The latest paperbacks reviewed
Nocturnes
Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber and Faber, £7.99
Music unifies this thoughtful quintet. Friendship, love, dreams and time, always time, also prevail. A woman who has not played the cello for years is content with how great she would have been, while a restless young man tastes the misery of a perfect couple. Ishiguro’s characteristic intelligence, irony, deadpan humour and offbeat vision shimmer. These convincing exercises in voice explore memory and realisation. Deservedly still celebrated for his 1989 Booker prize-winning, The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro, ever alert to culture and class, is mercurial, capable of elegiac beauty as in An Artist of the Floating World (1986) and of the cautionary polemic that shapes Never Let Me Go (2005), his courageous book about human cloning. All told in the first person, the five narratives – likeable, quasi-confessional – convey longing and failure, a touch of wonder and, as so often with the gifted, gracefully intuitive Ishiguro, wide-eyed comedy and surprise.
Eileen Battersby
Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is Another Way for Africa
Dambisa Moyo
Penguin Books, £9.99
Why have we failed to make any dent in Africa’s poverty despite billions in Western aid being pumped into the continent over the past 50 years? In Dead Aid, Harvard-educated Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo argues that when it comes to Africa’s lack of progress, aid is the problem and not the cure. Rebutting the approach of Bono and other celebrities who tap into our collective guilt, Moyo explains her theory that development aid perpetuates a culture of dependency and props up corrupt despots. Proposing alternative means of finance, Moyo recommends methods of accessing international bond markets and attracting foreign investment to wean Africa off its “aid addiction”. A slap in the face to Western pretensions, Dead Aid challenges our paternalistic attitude toward third world countries and stimulates a re-evaluation of antiquated economic thinking.
Kevin Cronin
Once On A Moonless Night
Dai Sijie
Vintage, £7.99
Dignified and scholarly, Dai Sijie’s third novel – about a lost Buddhist text – is a story of frames within frames. The narrative begins in the hands of a Chinese-English translator, who then randomly encounters a biographer of Empress Cixi; this prompts the biographer to begin his own tale of Empire and dynasty, and so the buck is passed through a long parade of subsidiary narrators. Eventually the fate of the lost text is unravelled, and there is (muted) tragedy in store here for our narrator.
The vignettes of historical China are perhaps the high point of this novel. Dirty, crowded markets of the Communist era; deserts and vast Imperial gardens: all these are still-lives of calligraphic detail, recreated with careful art. This detail-oriented, conscientious writing, however, tends to affect the pace; readers will need more patience than that required for Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, his bestselling, more energetic debut.
Claire Anderson Wheeler
The Little Stranger
Sarah Waters
Virago, £7.99
Dr Faraday, the narrator, is called to Hundreds Hall, a decaying Warwickshire mansion, where a servant, Betty, is faking an illness. Showing solidarity with his own mother, who was briefly a servant at the Hall, he does not give her away. Gradually, the Doctor sets his sights on Caroline Ayres and on the Hall, and, just as the famous chemist, Michael Faraday, was not considered a gentleman in the early 1800s, this fictional Dr Faraday in the 1940s suffers the hauteur of the landed class. It’s a tribute to Waters that she mostly succeeds in combining social realism with echoes of Wuthering Heights – both novels have overwrought scenes involving women and broken casement windows as well as change of house ownership. The hospital dance, a hilarious, but ultimately tragic, cocktail party, and dozens of local sick calls are played out against the post-war Labour Government’s refit of England to make this a novel that enthralls, appalls and bores by turn.
Kate Bateman
Heliopolis
James Scudamore
Vintage, £7.99
There is so much at work – and brilliantly at work – in James Scudamore’s Heliopolis that it seems arbitrary to praise one element over another. The plot, the characterisation, and the descriptions that leave the reader not just hungry for, but jealously craving, more, all merge together so naturally and so vividly that you do not so much read this book as experience it. The story centres on Ludo dos Santos who, in his late 20s, is conflicted over his unique good fortune. Born in the slums of Sao Paulo but saved by a market chain magnate and his charitable wife, Ludo struggles to adjust to his tenuous position of privilege.
Amidst Ludo’s reflections and flashbacks Scudamore introduces his audience to the conflicting worlds of Ludo’s life: the dark and dangerous city streets, the lavish penthouses towering above them, and the blissful countryside that provides escape from them both. By turns intoxicating, terrifying, sorrowful, and celebratory, Scudamore’s bildungsroman is utterly consuming.
Megan L McCarty
