Iain Sinclair was born in Cardiff. He has lived in London for many years. His books include poetry, novels and the non-fiction Lights Out for the Territory (1995), a celebration of London, London Orbital (2002), Edge of the Orison: In the Traces of John Clare’s Journey Out of Essex (2005) and Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report (2009).
Age in year of publication: forty-eight.
Khushwant Singh 1915–
1956 Train to Pakistan
‘The summer of 1947 was not like other summers. Even the weather had a different feel in India that year.’ So begins Singh’s famous novel about the Partition of Pakistan from India, set in the small Punjabi frontier village of Mano Majra, where Hindu, Muslim and Sikh have lived together for thousands of years. This place of about seventy families is best known for its railway station; as the book opens a Sikh boy and a Muslim girl are making love in the fields.
But in 1947 nothing is really the same; there is quiet unease, then, dreadfully, the first train from Pakistan arrives. At first glance the train seems normal, then its ghostly silence reveals a thousand corpses, emitting the incredible stench of putrefying flesh. Soon, in the rains, comes a second train, with an even more horrific cargo. The effect is devastating; religious warfare breaks out, the Muslims of the village are evicted and put on a train for Pakistan. The massacres of Partition are just beginning.
The strength of this political novel lies in the vivacity and life Singh gives to the people of the Punjabi community. You can feel the presence of Mano Majra and hear the rhythm and laughter of its days. The loss of this, in this fine novel, is a striking testament to the devastating human cost of religious prejudice.
Khushwant Singh was born in Hadali, now in Pakistan, and lives in Delhi. Critic, journalist, historian, short story writer and distinguished editor, this was his first novel.
Age in year of publication: forty-one.
Jane Smiley 1951–
1991 A Thousand Acres
Zebulon County, Iowa, is the centre of the universe. Larry Cook owns one thousand acres of land there and farms it well. When the old monster suddenly decides it’s time to pass the inheritance on to his daughters, he is infuriated when the youngest, Caroline, refuses the gift, whilst the older two, Rose and Ginny, accept it with reservations. Here we have the plot of King Lear transferred to the American Midwest, where it flourishes embedded in a recreation of every particular of farming and family life — the crops, the technology, the strawberry rhubarb pies, the mucking-out of farrowing pens, pizza with pepperoni and extra cheese — a multitude of tiny details evoking a world in which the land and its people seem indivisible.
Listening to the conversational voice of Ginny, we learn to see beyond the horizon. Jane Smiley’s skill here is to use the great play but to look at King Lear through a different microscope. This transforms it into an epic study of a tyrant and of a family slowly disintegrating as old sins see the light of day. There is an airy clarity about this novel, echoing the rolling landscape of the American Midwest. Jane Smiley’s graceful prose gives a similar beauty to the novel’s moral twists, its passion for life and its emotional vitality.
Jane Smiley was born in Los Angeles and lives in California. A Thousand Acres won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the US National Book Critics Circle Award.
Age in year of publication: forty.
Wole Soyinka 1934–
1965 The Interpreters
This is, to some extent, a dark and intricate comedy of manners set in Nigeria in the years after independence. It centres around the lives of a number of young intellectuals who are ambitious and uneasy in the new society, who meet regularly, drink a lot and talk all of the time. Much of the novel is made up of their dialogue. In scene after scene — the setting and tone change in each chapter — they confront their own idealism and sophistication, their own concern (or lack of concern) with manners and morals versus the concern (and lack of concern) of the society all around them. Religion, voodoo, art, government, journalism, sex, negritude, whiteness, etiquette (the wearing of gloves by women at certain parties, for example), Americans and Germans all come in for discussion and examination. (The American and the German in the book are treated with a good deal of contempt.) Soyinka makes none of his characters heroic in any way: they all have their weaknesses, but they also have a sort of innocence which makes them vulnerable. His ability to make dialogue sparkle — especially in the party scenes, where our intellectuals are at their most cynical and observant — is astonishing. At times, the novel demands close attention as Soyinka refuses to deal in easy realism; he makes no judgements or psychological assessments; he wrings a lot of emotion out of surface detail and moments of pure, careful observation, and manages — and this is one aspect of the genius of the book — to suggest that the people he has written about are doomed and will not have the strength to withstand the pressures of the society all around them.
Wole Soyinka was born in Nigeria. He was imprisoned for two years without trial in Nigeria in 1967–69. He has written many plays and has also published volumes of poems, memoirs and diaries. In 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Age in year of publication: thirty-one.
Muriel Spark 1918–2006
1961 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark is a novelist whose every line contains at least three insinuations. The oft-used phrase of Miss Jean Brodie, teacher extraordinaire, proclaiming that she is ‘in her prime’, are words now used by millions of women as they leave youth behind them.
It is Edinburgh in the 1930s. Miss Brodie is a mighty woman, forcefully politically incorrect, an individualist. She has her ‘set’ at Marcia Blanc School, five girls she raises to follow her principles, providing them with high culture, homing in particularly on Love. She involves them in her affairs with Teddy Lloyd the art master and Gordon Lowther the music master, and in her unfortunate penchant for Mussolini and his attractive fascisti. Her colleagues long to see the back of her. Miss Brodie confounds all their attempts until betrayed by one of her girls, raised to bite the hand that fed her.
This is a novel about nonconformity and spiritual pride and the nastiness of mankind, in particular in the shape of growing girls with peg legs and skinny souls. In spare, quirky dialogue, Miss Brodie and her disciples tempt fate with self-composure, accepting retribution with an imperturbable sense of guilt. This is a perfect novel, a classic, not a word out of place, laced with mother’s wit and wisdom.
Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh and lived in Rome. This novel has been adapted for the stage, the screen and for television. Her other novels included Memento Mori (1959), The Girls of Slender Means (1963) and The Mandelbaum Gate (1965).
Age in year of publication: forty-three.
Christina Stead 1902–1983
1966 Cotters’ England
(US: Dark Places of the Heart)
The rushing force of Christina Stead’s novels explodes with words and myriad personalities and images: reading her is like standing under a gigantic waterfall, shouting your head off with glee. Nellie Cook, née Cotter, is a spellbinder and a possessive manipulator, one of those Socialists to the left of everything, living in a tatty house in Islington, working as a journalist on a London newspaper in those harsh years which followed the end of the Second World War. Nellie never draws breath. She lies, she fantasizes, she drinks, she smokes, wandering round the house all night blowing smoke into sleeping faces, talking to the moon. She is a seductress, an emotional gangster. Her brother Tom, to whom she remains locked in adolescent intimacy, uses women’s hearts to wreak his havoc, oozing into them then out again, leaving a trail of slime behind. Cotters’ England made them what they are: the poor Northern town of Bridgehead where poverty — incest? — has stunted and perverted them, like trees growing underground. Christina Stead writes at full pelt about politics, domestic life and sexual politics. She fizzes with ideas, making no judgements, revealing everything through the monologues and encounters of the people of Cotters’ England. This is a great novel, savagely comic, demanding angry understanding for people and a country whose lives are blighted by the past.