Age in year of publication: forty-eight.
B. S. Johnson 1933–1973
1969 The Unfortunates
This novel was published in a box. Inside were twenty-seven sections, of which the first and last sections only were to be read in that position. The others could be read in any order, a daunting proposition, but in fact this random method of following the story is perfectly suited to the tale that unfolds.
The narrator is a football reporter, sent to a Midlands city to cover a match. Because we read the workings of his mind, thinking and remembering with him, it becomes clear that the book could be presented in no other way. For when he gets to the city he realizes that this is where his friend Tony had lived, with his wife, and that he had often visited them in the years before Tony’s tragic death from cancer.
And so the random form of the novel matches the random insecurities of life and death, all the more so because the voice and experience of recollection are both Bryan Johnson’s, and he was so soon to take his own life. There is hunger in this novel, a sense of waste and yearning — for time not to pass and for death not to come. The rugged strength of his writing and the warmth and sensitivity of his vision give B. S. Johnson’s unconventional experiments with the form of the novel real meaning and worth.
B. S. Johnson was born and lived in London. He was a poet, dramatist, journalist and film-maker; his other books include Albert Angelo (1964) and Christy Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973).
Age in year of publication: thirty-six.
Elizabeth Jolley 1923–2007
1988 The Sugar Mother
Elizabeth Jolley is always a surprise. She belongs to that flourishing tradition of English tragicomediennes which begins with Jane Austen and wanders on through Emily Eden, Elizabeth Taylor, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Penelope Fitzgerald and Beryl Bainbridge. Like them, her value lies in the absolute originality of her own distinctive voice.
The Sugar Mother is quintessential Jolley. Edwin Page, a hypochondriacal academic of considerable pomposity, is married to Cecilia, a self-satisfied gynaecologist. Cecilia absconds for a year’s study leave abroad with a cackling sort of woman called Vorwickl (one of Jolley’s great successes is her calm engagement with sexual predilections of a complex kind). Edwin and Cecilia keep in touch: ‘Vorwickl she told him ate a cocoon in the muesli. No he said, Yes she said. She said it was delicious even when she knew it was a cocoon.’ To fill the gap in the useless Page’s life, enter young Leila, and Leila’s insinuating mother, who proceeds to take over his life, his house, his bathroom and his sperm count, producing resolutions which are darkly funny, and unpredictably moving.
Jolley’s lightness of tone and her wry, sidelong style enable her to deceive us into serious considerations. She is the most disconcerting of novelists, flourishing words and witticisms like an extremely benevolent sorceress enticing us to laugh at, and understand, loneliness and the longing to love.
Elizabeth Jolley, born in Birmingham, England, lived in Western Australia. Her novels have been awarded many prizes and include The Well (1986), which won the Miles Franklin Award, Miss Peabody’s Inheritance (1983) and Lovesong (1997).
Age in year of publication: sixty-five.
James Kelman 1946–
1994 How Late it Was, How Late
James Kelman is at his best when he has a single male character under pressure and in pain: his novels and his short stories, like much of Beckett’s fiction, deal with the workings of the mind, the slow mechanics of thought and memory. He can write brilliant passages of invective and complaint, but these are often underwritten by passages about longing and seeking comfort — anything, a cigarette, a drink, some company, love. The tone of his work moves constantly from hardness and brutality to a kind of tenderness.
In his novel How Late it Was, How Late, Sammy, our Glaswegian hero, wakes up in a cell after two days’ solid drinking. He has a police record. He has been beaten up and he is in pain. He is also blind. The novel is written in what the American edition calls ‘the utterly uncensored language of the Scottish lower classes’. It catches his consciousness at work as he tries to reconstruct what happened, as he tries to walk and move around, deal with the bureaucracy and the police and the fact that his girlfriend has disappeared. The novel is lighter in tone than most of Kelman’s work, almost funny at times; it is full of his unique genius for exploring a carefully modulated poetic language of the mind.
James Kelman was born in Glasgow and lives there still. How Late it Was, How Late won the Booker Prize in 1994. His books include Not Not While the Giro (1983), A Chancer (1985), A Disaffection (1989), The Good Times (1998) and the award-winning Kieron Smith, boy (2008).
Age in year of publication: forty-eight.
Thomas Keneally 1935–
1982 Schindler’s Ark
(US: Schindler’s List)
This book is based on interviews conducted by the author with survivors of the Holocaust who were protected by the German industrialist Oskar Schindler. None of the book is invented, but it uses the form and tone of a novel. It is a harrowing book which centres in its early chapters on the Jewish ghetto in Cracow, on the beatings and casual murders of Jews, and then on the slow realization that nothing is casual, that all of this is planned.
Schindler, who set about employing and protecting as many Jews as possible while remaining on good terms with the authorities, emerges from the book as enormously sensual, oddly generous, very complex. His urge to save his workers is dramatized sometimes as pure heroism, but also as a strange innocence in his nature. Keneally’s version of Amon Goeth, who runs the camp nearby to which many Jews are taken, is dark and disturbing, but equally convincing. He writes with great skill about how systems were put into place and how they were circumvented and then how they prevailed once more. Although Schindler’s Ark is a story about heroism and ultimate survival, about a good man in a dark time, the atmosphere of the book is deeply depressing and savage, and this is, perhaps, as it should be: a small testament to those who perished as much as to those who survived.
Thomas Keneally was born and lives in Sydney, Australia. His many novels include The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) and Confederates (1979). Schindler’s Ark won the Man Booker Prize in 1982. It was made into a film, Schindler’s List, by Steven Spielberg in 1994. A memoir, Searching for Schindler, appeared in 2007.
Age in year of publication: forty-seven.
Jack Kerouac 1922–1969
1957 On the Road
This book is written with such calm, lazy ease it reads at times like an exercise in pure style, a way of showing that American prose could continue to shine and glitter and perform tricks just as much as it could when Hemingway and Fitzgerald were at their best. It is a book full of carelessness and youth and the search for sensation. It is a deeply American book, full of hope, open to the infinite possibilities which lie ahead; no European has ever written a book like this.