19 hours ago
An eerie tale about our impending doom, plus the best novels of June
by An Yu
Twelve years prior to the beginning of Sunbirth – the third novel by the Beijing-born writer An Yu, after her acclaimed Ghost Music and Braised Pork – the sun had begun to fade away. But Five Poems Lake, the town in which the novel is set, 'had been in decay long before'. The locals have lived through the star's slow evanescence largely as before, albeit under slightly chillier circumstances.
Sunbirth follows an unnamed pharmacist as she reckons with this precarious world. She has her regular customers: 'the Su girl', notable for a leg injury she acquired in childhood; the pregnant Miss Pan; and Driver Hua, a delivery man. He's infatuated with Miss Pan, the father of whose unborn child is unknown. After visiting her in hospital, our narrator walks home and finds an intoxicated Driver Hua waiting outside. He exposes himself – and then, out of nowhere, 'a bright light pushed itself out of his open mouth'. He is, it seems, one of the 'Beacons', a group of people 'with beams bursting' from their faces, who roam the streets shining as the real thing gradually dims.
In response to this slow, and then very sudden, undoing of the world, the narrator's sister returns to live with her. Their concern isn't with the disappearing sun, nor are they particularly alarmed by the transformed humans, who now wander among the inhabitants of Five Poems Lake in a manner itchily suggestive of the Covid pandemic. Instead, they take the opportunity to dig up their dead father's ashes – and learn that he was interred with a photograph of a Beacon. Yet he died when they were young, long before the creatures were first spotted: the photograph's existence is, therefore, the central mystery of the plot.
Think of Sunbirth as a quiet apocalypse novel. The sun disappearing, slice by slice, is an enchanting conceit: the story takes on a sort of innocence, its flatness reminiscent of a child's drawing. This is evident in the tone, too, which is often startlingly naive. Earlier in the story, when Miss Pan jumps from her hospital window, the narrator asks: 'How much had Miss Pan's world failed her, if death was the only way for her to communicate how she really felt?' Yu relies heavily on this sort of rhetorical question. Or else characters shout at each other in sudden outbursts: a conversation is muted until it isn't, 'exploding without any warning' or 'erupting uncontrollably'.
The end of the world is clearly en vogue. Sunbirth arrives shortly after another apocalypse novel, Elisa Levi's well-regarded That's All I Know, and the Levi is just one of many. Like That's All I Know, Sunbirth feels a little like a short story, distended – an enigmatic one, attempting mythical proportions. The characters operate as ciphers, and would lend themselves well to something briefer: policemen are moral arbiters; fathers and sisters are uneasy caretakers. We accept these archetypes as representative, but for prophecy to become plot, there needs to be detail, and Sunbirth struggles to give its story much substance.
Instead, we circle around the same questions for some 300 pages. Remarkably, the apocalypse becomes tiresome. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator muses that 'we used everything to distract ourselves from what was really happening'. Perhaps this explains the stasis. Yu has structured Sunbirth so that in the chapter immediately after the Beacon photograph is found, its existence is explained in flashback. And so, while the world is ending, for the reader there isn't much of a revelation.
It's possible that the most successful apocalypse novel is a self-destructive one: it mimics the lack of forward motion in its world, and therefore stalls, falling in on itself. But while the structure may be logical, it doesn't make for good reading.
In the final scene, the Beacons begin climbing on top of each other, creating a single, human-shaped body of light. It's one of Yu's more memorable images, and one that promises action. Instead, the figure slumps and falls into the lake. Perhaps it's a symbol of how we slide into disaster. Perhaps it's just a shrug. SD
Sunbirth is published by Harvill and Secker at £18.99. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
by Xenobe Purvis
One heat-addled summer in an Oxfordshire village at the start of the 18th century, a 10ft silvery creature is caught in the nearby Thames. 'A miracle,' pronounces one villager. 'Unnatural,' says another: 'Fetch the priest!' Only the ferryman demurs. 'Just a sturgeon,' he declares. The fish is sent to the pub, cooked and shared. The villagers, fears assuaged, are jubilant.
This minor event appears near the beginning of the young writer Xenobe Purvis's debut novel, The Hounding. Its placing is deliberate: the book is inspired by a real-life incident in 1701, in which a doctor reported treating five girls from an Oxfordshire village who'd been 'seized with frequent barking in the manner of dogs'. For the reader, it's not hard to imagine how such behaviour might be received by villagers for whom an unusually large fish is confused with deep evil. Throw in the threat of ailing crops; a patriarchal community for whom masculinity is tightly bound up in drinking, badger baiting and casual violence; and the reflexive social instinct to objectify unconventional women as something 'other', and you have a story that feels directly sprung from our collective cultural consciousness.
Purvis, who was selected to be part of the prestigious London Library Emerging Writers programme, writes in spring-water clear and often disarmingly lovely prose. She presents the village like something out of a picture book: there's the alehouse; the landlady, Temperance Shirly; a vicar who wears a patch to cover a hole in his head, following a shooting accident. Robin Wildgoose, a gentle farmhand, comes 'walking through the crisping cow parsley' like a character from a folk song. Even the Mansfield sisters feel semi-mythical: there are five of them and they live with their near-blind grandfather following the deaths of their parents. They like to keep themselves to themselves, and most of the villagers regard them as merely a little strange.
And yet to the drink-sotted ferryman Pete Darling, the girls remind him of his weakness. Pete is a God-fearing loner, who often prefers to sleep outside after a heavy night at the pub, and who is privately terrified at the prospect of his forthcoming marriage to a respectable village girl. He hates the way the Mansfield girls look at him, the sinful way they make him feel, their otherworldly eeriness. Mostly he hates their faces 'like five drifts of snow. Five fallen moons.'
It's no discredit to Purvis that her novel prompts thoughts of both The Crucible and The Virgin Suicides. The Hounding is also about the conflation of fear, suspicion and desire in a small, claustrophobic community; it also follows a group of girls who are bound together by inscrutable intimacy and who, as a result, are inscribed in the eyes of others with a mysterious power. But Purvis keeps the historical period vague and only alludes to it fleetingly – there's a reference to a father who fought in the Civil War; another to the dawning age of science. The village is clearly trapped between Puritan superstition, oppressive poverty and encroaching modernity, but that's left to the reader to discern. Mainly Purvis's novel exists suspended in time, a reading experience more akin to a lucid dream.
At the same time, the novel proceeds very much as you might expect. One night, young Robin – who, like Pete, privately feels himself to be different to most of the village men – hears barking down a lane where two Mansfield girls were recently walking. Later, Pete says he heard something similar, and starts the rumour connecting the two, which soon spreads 'like mould in the alehouse's dark corners'. Piles of animals are later found mauled to death in the parched fields; the river reduces in the heat to a dirty trickle; both are believed to somehow be the fault of the sisters. Even Thomas Mildmay, a farmhand who has fallen for the eldest Mansfield sister Anne, believes he sees her face briefly change shape.
Purvis writes with impressive emotional specificity, widening our understanding of this tiny traditional community through the alternating perspectives of Thomas, Pete, Robin, Temperance and the Mansfields' grandfather, Joseph. The slippery ability of rumour to acquire the solidity of truth may be a familiar theme, but Purvis is very good at showing the way in which a baseless idea can become a lightning rod for more general feelings of collective unease. As each character contributes to the growing conviction that the girls are indeed transforming into dogs, it's not the credibility of their belief that's at stake but the more diffuse insecurities behind why they and others might wish to believe it is true.
Eventually the story arrives at an event hinted at in the prologue, though it's also there throughout in the 'stifling air, the rankling heat'. Purvis loves a bit of foreshadowing, yet she also relies heavily on stock tropes – abnormal weather; a stealthy accumulation of incidental violence – to achieve it. More problematically, The Hounding feels bloodless. All the elements are there in their right place, but they lack any kind of weight and the novel confirms expectations instead of unsettling them. Still, Purvis is an exquisitely accomplished wordsmith. I'm greedy to learn what she writes next. CA
The Hounding is published by Hutchinson Heinemann at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99, call 0330 173 5030 or visit Telegraph Books
by Hal Ebbott
Hal Ebbott's mostly very impressive first novel begins with a kind of two-page overture. At an American university, a 'needful', rather anxious student called Amos spots a boy whose 'brown eyes accept the campus like something owned' and who takes a 'violent bite' out of an apple. The boy introduces himself as Emerson and the two discover they're going to be roommates.
From there, we fast forward three decades to the present day, when Amos (now a psychiatrist) is driving his wife Claire and their 16-year-old daughter for a weekend at Emerson's second home in upstate New York. Before setting off, Amos had been to the dentist, where he'd replied to the question of whether he flosses by shaking his head and saying, 'Better you know the real me' – a remark that he then rather anxiously analyses at some length: 'It was an odd joke, he allowed. Was it funny? Yes, sort of, not terribly, but enough. Funny enough for a dentist's office certainly…'
By the time they get to the house and meet Emerson (now a lawyer), together with his wife and 16-year-old daughter, we already know the primary source of Amos's continuing anxiety: that unlike both his entitled life-long pal and Claire – to whom Emerson introduced him – he grew up amid poverty and spectacular parental neglect.
Over dinner, the big news is that a few hours before, Emerson had run over a woman who'd tried to commit a vengeful suicide by jumping out in front of his car which, being the same model and colour, she'd mistaken for that of her perfidious teacher-boyfriend. 'How are you feeling?' asks Amos solicitously. 'Shaken obviously,' says Emerson. 'I mean just imagine, finding out that you drive the same car as a teacher?'
So, is this an example of Emerson being funny? Weirdly charming? Performatively outrageous? Unfeeling to the point of sociopathic? Or is he just trying to hide or deflect his sense of shock? The answer, as it so often is in the pages that follow, is all of the above. That's because, if Among Friends were to have a motto, it would be something Emerson says earlier at dinner: 'Paradoxes all round.'
As it soon turns out, Amos's remorseless scrutinising of every remark and deed is shared by both the other characters and Ebbott himself. All have the habit of 'parsing' (a word that recurs throughout the novel) whatever anybody says or does to tease out the many possible meanings. But all, too, generally reach the same conclusion: that, however contradictory, those meanings co-exist.
This reluctance to let anything go unexamined might sound either endlessly fascinating or slightly wearying. True to form, though, it paradoxically proves to be both. Taken as a whole, the book perhaps overdoes everybody's scrupulous anatomising. Yet each individual example is so unfailingly sharp that you can understand Ebbott's unwillingness to drop any of them.
Meanwhile, the same paradoxical approach applies to the wider themes of long-term friendship and long-term marriage, where the ability of the people involved to flit regularly between resentment, admiration, love, hatred, exasperation, tenderness and cynicism will, I fear, be familiar to most readers. But if this is making you think Ebbott forsakes narrative momentum in favour of chin-stroking meditation, that would be badly misleading. Instead, this apparent dichotomy is yet another question not of either/or, but of both/and.
During the weekend, Emerson commits an act of violence that, although it comes only halfway through the book, I'd better not spoil – but which darkens the action considerably. Suddenly there's something much bigger to parse than merely an off-colour joke or some small incident from the past. And, as the properly page-turning repercussions continue, it's not just the action that darkens, but the whole social setting.
Up until then the agreeable middle-class life the two families enjoy had seemed, at worst, a bit complacent. Now it's revealed to be far more ruthless than that, with any unwelcome truths seen as a threat to be resisted whatever the damage caused. There's also the striking notion that these people are haunted by the future at least as much as by the past – which in this case means they're constantly aware of the dire financial and social consequences of taking a principled stance.
Another word that recurs often in the novel is 'flailing', as it becomes increasingly evident that the calm and clear-eyed analysis the characters pride themselves on is essentially delusional, their real emotions far more unruly than they'd ever acknowledge. And it's here that they and their creator diverge, since anything less flailing than Among Friends itself is difficult to imagine. At times, in fact, Ebbott has everything under such total control that there's not much for the reader to do; every nuance so thoroughly elucidated as to make the narrative feel almost predigested.
But, at the risk of being patronising, maybe that's the result of being a first novel. Ebbott is obviously a writer of lavish talents in all the old-school virtues of sentence-writing, paragraph-building, dialogue, characterisation, plot and pacing. Now all he needs is to trust the reader a little more. JW
Among Friends is published by Picador at £18.99. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
by Gurnaik Johal
According to Hindu scripture, the Saraswati was one of the great rivers of ancient India. In this ambitious debut, named for that river, by the British Indian writer Gurnaik Johal, a young man of similar heritage from Wolverhampton travels to his ancestral village in the Punjab following his grandmother's death. On his last visit, as a child, the well on her farm had been dry for decades. But now Satnam finds water in it. Could, as the villagers claim, this be the return of the Saraswati?
The politicians who get wind of it certainly think so. If Satnam will just sign over the land, they tell him, he could be part of an 'era-defining project' to resurrect the river and 'return our country back to its former greatness'. Satnam, who's unemployed, going through a breakup and looking for a sense of purpose, cannot sign fast enough, and is soon committing acts of thuggery to encourage other landowners to do the same.
We're made to wait to find out what happens to him, as the novel then cuts to the Chagos Islands and the story of a pest exterminator; indeed, each of Saraswati's seven long sections concern a different main character. But we continue to hear about the Saraswati, the Narendra Modi-esque prime minister who's elected on the promise of resurrecting it, and the rising tensions between India and Pakistan over the project's contravention of a water treaty.
Saraswati is a sobering parable: we corrupt what is miraculous. Yet Johal never loses sight of his characters. In one section, a Canadian eco-saboteur keeps watch for her comrades as they sabotage a lumber mill. She has heard that their next target is where her mother works and phones her, casually suggesting she take some time off. But she can't say what for. It's a brilliantly charged scene.
Johal's other characters include an asexual Kenyan academic, a Bollywood stuntman, a 15-year-old Pakistani influencer and a nameless female journalist: all very different, all well realised. Then, there's Sejal, a 16-year-old girl when we first meet her in 1878, 'destined to live the life of her mother, who had lived the life of her mother'. She elopes to the Punjab with a man called Jugaad, but still ends up living the narrow, destitute life she's hoped to escape.
It seems an incongruous tale to be telling, until we realise it's the same tale – that our seven present-day characters are all Sejal's descendants. The connection forms a beautiful counterpoint with the Saraswati storyline. There, like the proverbial flap of a butterfly's wings, a small thing escalates into something terrible; here, the reverse happens – that is, from someone seemingly insignificant comes an amazingly various diaspora. But then almost everything in Saraswati works beautifully. Johal has written a major novel, and at his very first attempt. GC
Saraswati is published by Serpent's Tail at £16.99. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
by Francesca Maria Benvenuto
On Nisida, an island off the coast of Naples and site of a notorious juvenile prison, one inmate called Zeno – a 15-year-old who has been detained for shooting and killing another boy – is given a simple task by his Italian teacher, Ms Martina: write down what you're thinking, and you'll get furlough for Christmas.
Zeno duly complies. And so through a run of sprawling entries that make up Francesca Maria Benvenuto's engrossing debut novel, So People Know It's Me, we learn about Zeno's life both before prison and inside it. There's his impoverished upbringing, which forced his mother to resort to sex work; descriptions of friends he's made on the inside, among them a guard called Franco; his girlfriend, Natalina; and the story of his slow capture by a world of criminal drug gangs that has led him to where he is now.
Almost instantly, we see that Benvenuto is presenting us with that most tempting of literary archetypes: the loveable rogue, who despite having committed some of the most awful acts imaginable, still wins our sympathy through charm, and – in the case of a young criminal such as Zeno – the glimpses of innocence he occasionally betrays. We see this, and we prepare ourselves not to be taken in by it. Only here, through the unusual twists and turns of Benvenuto's narrative, the trick of the archetype works on us all the though this is, So People Know It's Me has an equally strong sales pitch: Benvenuto is an accomplished criminal lawyer who has defended minors in court. Her book draws from the experiences of her mother who – just like Ms Martina – worked as a teacher on Nisida, home to a very real prison for young people.
And yet Benvenuto avoids wielding that authority too heavily. She never bashes over our heads the very legitimate moral problems of housing minors in a prison complex as on Nisida; rather, intimate experience affords her an empathy that feels real without being sentimental. Zeno is under no illusions that what he has done is wrong – but that does not make him less human or beyond hope. With time, his simple writing exercise becomes a project of self-realisation; near the end of the novel, Zeno begins to envision a life for himself beyond prison, perhaps even as a writer.
As befits her setting near Naples, Benvenuto's original prose blends Italian with Neapolitan. Inevitably, the translator Elizabeth Harris has replaced this interplay between two languages with just one: but the more diminished English, with Zeno's voice peppered with vague colloquialisms, feels as though it belongs everywhere and nowhere at once ('she don't got no problems'). And where Harris has let the occasional Neapolitan word or phrase stand on its own – strunz, scornacchiato, 'nnammurata – we're only reminded of a layer of meaning that has been lost. This dualism is important, though: in particular, I'm left wondering where Benvenuto might have originally slipped into Neapolitan to distinguish between other dualities, such as between social classes or children and adults. (That isn't to criticise Harris's work, however. Another translator might have cast the Neapolitan in another mutually intelligible dialect – imagine a back and forth between English and Scots – but the specificities of Italy would still be lost.)
But perhaps this musing is all too hypothetical, and in any case, the unavoidable compromises of translation aren't enough to detract from Benvenuto's strength as a storyteller. Her messaging is similarly deft: everybody is simultaneously the product of structural problems and also not, as Zeno proves. Good people can arise even from difficult circumstances and vice versa. That's a philosophy that survives change and iteration – and is always worth retelling. DMA
So People Know It's Me is published by Pushkin. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
