The Modern Library (14 page)

Carl Hiaasen is an acerbic thriller writer, inventive and bizarre. His chilling black comedies, with their split-second timing, off-beat dialogue, raging laughter and death, are knowing and provocative records of the way we live now.

The art of Patricia Highsmith is cool and detached; this adds power to her depiction of quiet violence and of murderers who could almost be ourselves. This strange identification of reader with murderer – a kind of inverted murder mystery – gives her thrillers an hypnotic attraction.

This novel was the first she wrote about the more than talented Mr Ripley, a neglected and loveless child who grows up to ensure that he compensates for such deficiencies by letting nothing and no one stand in his way. His distinguishing characteristics are his charm, his anxiety to please, and luck, which in this instance whisks him to Italy to coerce the wealthy young Dickie Greenleaf into returning to the USA to take up his responsibilities. The relationship between Tom Ripley and Dickie is one of those troubled tugs-of-war between men in which Patricia Highsmith so eerily excels: fretful, duplicitous, overwrought.

The tension is electric, and Tom’s murder of Dickie – in which every ounce of water and blood, every slow motion of struggle is felt almost physically by the reader – is only the beginning of a chase which twists and turns as Tom veers towards his unexpected fate. This is a classic psychological thriller, sinister yet cajoling, swathed in Highsmith’s macabre wit.

This is a novel, written in effortless prose, about Cuban musicians and their families in New York in the 1950s. It throbs with sex, with the pain of desire, with the allure of bodies, with the pure, unadulterated, exotic pleasure of coupling. It is the only novel in this list which makes mention of ‘that muscle up at the high end of a woman’s thigh, that muscle which intersected the clitoris and got all twisted, quivering ever so slightly when he’d kiss a woman there’; for this alone, the novel is mandatory reading.

It tells the story of two struggling musicians, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, authors of a song called ‘Beautiful Maria of My Soul’, and their lives in the new country and their memories of the old. It is full of pure style and gorgeous flourishes, like the dance music our two heroes play – tangos, boleros, melancholy tunes. It reads as though it was written in one single hot afternoon. Hijuelos places an aura of huge sadness around his characters’ lives, especially that of Nestor, the younger brother, who is eaten up with ennui, despite his enormous sex drive. It is one of the few great books about immigrants to the United States, grappling with the new language and the old ties of affection, the women steady and ambitious, the men hard drinking, locked in the old world and all the more attractive and interesting for their displacement.

Written in the bastardized fragments of a ‘worn-out’ English,
Riddley Walker
is set in a brutal tribal world, thousands of years after a nuclear apocalypse. The twelve-year-old Riddley is led by a pack of wild dogs to help an imprisoned mutant, the Ardship of Cambry. Releasing him involves Riddley in a struggle to regain, by shamanistic and alchemical means, the secret of the bomb. On one side are the politicians, the Pry Mincer and the Wes Mincer, travelling showmen, who retell and decode the fragments of ancient stories. On the other are the mutants, whose damaged genes retain some shadows of the bomb that made them. Unknown to both is a simpler secret, the formula for gunpowder. The key is a yellow powder, ‘Salt 4’. In the battle for its possession, the Ardship is killed and the Pry Mincer deposed and blinded. Nevertheless, a bomb is made and exploded. Riddley, rejecting all power, except the power of story, becomes a travelling showman, with a new tale to tell.

This is a strenuously, fiercely imagined book. Hoban uses scraps of legend – Punch and Judy, the Green Man, St Eustace – to construct a mythology of original power. Riddley’s humanity provokes in the reader a kind of despairing sweetness. The language, which requires concentration, is both brutal and
visionary
: the effort to understand it becomes an effort to understand something much larger.
Riddley Walker
, which is often compared to
A Clockwork Orange
, releases a strange, raw, spiritual sense that cannot be found in smoother fictions.

Edward Manners, an Englishman in his thirties, goes to teach in a Flemish city – Bruges perhaps? – and like Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Brontë’s
Villette
falls obsessively in love. Luc Altidore, one of his pupils, is his adored object, a shadowy, unknowable, golden young man, longed for, lusted after, whilst Edward’s other worlds continue imperviously. There are the men he meets at gay bars; another pupil, Marcel, and his father Paul Echevin, curator of the museum devoted to the great Symbolist painter Orst; an entirely different, pastoral, domestic life appears when Edward returns to England for the funeral of his first lover.

Edward’s hunger for anonymous sex – for sex whatever – confronts in both a comical and affecting way the idealism of obsessive love. Edward possesses Luc but only for a moment; Luc seems to drift away, eternally elusive, a face glimpsed in a misty glass, unobtainable. Love is trailed by loss, with betrayal waiting in the wings. And shame – or worse, a Nazi past, menacing and tragic – turns romantic love to stone.

There is a mellow beauty to the form and structure of this novel, echoed in its melancholic, elegiac atmosphere. At the same time it is candid, comic, utterly contemporary, with a sly sense of the absurd. This is a luscious and continually fascinating novel; reading it is like contemplating one of the great paintings of the Flemish Old Masters.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s considerable skills as a novelist are especially evident in
An Artist of the Floating World
and
The Remains of the Day
(1989). The novels stand as a fascinating diptych about the atmosphere which created the Second World War, about the small sets of collaborations which make up a society. The former deals with Japan, the latter with England.

An Artist of the Floating World
is Ishiguro’s best and most subtle novel. It is narrated by an elderly painter in post-war Japan, it plays with ideas of custom and ceremony, tradition and nostalgia, vanity and modesty, as ways for the narrator to disguise himself; information about him and indeed his society come to us in small, carefully modulated, almost perfect moments, when something tiny is disclosed and allowed to stand for a great deal more. This makes the central moment of disclosure in the book immensely powerful. The narration has a withdrawn, distant, stilted tone, and yet it remains readable and engrossing; the tension is kept going by the constant possibility that something more will be said, that all the decorum will break down; by the readers’ satisfaction at knowing or guessing rather more than the unreliable narrator wishes to tell them.

The classic English detective story has inveigled readers all over the world into the mysteries of English life: class distinctions, eating habits and private passions. While there have been many brilliant male exponents of the genre, it is generally accepted that women such as Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie were the Queens of Crime. Today writers of fresh sophistication have taken on their mantle.

P. D. James has the workings of the English establishment at her fingertips – the civil service, medicine, the law, the judiciary, the police, the Church of England: all the bulwarks of the state are grist to her mill. She sets
Original Sin
in the world of book publishing, in Innocent House, on the River Thames in the East End of London, the elegant, marbled, ill-named home of the Peverill Press. James’s poetic detective, Commander Adam Dalgleish, is sent to investigate the death of its managing director, found half-naked with a snake draught-excluder stuffed in his mouth.

Uncommon intelligence and an authentic sense of sin mark P. D. James’s studies of vengeance and retribution. Most rewarding is her acute sense of place, in this case her atmospheric evocation of the River Thames which dominates this classic detective story as it unravels its secrets past and present to the sounds and scurryings of the great river.

Sometimes a very good writer produces an exceptional work which garners a word-of-mouth reputation as a treasure to be read again and again, increasing in fascination each time.
The Tortoise and the
Hare
is one such novel. This is the story of Imogen, quiet, self-effacing, loving and beautiful; of her husband Evelyn,
successful
barrister; and their country neighbour, the riding, shooting and fishing Blanche Silcox. These are the gentlefolk who have had the whip hand in England for hundreds of years: county people, living in beautiful homes, with servants and smooth cars, capable of sex in strange and desultory ways.

Imogen is the perfect wife and mother, the very model of how we were told women – married women – should be. Observing every gesture, every image, every note – ‘the sharp, tinkling sound’ of a phone being put down secretly – in her cool, graceful prose, Jenkins negotiates Imogen to a startling and satisfactory finale, producing at the same time a devastating portrait of
mariage à la mode
and of female masochism and timidity. There is an echo of Graham Greene in Elizabeth Jenkins’s perception of the bleak, arid wastes of a certain English upper-middle class, reared to mask self-interest with cant, bullying and hypocrisy. All this is revealed in simple but devastating ways, giving this surprising story of domestic betrayal larger, more subtle reverberations.