All the words you see overused on book jackets are true of this novel. The one I’ll pick to emphasize is ‘luminous’. Everything is lit perfectly: every landscape infused with light, like a painting; every sin lit from within by the fires of hell; every emotion clear and sharp and shining like broken glass. The tableau lit from below by violence; from above by piercing beauty.

Contemporary Western ethics doesn’t have as many taboos as we once did. The incest taboo, thankfully, remains. It is a strong emotional battery, and Tallent has hooked up the plot of his novel directly to it.

When one comes to the end of philosophy, there’s only one way forward. Inside oneself, it’s called faith. Outside, it’s called art. This novel is a theodicy, for those who have eyes to see. If that sounds like nonsense, ignore it.

Turtle’s father is a man who has come to the end of philosophy and has not found that way. He is a great soul, burning terribly. Not a role model. God save us from such men!

It’s impossible to root for a protagonist as much as we root for Turtle. It’s impossible to hate a villain as much as we hate her father. And yet grieve over him. And almost, in a way, love him because she does. Such strong emotions, which combine with such clarity and force.

All the power of Lolita, without all the misdirection and irony. An utter masterpiece.

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Reading this novel is like a gentle hallucination. A dream of the desert, more myth than image. Firmly grounded, but grounded in unfamiliar spaces. It’s a novel that revolves to show you new faces. Every character starts as a cardboard cutout. Then vibrates. Then some ink drops into water and the character blooms into round space.

Ondaatje tells the story of four dissimilar people who live for a while in a bombed-out monastery. Each is grappling with some deep disconnection from the world. There’s a lot of morphine. Indeed, it’s a novel as soaked in opiates as it is in memory. Like the distilled essence of a time and place that probably never was.

An airplane concealed beneath the sands of the Sahara. A man’s life recorded in the margins of Herodotus. A fugitive wife slowly starves to death in an ornately-tiled cavern. A woman holds a potentially deadly electrical wire perfectly still. A man steals documents from a safe in an Italian villa. They dance to the music of a scratchy gramophone.

He can’t bear that his own side would set off such a bomb.

What a beautiful book!

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Some of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels I do not understand at all. This is one of them. I could tell you about the characters and the setting. I could list scenes and events. But if there exists such a thing as a plot in this novel, I could not discern it.

The BBC exists. The characters work there. It’s World War II, during The Blitz. The characters are living life, recording sounds, broadcasting, taking in boarders, being dysfunctional, being brave, making ends meet, observing chaos, drinking tea and enjoying varying levels of understanding of one another’s psychological complexities and romantic entanglements.

But what is it about? Why did she write it? Who’s the protagonist? What do they want, and do they get it or not? Who or what, in the end, am I rooting for?

In Gate of Angels, she crafts a beautiful puzzle box with a single, exquisite key. When she gives you the key at last, on the final page, the whole mechanism falls into place. You see, with breathtaking clarity, what it’s been about this whole time.

Perhaps such a key exists for Human Voices. If so, I wasn’t perceptive enough to grasp it.

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What a novel! Set in a stern and disjointed college with odd and ancient roots, it follows a young professor and a working-class girl. He doesn’t know what to do with his life. Pursue academic greatness? How, in this dead-end place? Pursue love? With who, when the college forbids women to enter?

He meets the girl by accident. There’s a whiff of scandal. She is very right not to trust men. A professor tells a ghost story with symbolic resonance.

Will they or won’t they? And why has Fitzgerald been giving us all these other facts and stories? They have nothing to do with the main plot!

Except.

On the last page, she gives you one final key. One small, ghost-story element. Just a tiny thing like a filigreed toothpick. And it fits right into a little plot hole she’s left. You slide it in. Pieces shift, and click into place. The whole novel is a magnificent machine, assembling itself in a second out of a pile of scraps. Every part suddenly tight and square, the corners beveled and shining. It lifts a robot hand and pours you a cup of tea.

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Alice Munro is, of course, an excellent writer. She’s wonderful to read. Every sentence, paragraph and story is as well-built as a strong oak table.

These stories, however, suffer from a structural defect. They’re marked “Fiction”, so she’s allowed to invent the details. But the impetus behind the stories is biographical. And so the interest is biographical, too. And false biography isn’t interesting.

So they’re interesting because they’re true, but they’re not true. See the defect?

Despite that, they’re good stories. Little windows into a different time and place. One the author knows well, and has strong sympathy with. Literature as time travel is one of the worthwhile things to do with stories.

The best of the stories come at the beginning, in Ireland. They ride the edge between history and myth.

The title and initial image — “you think you’re looking at America, but you’re really looking at Ireland” — ought to have appeared in the rest of the stories. At least symbolically. I thought we’d be seeing glimpses of Irish culture persisting through history. There’s a little of it. Maybe you have to be a more subtle reader than I am to appreciate it.

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Jesse Ball has his own mysterious energy, and it is as strong as ever in The Divers’ Game. The novel is extraordinarily poignant.

The society in which the book is set has divided itself into two classes. Members of one class have the power to kill members of the other class. They don’t need a reason. There’s no legal procedure; they’re allowed to do it, and sometimes, they do.

The simplicity of his language and mastery of tone sweep you into the setting. It’s only afterward that you start to wonder about symbolic resonance. Meaning creeps in, afterwards.

Few readers of this book will understand what’s going on beneath the surface. Jesse Ball won’t say, for reasons that will be obvious to those who also understand. Nobody will say. I certainly won’t.

It’s like an optical illusion. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And most people will never see it. But the ritual mutilation of the thumbs is a dead giveaway.

Don’t worry about it. He’s a beautiful writer, so tender and poigant. Whatever that undercurrent is, it’s probably not something you’re guilty of. He’s telling the truth when he says that he writes instinctually. The issues the novel touches are far too complex for mere symbolism.

That’s why he said, in an interview about the novel, “I expect there will be a few people in various places around the world who will find it makes sense. At this point, my audience is that: just a few people here and there around the globe.”

Hi, Jesse. Here I am. It makes perfect sense to me.

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I do not understand this book. A sailor comes home on leave. He falls in love with a lady. The lady’s son watches them being intimate through a hole in the wall. The son and his friends kill a cat. The sailor leaves again, then comes back.

And then, when the sailor decides to stay home with his beloved, the son and his friends murder him.

What?

Although, take a peek at the author’s life story and it makes a bit more sense. But raises another question.

This guy was a finalist for the 1963 Nobel Prize for Literature? In the year this novel came out?

I’m going to be thinking about this novel for a long time. Because I understand the weirdest, most experimental American novel more than I understand this extremely realist Japanese novel from the 60s. There must be allegorical elements I don’t have the context to grasp.

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I consider this novel a real work of art. The first section of the triptych shows the hero living a solitary life on an island in the Bahamas. He’s experienced some hard things, but has dedicated himself to art and it’s rewarded him. The character is a painter, which allows Hemingway to render the scenery with a detailed eye.

Every page of this novel pulses with love. Hemingway loves the sea. He loves to fish. He loves guns. He loves to drink. He’s a slave to art. You can see that it’s the work of a man who is absolutely uncompromising with himself. He won’t let himself write a bad sentence, no matter how much he himself suffers for it. Whatever he’s writing about, he loves it too much to let himself write a lazy sentence about it.

There’s extraordinary tenderness. His sons come to visit, and you love them as their father does.

And then the world of the novel is as cruel as the real world, and as senseless. The other two triptychs are of the protagonist, broken by that cruel world. He’s in a daily battle with despair, as with a chronic disease. He has to manage it at every turn; he’s become competent at reading his moods, and so have those around him.

There’s a fantastic section in which he gets some terrible news. Because of the time and place, and the nature of the news, several of his friends are able to guess it. They’ll be talking to him as normal, and then they’ll suddenly start crying. Because something in the conversation, totally invisible to the reader, showed it.

The protagonist is often controlled by such hidden currents of grief. Those who know him well can sense these currents dimly. But nobody can navigate them.

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Rules of Civility is a contest between Washington and Thoreau. Washington recorded a set of ‘rules of civility’, and one of the characters (“Tinker”) tries to follow them. They have to do with how to treat other people. If they were your only rules, you’d be very formal. You’d know how to do things; but if you wanted to know what to do or why, Washington doesn’t give much help.

(I’m sure Washington’s writings give that help elsewhere. But not the Rules of Civility.)

The other book of advice is Walden. Self-reliance, nature, reading, solitude, et cetera. This is the guiding star of the protagonist and narrator. The novel tells the story of a year in her life when she was friends with Tinker, who followed the Washington star.

It’s nice when the author telegraphs what moral codes the novel is about. Yes, it’s a morality play. Here are the choices before you: Rules of Civility versus Walden. Here’s how a character living the Walden life looks. Here’s how a character living the Rules of Civility life looks. Here’s how they interact. Here’s the end result.

This, to me, is one of the strengths of the novel form. The reader dwells long and closely with the characters, and, in a way, lives their lives from within. So the moral choices feel like real moral choices in a way that’s hard for a poem or a movie to achieve. (Those forms have their own strengths, of course.) This kind of novel is like an Aesop fable if you were able to spend four or five hours feeling what it’s like to be the fox. Or whatever animal.

Otherwise, the novel is a pretty straightforward love song to New York. Why are there so many novels set in New York in which the characters spend all day thinking about New York? New York may have some sort of faerie glamour spell on it that makes people write these novels.

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David Mitchell maintains a high literary quality while incorporating elements of fantasy. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Bone Clocks and this are his most fantastical novels. But all the novels take place in the same world. There’s even a way to see how Cloud Atlas is the same world. Although Bone Clocks is the real axle that holds them all together.

It’s hard to write a novel that would be worthwhile without any fantasy, and also include fantasy in it.

Psychic vampires; an illusory house; victim portraits on the walls. Ghosts, barely echoes, plotting their vengeance.

Any chapter would be a totally legitimate spooky short story on its own. The serial murders, nine years apart, give Mitchell the chance to flex his ability to weave many separate stories, each told in a different style, into a coherent whole. If you don’t like repetition, it’s not going to work for you. But for me, the repetition is like getting to live the same ghost story over and over without getting bored.

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