This week's paperback reviews
It’s Beginning to Hurt
James Lasdun
Vintage, £8.99
The short story that gives this collection its title is the shortest in the book, and is a masterclass in the genre: in just two pages Lasdun conveys the gulf between a man's outer life and his inner world of loss and grief. With deft, precise language, strong narratives and great emotional insight, the writer – London born, now living in the US – writes compellingly about contemporary characters' loves, fears, passions and casual cruelties, in settings that range from urban to suburban to rural, mainly in England and the US. In one story a husband's anxiety about his wife's collapsing stock-market investments pervades his whole world; in another a married man's complacency is disturbed on a walking holiday in Greece with a womanising friend; in Peter Kahn's Third Wifea woman finally realises that she has to act on her instincts. Memorable and satisfying. Frances O'Rourke
Wanting
Richard Flanagan
Atlantic Books, £7.99
Reason and impulse are at war in this historical novel, set in 1840s Tasmania. In the remote penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land the governor and famous explorer Sir John Franklin carries out a civilising experiment on the native Aboriginal community. At the heart of this project is Mathinna, a young Aboriginal girl adopted by the governor and his wife, whose tragic story evolves into a wider, powerful metaphor for the injustices of the time.
The story also takes place in London, where Charles Dickens is enjoying literary success but struggling with a deteriorating marriage and family life. Wantingis the fifth novel from the Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan, who is perhaps best known for Gould' s Book of Fish, which won the 2002 Commonwealth prize. This latest work is a dense, lyrical read that delicately brings together separate narrative strands while delving into issues such as Christianity, science and morality. Sorcha Hamilton
Dracula
Bram Stoker
Penguin, £6.99
Stoker's classic thriller about the insatiable undead sourcing fresh human blood draws on central European myth and legend dating back to the mid-15th-century career of Vlad the Impaler. But the young London solicitor Jonathan Harker, who arrives at Count Dracula's dreary castle high in Transylvania's Carpathian mountains to finalise the purchase of the count's new English property, is not concerned with history. Dracula's intervention when Harker is about to be seduced by three depraved maidens initiates a sordid investigation. Once in England the count, having assumed a wolf's form, is busy. He plans on shipping 50 coffins filled with his native soil to his new estate. Inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, Draculais as much a late-Victorian melodrama as it is a horror story. The narrative consists of 27 chapters, raising some questions about the amount of letter and journal writing sustained by characters racing to beat nightfall. Still, Dracula, with its high-speed finale, remains urgent and evocative. Eileen Battersby
The Glass Room
Simon Mawer
Abacus, £7.99
The Glass Roomopens in Vienna before the second World War, when Viktor and Liesel Landauer are on their touring honeymoon. Victor is Jewish and owns the huge Landauer motor-car company. In Venice they meet architect Rainer von Abt, aka Mies van der Rohe, and commission a modernist house for their glorious site in Czechoslovakia. When it's built, the open-plan drawing room and emblematic onyx partition attract ire and adulation, and the beautiful room's glass walls become the contested focus of the novel. Though Victor and Liesel remain central characters, the emotional weight is carried by Liesel's racy friend, Hana, and Kata, Victor's lover and the children's nanny. Tension is ratcheted up after 1938, as the Nazi occupation advances. The Landauers' escaping entourage is vividly tracked across Europe while the house sequentially becomes a laboratory for Hitler's racial experiments, occupied by hostile forces and a clinic for handicapped children. The glass drawing room mostly escapes destruction. The novel, while slightly overpatterned, is of scale, dimension and scope; and it enthralls. Kate Bateman
How to Paint a Dead Man
Sarah Hall
Faber, £7.99
Four stories intertwine in Sarah Hall's How to Paint a Dead Man, two set in 1960s Italy and two in contemporary Britain. The four characters are delicately linked by plot details and motifs, lending the novel cohesion. The Italian strands feature a celebrated and reclusive painter who keeps a journal in the last weeks of his life, and a young girl adjusting to blindness who visits the master's grave shortly after his death. In northern England, laddish landscape painter Peter Caldicutt gets caught in the rocky terrain that has made him famous, and spends a night reflecting on his eventful, happy life while awaiting rescue. Several years on, Peter's daughter, Susan, is on the verge of losing herself in the wake of her twin brother's death. Arguably the character whose voice rings truest, Susan, compellingly, struggles to feel present in her life without her twin. Hall movingly explores sex, identity and the twin themes of life and death against the backdrop of art. Eimear Nolan
