitoba, Canada, and lived there, in Africa and in England. Her other novels include The Stone Angel (1964) and The Diviners (1974). A Jest of God won the Governor General’s Literary Award and was made into the film Rachel, Rachel.
Age in year of publication: forty.
Mary Lavin 1912–1996
1969 Happiness
In ‘Happiness’, the title story of this volume, the tone is rambling, almost anecdotal, like someone chatting. And slowly then, without you noticing, a picture is built up of a whole personality, a voice, a family, a set of relationships and a past. Mother talks about ‘happiness’, what it is, and how it might be found; she is a widow with daughters living in the Irish countryside. She is visited regularly by a priest; she works in a library and possesses an extraordinary strength which kept her going after her husband died, leaving her a young widow. That experience, the realization that he was going to die, has coloured her life, so that when she too comes to die – by this time the reader is in tears – this is what haunts her. The story is a masterpiece. In another story, ‘The Lost Child’, Mary Lavin manages as much as most novelists manage: a conversion to Catholicism, Renee’s realization that her sister is gay and then the extraordinary graphic account of a miscarriage. There are also moments of pure comedy in some of these stories, as when the priest says to Renee’s gay (and Protestant) sister: ‘You are a man after my own heart, Iris,’ or Annie’s brother in ‘A Pure Accident’ who ‘where he used to think sex was the only difference between a man and a woman, it seemed, now, that maybe it was the only thing they had in common’. Mary Lavin’s work is full of strange wisdom and insight; she writes brilliantly about marriage and children, but also about celibates and outsiders.
Mary Lavin was born in Massachusetts and moved to Ireland when she was nine, where she lived in County Meath. She is also the author of two novels, The House in Clewe Street (1945) and Mary O’Grady (1950), and her stories are collected in several volumes. She received many awards, including the Gregory Medal.
Age in year of publication: fifty-seven.
John le Carré 1931–
1963 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Few writers have used the word ‘cold’ as well as John le Carré. He gives it a hundred meanings, all of them intimating the absence of good, and the presence of evil, which erupts when squalid men play games that are unnecessary and vicious, in pursuit of aims corrupt in themselves, useless if achieved. Such autocrats flourished in the chilling moral vacuum the Cold War created from the 1950s to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Modern espionage became our post-war method of warfare, a bitter stamping ground in which spies were instructed that loyalty often meant betrayal.
Such a one is Leamas, about fifty, head of British Command in Berlin, still divided by the Wall. Not a university man, though his spymasters in London – Control – are just that class of English person: right university, right tie, right clubs. Leamas is a tired man, frozen of heart, a failure. Amid an unnerving atmosphere of conspiracy, Control finds a way to send Leamas back for one last attempt to defend the indefensible. Le Carré is a gripping storyteller – spare, ironic, sinewy. He is a master of atmosphere and those dark places of the heart where treachery and tangled moral ambiguities loiter. In this classic novel, full of icy implications and ambiguous truths, he summed up the social and political conditions of an era.
John le Carré was born in Dorset and lives in Cornwall. Other famous novels include his trilogy Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), The Honourable Schoolboy (1977), Smiley’s People (1980), The Tailor of Panama (1996) and The Constant Gardener (2001), which was made into an award-winning film in 2005. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold was also a notable film (1965).
Age in year of publication: thirty-two.
Harper Lee 1926–
1960 To Kill a Mockingbird
The voice in this novel belongs to Scout, an immensely intelligent, precocious six-year-old girl. Maycomb, her small town in Alabama in the 1930s, is a stable, conservative place which looks as though it will never change – the blacks live at the edge of town. Scout’s mother is dead; she and her older brother Jem are being brought up by their lawyer father, Atticus, who, along with Calpurnia, the black cook, slowly becomes the moral centre of the book. Both adults are portrayed with great, detailed affection, as pillars of society who do not share society’s prejudices, as figures of authority who often seem wilful and hard to understand for the six-year-old narrator, but yet are still never cruel or distant.
At first the novel focuses on the childish games of Scout and Jem and their friend Dill, but slowly the real theme of the novel, which is racial prejudice in the Southern states, emerges. A white woman has accused a black man of rape; it is clear that he is innocent. Atticus becomes his defence lawyer. In the scenes which deal with the accusation and the trial, and the bitterness in Maycomb, and the plight of the accused, the child’s voice becomes morally powerful, and the narrative, especially in the second half of the book, has a compulsive, thrilling force.
Harper Lee was born in Alabama. To Kill a Mockingbird, which won the Pulitzer Prize, is her only novel. The book was made into a film in 1962.
Age in year of publication: thirty-four.
Rosamond Lehmann 1901–1990
1953 The Echoing Grove
There is a triangular love affair at the centre of Rosamond Lehmann’s elegaic novel – but this entanglement conceals much else. Two sisters are in love with the same man. Madeleine is married to Rickie and is the mother of his children. Her sister Dinah is Rickie’s mistress. The place and time are London and southern England in the 1930s and 1940s. Against a backdrop of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War, Rosamond Lehmann evokes every nuance of the obsession which devours men and women when they love passionately and when loyalties are divided. Time, and outside events, provide the solutions they cannot find for themselves. Lehmann’s narrative art is at its most interesting when contemplating the predicaments of women – comic, painful or embarrassing. But she is also an adventurous writer in style and content, technically innovative, using memory and perspective to expose the many meanings human beings can extract from the past. In this novel she mingles the intricacies of social life with the influence of class, politics and much else, in ways that are both deft and imaginative. Rosamond Lehmann’s subject was the human heart and the inadequacy of men and women pursuing different goals in the name of love. This haunting novel is a classic exploration of that territory in which self, and love, are always lost, always rediscovered.
Rosamond Lehmann was born in Buckinghamshire and
lived in London. Her most famous novels include Dusty Answer (1927), An Invitation to the Waltz (1932) and its sequel The Weather in the Streets (1936).
Age in year of publication: fifty-two.
Elmore Leonard 1925–
1990 Get Shorty
Leonard views his country as doused in greed, peopled with fools pursuing the endless dollar: what can we do but laugh? His speciality is America’s racial mix, mostly drawn from the bottom of the barrel. In Get Shorty, a collection of such persons sashays into Los Angeles, to dabble in the two great American dreams, Hollywood and the Mafia.
There is Chili, hot tempered as a child, coolest of the cool now, debt collector for the Mafia. He encounters the visually challenged film producer Harry Zimm, maker of mutation movies so bad you see ‘better film on teeth’. Then there is Karen the Screamer, Leo the Drycleaner, the Bear, Yayo the Colombian mule, Armani-obsessed Bo Catlett and many others equally lyrically named. Will they achieve their life’s ambition – to get their hands on money (without being killed) by making a movie? This cast of schemeballs entwine the reader in their scams, heists and smart lines.
Though there is a nostalgia here for a time in America when villainy had a sort of innocence, Leonard avoids sentimentality. His genius lies in his idiosyncratic hipster’s prose, amused and inquisitive intelligence and consummate storytelling. This combination makes Leonard an addictive peddler of dreams, a writer whose use of dialogue is unsurpassed, who makes you shake with laughter and suspense, and beg for more.
Elmore Leonard was born in New Orleans and lives in Detroit. Among his best novels are Glitz (1985) and Freaky Deaky (1988). Get Shorty was made into a popular movie in 1995 and Rum Punch (1992) became the film Jackie Brown (1997).
Age in year of publication: sixty-five.
Doris Lessing 1919–
1962 The Golden Notebook
This is one of the most powerful and influential novels of the late twentieth century. Through the experiences of a writer, Anna Wulf, Doris Lessing investigates the moral, intellectual and sexual crises of our age. Anna Wulf is a heroine as vividly imagined as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Anna keeps four notebooks: a black notebook for her writing; a red notebook for politics; a yellow notebook which tells stories; and a blue notebook, her diary and a record of breakdown and psychoanalysis. The golden notebook connects each and brings the story full circle. Set in London in the 1950s, the novel is a testament to that decade, with its political tensions and disillusionments, but its centre is Anna’s search for truths which are not simple, which match life itself.
The four notebooks describe the scattered quality of women’s experience: that time of life when a woman is absolutely wrapped up in lovers, husbands, men’s bodies, sex, with a mind always partially elsewhere – with children in particular, and with women friends, ideas, beliefs. And then there is work, usually killed by all the rest of it.
Lessing’s distinctive and original mind, tough and prickly, marches in step with her vigorous way of telling a story. The Golden Notebook, airing all our dilemmas, holds a mirror to our times.
Doris Lessing was born in Kermanshah, Persia (now Iran), and moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) at the age of six. She left for England in 1949 where she has lived ever since. She has written thirty novels and ten works of non-fiction, including two volumes of her autobiography. She lives in London. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2007.
Age in year of publication: forty-three.
David Lodge 1935–
1975 Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses
This is one of three very funny novels, all carefully crafted and plotted, which David Lodge has written about university life in England and the United States. The other two are Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1989), but there is a sort of symmetry coupled with a rage for disorder in Changing Places that makes it his best book.
Two professors change places: Philip Swallow from the University of Rummidge in darkest England does an exchange with Morris Zapp of Euphoric State in the land of opportunity. (Rummidge is a version of Birmingham, Euphoric State a version of San Francisco.) Swallow is ‘unconfident, eager to please, infinitely suggestible’; Zapp has ‘an apocalyptic imagination’. They leave their wives behind, but take with them their cultural differences. America, to Swallow, is open and glamorous – it is after all 1969 and anything can happen. England, to Zapp, is dank and cold. One of Swallow’s former students, a failure at Rummidge, has become a phone-in show host in Euphoric State, and he plays an important part in one of the funniest scenes of the novel. Both men take a serious interest in each other’s wives. The moral of the novel is that Americans, at least in the short term, awaken the sleeping sexuality of the English and are therefore a good thing. Another moral may be that people should stay in their own countries unless they want to be deeply unsettled and much misunderstood.
David Lodge was born in London. He has worked for many years as an academic. His comic gifts are apparent in early novels such as The British Museum is Falling Down (1965), and his later work includes How Far Can You Go? (1980), Therapy (1995), Home Truths (1999), Thinks (2001), Author, Author (2004) and Deaf Sentence (2008).
Age in year of publication: forty.
Bernard MacLaverty 1942–
1980 Lamb
Bernard MacLaverty’s three novels, Lamb, Cal (1983) and Grace Notes (1997), and his four volumes of short stories, deal with the dramatic possibilities of the conflict within the human character between the areas of darkness and brutality and the capacity for love and tenderness. His prose is clean and spare, combining a clear and easy tone with moments of pure poetry. He offers his characters a level of understanding and sympathy which is rare among contemporary male novelists; he is not afraid to create scenes of pure unadulterated emotion.
In Lamb, Brother Sebastian works in a Borstal in the west of Ireland. Using a legacy from his dead father, he escapes to England with a twelve-year-old boy, Owen Kane. The novel is the story of their misadventures; the boy’s vulnerability and his epilepsy make his minder more and more anxious to protect him and love him, and make the outside world of authority – brothers, lawyers, hotel keepers – seem harsh and cruel, and make the ending of this story of the failure of a dream of love inevitable and very moving. The novel is short – just over a hundred and fifty pages – and as tense as a thriller; the set scenes are perfect; the reader knows that this sojourn will be doomed and short-lived, and reads on in terror hoping that the two main characters will survive.
Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast but has lived in Scotland for many years. Lamb and Cal have been made into films. Grace Notes was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His later work includes The Anatomy School (2001) and a collection of stories Matters of Life and Death (2006).
Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.
Alistair MacLeod 1936–
1976 The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
The name Alistair MacLeod does not appear in many surveys of contemporary writing. He has written only two books, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986), and these contain seven stories each. His tone is old-fashioned, close to certain classic Irish writers, the James Joyce of Dubliners, the fiction of John McGahern or Mary Lavin; close also to the tone and timbre of certain Scottish and Irish ballads.
His stories are set in Cape Breton or Newfoundland, his characters are involved in fishing or mining, or, in some of the best work, come from fishing or mining communities but have abandoned them for cities, and are caught now between the two places. MacLeod is, like almost nobody else, able to deal with pure rawness of emotion in the relationship between parents and children, in the drama enacted around ties of blood. His landscapes can be savage and alien, but for those who inhabit them they are real and true, and haunting for those who try to abandon them. He writes simply and clearly; his openings often dry and factual, he uses the present tense with particular skill, some of his accoun
ts of the rituals and sorrows of leavetaking almost unbearably poignant. In Canada his two books are considered classics; he deserves to be better known in the rest of the world.
Alistair MacLeod was born in Saskatchewan. When he was ten his parents moved back to the family farm on Cape Breton. He now lives in Windsor, Ontario. His novel No Great Mischief (1999) won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award.
Age in year of publication: forty.
Eugene McCabe 1930–
1992 Death and Nightingales
This is a remarkable novel; it is written in prose of bleak, unadorned beauty, closely matching the world in which the narrative takes place, with the sort of hair-raising plot which keeps you up all night wondering how it will end.
It is set on the Monaghan-Fermanagh border in the north of Ireland in 1883. It is full of the bitterness of contemporary politics and family feuds. Beth, a Catholic, is the stepdaughter of Billy Winters, a Protestant landowner. She comes straight out of nineteenth-century fiction: beautiful, intelligent, well read, passionate, just as her stepfather is bigoted, drunken, duplicitous and oddly charming. All around them are the forces that will shape twentieth-century Ireland – ambitious Catholic clergy, ruthless revolutionaries, a sense of Protestant privilege. Neighbours watch each other and bear dark grudges; the landscape itself becomes a significant force in the book, lakeland, bogland, soft hills. The sense of menace, of impending doom, of terrible darkness and hatred is all-pervasive. It would make a superb film. This neglected masterpiece deserves to be much better known.