Two of the most stimulating pieces I have read recently have been about writing: A. S. Byatt on Alice Munro in the (4 March 2006) and Frederick Busch on Hemingway, in , , a copy of which I picked up in Amsterdam for ten euros. Both were interesting to me as they were about writers whom I greatly admire (and might strive, in various ways, to emulate), and both managed to describe, without resorting to critical theory, how each writer achieves their effects.
Alice Munro’s most recent collection of short fiction, , is the most enjoyable and, I think, the best (not always the same) book I have read in the past 12 months. Her stories, as Byatt suggests, often contain as much life as most novels, and it is a life she portrays with both compassion and a needle-sharp eye for motivation and the vagaries of human behaviour.
Currently I’m two-thirds of the way through Lavinia Greenlaw’s second novel, , which keeps reminding me of Iris Murdoch in the off-kilter attitudes of its characters, whose relationships are played out in a London I recognise, if only, as it were, through a very particular prism. As befits, perhaps, a poet (I was happy to publish an early pamphlet of hers, 'Love From a Foreign City', with Slow Dancer Press back in 1993) Greenlaw’s prose is spiky and specific, yet elusive, and the reader, no bad thing, has to take quite a lot on trust in order to proceed.
In my own sphere, that of crime fiction, quite the best book I have read in the last year (and re-read) is Peter Temple’s . Temple has written good, better than average, crime novels before, but none, I think, as good as this. His style, which is taut and precise, yet frequently something he shares with Munro alluding to things just outside the frame, is shot through with a very righteous anger about the state of his world; the story moves along largely through dialogue that is barbed and armed with a black humour that wards off any possibly sentimentality. It’s both a marvellous entertainment and a deeply serious book about serious matters. A book I wish I’d been able to write.
John Harvey is a poet and novelist who is well respected for his crime series featuring Charlie Resnick, based in Nottingham. For further information please visit www.mellotone.co.uk
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