LITERARY FICTION
THE LAST GOOD MAN by Thomas McMullan (Bloomsbury £16.99, 320 pp)
THE LAST GOOD MAN
by Thomas McMullan (Bloomsbury £16.99, 320 pp)
Set in a deliberately vague alternative version of England, this calls to mind the novels of Andrew Michael Hurley and the hallucinatory folk horror films of director Ben Wheatley.
Having left the city and its perpetually burning fires behind, Peck has travelled to a small village on the edge of Dartmoor to be reunited with James: not a blood relative, but no less dear.
Yet the seemingly close rural community is not as cosy as it seems. Disgruntled citizens air their grievances by writing on an enormous wall, with retribution delivered by the ‘law and order’ and a team of ‘chasers’. Sins are made into literal burdens as wrongdoers are roped to crushingly heavy items of furniture — and, as Peck discovers, other punishments are far worse.
McMullan makes highly effective use of the rugged landscape, full of unease and portents, in his creepily unsettling debut, a timely tale about the dangers of toxic rhetoric and mob rule.
THE BETRAYALS by Bridget Collins (Borough Press £14.99, 448 pp)
THE BETRAYALS
by Bridget Collins (Borough Press £14.99, 448 pp)
This chunky page-turner owes an acknowledged debt to German author Hermann Hesse’s 1943 bildungsroman, The Glass Bead Game.
As in Hesse’s novel, the substance of the ‘grand jeu’, the game that consumes Collins’s characters, is obscure, but Leo Martin’s skill as a player was undoubted when he was a student at exclusive Montverre academy.
Now in his 30s, Leo is, however, returning to his alma mater in disgrace, having been forced to resign his political career over his opposition to sinister ‘purity laws’. Also at Montverre is Claire Dryden, the first female ‘Magister Ludi’, and a feral orphan girl identified only as ‘the Rat’.
Slowly, twistily, the secrets, deceptions and treacheries that connect them are revealed. While the spectre of fascism and its evils is half-heartedly conjured, tending to fade in and out, there’s Harry Potter-ish pleasures to be had getting lost in Montverre’s labyrinthine corridors and the byzantine intricacies of the game.
THE ARREST by Jonathan Lethem (Atlantic £14.99, 320 pp)
THE ARREST
by Jonathan Lethem (Atlantic £14.99, 320 pp)
Like The Silence, Don DeLillo’s recent, weirdly bloodless short tale, this novel imagines a world where technology has failed.
In the years since ‘the Arrest’, Americans have returned to farming, travelling by horse or bike as roads fall into disrepair. ‘Journeyman’ was once a movie scriptwriter; now he’s his isolated Maine community’s delivery boy.
But life for everyone looks set to change again when his obnoxious former writing partner, Todbaum, shows up driving a nuclear-powered retrofitted tunnel-digger . . .
Lethem, best known for the neo-noir Motherless Brooklyn, is an eye-catching phrasemaker of some panache; the jokes here are good, and there’s a sharp Hollywood satire bubbling somewhere under the surface.
If part of the point of The Arrest is that we love our apocalypses neatly packaged, then Lethem deserves credit for refusing to play along: his inimitable imagination never stops delivering curveballs. But as to the rest of the point? I was baffled.