THE INTERNATIONAL LIST

DAME HILARY MANTEL is the kind of writer whose lines are as memorable as her stories, if not more so. Many await the sequel to Bring Up the Bodies, the third of her celebrated Cromwell trilogy. In the meanwhile, read her masterful short stories to understand her dramatic genius. In THE ASSASSINATION OF MARGARET THATCHER (Fourth Estate, 256 pages), the two-time Booker winner’s characters are marvellously wicked, ugly real. The story might be an obvious one; in ‘Offences Against the Person’, the discovery of her father’s young mistress by a teenager, for example (the mistress is the secretary, of course, the father a lawyer). But Mantel picks the killer details even when the scenario is dated. Nicolette, with the ‘little darting movements of her pearlescent nails’, tan straight out of a package holiday; or the bristling cheek the adulterous father presents his daughter, caught out, for a bedtime kiss. Similarly, the vampiric Mrs Bathurst of ‘Harley Street’ could have become the clichéd predatory lesbian, but the struggles of Bettina, her gasping Australian victim, give us the realness of these working women’s boredom and its alleviation. Sometimes, the hand comes down too heavy; in ‘Winter Break’, a childless couple hurtle to their holiday hotel, sobered when their reckless driver creates wonderfully foreshadowed roadkill— but the sight of a child’s hand makes the story much too macabre. And sometimes, the atmosphere itself is so heavy as to turn dull, as in ‘Sorry to Disturb’, where a bored, sickly English housewife deflects a Pakistani businessman’s attempted friendship in Saudi Arabia, where both are exiles. But Mantel’s eye is acute, crackling, alive, as in the eponymous story—Mantel has confessed she dreamt of assassinating Thatcher, and in this story, a woman becomes a willing accomplice to the crime. It is a weird, claustrophobic story, but wonderfully intense, as the trigger pulls home.

I’m up for a good mindless thriller as much as the next person, but sometimes melo drama can take you only so far. Much-hyped new thriller THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN (Doubleday, 320 pages) is a dream debut for 42-year-old British journalist PAULA HAWKINS, already a bestseller and sold to Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks film studio. Rachel, the protagonist, is a convulsive, depressive alcoholic who has lost her job after losing her husband. What makes it readable, even if the sordidness of this tale gets to you? Hawkins is numbingly successful at describing Rachel’s itchy, compulsive behaviour, particularly when it is most creepy; ‘There’s something comforting about the sight of strangers safe at home,’ she says, as she rides the train to and from an imaginary job to reassure her unwilling flatmate. When a young woman—sighted every day on her commute—disappears from what is coincidentally her former home, Rachel finds an odd new purposefulness. She knows she can help the woman—if she can only remember what she was doing near Blenheim Road the night of the disappearance. For, part of the admittedly compelling aspect of the narrative, told severally from different perspectives, is how riddled it is with holes. The Gone Girl– style inconsistencies make Rachel the most unreliable narrator there is. But there is a mystery that connects her and the woman she came to know on her commute, and it is enough to keep us reading till the end, even if the melodrama will have you gasping for air. If you must, read it on the train.

There is a case to be made for books which collect essays previously published online—like activist and writer REBECCA SOLNIT’s MEN EXPLAIN THINGS TO ME (Granta Books, 144 pages). Most of these essays appeared on TomDispatch, an alternative ‘via email’ publication. They represent a moment, like all online journalism, though sometimes this moment has faded, and even a postscript cannot quite retain its power. Contributing editor to Harper’s and author of many free-ranging works—Wanderlust, a history of walking, and Hope in the Dark, which explores power and change, for example—Solnit set the internet on fire in 2008 with her essay ‘Men Explain Things to Me’, bringing about that notorious word ‘mansplaining’ (not altogether to her satisfaction and certainly not of her agency, she explains). Part manifesto, part treatise, the book’s big strength is its critique of systems of injustice; the Nirbhaya (‘Jhoti Singh’ here) and Steubenville rape cases have been compared before, but they are placed on a level plane, refreshingly. Solnit is charming as the ‘burr in [the] sock’ of Susan Sontag, a generous, baggy and eclectic writer, though at times repetitive. When she says,‘despair is a confident memory of the future’, like optimism, in her call for the celebration of uncertainty, it is still a lesson for our age. Her contention in ‘Pandora’s Box and the Volunteer Police Force’ (2014): ‘Maybe there is a full-fledged war now, not of the sexes—the division is not that simple, with conservative women and progressive men on different sides— but of gender roles.’ She even challenges the use of the word ‘feminism’: ‘I think the future of something we may no longer call feminism must include a deeper inquiry into men.’ Read this slim volume to remind yourself of the struggle behind, and ahead.

Has there been a more beautifully produced, more annoying little illustrated book, by a superstar novelist? Probably not. THE STRANGE LIBRARY (Harvill Secker, 96 pages) is HARUKI MURAKAMI’s creepy and somewhat self-indulgent contribution to this genre. It is almost a pity not to enjoy its gorgeous pages (translated by TED GOOSSEN), taken from old books found in The London Library. A young narrator is lured into a secret basement room of his library, as we watch. Regular as always, he submits How to Build a Submarine and Memoirs of a Shepherd and he is keen to return home on schedule, before his mother worries. Soon, the boy is being held prisoner by a little old man, whose hair ‘looked like a mountain after a big forest fire’, force-feeding him volumes on Ottoman tax collection. The sheep man, his unwilling jailer, tells him the old man is waiting for him to cram enough into his brains to make them nice and creamy when he decides to eat them. Icky much? There is a feast, an attempted escape, a pretty girl who turns into a starling that explodes in the mouth of a dog, a mysterious illness which claims his mother. This wilful tale about the dangers of new knowledge, intended as some kind of bleak comedy, is a touch too macabre, more House of Wax than Roald Dahl for grownups—whether or not Murakami intended it.

(A monthly roundup of the best of international publishing)

About The Author

Rajni George

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