Books REVIEWS
RURAL DRAMA ALAN WARNER The Deadman’s Pedal (Jonathan Cape) ●●●●● In a literary career which has played down the overly autobiographical tendency (all that writing from a female perspective malarkey for one thing), The Deadman’s Pedal seems far and away Alan Warner’s most personal fiction to date. We return to the Oban-ish terrain
of Morvern Callar with a story which focuses on the character of Simon Crimmons, just out of school in the summer of 1973 and looking for gainful employment. He finds it on the railways (just like Warner) to the annoyance of his Yorkshireman father (the same heritage as the author’s dad) who runs a successful lorry firm (and that’s where it ends, as papa Warner managed a hotel). Past and present collide with Crimmons working during a
time of major labour relations strife alongside the old school as represented by passive-aggressive John Penalty (a great Warner-esque name that) while in his spare time he courts the Caine sisters and Varie Bultitude (another cracking moniker), the mysterious and possibly demonic daughter of a local Commander of the Pass.
Warner isn’t a travel writer per se, but his output on modes of transport is clearly a strong suit. The opening pages of The Deadman’s Pedal paint a layered picture of trains, and the Highlands landscape they power through, that is richly evocative and captivating.
He does tone it down once the story gets motoring, (the reader would likely suffer from a rough case of vertigo if Warner kept that level of detail up) but you may well be drawn to re-reading that stark beginning once the tale concludes. (Brian Donaldson)
SOCIAL DRAMA NIKITA LALWANI The Village (Viking) ●●●●●
When Ray Bhullar travels to an Indian ‘open prison’ village to film a BBC documentary, she gets more than she bargained for. ‘Everyone here has killed someone,’ she’s told, as she slowly adapts to the sights and smells of her alien new surroundings, but ‘trust begets trust’. And so Nikita Lalwani introduces us to her second novel’s major theme, as broken promises and suspicion soon lead to life-altering relationship breakdowns. The Village is a captivating read, as Lalwani plays
with tense and form throughout, switching
SOCIAL DRAMA JOHN IRVING In One Person (Doubleday) ●●●●● Write about what you know, we’re told, and John Irving is certainly a big subscriber to that particular maxim. For his 13th novel, Irving once again inhabits the worlds of New Hampshire (his birthplace) and wrestling (his preferred sport). Where In One Person takes off on its own, is through protagonist Billy Abbott’s sexual predilections. Irving’s title refers not just to all the things Billy desires (men, women and transsexuals) but all the things he needs from others, which can’t be found in one person.
We first meet Billy in 1950s Vermont, when he discovers literature and lust at the local library. Attempts to repress his adolescent yearnings help shape him into the writer he will become, journeying through a burgeoning New York gay scene, the devastation of AIDS and through to the present day. As always, Irving’s characters are fascinating, his prose engaging. And while his approach to chronology can be challenging, it’s well worth the effort. (Kelly Apter)
seamlessly between poetic prose, drama-laden script extracts, muddled-in- translation conversation and scenic snapshot imagery.
The novel is as much an exploration of culture clashes and the cynicism of a reality TV-saturated modern media as it is a journey of self-discovery for Bhullar. As the documentary veers off in unexpected directions, its makers and subjects are forced to face the differences between them. (Camilla Pia)
SOCIAL BIOGRAPHY EWAN MORRISON Tales from the Mall (Cargo) ●●●●●
As Ewan Morrison notes in his introduction, the shopping mall is a potent symbol of the homogenised world in which we live now, with shopping centres from Dundee to Dresden looking pretty much identical. The mall is also a ripe metaphor for social meltdown: little wonder that George A Romero set his 1978 zombie classic Dawn of the Dead in a Philadelphia retail precinct.
With Tales from the Mall, the author of Swung and Distance seeks to find as many angles to the experience and aesthetic of the mall as he can. In
among the fictional and (probably) true stories of people who inhabit these spaces, he chucks in entertaining strands of history. We hear of the earliest shopping complex (The Agora in ancient Athens) to the proposed construction in Qatar that will be equivalent to 110 football pitches. Morrison has pulled together a wealth of information and anecdotes and produced a vibrantly funny and genuinely scary portrait of our times. (Brian Donaldson) 70 THE LIST 24 May–21 Jun 2012
RELATIONSHIP TALE CHRIS CLEAVE Gold (Sceptre) ●●●●●
There’s something intriguing about the mindset of those athletes who are honed from a very young age into Olympic machines. Lives are altered irrevocably in pursuit of a small gold disc and the too-fleeting associated glory: a strange way of living for relatively meaningless dividends. Chris Cleave comes tantalisingly close to an
understanding of this all-consuming ambition, in his rather well-timed tale of three cyclists taking a last shot at gold at London 2012. However, he doesn’t quite make the podium. Zoe, Kate and Jack’s intertwined love lives drag the book down into soapy, predictable plotting, and none of the three athletes is fully alive on the page. The motivations of these potentially complex adults are too easily written off as stemming from specific childhood traumas, and due to weak narration, we never quite feel their drive for gold. Two fantastically-realised supporting characters – a dying eight-year-old and an ageing sports coach – pump blood back into the story, but the medal itself remains elusive. (Kirstin Innes)