Alan Hollinghurst was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, and lives in London. His other celebrated novels are The Swimming Pool Library (1988), The Spell (1998) and The Line of Beauty (2004) which won the Man Booker Prize.
Age in year of publication: forty.
Kazuo Ishiguro 1954–
1986 An Artist of the Floating World
Kazuo Ishiguro’s considerable skills as a novelist are especially evident in An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day (1989). The novels stand as a fascinating diptych about the atmosphere which created the Second World War, about the small sets of collaborations which make up a society. The former deals with Japan, the latter with England.
An Artist of the Floating World is Ishiguro’s best and most subtle novel. It is narrated by an elderly painter in post-war Japan, it plays with ideas of custom and ceremony, tradition and nostalgia, vanity and modesty, as ways for the narrator to disguise himself; information about him and indeed his society come to us in small, carefully modulated, almost perfect moments, when something tiny is disclosed and allowed to stand for a great deal more. This makes the central moment of disclosure in the book immensely powerful. The narration has a withdrawn, distant, stilted tone, and yet it remains readable and engrossing; the tension is kept going by the constant possibility that something more will be said, that all the decorum will break down; by the readers’ satisfaction at knowing or guessing rather more than the unreliable narrator wishes to tell them.
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan. At the age of six, he came to England with his family. His other novels are A Pale View of Hills (1982), The Remains of the Day, which won the Booker Prize in 1989 and was filmed in 1995, The Unconsoled (1995), When We Were Orphans (2000) and Never Let Me Go (2005), which has recently been adapted to film. His latest work is Nocturnes (2009). An Artist of the Floating World won the Whitbread Prize.
Age in year of publication: thirty-two.
P. D. James 1920–
1994 Original Sin
The classic English detective story has inveigled readers all over the world into the mysteries of English life: class distinctions, eating habits and private passions. While there have been many brilliant male exponents of the genre, it is generally accepted that women such as Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie were the Queens of Crime. Today writers of fresh sophistication have taken on their mantle.
P. D. James has the workings of the English establishment at her fingertips — the civil service, medicine, the law, the judiciary, the police, the Church of England: all the bulwarks of the state are grist to her mill. She sets Original Sin in the world of book publishing, in Innocent House, on the River Thames in the East End of London, the elegant, marbled, ill-named home of the Peverill Press. James’s poetic detective, Commander Adam Dalgleish, is sent to investigate the death of its managing director, found half-naked with a snake draught-excluder stuffed in his mouth.
Uncommon intelligence and an authentic sense of sin mark P. D. James’s studies of vengeance and retribution. Most rewarding is her acute sense of place, in this case her atmospheric evocation of the River Thames which dominates this classic detective story as it unravels its secrets past and present to the sounds and scurryings of the great river.
P. D. James was born in Oxford and lives in London. Amongst her best crime novels are An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), A Taste for Death (1986), Original Sin (1994) and Death in Holy Orders (2001). In 1987 she was awarded the Crime Writers Association Diamond Dagger.
Age in year of publication: seventy-four.
Elizabeth Jenkins 1905–2010
1954 The Tortoise and the Hare
Sometimes a very good writer produces an exceptional work which garners a word-of-mouth reputation as a treasure to be read again and again, increasing in fascination each time. The Tortoise and the Hare is one such novel. This is the story of Imogen, quiet, self-effacing, loving and beautiful; of her husband Evelyn, successful barrister; and their country neighbour, the riding, shooting and fishing Blanche Silcox. These are the gentlefolk who have had the whip hand in England for hundreds of years: county people, living in beautiful homes, with servants and smooth cars, capable of sex in strange and desultory ways.
Imogen is the perfect wife and mother, the very model of how we were told women — married women — should be. Observing every gesture, every image, every note — ‘the sharp, tinkling sound’ of a phone being put down secretly — in her cool, graceful prose, Jenkins negotiates Imogen to a startling and satisfactory finale, producing at the same time a devastating portrait of mariage à la mode and of female masochism and timidity. There is an echo of Graham Greene in Elizabeth Jenkins’s perception of the bleak, arid wastes of a certain English upper-middle class, reared to mask self-interest with cant, bullying and hypocrisy. All this is revealed in simple but devastating ways, giving this surprising story of domestic betrayal larger, more subtle reverberations.
Elizabeth Jenkins was born in Hertfordshire and lived in London. She was a distinguished historian and biographer; other novels include Harriet (1934), winner of the Femina Vie Heureuse, and Honey (1968). At the age of 100 she was asked ‘Did she read?’ to which she replied ‘Good gracious, what else would I do?’
Age in year of publication: forty-nine.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala 1927–
1975 Heat and Dust
The love story between England and India has never been better told than in this discerning novel. In 1923 Olivia, married to an English official, Douglas Rivers, stifles amid the staid social habits of the British in India. Fleeing these gatherings of stultifying boredom, Olivia meets the dissolute but charming Nawab and drops the company of her fellow memsahibs for exotic occasions at the palace, which eventually lead to love, and worse. She abandons her husband — abandons England — for the Nawab, and, fifty years later, her ex-husband’s granddaughter follows her to India to investigate this family scandal. It is the granddaughter who tells the story, and whilst her experiences imitate and are a counterpoint to the earlier love story, they are entirely different too. Jhabvala conveys the daily realities and teeming profusions of modern India, so that Olivia’s story and the days of the Raj and the Nawab seem to settle into the heat and dust of the present as part of a pattern that had to be.
Nothing is stated in this novel which can be implied or imagined; gracefully written, finely constructed, it fascinates both as a love story, and as a sensuous evocation of what the English lost most in India — the soul and feeling those sent out to rule her longed for, yet feared the most.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala was born in Germany and has lived in England and India; she now lives in New York. She is an acclaimed and prolific novelist and scriptwriter, and won the Booker Prize for this novel. Her screenplays include Howards End, A Room with a View, The Golden Bowl and Le Divorce.