BOOKS / In brief

Going West by Maurice Gee, Faber pounds 14.99. New Zealanders Jack Skeat and Rex Petley have been pals since boyhood, when they both aspired to become poets. Petley succeeded while Skeat abandoned Parnassian pursuits to become an archivist. When Rex goes overboard from his fishing dinghy and drowns, Jack sets out to discover why. The investigation leads him to appraise Rex's life and oeuvre, and to recall the main events in the two friends' careers. Chapters of conventional narrative interspersed with Jack's notebooks establish a robustly credible cast whose family secrets include amatory vicissitudes, violence, murder and madness. Gee vividly evokes the topography around Auckland and Wellington, and his rendering of an ex-poet's notes is spot-on: 'The open weave of her sun-hat brim drops flakes of gold on her cheeks . . .'

Under the Frog by Tibor Fischer, Polygon pounds 7.95. Funny, slangy, tragic, impeccably researched romp in the company of Gyuri and his pals of the Locomotive basketball team during the continuous carve-up of Hungary from the end of the Second World War to the revolution of 1956. Fischer skilfully juggles high farce and horror: the glorious fiasco of a fixture against a team of meat processors, the spilt viscera of war-rent Budapest, the balls-ups of communist bureaucracy. The characters are a richly convincing line-up of skivers, copulators, opportunists and, above all, survivors in the face of oppression.

The Czar's Madman by Jean Kross, trs Anselm Hollo, Harvill pounds 14.99. In 1818 Baron von Bock is, on the Czar's orders, imprisoned on a Baltic island, where he is told that he has gone mad and needs special care - his smashed teeth, it is claimed, are the result of his having gnashed them to shards during a paroxysm. On his release, he is allowed to return to his Livonian fastness, but is closely watched, harrassed and eventually (we are given to understand) murdered by the omniscient power-wielders. The baron's mysterious tale is told fragmentarily through the pages of a secret journal. An intriguing lump of putative Estonian history.