A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar By Suzanne Joinson Bloomsbury, £14.99
In 1923 three English women arrive in the Silk Road city of Kashgar to set up a Christian mission. Millicent is ebullient, driven, fanatical; Lizzie is a photographer and a dreamer; her sister Evangeline is a writer who has brought her bicycle to China with a view to researching a travelogue – hence, the eye-catching title of this debut novel.
As they cross the desert landscape of eastern Turkestan, the women stumble on a young girl giving birth on the road. They try to help her, but she dies; and the trio – plus the newborn baby – are placed in the care of a wealthy Muslim and his family, effectively under house arrest.
Back in present-day London, meanwhile, a woman finds a “man of Middle Eastern appearance” outside her apartment in the middle of the night. She hands him out a blanket and a pillow. Next morning she finds them placed neatly outside her door; on the wall, there is an elegant drawing of a bird. She is intrigued, and so are we.
Joinson balances these parallel stories with impressive skill. In an alternating-chapter narrative, there’s always a temptation to skip through one story in favour of the other. Here, both are equally absorbing. She also assembles a cast of oddballs, eccentrics and exiles, peopling her literary canvas with believable characters through whom she can explore – though gently – the ways in which ideological rigidity exacts a terrible cost on frail human creatures.
A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar is not perfect – some will quibble with its lightness of touch, and there’s at least one clunky coincidence of the “ah, surely not” variety – but it’s a strikingly original first novel, and a total page-turner. In fact, it has the look of a slow-burn, word-of-mouth favourite.
Arminta Wallace
The Colours of Man
Micheál Ó Conghaile
Cló Iar-Chonnacht, €15
Micheál Ó Conghaile holds the distinction of having been ignored by a literary competition in Irish and then winning the same competition in English. Back in the 1990s Ó Conghaile submitted his Irish short story, Athair, to the now-defunct Sunday Tribune and received no acknowledgement of the work. A year later, he sent it to the paper in an English translation, as Father, and won its Hennessy Writer of the Year award. The incident is reminiscent of the experience of the Co Donegal writer, Seosamh Mac Grianna, who wrote that he should translate his novel An Druma Mór into English in order to get it published. That there were 60 years between the two episodes says much about the acceptance (or otherwise) of Irish-language prose in the cultural scheme of things.
Father, a story about a gay man coming out, is included in this collection, The Colours of Man, one of 17 short stories translated from the Irish. One of the colours that interests Ó Conghaile is the experience of gay men. With These Hands is red raw in its carnality while The Mercyfucker is, despite the title, a more tender exploration of the same theme. Lost in Connemara charts the painful loss of a partner and a survivor’s consequent disorientation.
Other stories veer towards the surreal and the brutal. The marvellously named Death at a Funeral viciously mocks the false sentiment that so many people offer on the occasion of someone’s death. Perhaps taking his cue from the Irish saying “Más mian leat do mholadh, faigh bás” (“If you want to be praised, die”), the story sees the corpse rise from the coffin on the back of the fulsome praise he is given by mourners – though he is subsequently beaten back into it for his impudence and other transgressions that are soon recalled.
The translators include writers who will be known to readers of this paper – Alan Titley and Gabriel Rosenstock – while academic Brian Ó Conchubhair provides a very readable introduction. Readers unfamiliar with Irish will not register the stories as “changelings”, such is the fluency of the English. Ó Conghaile may well be lost in Connemara but he is not lost in translation.
Pól Ó Muirí
Autumn Laing
By Alex Miller
Allen and Unwin, £12.99
At 75 the Australian novelist Alex Miller is a consummate storyteller. He even tells a great story about the genesis of this novel. “I think I’ll write a simple love story,” he said to his daughter, who retorted: “Love’s not simple, Dad. You should know that.”
He does know it. In Autumn Laing he tells the story of the passionate affair between his eponymous narrator-heroine and a young painter, Pat Donlon, which took place half a century earlier. From the opening pages – narrated with hilarious, heartbreaking honesty by the 85-year-old Autumn – this is an close-up-and-personal book, full of compelling characters and the complex dance that traces the constantly shifting nature of the relationships between them. Based on an incident in the life of the Australian painter Sidney Nolan, it is also a meditation on the nature of Australian artistic identity and whether, or how, it might carve a place for itself that is not entirely dependent on its European antecedents.
If that all sounds more worthy than worthwhile, the fault lies with this reviewer. Miller weaves a shimmering tapestry whose intensity carries the book effortlessly across more than 400 pages – and the reader with it. It’s hugely readable, but it’s not just about surface narrative momentum. Miller’s art is to be found in the deep, dark pools. Stop a moment (if you can) and peer down. You’ll see paragraph after paragraph of perfectly crafted prose. And something more: the kind of movement from the everyday to the sublime that is familiar from the work of another superb chronicler of the everyday, Alice Munro.
Miller is a treasure from the land Down Under – and when you’ve read Autumn Laing, you can treat yourself to his back catalogue, which glints with the promise of further hidden gems. Why we haven’t been reading him for years, I honestly can’t imagine.
Arminta Wallace
