Spring Library

PETER CAREY, one of the best writers alive today, gives us a crackling reminder of his prodigious gifts in AMNESIA (Faber & Faber, 384 pages). In his taut, athletic prose, the saga of Australia and its nationhood plays out against the spectre of cyber terrorism, through the pitiful figure of Felix Moore, ‘Australia’s last serving left-wing journalist’. Laid low by a defamation suit and estranged from his family, Moore is hired by property- developer buddy Woody Townes and offered redemption. Young Gaby Baillieux has just released the ‘Angel Worm’ into prison systems around the world, freeing thousands of captives and threatening countless secrets like real-life counterpart Julian Assange—Moore must write her biography to save her. The long-suppressed drama of the Gough Whitlam government which was overthrown in a stage-managed British-American coup in 1975 snakes through Gaby’s own troubled family history, within a split Labour Party family. Yet, there can be no better ode to Australia: here is gorgeous pride in a feral, rust-hued landscape, and the anomaly of the arid past and the high-rise present of Eureka Towers, where Felix first lives in a series of amusing writerly hideaways. Whether in Gaby’s dugout, dripping electric wires ‘like prawn veins’, or a drafty shack by the river, Felix’s longest incarceration, all the characters are doing time in some way. His is a means to learning that he was ‘born in the previous geologic age while Gaby was born in the Anthropocene age and easily saw that the enemy was not one nation state but a cloud of companies, corporations, contractors, statutory bodies whose survival meant the degradation of water, air, soil, life itself’. Indeed, Gaby takes over for Felix at the end in Carey’s expert relation of the romance of computer coding. Perhaps the book’s weakness is too many narrators and no narrative balance. Yet, we must follow this master of the seriocomic detail even to the ballooning of his saucepan-laundered underwear, as he likens it to the Sydney Opera House.

In the quietly heart-warming AN UNNECESSARY WOMAN (Hachette India, 304 pages), Lebanese- American writer and painter RABIH ALAMEDDINE finds a worthy successor to his best- selling The Hakawati. His fictional memoir of an introverted single woman in Beirut sings with parallel stories. Ageing Aaliyah Saleh, literally ‘the high one, the above’, also ‘the alone, the separate’, is a wonderful and witty narrator even if stumbling into her seventies with aches and pains. We meet her two glasses of red down, hair accidentally dyed blue; her short wavelength cones probably make colour less perceptible, she says, with characteristic omniscience. Delivering herself early of her impotent husband (likened to a mosquito with a faulty proboscis) and traditional family, she worked at a bookstore and discovered everyone from Pesare to Sebald. And, admiring of the virgins and sociopaths even as she discriminates between hopeless Hemingway and ‘sui generis genius’ Faulkner, she has translated 37 unpublished books into Arabic. Our solitary yet un-lonely heroine has had just one friend, yet is replete; similarly, her books are confined to her flat but she rejoices in them. As she does in all else. Of her eldest half-brother, she says, ‘Think Bush—that indecent amalgam of banality and perdition’; her mother is like ‘the young United Nations’. Most of all, this warm account of bibliophilia is also an ode to Beirut, that once-great citadel riven by war and conquest, the ‘Elizabeth Taylor of cities: insane, beautiful, tacky, falling apart, aging, and forever drama laden’.

Masterful ROBERT MACFARLANE is unfailingly sublime on landscape, as seen in Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places and The Old Ways, the acclaimed trilogy which earned him a knighthood within the contemporary order of travel and nature writers. In LANDMARKS (Hamish Hamilton, 400 pages), his fifth book, he goes unabashedly technical in 11 chapters suffused with glossaries and boosted by indexes and bibliographies. MacFarlane mines the linguistic and literary riches of the British Isles, moving from the Shetlands to Suffolk in a hungry quest. Whether trawling the woods, hunting grounds or the ‘bastard countryside’, each intense chapter commemorates one aspect of the natural world. From seabhainn (very small river in Gaelic) to monek (mineral-rich ground in Cornish), his ‘word-hoard’ gives us new ways to love the lay of the land, even if some of this wonderment may be accompanied by nervous giggles at the particular minutiae of this undertaking.

‘Our language for nature is now such that the things around us do not talk to us in ways that they might’, says McFarlane. ‘As we have enhanced our power to determine nature, so we have rendered it less able to converse with us. We find it hard to imagine nature outside a use-value framework. We have become experts in analysing what nature can do for us, but lack a language to evoke what it can do to us.’ To demonstrate its keen power, he uses the words of greats before him; eminent birdwatcher JA Baker, the archivist-writer Richard Skelton (‘a keeper of lost words’), Nan Shepherd in The Living Mountain, who lyricises the Cairngorms of north-east Scotland, ‘born of fire, carved by ice, finessed with wind, water and snow’. A must-read for anyone looking to walk, metaphorically or literally, through the mighty terrain of these moors, crags and lochans.

NICK HORNBY, that high priest of popular culture (High Fidelity and Juliet, Naked are among his five best-selling novels) takes on British sitcoms in FUNNY GIRL (Viking, 352 pages). Nothing like the star of the Broadway hit and 1968 film of the same name, this Barbara is straightforwardly beautiful; enough to win her ‘Miss Blackpool’ and keep people from taking her seriously as a comedy star like Lucille Ball, her true ambition. Moving to London to work at a departmental store, buxom Barbara is soon Sophie Straw, star of (ironically) Barbara (and Jim), a successful new sitcom around a married couple. Her team: Oxbridge-educated producer Dennis who is immediately in love with Sophie, on-and-off boyfriend Clive and the writers, Tony and Bill. The book is full of mentions (and photographs, weirdly) of real-life characters: then-Prime Minister Harold Wilson and Marcia Williams, 70s TV stars like Alf Garnett and BBC’s Tom Sloan. The real protagonist, however, is light entertainment: ‘What a terrible thing an education was, [Dennis] thought, if it produced the kind of mind that despised entertainment and the people who valued it’, in mental argument with unfaithful wife Edith, a ‘queasy’ socialist and intellectual whose lover Vernon Whitfield laments that the BBC ‘feels the need to talk down to [ordinary people]’. Perhaps the biggest tragedy of this nostalgic novel is that it lacks pace, more like a documentary than entertainment.

(A monthly roundup of the best of international publishing)

booksInternational listNick HornbyPeter CareyRabih AlameddineRobert Macfarlane