Fiction Files: Chuck Palahniuk reveals himself to be a nihilist with a heart according to Jocelyn Clarke who reviews his latest effort Lullaby, while Vincent Banville doesn't expect to read a better novel this year than Alan Furst's Blood of Victory.
Lullaby. By Chuck Palahniuk. Jonathan Cape, 250pp. £10
In Chuck Palahniuk's new book, Lullaby, reporter Carl Streator, researching a story on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, discovers that parents whose children had died mysteriously all have a copy of the same book. On page 27 of Poems and Rhymes From Around The World, he comes across an ancient African culling song "sung to children during famines or drought, warriors crippled in battle and people stricken with disease . . . to end their pain". The eight-line poem proves lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone's direction, and is highly infectious. Once the poem becomes lodged in his brain, Streator finds himself becoming an involuntary mass murderer as his anger at noisy neighbours ("noise-holics and quieto-phobics") and frustration with pushy editors result in numerous fatalities. He meets Helen Hoover Boyle, a real-estate agent who makes a fortune reselling the same high-end haunted houses, and together they embark on a cross-country odyssey to destroy all copies of the fatal book, and save the world.
Formally playful and intellectually promiscuous, Lullaby reveals the author of Fight Club, Survivor and Choke to be a nihilist with a heart. Meditations abound on 19th-century American flora and fauna, serial killers, information technology and necrophilia as symptoms of psychic infection and damage. His signature laconic style infuses his blackly comic fairytale with a surprising tenderness - admittedly in his own scabrous terms - and emotional seriousness.
There is also a rare moral urgency to it as Palahniuk uses his literary performance as a form of cultural and political shamanism: "Maybe acts of God are just the right combination of media junk thrown in the air . . . too many television reruns bouncing around might cause hurricanes. Cancer. Aids."
In Lullaby, the words kill you.
Jocelyn Clarke is the commissioning manager of The Abbey Theatre
Blood of Victory. By Alan Furst. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 237pp. £12.99
At a conference on oil in 1918, after the end of the first World War, a French senator said: "Oil, the blood of the earth, has become, in time of war, the blood of victory." Carrying this on, Alan Furst begins his latest novel with the words: "In 1939, with the approach of war in Europe, the British secret services tried to impede the exportation of Roumanian (sic) oil to Germany. They failed. Then, in the fall of 1940, they tried again."
Using this further effort as his motivating factor, Furst spins another in his by now most impressive series of novels set in and around the dark days of the beginnings of the second World War. His protagonist this time, the man British Intelligence enlists in a clandestine operation to prevent the export of oil from the Ploesti oilfields to Germany, is one I.A. Serebin, a Russian writer now living in Paris, who is also the executive secretary of the International Russian Union, an émigré organisation that attempts to help those on the run from Stalin-led oppression.
Our hero will be a recognisable figure to those who have read Furst's other books: "Serebin was 42, this was his fifth war, he considered himself expert in the matter of running, hiding, or not caring." A simplification, of course, for he does care, but only in a disinterested, keeping-boredom-at-bay kind of manner.
Serebin is a loner, one of those people who exists on the periphery of life, a drifter with an ironic view of humanity's various failings, but still someone who is willing to play a part; maybe not the puppet-master, but rather the one who adjusts the strings when the puppet-master is not looking.
Following him on his peripatetic journey around Europe, we see him stepping in where other men fear to tread, escaping deadly situations by the skin of his teeth, for in the heel of the reel that is what Serebin is, a survivor. In a beautifully realised study, Furst once again proves himself a master at creating the atmosphere of the time and the place. Nothing is overt; everything is underplayed, whittled down and polished to perfection. And the writing, all understatement, nuance, suggestion and shade, is a joy. I don't expect to read a better novel this year!
Vincent Banville's African novel, An End to Flight, has just been reissued by New Island Books