The Modern Library Read online

  Sybille Bedford was born in Charlottenburg, Germany, and lived in London. Biographer, novelist and travel writer, she drew on the experiences of her family for this famous novel.

  Age in year of publication: forty-five.

  Sam Hanna Bell 1909–1990

  1951 December Bride

  In the second half of the century, a few writers continued to work as though the modern movement in fiction – Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner – and the Industrial Revolution had never existed, as though they were still living in the eighteenth century. Yet there is a strange beauty and intensity about some of these books, as though the authors were well aware that they were working against the grain, telling old-fashioned stories with a dark Freudian self-consciousness.

  December Bride is set on the coast of County Antrim in Northern Ireland in a small, tightly knit Presbyterian community. After their father’s death in a drowning accident, two brothers, Hamilton and Frank, continue to employ Sarah Gomartin and her mother as servants. When the mother leaves, Sarah stays on, and to the horror of those around her she begins to consort with both brothers; no one knows which of them is the father of her children. She is an immensely selfish and bigoted woman – her hatred of a local Catholic family is extraordinary – but there’s a sort of innocence about her in the book, and her involvement with the brothers is so lovingly described, so slow and uneasy in its development, that she becomes oddly sympathetic, her independence and stubbornness seem like gifts. There are scenes towards the end of the book, when the new generation has grown up, that are heartbreaking. The writing is plain, deliberate and flawless. This is a book which everyone interested in modern fiction should read: it shows what can still be done.

  Sam Hanna Bell was born in Scotland and brought up in Northern Ireland. He worked for more than twenty years as a producer for BBC Radio in Belfast. His other books include Summer Loanen (1943), A Man Flourishing (1973) and Across the Narrow Sea (1987).

  Age in year of publication: forty-two.

  (1) Saul Bellow 1915–2005

  1953 The Adventures of Augie March

  Bellow’s Augie March is born into immigrant Jewish poverty in Chicago, before the Depression. Augie is on a mythical quest to discover ‘the lessons and theory of power’ but everywhere he finds greed and lies, until acquired wisdom reveals that the greedy and the prevaricators, including his good self, are not to be despised.

  This is a picaresque masterpiece, issuing forth the words and thoughts of Augie March in Bellow’s marvellous language, roiling from the gut, strong and vivid. Augie’s pilgrimage begins with his tattered childhood with his mother, his retarded brother George and his labyrinthine older brother Simon, each of them ‘drafted untimely into hardships’. Proceeding through a variety of dubious jobs and precarious adventures – wonderful street theatre involving the riff-raff, rich and poor, of Bellow’s Dickensian humanity – Augie best loves women, the flesh of them, their pernickety brokering for power. Augie chooses Thea, Mimi, Lucy, Stella and more, trailing through abortions, falcon training, each portion of female anatomy closely observed. ‘Guillaume’s girl friend … was a great work of ripple-assed luxury with an immense mozzarella bust …’

  This novel is a hymn to city life, suffused with eagerness and delight. Bellow’s pulsing use of words is controlled by the simplicity Augie constantly insists upon, and so this novel avoids the Jewish sentimentality and convoluted clamour which become tiresome in Bellow’s later works. This is a Great Expectations or David Copperfield set in Chicago, full of a sense of longing – a longing for family, for love: the greatest and most universal of all themes in fiction.

  Saul Bellow was born in Canada and lived in Boston. Among his famous novels are Seize the Day (1947), Henderson the Rain King (1959) and Humboldt’s Gift (1975), which won the Pulitzer Prize. Both The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog won National Book Awards. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976.

  Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.

  (2) Saul Bellow 1915–2005

  1964 Herzog

  Herzog is Bellow’s most accomplished novel in which ideas are presented fluently without damaging the characters or the sense of life in the narrative. It has a marvellous first sentence: ‘If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog.’

  He is indeed out of his mind, and he has many good reasons to be so. One, his mind is too well stocked, he knows too much, he has read too much Western philosophy and it weighs him down. Two, his wife has behaved appallingly, has run off with his friend; ‘run off’ may not, however, be the appropriate term since his friend has only one leg. Three, he is oversexed for a man of his age. Four, his whole family history and the emotion surrounding it exasperate him and make him sad. And these are only four examples.

  Moses Herzog will not lie down; his despair is made all the worse by the fact that it is rich in comedy. He writes letters to elderly relatives, to the President, to the New York Times, to many dead philosophers. He is deeply worried about the future of civilization, but he is easily distracted by jealousy, further bouts of madness, lust and memories of childhood, not to speak of guilt and hatred, and by his new girlfriend, the wonderful Ramona. The novel possesses an extraordinary narrative energy. Herzog and those close to him take on a life of their own in the book, and the ideas about the future of civilization which obsess him are woven carefully and skilfully into the story of his disintegration.

  Age in year of publication: forty-nine.

  Elizabeth Bowen 1899–1973

  1963 The Little Girls

  The title of this novel is ironic. Whatever their age, the three girls in question are in spirit anything but little. Diana-Dinah (Dicey), Clare (Mumbo) and Sheila (Sheikie) emit that fiery power certain women have, which they get from smelting whatever gifts circumstances have given them, however shoddy, into monumental wills of iron. In 1914 the girls are at school together at St Agatha’s in Kent. Fifty years later, Dinah begins to fret for her old friends and she advertises for them; Mumbo and Sheikie surface. These bare bones convey nothing of the rich flesh of this novel, splendidly droll both in its dialogue and in the testy, ironic tone of Bowen’s writing. She is given to short, devastating sentences and she applies them to places and persons: her account of the streets and ‘flaccid gates’ and crumbling dogs of the houses of southern England is incomparable. But the real treasure of this novel is its excavation of the meaning of memory, the meaning of time passing, Bowen’s attempt to catch the very moment when it does. That she succeeds turns this brisk comedy into an extraordinary piece of work: clever, beautifully written, a novel which grasps in words and images and laughter that comic despair which comes from the acceptance of life as something which can be only half seen, half known, half understood.

  Elizabeth Bowen was born in Ireland and lived both there and in England. The Death of the Heart (1938) and The Heat of the Day (1949) are two of her most praised novels.

  Age in year of publication: sixty-four.

  T. Coraghessan Boyle 1948–

  1995 The Tortilla Curtain

  T. Coraghessan Boyle is one of the funniest, sharpest, most original novelists in the United States now. He is interested in the advanced humour inherent in advanced capitalism; America is the vast, dark comedy to which he is wide awake.

  The Tortilla Curtain tells the story oftwo Californian families. The first, led by the nature-loving Delaney, is white and rich and less liberal as the days go by and illegal Mexicans haunt the horizon. The second family is Mexican and illegal and open to every possible calamity known to the human race – fire, flood, robbery, hunger, rape, poison, to name but a few. Delaney’s wife Kyra is one of the most vile people in contemporary literature, and as the book proceeds Delaney starts to join her.

  The plot may sound deterministic and crude, as chapters alternate between the ghastly rich and the simpatico poor, but the writing and pacing of the book are too clever for that, and the characters too deeply felt and carefully dra
wn. The book is, however, very political indeed, startlingly so in a time when hardly any American writing is political; it makes you loathe white middle-class Californians, and this must surely be a good thing.

  T. Coraghessan Boyle was born in Peekshill, New York, and is the son of Irish immigrants. His other novels include Water Music (1981), East is East (1990) and The Road to Wellville (1993).

  Age in year of publication: forty-seven.

  Anita Brookner 1928–

  1985 Family and Friends

  In this tart comedy of manners Anita Brookner uses family photographs – wedding photographs – to tell the story of the Dorns, a well-off London family with wistful echoes of a middle-European milieu left behind. There is the matriarch Sofka and her four children: Frederick, her pride and joy; Betty, the favourite daughter; Mimi, the gentle one; and Alfred, the sacrificial lamb. In their world of comfort and coffee, brandy and marzipan cake, an ‘air of family unity serves to disguise unforgivable facts’. Some of these are that Frederick and Betty – two of Brookner’s most artful monsters – are heartless and self-serving, manipulators of family arrangements which seem superficially innocent, but which flicker with unexplored deceits and vanities.

  Family and Friends includes some of Anita Brookner’s finest writing – and some of her most trenchant. Her fiction is noted for its subtlety and technical skill but this can be deceptive, and has indeed deceived the odd ghetto of English critics who greet her novels with delighted misunderstanding. Elsewhere it is recognized that, in ambush behind her classically beautiful prose, rooted in her territory of small lives, is a devilry that works on her stories like lemon zest. Family and Friends, in Alfred’s final revenge, provides a finale so delicate and precise that you can almost see the keen eye of the author slowly blinking at you.

  Anita Brookner, the daughter of Polish parents, was born and educated in London, where she lives. Her fourth novel, Hôtel du Lac, won the 1984 Booker Prize.

  Age in year of publication: fifty-seven.

  Anthony Burgess 1917–1993

  1980 Earthly Powers

  Anthony Burgess wrote a thousand words a day – journalism, reviews, criticism, autobiography, verse, short stories, novels. He never repeated himself. He wrote science fiction and a thriller, he wrote A Clockwork Orange (1962), he wrote novels about Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and Beethoven, and many comic novels.

  His most ambitious novel and the work in which he combines his comic talent, his sense of history and his nose for a good story is Earthly Powers. It is narrated by one Kenneth Toomey, an octogenarian celebrity writer, a cross between Burgess himself, Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, a man capable of producing the following first sentence: ‘It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.’ The archbishop wants to talk about Carlo, Toomey’s brother-in-law who became Pope and could work miracles. The novel explores the cruelty of the century watched through Toomey’s decadent and world-weary eyes. It is a gripping, exhilarating and often melodramatic book which plays with ideas of good and evil, and combines moments from history – the Holocaust, the death of the followers of Jim Jones, changes in the Catholic Church – with strong characters and moments of pure theatre.

  Anthony Burgess was the pseudonym of John Anthony Burgess Wilson. He was born in Manchester of a Catholic family and lived for many years in Monaco. He was also a composer. In 1984 he produced a book which listed his ninety-nine favourite novels. People suspected this was the hundredth.

  Age in year of publication: sixty-three.

  William Burroughs 1914–1998

  1959 Naked Lunch

  This is a novel of dreams and nightmares, hallucinations and sudden moments of crystal clarity. Nothing connects, except an uncompromising tone, an attitude, and the constant presence of the body in all its ugly manifestations, and the state, or organized society, in all its brutality. This is not to forget the narrator’s relish in offering further images of pure disgust, setting scenes of cruelty and violence and drug-induced craziness and laughing at the good of it all. If there is a pregnancy, then there will be a bloody miscarriage; if there are teeth, then they will fall out; if there is a passenger plane, then someone is chopping the floor out of the lavatory. Blood, semen, pus, gangrene, venereal diseases, all types of drugs, belches, farts, hangings, shit, toilet paper, condoms, are everywhere. There is some marvellous surgery, including a scene in which a live monkey is sewn into the patient. There are sick jokes about ‘niggers’ and Jews; there are some good one-liners: ‘May all your troubles be little ones, as one child molester says to the other.’ The tone is often deadpan, matter of fact, like a movie script; the book is full of a morbid energy and rhythm; the method, which is fast-moving, aleatory and jumbled, holds your attention and makes the novel oddly riveting, relentlessly dark and crazed.

  William Burroughs was educated at Harvard. He lived for many years in Central and South America and Morocco. His other books include Junkie (1953), Cities of the Red Night (1981) and Queer (1987).

  Age in year of publication: forty-five.

  A. S. Byatt 1936–

  1990 Possession

  This feast of a novel, accurately subtitled ‘A Romance’, is replete with love stories both passionate and fateful, with high comedy, languishing tragedy, poetry, mystery and adventure.

  The time is now – and then. Now tells the story of an array of scholars of varying levels of greed or goodwill, anxiety and envy, who pursue the literary and emotional pasts of the Browningesque poet Randolph Henry Ash, and Christabel LaMotte, poet and muse. Then is the story of the Victorian liaison between Ash and LaMotte which is dramatic and obscure, and – as is slowly revealed – thoroughly heartwrenching. The present-day lovers-to-be, Ash research assistant Roland Michell and LaMotte scholar Maud Bailey, are inheritors of and act in counterpoint to the lovers from the past.

  A. S. Byatt is remarkable for the abundance and richness of her storytelling gifts. She offers robust drama – and a hundred other pleasures: myth and fairytale mingle with the poetic works of Ash and LaMotte and with journals, letters, mishaps, discoveries and farcical absurdities. Possession is a romance and a detective story which combines all the entertaining virtues of popular fiction with those qualities A. S. Byatt shares with George Eliot: prodigious narrative, imaginative energy and intelligence. Reading Possession is a mesmerizing experience; it becomes a happy addiction, one of those rare novels that lingers in the mind.

  A. S. Byatt was born in Sheffield and lives in London. Amongst her novels, criticism and short stories are the Frederica Quartet: The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and The Whistling Woman (2002). The Children’s Book came out in 2009. Possession won the 1990 Booker Prize.

  Age in year of publication: fifty-four.

  Peter Carey 1943–

  1988 Oscar and Lucinda

  This is a virtuoso performance, an eloquent love story and an epic account of mid-nineteenth century life in England and Australia, interweaving a mercurial adventure story with the intimate, the comic and the fanciful.

  Oscar Hopkins is born in Devon, the frail and red-headed son of a fundamentalist member of the Plymouth Brethren: his escape first into Anglicanism and then into gambling takes him to Australia in the 1850s to bring the word of Christ to New South Wales. Lucinda Leplastrier is an orphaned heiress, daughter of an early feminist, and she scandalizes Sydney by wearing rational dress, owning a glass factory and gambling compulsively. One of Carey’s triumphs in the novel is to make us care fervently about these two odd misfits; another is to surround them with an explosion of clergymen, glass-blowers, explorers, villains, a profusion of idiosyncratic characters galvanized into vigorous pursuit of the vagaries of chance by Carey’s singular genius. Equally admirable is his ferocious caricature of Imperial Britain and of nineteenth-century Australian history, and of the bigotry and intolerance of Christianity, particularly in its ex
treme Nonconformist modes. But it is Carey’s fertile imagination and quirky curiosity about all manner of things that give Oscar and Lucinda its special quality. This is a most sympathetic novel, full of ideas, endearing, full of gusto.

  Peter Carey was born in Bacchus Marsh in Victoria and now lives in New York. His award-winning novels include Bliss (1981), Illywhacker (1985) Jack Maggs (1997), Theft (2003) and His Illegal Self (2006). Oscar and Lucinda won the 1988 Booker Prize and True History of the Kelly Gang won the 2001 Booker Prize.

  Age in year of publication: forty-five.

  Angela Carter 1940–1992

  1991 Wise Children

  Dora Chance, a seventy-five-year-old ex-hoofer, is the leading lady of Wise Children. Clustered round her, as in a Busby Berkeley musical extravaganza, is the theatrical dynasty of Hazards and Chances, artistes and entertainers. Everything comes in twos in this novel. Twins are everywhere, born on both sides of the blanket. Dora and Nora Chance are the illegitimate twin daughters of the great thespian Sir Melchior Hazard. Living in Bard Road, Brixton, they are ‘two batty old hags’ now, but they were not always thus, and Dora is writing her reminiscences, a garrulous account of their theatrical ups and downs – a ‘history of the world in party frocks’. Wise Children turns a hundred cartwheels as it introduces its entertainments. One of them is about fathers, known and unknown – for, as Dora says, ‘You can’t fool a sperm.’ Another is a rapturous homage to the theatre of Shakespeare and the bawdy cheer of showbusiness. Most of all, this is a ribald satire on Britain’s enduring class system. It speaks for the popular and for the people, celebrating the incivilities and trash culture of those who live with vim and vigour on the wrong side of the tracks.