The Modern Library (10 page)

This novel, one of the most popular of the 1990s, received the most nominations from our readers as their favourite novel of the last fifty years.

An elegiac, romantic work, it is both a heart-breaking evocation of life in the killing fields of the First World War, and a passionate account of an anguished love affair. Faulks interweaves these two central narratives with the love stories of generations of one family, the birth of children, and the power of love, sexual and otherwise, so that hope flutters through the story like the thin but exquisite song of the birds from which this poignant novel takes its name.

Faulks’ hero, Stephen Wraysford, is an unwilling survivor: through his sad eyes the agonizing years of battle follow, one after another, and he sees every man with whom he has shared this holocaust blasted to oblivion. Most powerful is the recreation of the underground tunnels which lay beneath the battlefields,
constructed
at terrible cost, and which Faulks, with consummate skill, presents as an underground Hell, the inevitable punishment for humanity so fruitlessly at war. ‘Jack saw part of Turner’s face and hair still attached to a piece of skull rolling to a halt where the tunnel narrowed … there was an arm with a corporal’s strip on it near his feet, but most of the men’s bodies had been blown into the moist earth.’ And thus Birdsong is also a testament to the millions of men who were slaughtered in the abattoir of Flanders Fields, a reminder to later generations never to forget ‘the pity of the past’.

This is a novel about the illogicality of love, and much else: dialectics, philosophy, food, medicine, eighteenth-century surgery (fatal), mathematics and gossip. It fairly hums with absorbing personal and philosophical considerations. The impoverished young nobleman Friedrich (Fritz) von Hardenburg, later known as Novalis, the great eighteenth-century German Romantic poet and philosopher, falls in love with Sophie von Kuhn. She is twelve when Fritz falls in love with her, fifteen when she dies of tuberculosis. Sophie is silly and uninteresting but Fritz’s love is not. Embedded in a German world of family and food notable for its unquestioning brutishness – geese, for example, were killed after being plucked alive, twice – Sophie inspires Fritz’s writing, philosophy and his Romantic quest, symbolized by his book,
The
Blue Flower
. The scene in which Fritz reads the opening chapter of this early work to the uncomprehending Sophie is only one of the episodes in which absurdity and heartbreak cannot be separated.

Penelope Fitzgerald was a writer with an ironic, dry wit, and an exquisite, elliptical prose style. Everything she wrote seemed effortless: her timing, her obliquity, her knowing way of telling us little but implying much. This conciseness nevertheless produced a tumultuous and convincing effect, so that whilst Death stalks its pages, The Blue Flower, crowded with seductive personalities, glows with laughter and fizzles with interest and ideas.

In 1798 the people of County Mayo rose up to join the small force sent by the French Revolutionary government to support Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen in their fight to liberate Ireland from English rule.

To the Irish, the English were ‘Big Lords’, the absentee landlords, Protestant persecutors; to the English, the Irish were savages, traitors, Catholics. It is a rare writer who can project dispassion into this gruesome relationship. Flanagan does so, his vast knowledge of the period pouring through the voices of a handful of men of the time: we see what happened through their eyes, their passions and suffering. They in turn reveal to us a cast of thousands, so that every sound and vision of 1798 erupts before us – the battles, the beddings, the slaughter, the boozing, the poetry, the hangings, the generals and the English at war, and at their ease.

For the Irish, ease is their music and poetry, which flows through the dramatic pages of this great epic. Even in the thick of battle Thomas Flanagan has a remarkable way of using the particular eloquence of Irish English so that we understand why, two hundred years later, few remember Cornwallis’s victory over the rebels at Ballinamuck (the place of the pig), whilst the Irish songs about the year of the French are still sung today.

Richard Ford has a special ability to create complex moments in his narrative where something difficult – a feeling, a memory, a desire or an action – is explained and understood, and then he allows the explanation not to be enough, he preserves a sense of mystery and strangeness about what his characters feel and how they are motivated.

Frank Bascombe is the narrator of both
The Sportswriter
and
Independence Day
(1995); he lives in New Jersey. His life is, on the face of it, ordinary. He is divorced, he had a child who died, he thinks about women and work, he has friends. Ford surrounds him – both novels take place over a short space of time – with a sort of halo as he meditates on his life and days, tries to come to terms with those around him. He is calm, nothing is exaggerated, the scale of his emotions remains small, and yet – and this is the genius of
The Sportswriter
– his feelings are rendered with such sympathy and complexity, such a sense of wonder and careful, thoughtful prose that he burns his way into the reader’s imagination as a modern Everyman. The novel uses time with particular skill: the three days in which it takes place contrasted with a lifetime in flashback and memory. The events of these three days – meetings with close family and friends – are brilliantly and memorably rendered.

Everybody knows that General de Gaulle died in his bed and all attempts to assassinate him failed. Therefore, any novel which focuses on an attempt to assassinate him must lack one central tension: excitement about the outcome. How is it, then, that this book, almost thirty years old, remains powerful and exciting?

It is written in the style of investigative journalism, or indeed a police report. There are hardly any flourishes, and there is a great deal of technical information. The narrative hardly ever enters anyone’s mind, and this gives the novel a strange, chilling tone: things are described as from a distance, as though someone later managed to piece together what had happened, and this makes the events of the novel very convincing indeed.

At the beginning the OAS decide, after many botched attempts, to hire an outsider to assassinate de Gaulle who has, in their opinion, betrayed Algeria. We learn very little about the Jackal, the man they hire: he has no thoughts and hardly any past, he is English, blond, efficient and ruthless. As his plans – perfect weapon, several new identities, perfect location – are made, the police in Paris slowly realize that the danger this time is real. Once this happens you cannot put the novel down, and there are moments when you almost want the Jackal to succeed. The narrative is fast moving, tense, supremely confident and makes this book a classic of its kind.

This novel follows in the great tradition of island stories in which our hero, Nicholas Urfe, innocent, raw and English, arrives in a strange and foreign place full of strange and foreign people. He is rational, intelligent and civilized and suddenly now is forced to grapple with dark and hidden forces.

The Magus
is set in the years after the Second World War; Nicholas, an Oxford graduate, finds work as a teacher in a school on a remote Greek island. Fowles is brilliant at establishing the island’s topography, its bareness and its isolation. He also allows history and myth to hover over the book, so that at times Nicholas seems to be acting out an older story as he comes, like a moth to flame, to the house of Maurice Conchis on the island. Conchis is a conjuror, a story-teller, an art collector. His house is filled with ghosts, strange noises, odd music. And Nicholas is both frightened by what he finds there, and deeply drawn to and intrigued by it.

Fowles is fascinated by the darker aspects of male desire, and by the compulsive and the irrational. He manages to make his island both a real place, rugged and beautiful, and an imaginary place, as though Prospero and Caliban had recently walked these shores. Just as the protagonist is dragged deeper and deeper into the enigma of his host, so too the reader is constantly jolted and surprised by the drama in the novel between the rational and the mysterious.

Janet Frame’s gift is to use a lucid, often comic view of her own experiences as the touchstone for her distinctive work.
Owls Do Cry
fictionalizes her childhood in New Zealand as one of the siblings of the impoverished Withers family. The father is Bob, a
shiftworker
; the mother the gentle Amy, always wearing a damp pinny; Francie is the eldest, destined for the woollen mills and worse; then comes Toby who is ‘a shingle short’; and Daphne, Frame’s alter ego, who like Frame herself is given a leucotomy for little reason except as a curb on an excess of imagination. Finally there is Chicks, the youngest, who plunges into the best – or worst – that New Zealand has to offer.

Childhood for the Withers children revolves around scarcity; they are dirty, they are poor. For pleasure they loiter around the town rubbish dump, long to go to the cinema and know the words of every Forties and Fifties popular song. These childhood memories echo with tragic clarity through the adult lives each chooses.

Janet Frame has a relish for words, and for the small details that identify an incident or an event. In
Owls Do Cry
the language shimmers with her poetic sensibility, but there’s a toughness too, fortified by her gentle fierceness and her angry calm.

This is an epic historical romance set against the backdrop of the American Civil War. Inman is a wounded Confederate soldier. As his recovery is near completion, his despair at the futility of the fighting and his desire to be reunited with his love Ada lead him to abandon his fellow soldiers in a makeshift hospital and journey home to Cold Mountain in the hills of North Carolina.