The international list

Japanese introverts, aircraft carriers, celebrity interviews, new dope on a legendary double agent and more

The legendary Haruki Murakami, always trippy, is back with his weird yet affecting Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage (Harvill Secker, 300 pages). The Atlantic recently published a piece (‘The Mystery of Murakami’) about his continued appeal despite ‘awful’ sentences and ‘formulaic plots’.

Never truer than in his thirteenth novel. The story is typically simple yet poignant, told in Murakami’s taut, hermetic style: Tsukuru Tazaki, a lost thirty-something must find out why the four other members of his high school unit of five abandoned him, if he is to find love with Sara, who asks all the right questions of this reclusive railway worker. He always thought it was because he wasn’t colourful or interesting enough (his friends all have colours in their very names, and are bright and compelling). But there may be a darker reason lurking beneath it all, connected to his vivid subconscious and the desires their group had to resist to stay together.

There are beautiful descriptions of consciousness, of the will to stay alive, of the sexy texture of life itself: ‘The rear light of consciousness, like the last express train’, as it were. Who can’t relate to the sudden, unreasonable punctuation of friendship, occasioned by so many of us when young, for which we still bear the scars? But the puzzle, this time, leaves us cold.

So, has Geoff Dyer gone soft? In his thirteenth book, Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George HW Bush (Pantheon, 208 pages), about his residency aboard an aircraft carrier, the master comic English whiner mutes his cynicism and even tears up at a speech.

The hyper-real atmosphere of flight decks and 14-hour work days examines the American ability to ‘dwell in the realm of the improvable superlative’, but stalls in places. Yet, he is hilarious as ever; his farts appear to summon a trusted guide and he compares the Foreign Object Debris safety walk to rituals at Burning Man. At 53, Dyer is ‘sucking it up’; his parents die, he is finally old(er), he prays, and he may have lost some sexual feeling. We still love him.

Sparkling British journalist Lynn Barber is wise and wonderful in A Curious Career (Bloomsbury, 224 pages), her memoir about interviewing celebrities. Full of wicked insight and guarded love for her subjects, she essentially interviews herself— and no one could be better suited.

From finding a used condom on artist Tracy Emin’s sofa to a lush evening with The Pogues’ Shane MacGowan, which ends in a promise to rob a bank with him after her husband’s passing, Barber has done plenty. She tells you how to elicit information— concerted attention and sudden pounces—and how to avoid questions you don’t want to answer. Speaking to interviewers’ vulnerabilities, she recalls the experience of hearing your voice on a recording: dreadful. Sly at the right moments and throwing herself wide open to possibility throughout, Barber offers a master class in journalism. Like Stet before her, hers is a luminous and painfully honest look at a life of letters.

Has there been a greater con artist than Soviet mole Kim Philby? Using newly released MI5 files and family papers, Ben McIntyre explores the tragedy of early Anglo- American espionage in his stylish A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal (Bloomsbury, 368 pages).

Brilliantly vivifying infamous incidents like the botched Crabb operation, the betrayal of Konstantin Volkov and an ill-fated Albanian mission, the action flies fast and loose. For, the decadent and ‘bibulous’— often used to convey the extent to which Philby and Nicholas Elliott, his great friend and fellow veteran, enjoyed their trade— world of espionage also sent many to their death. And it is Philby the dogmatist who sank this failed friendship of the Old Boy network, we learn.

In this bold and vital comment on gender politics, Laurie Penny roars as she speaks up for the underclass— standing right by their side, and usually at a protest. Unspeakable Things (Bloomsbury, 288 pages) is no academic treatise; it is full of passages that seem to strain at the confines of their section breaks, as The New Statesman contributing editor examines what ‘is not a fairytale’; for, ‘sex and money and power police our dreams’.

Harnessing all the power of a rant but transcending shoutiness, Penny analyses slut shaming, poverty and prejudice in the same vein as Caitlin Moran and Hadley Freeman, only younger (27) and angrier. A formidable anomaly, she has documented her time as a burlesque dancer, her rape by an older man, fighting anorexia; yet, she also won a George Orwell award for a blog post. At times the writing is uneven and difficult to handle; and the pain in these discourses is never easy reading. But ‘nobody is really a perfect girl’, as Penny says, aptly.

Showgirls in 1930s San Francisco form the backdrop of Lisa See’s new novel, China Dolls (Bloomsbury, 383 pages). Three young Oriental women from different backgrounds come together as dancers at the popular Forbidden City nightclub: Grace comes from Plain City, Iowa, and is fleeing a violent father; Helen is dealing with an excessively traditional family; Ruby, born in Los Angeles to Japanese parents, must pass as Chinese to find a job.

The girls look ‘delicate and breakable’, but they are anything but dolls, we learn, after Pearl Harbor: ‘I had made it this far without revealing my deepest secrets… I forgot that to believe in dreams is to spend half your life asleep.’ A narrative spanning 50 years, the latest from this bestselling author will haunt you.

Javier Cercas’ seventh novel begins as Spain transitions from dictatorship to democracy, following General Franco’s death in 1975 and tracing three main characters over three decades. Outlaws (Bloomsbury, 384 pages), set in the Catalan city of Girona, introduces us to the protagonist Ignacio as a middle- class teenager who is frightened by the gang he has fallen in with.

He wants gorgeous blonde Tere, though she is with the gang’s boss Zarco, and the trouble starts here. Told through a set of interviews with a third party, the narrative takes us to his current life as a successful criminal defence lawyer. When Tere appears and asks him to represent Zarco, Igacio must accept, in a sequence worthy of Tarantino. ‘But worst of all was that, as soon as I saw Zarco and Maria beside each other, I felt with no room for doubt that such a couple could not function’, the narrator tells us. Full of gritty dialogue but not for everyone, here is great fun for crime novel readers.

An old-fashioned tale, All the Light We Cannot See (Fourth Estate, 544 pages) tells of the blind daughter of a locksmith at the Museum of Natural History, Marie-Laure, whose purity guides her through the ravages of World War II; and Werner Pfennig, whose skill with the radio brings music close but snuffs out countless lives.

The two find each other in Saint Malo, by the sea, in Anthony Doerr’s first ‘big’ book (The Shell Collector is his first and foremost gem). Always a pretty writer (‘A child is born, and the world sets upon it with violence and milk and language’), here he ups his game. Gorgeous descriptions of wartime transmissions lift a tale that is sentimental but compelling.

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