Age in years these books were published: fifty-two — fifty-seven.
William Maxwell 1908–2000
1980 So Long, See you Tomorrow
The ghost of David Copperfield hovers over this beautiful novel, its evocation of childhood loss — of a father, of a mother, of a friend — is one of the classic accounts of being a motherless boy: ‘Other children could have borne it. My older brother did. I couldn’t.’
Set in a small farming community in Illinois, the narrator, now an elderly man, recalls his childhood and the influenza which suddenly removed his mother when he was ten. With her death, trust disappears — the world becomes a void through which he tiptoes with caution and he moves his muted gaze to tell the story of another gentle boy, Cletus Smith, his only friend. Cletus’ mother is unfaithful; Cletus’ father commits murder.
This is the story of two boys who live undefended in an adult world where nothing is said, but everything happens. The passions of insignificant and modest people, precisely placed amongst the animals, milking sheds and flat landscape of the plains, reach Shakespearean heights in Maxwell’s exquisite prose. As Maxwell languorously recalls the ‘strange and unlikely things washed up on the shore of time’ he gives us an elegy to memory which calls forth the vast legacy of seemingly insignificant human suffering.
William Maxwell was born in Illinois and lived in New York, where as fiction editor of the New Yorker for forty years, he was a formative influence on a generation of writers. The author of six novels and three short story collections, this novel won the American Book Award in 1980.
Age in year of publication: seventy-two.
Gita Mehta 1942–
1993 A River Sutra
‘There is a woman at the gate who wants to see you, Sahib.’ In A River Sutra, she is sure to tell a story. A sutra is a thread or string, but also a literary form; in Gita Mehta’s hands a bright necklace which flashes with the religions, philosophies and fables of India.
There are many threads in this necklace. The connecting one is the experiences of a retired bureaucrat, who late in life comes to manage a government resthouse along the banks of the River Narmada, holiest of Indian rivers. This river is a place of pilgrimage, to which come ascetics, minstrels, archaeologists, bandits, musicians, refugees. The tales they tell the bureaucrat are sometimes ecstatic, sometimes, like Mehta’s finest achievement here, ‘The Teacher’s Story’, heartbreaking. Piercing each narrative, always, is the question: where does wisdom lie? In the thousand answers, one message is clear: it can only come through experience, and through some experience of love.
Gita Mehta uses the images and mysticism of India to dazzling effect, harmonizing sounds of landscape, animals and music, river and earth. But though these stories draw much from the history and mythology of India, they resonate with the flamboyant presence of modern India too. Mehta has used traditional Indian narratives in an entirely new and muscular way in this exquisite novel.
Gita Mehta was born in Delhi and lives in London, New York and India. Her other books are: Karma Cola: Marketing the Mystic East (1976), a novel, Raj (1989) and Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of India (1997).
Age in year of publication: fifty-one.
Rohinton Mistry 1952–
1995 A Fine Balance
Dickens — Tolstoy — Balzac — Zola: Rohinton Mistry writes in this tradition. The vastness of India and the condition of its people are his subjects, but his genius lies in his exact observation, which brings to life every atom of his characters’ experiences, so that we live and breathe with them, laugh when they laugh, suffer as they do.
It is the 1970s, and four people, two Hindu, two Parsi, come together in a dingy Bombay flat. Ishvar and Omprakash are tailors, Untouchables; Dina, their employer, is a widow struggling for financial independence as a seamstress. Her lodger Maneck is a student of ‘refrigeration and air-conditioning’. Mistry retraces the background of each, placing the incidents of their insignificant lives against the majestic sweep of Indian history. This is Mrs Gandhi’s India, with its vicious Emergency laws bringing forced sterilization, labour camps, thuggery and persecution. Mistry’s energetic realism and command of comic nuance capture the long-suffering citizens of India in all their variety and stoic endurance. They burst off the page, making you laugh, weep and rail against the fates.
A Fine Balance is a magnificent novel, beautifully crafted, a political novel which is also the work of an inspiring imagination. Despite its lyrical despair it is full of an exuberance and humanity that fix in the mind and heart a sense of wonder and excitement.
Rohinton Mistry was born in Bombay, India, and has lived in Canada since 1975. His first, equally acclaimed novel was Such a Long Journey (1991), which won the Governor General’s Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.
Age in year of publication: forty-three.
Timothy Mo 1950–
1991 The Redundancy of Courage
In 1975 Indonesia invaded the Portuguese colony of East Timor, half an inch above Australia on the map. The USA wanted East Timor’s deep-water channels for their nuclear submarines, so allowed Indonesia to annex East Timor: one in three East Timorese died in the slaughter that followed.
Timothy Mo changed names, places, nationalities in this stirring fictional testament to the East Timor resistance fighters, but the connection between fact and fiction has become even stronger with time.
Adolph Ng, an outsider on the island, is a homosexual Chinese hotelier, and his is the knowing voice we hear. Ng’s account of the invasion and the years with the freedom fighters in the hills vibrates with crazed brutality, starvation, disease and the gruesome sights which were their daily fare. But resistance is only the backdrop to the humour and humanity that dominate this novel; Adolph is a wry fellow, and as he records the shifting allegiances of the islanders he produces that rarity — a vivid, funny novel about people who fight without hope: not heroes, ‘just ordinary people asked extraordinary things in terrible circumstances’.
Mo is a detached yet incisive chronicler of the worst aspects of Empire; in this furiously unsentimental novel about a forgotten war he reveals, with sympathy and political acumen, the real meaning of nobility: courage, exercised when it can achieve nothing.
Timothy Mo was born in Hong Kong and lives elusively around the Pacific Rim and in London. Among his prize-winning novels are The Monkey King (1978), Sour Sweet (1982) and An Insular Possession (1986).
Age in year of publication: forty-one.
Brian Moore 1921–1999
1985 Black Robe
Brian Moore had three phases. In his first incarnation, he was an Irish novelist. Judith Hearne, 1955 (USA: The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, 1956), is probably his best from this period. In his second coming, he wrote intense novels about faith and morals, obsessions (The Doctor’s Wife, 1976, is particularly brilliant) and history. In his third phase, he wrote terse novels about contemporary political crises. Always, he was preoccupied by the conflicts surrounding loyalty and belief, and increasingly, he strove for a style which is almost neutral, without flourishes.