This weeks selection of Paperbacks.
The Pickup
Nadine Gordimer
Bloomsbury, £6.99
Gordimer may not be one of the great literary stylists, but she is a surefooted storyteller, as this tense, deliberate study of emotional power-shifts demonstrates. As in her last novel, The House Gun (1998), an ordinary situation develops into a shrewd study of character in the new South Africa. Julie is a young white woman, the privileged daughter of a wealthy father she dislikes. He has married a second, younger wife, while her mother has also remarried and is living in the US. Julie, an emotional drifter, wants to belong, but is busy being cool. When her car breaks down, a young Arab mechanic, neither black nor white, fixes it. He says little, but Julie battles to establish a relationship with him. Various attempts to secure Abdu's residency fails, and the unhappy couple set out for the desert home he despises. Written in an urgent present tense, it is not so much a love story as an insightful tale of mutual, if very different needs.
Eileen Battersby
Banks of Green Willow
Kevin Myers Scribner/TownHouse €8.99
We speak so blithely, in our slightly saddened post-Tiger country, of "refugees" and "multiculturalism" and even, occasionally, "Europe" - but as the level of debate on the Nice Treaty referendum shows all too shockingly, we understand nothing. Banks of Green Willow opens with a brief affair between an American student and a Bosnian student who meet in Dublin. The woman gets pregnant but opts to return to the States, where she settles down in small-town Louisiana; years later, a failed marriage behind her and a battle with terminal illness ahead, she comes back to Ireland to try to make peace with her past. If it sounds like the plot of a romantic novel, it is - and Banks of Green Willow features many of the staples of the genre, including rather too many stolid sex scenes, a somewhat hysterically jolly Irish family and a clutch of outlandish coincidences. But this is no ordinary romantic novel. It is more like a lament in the key of loss. Images of mass brutality in Bosnia are juxtaposed with a gentle portrait of one woman's slow death; and as the cancer of ethnic conflict spreads its ugly shadow across the supposedly civilised world, science and technology are swamped by ancient evils. Myers has crafted this swirling mass of material into an effortless page-turner with some laugh-out-loud moments; pick it up, and not only will you not put it down, you won't forget it in a hurry, either.
Arminta Wallace
Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet Elaine Feinstein
Phoenix £8.99
Feinstein, who is herself a poet as well as a biographer, knew Hughes personally, and draws on her own memories as well as others' for her concise but illuminating biography. Her writing is clear and crisp and the story fairly zips along. She deals sympathetically and knowledgeably both with Hughes's work and with the defining events of his life, most notably the suicide of his wife, Sylvia Plath, in 1961, following his affair with Assia Wevill and Wevill's subsequent taking of her own life and that of her young daughter, Shura. Demonised at the time, Hughes survived and continued working, eventually becoming Poet Laureate in 1984, and, in Birthday Letters, published just months before his death from cancer in 1998, writing in detail about his relationship with Plath. You sense that Feinstein is treading carefully in telling the story of this complicated and controversial man - but, despite that, the result is never less than enthralling.
Cathy Dillon
Spadework
Timothy Findley
Faber £10.99
In his last novel before his recent death, Timothy Findley, Canada's bestselling author, describes a year in the life of a seemingly perfect family in Stratford-upon-Avon in Ontario. The location of the action is but the first of many Shakespearean references in the book. The protagonist, Griff, is an up-and-coming actor starring in Richard III and Much Ado About Nothing, at the internationally renowned Stratford Festival and suffers from the same tragic flaw as Richard - over-ambition. He becomes gradually estranged from his wife and their young son as his aspiration and the events of their lives drive them apart. A clever and insightful book, it is essentially based on surfaces, especially those of the shallow theatrical cliques where mere good looks and a ready wit may be the difference between success and failure in a self-obsessed protagonist who does not see failure as an option. A sub-plot of murder and drug abuse keeps the reader somewhat involved, but ultimately Spadework rarely digs deep enough.
Mark McGrath
Eva Moves the Furniture
Margot Livesey
Methuen £9.99
Where is the porous interface where the natural and supernatural wash against each other? At the moment when Eva is born in 1920, six magpies appear outside. Shortly after this portentous event, Eva's mother Barbara dies. But, far from being alone, Eva retains the dubious advantage of two "companions" throughout her life - the "woman" and the "girl". These visitations, never seen by anyone else, maintain a close watch and strong influence over her life, not only through their frequent interference - sometimes getting her into trouble, sometimes protecting her life and safety - but also through Eva's constant caution - she is understandably loath to annoy or upset them. By populating Eva's loneliness, the companions ultimately exacerbate it. A lyrical and disturbing novel about our naïve notions of death and life. And, on another level, who doesn't carry their ghosts about with them: apparitions of the unconscious that guide and sabotage our activities and decisions?
Christine Madden