Fiction

On the cover, A Short History of Richard Kline is identified as a ‘pilgrim’s progress for the here and now’. For Lohrey, the here and now demands an easily accessible realist narrative rather than Bunyan’s choice of allegory. That may be the right call, but realism curtails the freedom that allegory offers readers to bring their own meanings and experiences to the text.

Reality is one of Outline’s key themes and it extends beyond the content and the characters’ concerns, calling into question the very idea of the novel. This existential inquiry is embedded in Outline’s autofictional approach.

The first scene in Clade is in Antarctica. It is the summer solstice, ‘the first intimation of the year’s long retreat into the dark’. Adam is a scientist and, in particular, a climate-change researcher. The urgency of this activity is underscored, not for the last time, in a novel that will let us consume our fill of human-assisted natural catastrophes …

Understandably, James wants to rescue Marley from the kitsch images of bong hits and tropical holidays, re-situating him as a political player emerging from a particular historical setting. But Marley’s social significance cannot be disentangled from his art. If, as A Brief History of Seven Killings suggests, Marley came to embody a sense that ‘there was this once time when we could’a do it’, it was, first and foremost, through his music.

Journey By Moonlight is often said to be a book about nostalgia. Szerb himself said so. Agnes MacDonald, in her dissertation on the Nyugat writers – the only English text on the subject more detailed than a Wikipedia entry – quotes from a letter Szerb wrote in 1937 ‘Now I am writing a novel about nostalgia. It will be something like Le Grand Meaulnes and Les Enfants terribles. The plot will take place in Italy, of course. Assissi, Gubbio. Have you been there before?’

Amnesia is a less serious novel than I thought it would be. This is, for the most part, a good thing. There are long moments in which the novel sinks its reader into the soft pillow of a well-told story, the guilty pleasure of being in the hands of a practised manipulator of readerly emotions, as Carey deals out his cards of sentiment, guilt, betrayal and compromise. Much of Amnesia, however, works in another, slightly less comfortable register.

Like a night of vivid, randomly connected dreams, the content of 10:04 holds together in hindsight. The catalogue form of recollection permits this: and then, and then, and then … It is easy, in this way, to smooth the novel out and make a neatish summary of its events and concerns. But if we look closely, we find that references to when things occur in time are often missing.

The Wonders is an allegorical novel with worthy intentions. However, O’Reilly’s attempt to unpack a surfeit of twenty-first century issues – including animal welfare, human rights, the cult of celebrity, ecology, conservation, disability and gender politics – is marred by over-simplification and a tendency to parrot clichéd and prosaic opinions.

The Tribe tells stories of people of largely Lebanese Muslim origin, stories of the young narrator’s immediate and wider circle of family, friends, associates. In relating the lines of agreement as well as the points of dissension and tension among his people, Ahmad shows that there are various streams of belonging, some that flow fiercely, some that are shallow to the point of being non-existent.

Intrinsic to Tóibín’s work, from The South and The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe through to Nora Webster, is a social realist reformulation of what were known in Catholic circles, once upon a time, as ‘holy mysteries’. You will find no cheap irony in Tóibín about this. He has made himself a conduit for the concept, with its rootedness in ordinary human failure, loss and vulnerability.