The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.
There’s a scent in the air; a scent of summer. Joanne Harris is still inhaling French chocolat, returning to the village Britain swooned for in 1999, with her novel Peaches for Monsieur le Cure. While the streets of Britain are papered to the chimney-pots with union jacks and Olympic/Jubilee fever, literature is crossing the pond. Fiction is having a moment and, this summer, it firmly belongs to the Americans. This year is all about olives and cocktails. Oh and glamour, plenty of new-money, hey-day, glamour.
America has been waiting for a real punch-heavy new voice for some-time and as recession bites perhaps it’s no surprise that the biggest waves are being made with novels which are as heady and escapist as they are prescient. Amor Towles’ brilliant debut of Depression-era New York, Rules of Civility, published when we still had snow on the ground, really deserves a re-release for the summer months as this is undoubtedly a perfect summer read. It’s also an ideal sister-read to Liza Klaussman’s forthcoming and hotly anticipated first novel, Tigers in Red Weather which shares something of the same feeling.
These are new American novels which borrow from (and grow out of) a rich tradition. They are squarely in the vein of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald: America’s high-society, Jazz Age Fiction. It is perfect timing coming, as it does, just when Fitzgerald’s classic novel of tragic obsession, society and the self-made man, The Great Gatsby, is being brought to the big screen.
Neither of these books are exactly what they seem and both come with an overt sense of the complex echoes of history in contemporary society. They also transmit an acute sense of the way history exists to be re-written and re-conceived. Rules of Civility is a novel narrated entirely in retrospect. It begins with heroine, Katy Kontent (surely named-for-Hollywood) , looking back over her own life through a set of photographs. Katy watches as faces she knows rejuvenate before her eyes, the effects of the Depression and the actions that have shaped this cast of characters are erased. Such is the power of retrospection. The whole of the novel carries the same feeling; this is not a story where realism is the key. This is a ‘Mad Men’ picture (and cinema is redolent throughout the novel) of carefully, painstakingly reconstructed perfection. Which isn’t to say that the characters, emotions and situations feel two-dimensional and wooden. More that this has all the quality of memory; of emotionally coloured events rendered with a hyper-realism which emphasises their passion and tragedy. The reality of pain, the intensity of love made more intense in hindsight, combined with the acute knowledge in retrospect of the path events were taking. The pavements shining after rain, the crystal brilliance of New York in the snow, the harsh taste of betrayal in the back of the mouth all seen in an Art Deco mirror. The brevity and transient beauty of a moment, the acute memory of pain – this heady combination is what conjures the magic of this novel.
It is also double-revision because just as Katy’s story is one which is certainly fabricated by memory so the whole novel is coloured by 21st century nods. This is a world reaching out to the Sex and the City generation, holding up a mirror to the Mad Men devotees and the Boardwalk Empire fanatics. This is a narrator who above all, has the readership pegged and gives them exactly what they’re looking for.
Tigers in Red Weather is in many ways (if you’ll excuse the pun) a very different animal. Much darker in tone and with a more complex narrative structure it is, perhaps, a more accomplished endeavour. Narrated from five different points of view, in ever decreasing circles of connection amidst broken, fatally interwoven lives. Set in the post-war era, this is a future vision of the world Katy Kontent steps into at the end of Rules of Civility. Looking back over pre and inter-war Europe and America from a world irrevocably changed by conflict, absence and female emancipation. Like Towles’ novel though, this is a story dominated by women’s voices. Essentially it is about the lives of three women in particular, Nick, her friend and cousin Helena and Nick’s daughter Daisy. This is about the ways in which the lasting effects of the mistakes of one life can be seen like ripples in the lives of future generations. Nick, the centrifugal force at the heart of the family acts as the catalyst for action in the lives of everyone around her. Jealousy, deceit, love and betrayal, all bubble over as the mistakes of the past wreak havoc. Truth, as they say, will out.
Like Rules of Civility this novel has beauty, or more particularly, the dangerous mystery of allure at its heart, more specifically of seductive power. This is the power some people have, when they walk into a room to turn heads and keep them turned, to attract desire bordering on madness, to drive others to distraction and despair. Nick’s mesmerising ability to make every man and woman turn circles around her tangles her in ever more intricate knots as she struggles to undo the devastating relationships she has created. In the end, the women in these novels who have the possibility of navigating their lives more safely have beauty without that added ingredient. They have learned (perhaps the hard way in some cases) the dangers of the je ne sais quoi quality that makes men and women stop and stare – the power which (particularly when exercised with wilful, selfish abandon) drives people mad and leads, ultimately, to destruction.
A common theme of these novels is the way in which they contain a nod to a British nostalgia and an elevation of the British archetype. Perhaps no surprise in a summer where all things traditionally British from flags to Victoria sponge are being harked back to as a heyday. It is an austerity Zeitgeist – the historical tipping point of the early 20th century where we look back at the luxuries of traditional indulgence in the security of our own innate thriftiness, common-sense attitude and that indomitable favourite: the British spirit. Modern Britain maybe a very different place but all the more reason to look to the past when Britain was ‘great’. Katy Kontent with her buttoned up, pseudo-european characteristics, Nick’s husband’s inability to forget a British woman he abandoned after the war. These books have characters who inhabit something of a love-affair with a British aesthetic – perhaps we, as readers are returning the favour.
It is a sign of depression-era culture that we turn to nostalgia and the familiar comfort of imagined luxury and largesse. This is a double refraction for the modern reader, we join in silent synergy with the characters looking back at a past refracted though rose-tinted glasses. The skill of these novels is keeping the edge, the kernel of hard reality in the dream and the lasting consequence of life’s choices. Both at a societal and personal level – we can’t avoid the past nor escape the way it colours the future.
If you’re looking for something a cut-above to read on the beach these both come recommended. Cocktail novels: olives in champagne with an effervescence hiding a darker, bitter core. The perfect combination of sweet and salt, creating complex absorbing writing from talented new voices.
To Capture the Castle 