The latest papaerbacks
Molly Fox’s Birthday
Deirdre Madden
Faber, £ 7.99
Molly Fox is a famous actress and enigma even to her friend, the narrator, an equally well known playwright. While the narrator stays in Molly’s charming Dublin home battling writer’s block, she considers Molly, who is away in New York. It is Midsummer’s Day, Molly’s birthday. Deirdre Madden’s elegiac seventh novel is a subtle, gentle study about one woman reassessing her life and the various ways in which her friends have interacted with each other. A hint of missed opportunity prevails. The narrator is a forensic observer who watches, listens and remembers. A strong contender for this year’s Orange Prize, Molly Fox is shaped by Madden’s disciplined intelligence, humanity and understanding of how people behave and above all, how they survive. Molly, with her belief in her identity as an actor, who assumes the lives of others, is a survivor, whereas the narrator, whose career began in a gesture towards a deep hurt, has spent her life nursing an impossible love.
Eileen Battersby
Breath
Tim Winton
Picador, £7.99
Australian adolescent Pikelet is bitten by the surfing bug, along with his wild friend Loonie, who is “greedy about risk”. The young pair compete for the attention of an older surfing guru, Sando, an expert wave-chasing hippy from Melbourne. The exhilaration of their extreme surfing antics sometimes protects Pikelet from fear, but more often he is conquered by his nerves. He starts to feel disaffected with Loonie, who continues to surf “like someone who didn’t believe in death”. Winton’s novel continues as a boy’s own adventure, complete with plenty of earthy and blunt descriptions. The mood darkens when Pikelet realises he has under-estimated Sando’s sullen American wife, Eva. The novel is structurally frustrating, as the reader longs for a return to the curious later period of the narrator’s life described in the dramatic opening chapter. When that return comes, it comes almost unbearably late.
Mary Minihan
The Corner
David Simon Ed Burns
Canongate, £12.99
For Homicide, David Simon spent a year with the Baltimore police department’s homicide division. This, written with Ed Burns, is the view from the other side of the fence – a year with an American family living in the midst of one of Baltimore’s open-air drug markets. Fans of The Wire (for which Burns and Simon are responsible) will be familiar with many of the characters, though this is pure fact, not diluted fiction. What they have managed is a staggering depiction of the broken urban hearts of America, with little, though persistent, hope of repair.
This is reportage of the highest order from the frontlines of the American “war on drugs”, a war the country long ago lost, though it still cannot understand how to treat the casualties. This book could go a long way towards coming up with an effective therapy for America’s shattered inner cities.
Laurence Mackin
The Return of History and the End of Dreams
Robert Kagan
Atlantic, £7.99
Kagan’s short, sharp essay on the current state of power politics argues that the western world’s optimism at the end of the Cold War was misplaced. The fall of the Soviet Union offered the United States, supported by the EU, its long-held dream of global leadership. It hasn’t happened.Russia and China have re-emerged as autocratic powers. Russia, under Putin, has restored its national pride and is behaving like a nineteenth-century nation state, using its oil and gas assets with, as French president Sarkozy observed, “a certain brutality”. China too is a successful autocracy, trading happily with the west but utterly unwilling to embrace democracy and, like Russia, developing its military strength apace.The great fallacy of our era, argues Kagan, has been that the liberal democratic idea and the free market would inevitably prevail over alternative world-views. A little more scepticism was in order. Kagan deals with these weighty issues in a crisp, clear style which is a pleasure to read.
Tom Moriarty
Human Love
Andreï Makine, translated by Geoffrey Strachan
Sceptre, £7.99
Makine’s lyrical novel is a gripping story couched in sentimentality. Ignoring the implausibility that the unnamed Russian narrator Elias meets in a cell in the Angolan jungle is able to piece together his life in such detail, Elias’s narrative begins in Angola, where, as a child, he follows his communist father to fight the Portuguese. After seeing his parents brutally murdered, Elias flees to Cuba, and then goes to the USSR where he trains as a professional socialist revolutionary. At the heart of Elias’s politics, however, is the idealistic notion that a revolution would change human relations and that, simply, love will persevere. This love is embodied by Anna, a young Russian Elias meets while in Moscow.
The desire for this pure love appears utterly ironic against the horrific violence of Elias’s life. But the story told in Human Love is an engrossing narrative – a ruthless and terrifying account of war that spares no blood or gore.
Emily Firetog