by Colm Toibin
In his three novels of the 1990s, Remembering Babylon (1993), set in a remote part of Queensland in the middle of the nineteenth century, and The Conversations at Curlew Creek (1996), a dark, intense novel set in early nineteenth-century Australia and Ireland, he has been constructing a sort of history of Australia, an old and new testament for his own country. The Great World deals superbly with the drama of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp; indeed, the novel could have dealt solely with that experience. But this is a more ambitious book, which follows a number of characters back to Australia and makes what happens to them during subsequent decades, emotionally and domestically, in their work and their families, hugely interesting, so that you feel you know them. The Great World is memorable for the range of the characters’ emotional response, for the depth and detail and sheer integrity of the writing.
David Malouf was born in Brisbane and lives in Sydney. He is also a poet and librettist. The Great World won the Commonwealth Writers Prize. His other books include the magnificent An Imaginary Life (1978), a brilliant account of Ovid in exile and after exile, and The Complete Stories (2007).
Age in year of publication: fifty-six.
Olivia Manning 1908–1980
1960–1965 The Balkan Trilogy
The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City (1962), Friends and Heroes (1965)
The Balkan Trilogy recounts in fictional form Olivia Manning’s Second World War experiences as the young bride of a British Council lecturer, first in Romania, then in Greece and finally in Egypt, moving always away from the advancing German army. Harriet Pringle, Manning’s alter ego, lives in cities where revolution, imprisonment and persecution of the Jews are omnipresent, while expatriates and a motley crew of other riffraff pursue the last remaining restaurant in which horse is not served, or finagle money or favours to enable them to survive one more day.
Harriet, a young woman never loved in childhood and about to repeat the experience with her infuriating husband Guy, is a discerning recorder of the cruelties and fragilities of men in pursuit of power, of whatever kind. A parade of eccentrics, led by the seedy emigre Yakomov, the preposterous Lord Pinkrose, the potty Misses Twocurry, alternate with personal lives from which the plangent notes of private love and grief are never absent. Reading The Balkan Trilogy, one of the finest accounts of the impact of war on Europe and on its people, is like reading Jane Austen on a broader canvas, in another time, another place.
Olivia Manning was born in Portsmouth, grew up in Ireland, and except for the Second World War, spent most of her life in London. The Levant Trilogy – The Danger Tree (1977), The Battle Lost and Won (1978) and The Sum of Things (1980) – continues The Balkan Trilogy, the entire sequence entitled The Fortunes of War.
Age in years these books were published: fifty-two – fifty-seven.
William Maxwell 1908–2000
1980 So Long, See you Tomorrow
The ghost of David Copperfield hovers over this beautiful novel, its evocation of childhood loss – of a father, of a mother, of a friend – is one of the classic accounts of being a motherless boy: ‘Other children could have borne it. My older brother did. I couldn’t.’
Set in a small farming community in Illinois, the narrator, now an elderly man, recalls his childhood and the influenza which suddenly removed his mother when he was ten. With her death, trust disappears – the world becomes a void through which he tiptoes with caution and he moves his muted gaze to tell the story of another gentle boy, Cletus Smith, his only friend. Cletus’ mother is unfaithful; Cletus’ father commits murder.
This is the story of two boys who live undefended in an adult world where nothing is said, but everything happens. The passions of insignificant and modest people, precisely placed amongst the animals, milking sheds and flat landscape of the plains, reach Shakespearean heights in Maxwell’s exquisite prose. As Maxwell languorously recalls the ‘strange and unlikely things washed up on the shore of time’ he gives us an elegy to memory which calls forth the vast legacy of seemingly insignificant human suffering.
William Maxwell was born in Illinois and lived in New York, where as fiction editor of the New Yorker for forty years, he was a formative influence on a generation of writers. The author of six novels and three short story collections, this novel won the American Book Award in 1980.
Age in year of publication: seventy-two.
Gita Mehta 1942–
1993 A River Sutra
‘There is a woman at the gate who wants to see you, Sahib.’ In A River Sutra, she is sure to tell a story. A sutra is a thread or string, but also a literary form; in Gita Mehta’s hands a bright necklace which flashes with the religions, philosophies and fables of India.
There are many threads in this necklace. The connecting one is the experiences of a retired bureaucrat, who late in life comes to manage a government resthouse along the banks of the River Narmada, holiest of Indian rivers. This river is a place of pilgrimage, to which come ascetics, minstrels, archaeologists, bandits, musicians, refugees. The tales they tell the bureaucrat are sometimes ecstatic, sometimes, like Mehta’s finest achievement here, ‘The Teacher’s Story’, heartbreaking. Piercing each narrative, always, is the question: where does wisdom lie? In the thousand answers, one message is clear: it can only come through experience, and through some experience of love.
Gita Mehta uses the images and mysticism of India to dazzling effect, harmonizing sounds of landscape, animals and music, river and earth. But though these stories draw much from the history and mythology of India, they resonate with the flamboyant presence of modern India too. Mehta has used traditional Indian narratives in an entirely new and muscular way in this exquisite novel.
Gita Mehta was born in Delhi and lives in London, New York and India. Her other books are: Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East (1976), a novel, Raj (1989) and Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of India (1997).
Age in year of publication: fifty-one.
Rohinton Mistry 1952–
1995 A Fine Balance
Dickens – Tolstoy – Balzac – Zola: Rohinton Mistry writes in this tradition. The vastness of India and the condition of its people are his subjects, but his genius lies in his exact observation, which brings to life every atom of his characters’ experiences, so that we live and breathe with them, laugh when they laugh, suffer as they do.
It is the 1970s, and four people, two Hindu, two Parsi, come together in a dingy Bombay flat. Ishvar and Omprakash are tailors, Untouchables; Dina, their employer, is a widow struggling for financial independence as a seamstress. Her lodger Maneck is a student of ‘refrigeration and air-conditioning’. Mistry retraces the background of each, placing the incidents of their insignificant lives against the majestic sweep of Indian history. This is Mrs Gandhi’s India, with its vicious Emergency laws bringing forced sterilization, labour camps, thuggery and persecution. Mistry’s energetic realism and command of comic nuance capture the long-suffering citizens of India in all their variety and stoic endurance. They burst off the page, making you laugh, weep and rail against the fates.
A Fine Balance is a magnificent novel, beautifully crafted, a political novel which is also the work of an inspiring imagination. Despite its lyrical despair it is full of an exuberance and humanity that fix in the mind and heart a sense of wonder and excitement.
Rohinton Mistry was born in Bombay, India, and has lived in Canada since 1975. His first, equally acclaimed novel was Such a Long Journey (1991), which won the Governor General’s Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.
Age in year of publication: forty-three.
Timothy Mo 1950–
1991 The Redundancy of Courage
In 1975 Indonesia invaded the Portuguese colony of East Timor, half an inch above Australia on the map. The USA wanted East Timor’s deep-water channels for their nuclear submarines, so allowed Indonesia to annex East Timor: one in three East Timorese died in the slaughter that followed.
Timothy Mo changed names, places, nationalities i
n this stirring fictional testament to the East Timor resistance fighters, but the connection between fact and fiction has become even stronger with time.
Adolph Ng, an outsider on the island, is a homosexual Chinese hotelier, and his is the knowing voice we hear. Ng’s account of the invasion and the years with the freedom fighters in the hills vibrates with crazed brutality, starvation, disease and the gruesome sights which were their daily fare. But resistance is only the backdrop to the humour and humanity that dominate this novel; Adolph is a wry fellow, and as he records the shifting allegiances of the islanders he produces that rarity – a vivid, funny novel about people who fight without hope: not heroes, ‘just ordinary people asked extraordinary things in terrible circumstances’.
Mo is a detached yet incisive chronicler of the worst aspects of Empire; in this furiously unsentimental novel about a forgotten war he reveals, with sympathy and political acumen, the real meaning of nobility: courage, exercised when it can achieve nothing.
Timothy Mo was born in Hong Kong and lives elusively around the Pacific Rim and in London. Among his prize-winning novels are The Monkey King (1978), Sour Sweet (1982) and An Insular Possession (1986).
Age in year of publication: forty-one.
Brian Moore 1921–1999
1985 Black Robe
Brian Moore had three phases. In his first incarnation, he was an Irish novelist. Judith Hearne, 1955 (USA: The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, 1956), is probably his best from this period. In his second coming, he wrote intense novels about faith and morals, obsessions (The Doctor’s Wife, 1976, is particularly brilliant) and history. In his third phase, he wrote terse novels about contemporary political crises. Always, he was preoccupied by the conflicts surrounding loyalty and belief, and increasingly, he strove for a style which is almost neutral, without flourishes.
Black Robe is set in seventeenth-century Canada. Father Laforgue, a Jesuit, has come to the remote and hostile territory to convert the heathens. The novel dramatizes the conflict between his certainties and the beliefs of the natives, which are presented with immense conviction. The narrative is powerful and emotional, and the violence in the book is shocking, more graphic than anything in Cormac McCarthy. The landscape, the dark forest, the constant menace, the untamed world, are wonderfully evoked. This is Moore’s darkest book and most haunting; his account of the Jesuits’ colonial enterprise, which echoes other moments in the history of the building of empires, is gripping and deeply disturbing.
Brian Moore was born in Belfast. In 1948 he emigrated to Canada. He lived in California for many years. He wrote numerous novels including The Emperor of Ice Cream (1966), Catholics (1972), a W. H. Smith Award winner, The Great Victorian Collection (1975) and The Colour of Blood (1988).
Age in year of publication: sixty-four.
Frank Moorhouse 1938–
1988 Forty-Seventeen
The hero of this novel calls himself variously Sean or Ian, seeming unable to make up his mind between the Irish and Scots version of his name, a fitting bafflement for a modern Australian male, floating in beer and fornication yet emitting muffled longings to be otherwise.
About to become forty, a drinking, writing man addicted to women, he is partial to sluts. His grandmother made a fortune being a whore in the caves of Katoomba, and the seventeen-year-old girl he truly loves has departed to London to find herself by becoming a call-girl. His ex-wife Robyn is about to die of cancer. Among the high points of the novel are Robyn’s first letters to him; everything that is lost in middle age is plaintively rendered in the naive voice of this young girl. Then there is Belle, one of those sluts who get the blues, and the invaluable seventy-year-old Edith with whom he travels to conferences in Vienna and Israel.
This is a finely crafted work, cleverly moving back and forth through time, written in rueful, mocking prose. Moorhouse’s artistic achievement is to give his hero a life that seems casual, but this man on the loose is in fact ligatured to women, and the novel beats with a particular pulse of desperation which is both touching and exhilarating.
Frank Moorhouse was born in Nowra in New South Wales and lives in Sydney. Among his prize-winning novels are The Americans, Baby (1972) and Grand Days (1993).
Age in year of publication: fifty.
Toni Morrison 1931–
1987 Beloved
‘For a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.’ This is Paul D., whom Sethe, our heroine, has known in slavery. He has not seen her for eighteen years, and now he has come to visit her when her husband has disappeared, her mother-in-law is dead and her two sons have left, her house is haunted by her dead baby daughter, and she is living alone with her daughter Denver. It is 1873 in Ohio. Sethe is torn with memories of the dreadful past, the petty cruelties of being a slave, and then the particular viciousness of certain events which she finds almost impossible to contemplate, and yet cannot forget.
The novel’s strength comes from its obsession with the power and the problems of love between people who are enslaved and savagely exploited; there is an extraordinary skill in the way the narrative goes back over events of the past while focusing also on the domestic minutiae, small moments of tension, the play of light, the interior of the house, the constant efforts to survive the catastrophe which haunts the novel and indeed haunts the reader. The figure of the mother-in-law Baby Suggs, who has been bought out of slavery by her son, is especially memorable and sad; the idea of the house being haunted by the dead child is presented calmly and with authority and becomes immensely credible.
Toni Morrison was born in Ohio and lives in New York. Her other novels include Song of Solomon (1977), Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998). She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Age in year of publication: fifty-six.
Alice Munro 1931–
1990 Friend of My Youth
Alice Munro territory is the Ottawa Valley, in the small harsh Munro towns of Logan or Whalley. These are the towns people leave and come back to, but the place and time hardly matter with Alice Munro because she writes about apparently ordinary folk and therefore all of us, wherever. Alice Munro’s people are careful souls, you think. But here she skewers those moments when change comes about because of one incident which, taken at the flood, leads on to divorce, another husband, another wife, a different town, a different life.
Simply told, these gossipy, wise stories are full of recognitions: ‘One evening Raymond had said to Ben and Georgia that it looked as if Maya wasn’t going to be able to have any children. “We try our best,” he said. “We use pillows and everything. But no luck.”’ ‘I used to sneak longing looks at men in those days. I admired their necks and any bits of their chest a loose button let show.’ A wife leaves her husband: ‘He said he was giving her a week to decide. No more drinking. No more smoking … Karen said don’t bother with the week.’
Each story is as rich as a novel. Her characters stand next to you, about to engage you in conversation, their lives laid bare with slashing accuracy so that reading about them, the heart is stopped as something familiar, hopefully hidden, surfaces in a sudden, illuminating way.
Alice Munro is one of the greatest short story writers; only Chekhov comes to mind when contemplating her work. Alice Munro was born and lives in Canada. Some of her award-winning collections are The Progress of Love (1987), Open Secrets (1994), which won the W. H. Smith Award in 1995, The Love of A Good Woman (1998) and Runaway (2004). She was awarded the Man International Booker Prize in 2009.
Age in year of publication: fifty-nine.
Iris Murdoch 1919–1999
1968 The Nice and the Good
Iris Murdoch had an extraordinarily rich if uneven career as a novelist. She published more than twe
nty-five novels, and of these the one that we would most recommend readers to begin with is The Nice and the Good.
Most of the novel takes place in a large old house beside the sea in Dorset where Octavian Grey, a civil servant, his wife Kate, their daughter Barbara, and an infinite number of friends, servants, house guests and hangers-on spend the summer. The novel has Montrose, the best cat in any of the novels listed in this book (Graham Greene’s The Human Factor has the best dog): ‘a large cocoa-coloured tabby animal with golden eyes, a square body, rectangular legs and an obstinate self-absorbed disposition’. The writing is elegant; Murdoch handles the large cast of characters with great clarity and skill – the children are especially good. She carefully surrounds some events in the novel with echoes of myth and magic, while leaving others as undisturbed pieces of social realism. Her characters are both vividly drawn and credible, but they also operate on other levels, as forces in a field of energy.