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1984

George Orwell, 1984

(repression and oppression in grim totalitarian future)

Bleak Prospects (nightmare scenarios for the future of human society)

Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves  ("civilised" woman in distress, rehabilitated by contact with aboriginal "primitive" people)

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid"s Tale  (grim future: totalitarian, religious oppression, anti-women)

George Turner, The Sea and Summer

Paul Theroux, O-Zone  (efforts to make a viable post-nuclear society in US wilderness)

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange  (crime and class-war in future Britain)

Inner Hell (the nightmare is inside us)

Will Self, My Idea of Fun

William Golding, Lord of the Flies  (choirboys lost on desert island revert to satanic evil, humanity"s dark side)

Georges Simenon, The Murderer  (criminal psychologically destroyed by guilt)

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness  (wilderness as a satanic, engulfing force, human evil symbolised)

Fay Weldon, Life and Loves of a She-Devil  (betrayed wife takes macabre, comic revenge)

The Ghastly Past (totalitarian, fundamentalist nightmares from "real" history)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter  (religious bigotry in Pilgrim Fathers America)

Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop  (Catholic missionaries test their faith in 1870s Mexican wilderness)

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock  (crime and redemption in 1930s England)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich  (repression of dissidents in Stalinist labour-camp)

Maxim Gorky, Foma Gordeev  (underbelly of Tsarist Russia in decline)

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ACHEBE, Chinua

Nigerian novelist (born 1930)

THINGS FALL APART  (1958) Achebe's best known novel, is a story of the people of Umuofia on the river Niger, and especially of Okonkwo, a rich and headstrong elder. To British readers the period seems early Victorian; to the men and women of Umuofia it would have no date, it would be part of the gentle continuum of existence. Their lives depend on the harmony between human beings and spirits, and that is preserved by a precise set of rituals and beliefs, established by precedent, explained by folk-tale and so familiar that instead of constricting the soul they liberate it. Okonkwo wins respect among his people by a magnificent wrestling-throw when he is 18, and keeps it by his hard work as a farmer, his love for the land. Then, by accident, he kills a relative, and is forced by custom to live out of the village for seven years. While he is away Christian missionaries come. They speak through interpreters, understand nothing of the people's beliefs and are followed by white commissioners whose laws destroy the society they were devised to 'civilise'. Achebe's points are blunt, and (for ex-colonialist) shamingly unanswerable. But his novel's main fascination is not political but social. External observers, however sophisticated their cameras or meticulous their anthropological methods, can only describe the surface of timeless, tribal societies: they report and explain events. Achebe, by contrast, uses a series of direct, uncomplicated scenes, reverberant as poetry, to reveal his people's souls.

Achebe's other novels are No Longer at Ease, Arrow of God and Anthills of the Savannah. Chike and the River is a children's book, sweet as a folk-tale.

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A Man of the People (a satirical, bitter farce about what happens when white imperialists leave and black politicians set up a state on 'western' lines).

To Things Fall Apart : Janet Lewis, The Trial of Sören Kvist I.B. Singer, Satan in Goray Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (making a denser, more Homeric use of Nigerian folk-styles)

To Achebe's later, and politically much more savage work : David Caute, News from Nowhere V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief - in a more hilarious but not less bleak mood

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ACKROYD, Peter

British writer (born 1949)

Ackroyd is a biographer as well as a novelist -- his Dickens is 1200 pages long, sumptuously detailed, and acclaimed -- and his fiction benefits from a researcher's eye for extraordinary and revealing detail about the past. Often, he blends a modern story with a historical one, and characters from the past move in and out of the contemporary narrative like ghosts. He sets many stories in London (he is the author of London: A Biography), and superbly evokes its people and atmosphere, both today and in different periods of the past.

HAWKSMOOR  (1985) This remains the most exhilarating and adventurous of Ackroyd’s explorations of a London in which past and present endlessly intertwine. A contemporary detective (the namesake of the seventeenth-century architect) is driven towards a mystical encounter with forces from the past through his investigations of a series of murders in London churches. Part of the narrative is written in a prose which demonstrates Ackroyd’s chameleon-like ability to mimic the English of past centuries and its rhythms.

THE HOUSE OF DOCTOR DEE  (1993) Matthew Palmer, a contemporary 29-year-old, inherits an old London house which once belonged to (the real) John Dee, a scientist and alchemist of the time of Elizabeth I whose life's obsession was to create a 'homunculus' (a kind of cross between test-tube baby and devil). Each chapter of the book alternates between the modern story and Dee's own narrative, and the links are first, the house and its Clerkenwell setting, and second, the fact that homunculi were believed to live for thirty years, and then to disappear and be reincarnated -- so that the overriding question is, 'What is Matthew's real identity?' The modern story is an engrossing combination of mystery and ghost-story, and Dee's narrative, told in a resounding pastiche of Elizabethan English, catches both the social life and manners of the age, and the obsession of a 'scientist' whose work leads him to flirt with the occult.

Ackroyd's other novels include: Chatterton (about the 18th-century literary forger who committed suicide at the age of 17), The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and English Music. He has also written poetry, prize-winning biographies of T.S. Eliot, William Blake and Shakespeare and, in addition to his London ‘biography’, Albion, a characteristically idiosyncratic investigation of the English imagination.

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Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (blending the stories of the real Dan Leno, 'the funniest man in England' in 19th-century music-hall, such literary figures as George Gissing and Karl Marx, and the mysterious serial killer of the 1890s nicknamed the 'Linehouse Golem')

The Lambs of London (n which he provides his own fictional version of the lives of Charles and Mary Lamb)

To Hawksmoor : David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost; Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

To The House of Doctor Dee : Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

To Ackroyd's work in general : Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels (first novel in the 'Cornish' trilogy) E.L. Doctorow, Waterworks Rose Tremain, Restoration Michael Moorcock, Mother London Iain Sinclair, Downriver

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Action Thrillers

Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate

Clive Cussler, Cyclops

Len Deighton, Mamira

Daniel Easterman, Name of the Beast

Ken Follett, Lie Down With Lions

Frederick Forsyth, The Day of the Jackal

Martin Cruz Smith, Stallion Gate

Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent

Walter Wager, Telefon

See also: HIGH ADVENTURE    HISTORICAL ADVENTURE    SPIES AND DOUBLE AGENTS    TERRORISTS / FREEDOM FIGHTERS   

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ADAMS, Douglas

British novelist (1952-2001)

Adams began his career as a radio joke-writer, and also worked for the TV sf series Doctor Who. He made his name with a series of genial sf spoofs, beginning with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY  (1979) Earthman Arthur Dent, informed that his planet is about to be vapourised to make room for a hyperspace bypass, escapes by stowing away on an alien spacecraft. This is the beginning of a wild journey through time and space, in the course of which he meets the supercool President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox, discusses the coastline of Norway with Slartibartfast (who won prizes for designing it), watches the apocalyptic floor-show in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and discovers the answer to the 'ultimate question about life, the universe and everything'. Adams hinself is on a spree, spray-painting the stuffiest corners of the genre.

The other Hitchhiker books (self-contained sequels) are The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish; Mostly Harmless. In 1987 Adams began a second series, this time starring Dirk Gently, an intergalactic private eye who has to cope not only with the usual quota of blondes and hoodlums, but with electronic monks, thinking horses, the space-time continuum and an uneasy feeling that he is no more than a bystander in his own bad dreams. The Gently books so far (appropriately, a gentler entertainment than the Hitchhiker series) are Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul. In his later years Adams largely turned away from the printed page to concentrate on projects in other media but the Hitchhiker books remain as the most inspired of all science fiction spoofs.

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SF spoofs in similarly lunatic vein : Robert Asprin, Phules Company Harry Harrison, The Stainless Steel Rat Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

NSF booka featuring bewildered heroes at the centre of the chaos : Patrick Dennis, Auntie Mame Charles Webb, The Graduate William Boyd, Stars and Bars Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fail

Fantasy spoofs : Robert Asprin, Another Fine Myth Terry Pratchett, The Colour of Magic Robert Rankin , The Anti-Pope (and others in the Brentford series) Jasper Fforde , The Eyre Affair

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Adolescence

Alain-Fournier, Le Grand Meaulnes

Beryl Bainbridge, A Quiet Life

Maeve Binchy, Echoes

Colette, The ripening Seed

Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career

Jane Gardam, Bilgewater

Lesley Glaister, Digging to Australia

Rumer Godden, The Greengage Summer

S.E. Hinton, That Was Then, This is Now

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Sue Townsend, The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 3/4

Rose Tramain, The Way I Found Her

Antonia White, Frost in May

E.B. White, A Boy's Own Story

See also: CHILDREN    ECCENTRIC FAMILIES    PARENTS AND CHILDREN    SCHOOLS    TEENAGERS   

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Africa

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Ronan Bennett, The Catastrophist

Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky

William Boyd, A Good Man in Africa

Justin Cartwright, Masai Dreaming

Buchi Emechta, Rape of Shavi

Giles Foden , The Last King of Scotland

Nadine Gordimer, None To Accompany Me

Abdulrazak Gurnah , Paradise

H. Rider Haggard, She

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State

Ben Okri, The Famished Road

Wole Soyinka, The Season of Anomie

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

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ALDISS, Brian

British novelist (1925-2017)

For over 40 years Aldiss has been a major propagandist for British sf, editing anthologies, speaking at conventions and writing several non-fiction books including Billion Year Spree (revised version: Trillion Year Spree), a critical history of the genre. His own sf covers the whole range from space opera (e.g. Non-stop) to future catastrophe (e.g. Hothouse, about human life after a global catastrophe shrinks our race to two feet high), from philosophical fantasy (e.g. Frankenstein Unbound and Moreau's Other Island, extensions of themes from earlier sf masterpieces) to stories of alternative worlds (e.g. the Helliconia trilogy: see below). He is also known for non-sf novels. These range from a comic trilogy about the oversexed 1950s adolescent Horatio Stubbs (A Hand-reared Boy; A Soldier Erect; A Rude Awakening) to Life in the West, a Bellow-like book about the plight of a man who has made his reputation preaching science and technology as the salvation of humanity, and is now forced, by the disintegration of his own emotional life, to give his views more intimate analysis.

THE HELLICONIA TRILOGY  (1982-85) Helliconia is one of four planets which revolve round Batalix, itself a satellite of the giant star Freyr. Helliconia seasons last not for months but for hundreds of Earth years, and the planet is inhabited by two separate and incompatible races, one adapted to winter life, the other to summer. The three novels (Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer, Helliconia Winter) explore the effects of Helliconia's enormous seasons, each long enough for whole civilisations to rise, flourish and die. Colonial wars, racism, ecology, the clash between religion, science and the arts, are underlying themes -- and all the time, Helliconia is observed: watching it provides entertainment, a blend of travel-documentary and soap-opera, for the bored inhabitants of Earth.

Aldiss' other sf books include Earthworks, The Saliva Tree, Barefoot in the Head, Enemies of the System, The Malacia Tapestry, Dracula Unbound, and a dozen story-collections including Starswarm, Cosmic Inferno and New Arrivals, Old Encounters. His non-sf novels include The Brightfount Diaries, The Primal Urge, The Male Response and Forgotten Life.

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The Dark Light Yeats

To the Helliconia books : Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

To Aldiss' SF in general : Isaac Asimov, The Foundation Saga Ray Bradbury, The Golden Apples of the Sun

To the Horatio Stubbs books : Leslie Thomas, The Virgin Soldiers

To Life in the West : John Fowles, Daniel Martin John Updike, Roger's Version

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ALLBEURY, Ted

British novelist (1917-2005)

Allbeury writes packed, fast spy thrillers, usually with cold-war settings. His titles include A Choice of Enemies, Moscow Quadrille, The Man With the President's Mind, The Lantern Network, The Alpha List, The Crossing, Children of Tender Years and The Secret Whispers (about double agent attempting to escape from East Germany). He also uses the pseudonym Richard Butler (Where All Girls Are Sweeter; Italian Assets).

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Duff Hart-Davies, The Heights of Rimring Ted Willis, The Churchill Commando Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

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ALLENDE, Isabel

Peruvian-born Chilean novelist (born 1942)

Allende’s first novel, The House of the Spirits (1985), was a glowing family tapestry in the magic-realist manner of Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, spanning five generations and thronged with larger-than-life characters and supernatural events. She followed this vein in Eva Luna, which is particularly evocative of life on a decaying hacienda deep in the tropical bush. Her finest book, Of Love and Shadows (see below) adds politics to the magic-realist mixture, to devastating effect. Paula is a moving account of the death of Allende’s daughter which opens out into the story of her own life and the political tragedies of Chile. Aphrodite is an unclassifiable celebration of food, sex and sensuality which reflects the same delight in the physical world that runs through all her fiction.

OF LOVE AND SHADOWS  (1987) Irene Beltrán, a journalist, and her photographer-lover Francisco Leal are investigating the disappearance of a disturbed, possibly saintly adolescent. In the jackbooted dictatorship in which they live, however, the child is not simply missing but ‘disappeared’, one of thousands snatched by the authorities who will never be seen again. Allende surrounds her main characters with a web of fantastic personal history in true magic-realist style. But the further the investigators thread their way through the sadism and ruthlessness of the labyrinthine fascist state, the more fact begins to swallow fairytale. The investigators themselves begin to lose reality – their love affair becomes a swooning parody of romantic fiction – but what they discover grows more and more uncomfortably like real South American life, like nightmare fleshed.

Allende’s other books include The Stories of Eva Luna (a set of long short stories which forms a pendant to Eva Luna), Daughter of Fortune, Portrait in Sepia (two novels which have the same setting and some of the same characters as The House of the Spirits), City of the Beasts and Zorro, her own take on the legend of the swashbuckling, masked hero.

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Eva Luna

Alejo Carpentier, The Chase Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist Richard Condon, Winter Kills Stephen Dobyns, The Two Deaths of Senora Puccini Carlos Fuentes, A Change of Skin Günter Grass, The Tin Drum Oscar Hijuelos, The Fourteen Sister of Emilio Montez O'Brien Mario Vargas Llosa, Captain Pantoja and the Special Service gives a more farcical view of Allende's terrifying, haunted world

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All-Engulfing Families

Anita Brookner, Family and Friends

Angela Carter, The Magic Toyshop

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

Anne Fine , Telling Liddy

Margaret Forster, The Battle for Christabel

John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

Lesley Glaister, Digging to Australia

Irene Handl, The Sioux

François Mauriac, The Nest of Vipers

Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children

See also: ECCENTRIC FAMILIES    MANY GENERATIONS    PARENTS AND CHILDREN    TEENAGERS   

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ALLINGHAM, Margery

British novelist (1905-1966)

Allingham wrote ‘crime fiction’ only in the sense that each of her books contains the step-by-step solution of a crime, and that their hero, Albert Campion, is an amateur detective whose amiable manner conceals laser intelligence and ironclad moral integrity. But instead of confining Campion within the boundaries of the detective-story genre, Allingham put him in whatever kind of novel she felt like writing. Some of her books (More Work for the Undertaker; The Beckoning Lady) are wild, Wodehousian farce; others (Sweet Danger; Traitor’s Purse) are Buchanish, Amblerish thrillers.

FLOWERS FOR THE JUDGE  (1936) Strange things are happening at the old-established publishing firm of Barnabas and Company. First the junior partner turns a street-corner in Streatham and vanishes into thin air, then there is skullduggery over a priceless but obscene manuscript, and soon afterwards the firm's stuffy senior partner is murdered and Mr Campion has three intertwined mysteries on his hands.

THE TIGER IN THE SMOKE  (1952) Allingham's best book is set in an atmospheric, cobble-stones-and-alleyways London filled with low-life characters as vivid as any in Dickens. Like all Allingham’s novels, it is not a conventional whodunit, although it contains plenty of mysteries that demand solutions. Jack Havoc, the ‘tiger’ of the title, escapes from jail and the hunt for this violent convict takes place in an eerie and fog-enshrouded London that Allingham brilliantly evokes. Campion and other characters familiar from Allingham’s work loom in and out of the fog as the action moves inexorably towards a violent conclusion.

Allingham’s other Campion books include Coroner’s Pidgin, Police at the Funeral, Hide My Eyes, Look to the Lady and the short-story collections Mr Campion and Others and Take Two at Bedtime. After Allingham’s death, her husband P. Youngman Carter wrote two further Campion novels, one of which, Mr Campion’s Farthing, is up to his wife’s most sparkling standard.

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Death of a Ghost (set in London’s eccentric art community and involving – what else? – forged paintings)

Hide My Eyes.

Edmund Crispin, The Case of the Gilded Fly Michael Innes, The Daffodil Affair H.R.F. Keating, A Rush on the Ultimate P.D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman P.D. James, A Taste for Death Joan Smith, Masculine Ending is a tongue-in-cheek whodunnit starring a feminist sleuth

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All the World's a Stage

(books about theatre)

John Arden, Books of Bale

Beryl Bainbridge, An Awfully Big Adventure

Richard Bissell, Say, Darling

Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon, A Bullet in the Ballet

Angela Carter, Wise Children

Robertson Davies, Tempest-Tost

Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

Bamber Gascoigne, The Heyday

H.R.F. Keating, Death of a Fat God

Thomas Keneally, The Playmaker

Noel Langley, There's a Porpoise Close Behind Us

J.B. Priestley, The Good Companions

Mary Renault, The Mask of Apollo

Barry Unsworth, Morality Play

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Altered States

(chemical fiction)

M. Ageyev, Novel with Cocaine

Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

J.G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights

William S. Burroughs, Junky

Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama

Donald Goines, Dopefiend

Jay McInerney, The Story of My Life

Kevin Sampson, Powder

Hubert Selby Jr, Requiem for a Dream

Alexander Trocchi, Cain’s Book

Irwine Welsh, Trainspotting

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ALTHER, Lisa

US Novelist (born 1944)

KINFLICKS  (1976) The 'autobiography' of Ginny Babcock, a typical' US adolescent in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The book sends up every cliché of the genre and of the period: Ginny spends her high school years jerking off a muscle-brained football star, discovers lesbian love at university, joins protest marches, takes up macrobiotic diets, zen and LSD, marries, has a child and divorces - and treats each experience as if she were the first person in the world ever to discover it, as if she were hypnotised by her own adventurousness. Alther intersperses Ginny's first-person narrative with chapters set ten years further on, when Ginny visits her dying mother in hospital, trying to come to terms with her feelings about herself, her family and her future. These sections give the book a harsher, more elegiac tone: the young Ginny symbolises a whole adolescent generation, as rebellious and zestful as any other but engulfed by the age they live in.

Alther's second novel, Original Sins (1980), similarly blends satire, slapstick and irony. A 1980s equivalent to Mary McCarthy's The Group, it traces the experience of five childhood friends as they grow to adulthood, discovering in the process civil rights, the women's movement and the pleasures and preposterousness of the sexual revolution. Other Women (1985), a less larky exploration of women's experience in the last generation, counterpoints the lives of two utterly different people, a "flower-child' depressed at the first wiltings of middle age and the prickings of lesbianism, and her English psychiatrist.

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Bedrock

To Kinflicks : John Irving, The World According to Garp Marge Piercy, The High Cost of Living Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint Philip Roth, Letting Go Aritha Van Herk, No Fixed Address

To Original Sins : Rona Jaffe, Class Reunion Mary McCarthy, The Group

To Other Women : Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs

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