R. K. Narayan was born in Madras and lived in Mysore. Considered one of India’s greatest writers, among his best-known novels are The Painter of Signs (1977) and A Tiger for Malgudi (1983).
Age in year of publication: forty-six.
Patrick O’Brian 1914–2000
1970 Master and Commander
This is the first of Patrick O’Brian’s sequence of novels about life in the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. For those who entertain dismal notions of the sea and all who sail on it, it is important to know that naval paraphernalia and perfect period detail are only two of the splendours of O’Brian’s writing, superseded by the vice-like grip of his storytelling and the instant charm of his characterization and dialogue.
Lieutenant Jack Aubrey, RN, meets Stephen Maturin, a penniless physician, during the performance of Locatelli’s C major quartet at the Governor’s House in Port Mahon, Minorca, on 1 April 1800. They fall out. Thus begins one of the great literary friendships, as these two very different men — Aubrey a cheerful bulldog Englishman and true man of the sea, and Maturin an enigmatic Irish-Catalan — begin a lifetime of adventure together. Though there are battles aplenty, how men live together, the capering, petty and sometimes lonely qualities of a male society, rather than the tedious brutalities we associate with war, is the subject here. There is nothing monastic or uncultivated about their experiences. Music flows through the novels, which, in turn, are like a series of illustrations, each telling a different story, each one illuminating, through a tiny community on a wooden ship, the confusions and glories of the human condition.
Patrick O’Brian was born in Buckinghamshire, and lived in south-west France and Dublin. A distinguished translator, biographer and novelist, he published twenty Aubrey/Maturin novels.
Age in year of publication: fifty-six.
Edna O’Brien 1932–
1962 The Lonely Girl
(renamed Girl with Green Eyes in 1964)
The idea that the Republic of Ireland moved from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century in five or ten years has proved very fruitful for Irish novelists. All Edna O’Brien’s work is concerned with the drama between freedom and restriction, between old-fashioned values, and possibilities which are new and untested. In later novels such as Time and Tide (1992) or Down by the River (1996) she presents this conflict as tragedy, but in her early work, especially her first three novels known as ‘The Country Girls Trilogy’, she uses a lighter tone.
Of these novels, the second one, Girl with the Green Eyes, is the most accomplished. Caithleen and Baba have arrived in Dublin where they are staying in digs and searching for adventure; they are desperate to lose their virginity and desperate to hold on to it at the same time. Baba is full of malice and plans for the future; Caithleen, on whom the novel focuses, is more melancholy and uneasy than her friend, more provincial, but she too wants love and wants to get away from her ghastly family. She meets an older man, a foreigner involved in the movies, who is oddly wise and distant and cynical but great in bed. The tone of the novel is perfectly wry and innocent; some scenes — Caithleen’s efforts to cook fish, for example, or her father’s visit — are desperately funny.
Edna O’Brien was born in the west of Ireland, but has lived in London for many years. Her other books include August is a Wicked Month (1965) and A House of Splendid Isolation (1994).
Age in year of publication: thirty.
Flannery O’Connor 1925–1964
1952 Wise Blood
‘Jesus was a liar’ is the oft-repeated cry of Hazel Motes, grandson of a preacher, who returns from the war with his mother’s spectacles, the Bible, and his faith gone awry. In Taulkinham, Tennessee, he founds the Church Without Christ, an entirely original concept to the inhabitants of that town, imbued as they are with Bible-belt religion of the more conventional kind. Motes’s journey through this novel is a test from God. He is accompanied by bizarre villains such as Asa Hawks, the seeing blind preacher, and his determinedly nauseating daughter Sabbath. And there is the fox-faced young Enoch Emery, driven to absurdities by his wise blood, ‘inherited from his daddy’. Animals provide a Greek chorus — a gorilla, a moose, some interesting pigs — even Haze’s car looks like a rat. Hoover Shoats, whose rival Holy Church Without Christ precipitates vengeance, completes these ‘poor white trash’ who have no need for the Lord to mete out punishment; they are a dab hand at doing so themselves.
O’Connor’s creations are grotesque but familiar, brutish but funny, every stitch of their clothing and oddity of speech presented to us in fine detail like an etching on glass. Unique in O’Connor’s startling use of language and in the intense originality of her Gothic imagination, this is a classic of the American South.
Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia. Her novels include The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and her Complete Stories won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971. John Huston filmed Wise Blood in 1979.
Age in year of publication: twenty-seven.
John O’Hara 1905–1970
1958 From the Terrace
This is a big, brilliant, old-fashioned novel — all eight hundred and ninety-seven pages of it — which offers a panoramic view of American society in the first half of the twentieth century. It moves slowly, showing scenes and characters in great detail. The dialogue, throughout the book, is inspired: it is hard to think of a writer who uses dialogue so well. It is also full of strange, startling insights into the lives and motives of the characters, which are reminiscent of those of George Eliot.
Our hero Alfred Eaton is born into a prosperous family in a small town in Pennsylvania; his mother drinks and has affairs, his father loved his older brother who died, and has no interest in Alfred. Thus he grows up self-sufficient, he makes an effort, people respect him and admire him. There is a wonderful account in this book of what it is like to be young, rich and good-looking in New York in 1919 and 1920. After the war Eaton goes into business, he gets married, he has children, he has a mistress, he moves to Washington and takes part in government. O’Hara writes well about his most private, intimate thoughts and moments, and then superbly about public events such as the Wall Street crash. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, as time moves on and Eaton’s personality coarsens, this great American story darkens, this exemplary character, given every opportunity, somehow fails. This is a deeply convincing and disturbing novel, with myriad small touches of pure genius; it is also very funny. It deserves to be widely read and known.
John O’Hara was born in Pennsylvania. His other books include Appointment in Samarra (1934), BUtterfield 8 (1935) and Pal Joey (1940).
Age in year of publication: fifty-three.
Michael Ondaatje 1943–
1987 In the Skin of a Lion
This is a short novel about layer and texture and language. It is set in Toronto and south-western Ontario in the 1920s and 1930s: it offers still points, short scenes, moments in the lives of a number of immigrants; it dramatizes the construction of Toronto. The novel is haunted by the building of one bridge, how it was designed and planned, the deaths and accidents during the slow progress. The prose here has a strange, slow, poetic and deliberate tone, which is also present in Ondaatje’s subsequent novel The English Patient (1992). Great risks are taken with narrative, so that the novel comes to resemble a group of photographs or tiny clips from a film. The main character is Patrick Lewis: in a stunningly beautiful piece at the beginning of the book we see him with his father, who works with dynamite to clear logs. Later, we see him arriving in Toronto, falling in love, spending time in prison, and then telling the story. Ondaatje manages to combine a sense of mystery in the spaces between the words with a deeply solid characterization. His genius is in creating one of the best novels of the century about work, which is also one of the best novels about dreams and disappearances and magic.