The latest releases reviewed
The Slap
Christos Tsiolkas
Atlantic Books, £7.99
Someone slaps someone else's child: this is the clever little firebrand at the heart of Tsiolkas's Booker-longlisted offering. It sounds a small, even banal premise for a big novel, yet it's something almost every reader will have a stance on. One approaches it with a pleasurably combative edge, ready for a challenge. And Tsiolkas does not pander to easy stereotypes here. Following the points of view of eight characters in turn, Tsiolkas shows us their secrets, their pasts and their prejudices, and it is obvious that there are no saints here, only sinners. Yet this is also the novel's main flaw: rifling through the private lives of one damaged, narcissistic character after another, there is much dirty laundry but, in the end, little to interact with. The canvas is broad, the treatment intelligent, but as a novel this deconstructs rather better than it constructs. Claire Anderson-Wheeler
St Pancras Station
Simon Bradley
Profile Books, £8.99
Now an iconic part of the city, the inclusion of London's St Pancras Station in a series titled Wonders of the World would have raised eyebrows a century ago. As Simon Bradley reveals in this updated edition of his history of the station, its future has often been in doubt. When built, in the 1860s, William Henry Barlow's pointed-arched train shed represented a revolutionary approach to a new challenge for engineers, and George Gilbert Scott's accompanying hotel was a landmark of the Gothic Revival. During the 20th century, however, the station fell foul of modernist tastes and was repeatedly threatened with closure and demolition. It is only since it was chosen as the terminus for the Eurostar service that St Pancras has been restored to its former glory. Bradley is illuminating on the architectural achievement that was the original building, while also using St Pancras as an opportunity to expand on some fascinating aspects of social history. Nicholas Hamilton
The Hard Life
Flann O’Brien
Souvenir Press, £10
The Hard Lifeis the best result of a late flowering by Flann O'Brien the novelist in the 1960s. Written rapidly after the reissue of his debut, At Swim-Two-Birds, it ended 20 years of silence from Brian O'Nolan's "other" pseudonym, following the rejection of his second work, The Third Policeman, in 1940. He had since become famous as Myles na Gopaleen (formerly na gCopaleen), author of a long-running and brilliant Irish Timescolumn. But relief in literary circles at his comeback to book form may have tinged the initial reception to The Hard Life. Time has not been entirely kind to a novel that was greeted as a small masterpiece when it first appeared. Shorn of its calculated shock value (O'Nolan hoped the book would be banned, on the grounds of his naming a priest Fr Fahrt), the anticlerical humour now seems merely quaint. As a result the inadequacies of the plot are even clearer. What remains undiminished is the pitch-perfect Dublinese, of which O'Nolan rightly regarded himself a master. Frank McNally
