Iris Murdoch, The Bell (Vintage, 1999; first published in 1973)
I first began to read Murdoch when I was studying in England in the 1980s and was drawn to her complex characters; no-one is ever good or bad, everyone is an amalgam. The Bell is no exception, for here we have a religious community of deeply confused people struggling to find a way to live […]
Tim Winton, Dirt Music ( Scribner, 2001)
I discovered this book browsing in a New York bookstore. Winton is a youngish Australian whose novels have twice been shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. Dirt Music is the story of a couple of outcasts who find each other, lose each other, and against pretty remarkable odds, connect again. I have rarely read any […]
David Mitchell, Black Swan Green (Vintage Canada, 2007)
Mitchell is probably best known for Cloud Atlas, now, as they say, “a major motion picture.” I thought that The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (2010) was fabulous. Mitchell’s diversity of subject matter and style is remarkable. In Black Swan Green he writes in the voice of thirteen-year-old Jason Tyler, who lives in a […]
Nadine Gordimer, A Guest of Honour (Penguin, 1973)
Gordimer’s writing is simply brilliant, but her stories always leave me with a profound sense of sadness. Winner of the Nobel Prize in 1991, Gordimer is closely associated with the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. But she is no naïve optimist! A Guest of Honour is the story of a colonial-era British civil servant, Colonel […]