Francis Stuart was born in Australia and brought up in Northern Ireland. He lived in Dublin. His other novels include The Pillar of Cloud (1948) and Redemption (1949), both of which deal with the war and its aftermath.
Age in year of publication: sixty-nine.
William Styron 1925–2006
1967 The Confessions of Nat Turner
This book caused considerable controversy when it was first published. It is based on the true story of Nat Turner, who led a slave revolt in Virginia in 1831; it is narrated in the first person. Styron, who is white, took considerable liberties with the historical context; he also — and this caused the greatest offence — invented a black consciousness and an African — American voice and sensibility at a time when black intellectuals no longer thanked white liberals for inventing their voices. Thirty years later, however, read as a novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner has great emotional impact; as a psychological portrait, it is credible and complex and unexpected.
Styron’s Nat Turner is not a typical slave: he learns to read, he knows the Bible and he is, at one point, offered the possibility of freedom. Thus the drudgery and misery of his later years are rendered all the more sharply painful, and make his coldness and calculating determination to exterminate ‘all the people in Southampton County and as far beyond as destiny carried me’ understandable. The narrative is beautifully written, with echoes of the Bible; the mind which is dramatized here is educated and sophisticated, capable of subtle analysis and careful discrimination. Styron’s triumph is to make this voice convincing and absorbing and to make Nat Turner’s actions plausible and dramatic.
William Styron was born in Virginia and lived in Connecticut. His other novels include Set This House on Fire (1960) and Sophie’s Choice (1979).
Age in year of publication: forty-two.
Graham Swift 1949–
1996 Last Orders
Vic and Ray, Lenny and Vince set off in a car from Bermondsey in the East End of London to throw into the sea off Margate Pier on the Kent coast the ashes of their friend Jack, the butcher. In their laconic voices — memories expressed in the vernacular of South London — secret histories are revealed so that the journey becomes a Chaucerian pilgrimage with every character placed before us as in a lost medieval fresco in some old English church.
Among Swift’s accomplishments as a novelist are his great technical skill and his imaginative intimacy with his characters: we hear the accents in which they speak and think. Jack, Ray, Mandy, Amy — all their separate voices, talking to us, give them living shape. These are ordinary English human beings who live on an island surrounded by sea, battered by wars and plagued by institutions distinguished for their lack of concern for lesser lives and vanishing ways. Their dense little world is crammed with the grief of families, but also with the jokes, popular songs, boozers, betting shops and the sad ‘things that do and don’t get told’.
Last Orders is an inspired novel about love, patience and redemption, about great events remembered in the tiny bits and pieces of memory and feeling which make up a people’s history.
Graham Swift was born in and lives in London. He is the author of several other novels, among which are Waterland (1983), Ever After (1992), The Light of Day (2003) and Tomorrow (2007). Last Orders won the 1996 Booker Prize.
Age in year of publication: forty-seven.
Amy Tan 1952–
1989 The Joy Luck Club
One of the most fascinating aspects of emigration is that moment when the last generation to remember the old country gives way to the next. The Chinese who fled the invading Japanese in the Second World War and escaped to San Francisco are Amy Tan’s emigrants. Turn and turn about, four Chinese mothers and their Chinese — American daughters tell us their stories. Their meeting place is the Joy Luck Club, source of all laughter and news from the past and present: here the mothers meet, eat, play mah-jong and boast about their Chinese — American daughters. The women expect every achievement from their American-educated offspring, but illogically continue to demand Chinese obedience and compliance. This conflict, together with their vibrant misuse of the American language, give the battles between mother and daughter an irresistible tang, as, gradually, past catastrophes are revealed that make their anxious bullying entirely understandable. How can mother not always know best when she has survived arranged marriages, concubinage, abandonment and worse?
Amy Tan is a natural entertainer, her Joy Luck ladies emitting a quickness of wit and a particularly attractive and Chinese kind of inquisitiveness and gossipy good sense. She writes simply, with laughter always on the tip of her pen. And she is wise: through her eyes intolerable tragedies become part of life, to be accepted, remembered and honoured.
Amy Tan was born in California and lives there. This first novel was an international bestseller and was followed by The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1996), The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001) and Saving Fish from Drowning (2005).
Age in year of publication: thirty-seven.
Donna Tartt 1964–
1992 The Secret History
Richard Papen recalls in solitude his years as an impressionable student amongst a small but gilded group at Hampden College, Vermont, a hermetically sealed place of education in the chilly north-east of the United States. In that longed-for but exclusive world he becomes infatuated with Henry, Bunny, Francis and the twins Charles and Camilla, privileged and self-confident youths studying classical Greek under the effete care of Julian Morrow, Svengali of this elite coterie. The Dionysian murder these five have already committed is as far from ancient truth and beauty as you can get: their second murder, to conceal the first, gradually reveals how flimsy an edifice the life of the intellect can be. This is a bravura performance, a novel of high ambition fully achieved. Tartt elaborates the style and tone of this favoured world with chilling control, making the arrogance and snobbery of her chosen few seem almost innocent. Vermont itself and the habits of college life are so solidly created that whether munching cream cheese and marmalade sandwiches, gobbling alcohol and drugs or declaiming in ancient Greek, the charm and individuality of each member of the group are firmly established. These are only a few of the secrets of this unusual literary thriller. Others lie in Tartt’s clever manipulation of suspense and the sardonic note she injects into these confessions, final touches of literary magic.