Susanna Tamaro, Answer Me, 2001

A worthwhile collection of stories that explores that heavily populated border between Catholicism and atheism. There is something precarious about all the characters in these three novelettes, raised on religion yet finding themselves in long-term situations where religious faith does not help: in ‘Hell Does Not Exist’, easily the best story, an abused wife attempts to protect her young son from his violent father, and yet as a teenager the son becomes the cause of personal devastation. In ‘Answer Me’ an orphaned girl with a troubled past searches for signs that she is loved while cultivating an inner hardness that allows her to carry on, and in ‘The Burning Forest’ a widower gives an account of the unravelling of his marriage while seeking the forgiveness of his estranged daughter. I was rather taken with these stories, or rather the Stygian voice with which Tamaro relates them. They were certainly not comfortable reads – I expect for people with faith they would be even less so – and their quiet power is both startling and a little disturbing. This is fiction that doesn’t shout its atheism, just quietly points out how Christianity can indeed be either an unhelpful distraction when dealing with some life’s major problems, or even the cause of them. A dark book, and necessarily so.  PY

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Maxence Fermine, The Black Violin, 1999

The second in Fermine’s ‘Colours’ trilogy, each of which stand alone as stories of people whose lives are defined by colour. Unlike the first in this trio, Snow (about a young Japanese poet who writes haikus about snow), The Black Violin is a darker tale set in the 18th century Napoleonic wars: a young soldier who is also a genius with the violin is posted to Venice where he encounters Erasmus, understudy to the Stradivari family and creator of a violin imbued with a dark soul of its own that somehow captures the essence of those whose lives it touches. The book tries to connect both creation and destruction with the unseen world of the spirit and succeeds, though it seems to be a stripped down version of what could have been a far more detailed and nuanced story if Fermine were, politely put, a more detailed and nuanced writer. It's unchallenging for the most part and a hundred pages shorter than it ought to be, nevertheless it does resonate with a hauntingly uncomfortable question or two about fundamental motives when it comes to matters of the heart.  PY

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Italo Calvino, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, 1947

Throughout his career Calvino had a very ambivalent relationship with this, his first novel, and even when not quite disowning it he was more than happy to point out its various faults and explain just how and why they came about. Written when he was twenty-four after Calvino had lived through some of the kinds of events he describes, and despite clearly trying not to be this is still a very naïve coming-of-age novel. Set in a town on the Ligurian coast at the tail end of the Second World War that is overrun with both the Germans and the Blackshirt fascist paramilitary, a young cobbler’s apprentice hangs out with adults in the local bar, playing their dangerous adult games and, after stealing a German soldier’s pistol, later plays at being a partisan revolutionary. It really doesn’t go any further than this (apart from the awkwardly polemical ninth chapter that really does stick out like a sore thumb) having been specifically plotted and themed to tick all the boxes of the recently formed Italian ‘neo-realist’ school, its aim seemed to be more to preach to the converted (it sold very well on first publication) and nail Calvino’s communist-leaning politics to the mast, rather than tell a good story. Disappointing, but clearly the best place to start when understanding the transformations of Calvino’s later career.  PY

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Derek Raymond, A State of Denmark, 1964

A pull-quote on the back cover of the most recent edition describes this as “alternative science fiction on the scale of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four”, which is, frankly, rubbish: this doesn’t have the same imaginative scope, even remotely, though it is certainly a descendant of that more famous dystopia. A British socialist Prime Minister of the 1960s called Jobling reveals his true colours and quickly turns England into a relentless dictatorship, while Wales and Scotland secede from the United Kingdom and the Left just rolls over and dies. Set against Jobling is Richard Watt, a political journalist living under self-imposed exiled in Italy; this exotic and rather languorous setting for the first half of the book sets a pace that creaks along, but it’s there mostly to draw parallels with Mussolini. The second half is more descriptive of England under dictatorship and starts off far more boisterous, though endures to a downbeat finale of unceasing hopelessness. Serpent’s Tail reissued this pulp novel posthumously in 2007; it’s different from the usual English noir Robin Cook (as Derek Raymond) offered up but in places it’s plausible – a small warning that, actually, it could happen here if we let our guard down. Cautiously recommended, because in truth I suspect any aspiring British dictator would encounter far more resistance than is portrayed here.  PY

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Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers, 1981

The Comfort of Strangers captures perfectly the almost gothic, spiking sense of unease for which McEwan has become famous. Set in Venice, the English holidaymakers Colin and Mary encounter the dangerous Robert and his genteel wife Caroline. I found Colin and Mary’s initial emotional distance from each other to be brilliantly done, as if McEwan is somehow able to draw the spaces between them, and the way they then get closer to each other after their first encounter with the sadistic Robert becomes the emotional heart of the story before they’re then drawn back to Robert’s dangerous mind games like moths to a flame. Robert has an unsettling combination of sheer mysogyny and power that overwhelms all other characters; the way in which McEwan takes the wraps off Robert’s concealed evil, and by simply discarding all he has created for Colin and Mary, is genuinely unsettling.   PY

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