A real United Nations of reading this month, with four novels by British writers, two by Italian, Chinese, French and Dutch writers and also books by Japanese, Australian and Irish novelists.
I was completely hooked by Niccolo Ammaniti’s novel THE CROSSROADS, an Italian translation which tells the story of a young boy who gets caught up in a criminal scheme devised by his father and his father’s friends. More plot twists than you could shake a stick at, it’s a difficult book to put down and is written with real energy and storytelling power. The only disappointment was the sudden nature of the ending; some of the storylines are left unresolved. No, forget that. Nearly all of them are. Maybe that’s the way Ammaniti wanted it. Anyway, it’s a terrific read.
Yoko Ogawa’s THE DIVING POOL, a collection of three novellas, is a dark and creepy little book by one of Japan’s most prolific writers. Each is written in a clean, clinical tone which makes them quite menacing, particularly the random acts of violence perpetrated by the narrator in my favourite of the three, the title story.
Florian Zeller is a writer whose second novel, Lovers or Something Like It, impressed me when I read it a couple of years ago. His fourth and most recent book is JULIAN PARME, is much lighter in tone but good fun. It owes a huge debt to The Catcher In The Rye, there’s no question, but Julian is such a wonderful character, so melodramatic, so convinced of his own future greatness, that it’s impossible not to fall in love with the book. Question of taste, as Julian might say. I also read Zeller’s Florian Zeller’s debut novel, ARTIFICIAL SNOW. Much less exuberant than Julian Parme, much closer in style to Lovers or Something Like It, it’s the story of a young man who becomes obsessive about a lost relationship. Introspective and unsettling, the novels of this talented writer need to be brought to a wider international audience.
In Amsterdam, I picked up a novel by a Dutch writer Harry Mulisch, THE ASSAULT. The story of a young boy whose family are slaughtered in Amsterdam towards the end of the Second World War, the novel traces a series of events in his life over the following thirty years. A very thoughtful and introspective novel, by an author who I was unfamiliar with, but who is apparently one of Holland’s great post-war writers.
I struggled with Chris Killen’s debut novel THE BIRD ROOM, yet another British debut by a young writer that focusses entirely on bad sex, unhappy relationships and boring jobs. There are moments of interest, when the writer veers away from his story and allows language and character to take over in the occasional short scene, but not enough of them. I wish sometimes that debut British novelists would use their imagination more and not stick to the tried and tested themes of debuts. (Two who broke the mould last year were Ross Raisin and Joseph Smith.) Still, it is a debut and there might be more interesting work by Killen on the horizon.
Tim Krabbe’s THE VANISHING, on the other hand, another Dutch novel I picked up in Amsterdam, is a masterful piece of suspense writing. A young couple stop at a garage, she goes missing, he spends eight years obsessing about what happened to her. And when we find out… A terrific, short novel.
I read Carlo Collodi’s PINOCCHIO this month, a book I hadn’t read since I was a child, although I’m not sure I ever even read the full novel. A tragi-comedy, the Pinocchio of the story is very different from the animated version; he’s a ne’er do well, a rogue who makes mistakes at every juncture and only finally realises how to be a better puppet and then becomes a boy. It’s often hilarious but strangely unsettling too.
Kate Grenville’s new novel THE LIEUTENANT is a powerful story of a young, highly intelligent officer sent with the British forces to a colony in New South Wales where he is to work as an astronomer. His experiences among the newly enslaved natives – and with one in particular – opens his mind to questions of freedom and choice, servitude and empire. It’s a fascinating novel, all the more so in that it is based on a real person and has a strongly dramatic and then emotionally satisfying resolution.
Next I read Yiyun Li’s novel THE VAGRANTS. A big admirer of her debut colletion of short stories, I was really looking forward to the novel and wasn’t disappointed by it. It’s a fascinating look at the lives of a group of disparate characters at the end of the 1970s in China and their response to the execution of a counter-revolutionary. All the stories come together to form connections at different times and this novel is both a political statement and a deeply moving memory of terrifying times.
Something of a SECRET HISTORY set among 15 year-olds, THE SUICIDE CLUB by Rhys Thomas is a rivetting and often moving read centred around a group of disaffected teenagers who, under the guidance of a manipulative leader, decide to embark on a suicide pact. The narrator’s voice compels the narrative – he’s a hugely likeable character – and while it’s yet another debut British novel about a precocious teenager, this is the best of its type that I’ve read in a long while. I’ll be very interested to see what Thomas writes next.
Another debut, MR TOPPIT by Charles Elton, is a curious book. Telling the story of the family of a phenomenally successful children’s author, the novel has shades of one of my favourite writers, Jonathan Coe, in the humorous writing on the family and their many catastrophes. The story of how the books became successful also works well but the novel comes a-cropper in the last third, when the action moves to Los Angeles, which is a shame as before that it was rather good. Terrific book design though.
Siobhan Dowd’s novel BOG CHILD, set in Northern Ireland in 1981 when the Troubles were at their height, is one of the most moving and politically astute novels I’ve read in some times. The young protagonist, Fergus, is an extremely sympathetic character and the reader follows his difficult journey as he deals with the decision of his older brother to go on hunger strike. This is a powerful novel by a great writer.
Next up was Xialou Guo’s novel UFO IN HER EYES, a short, strange book about a girl who spots a UFO in the sky in China and the forces who interview her and those who know her to understand exactly what has happened. Not entirely for me, I’m afraid.
And finally, Nevil Shute’s 1942 novel PIED PIPER, which will be reissued by Vintage Classics in October this year. I’m writing the introduction for the book so will be writing more about it then.
If you simply cannot wait until May 7th to read my new novel 
Public voting for this year’s British Book Awards has opened and THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS in on the longlist for the Children’s Book of the Year.
A new paperback edition of NEXT OF KIN, my fifth novel, has just been published in the USA by Thomas Dunne Books/Macmillan. A thriller of sorts, I wrote it during late 2003/early 2004, just before THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS. (In fact, I had just finished the first draft of Next of Kin and was taking a break to recharge myself when I wrote the first draft of BOY). I’m a huge fan of the work of Patricia Highsmith and it’s a sort of homage to the Tom Ripley books. I always imagined it as the first of a trilogy of novels based around the character of Owen Montignac and although I haven’t returned to him yet, I hope to do some one day.
