Books of the month: From William Boyd’s Trio to Don DeLillo’s The Silence

It’s hard to look on the bright side when the daily news is an apocalyptic mix of climate devastation and pandemic annihilation. Be thankful, at least, that your home is not haunted by a poltergeist. The “crazy happenings” investigated by 1930s ghostbuster Nandor Fodor included the eerie case of the “Croydon Poltergeist”. The antics of this South London miscreant phantom is one of the tales detailed in Kate Summerscale’s thoroughly engrossing The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story (Bloomsbury). 

Investigations of a more brutal nature are the subject of Jim Fraser’s powerful memoir Murder Under the Microscope: A Personal History of Homicide (Atlantic Books). Fraser, a professor in forensic science, worked on numerous high-profile crimes. One grimly fascinating chapter is about Rachel Nickell, who was stabbed 49 times on Wimbledon Common in the summer of 1992. Fraser details the terrible police mistakes that allowed the real killer to evade justice for years. 

A vicious murder is at the centre of Three-Fifths (Pushkin Vertigo), an impressive debut from John Vercher. His gritty tale of racial tension is set in Pittsburgh during the fractious era of the OJ Simpson trial in 1995. There are also plenty of compelling crime thrillers. Rebus fans will love Ian Rankin’s new thriller A Song for the Dark Times (Orion), while Peter James is on form again with I Follow You, which explores the mind of a stalker. 

Nicola Rayner has followed her fine debut The Girl Before You with a taut psychological thriller called You and Me (Avon Books), which is full of clever twists. Edward Wilson’s excellent Portrait of the Spy as a Young Man (Arcadia) draws on his own special forces training. 

Strong new fiction includes Jodi Picoult’s The Book of Two Ways (Hodder & Stoughton), Polly Crosby’s The Illustrated Child (HQ), and Alice Hoffman’s Magic Lessons (Simon and Schuster). Dolly Alderton’s Ghosts (Fig Tree) will strike a chord with thirtysomething Londoners. Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s The First Woman (One World) is a captivating feminist coming-of-age tale set in Uganda. Although Sarah Perry’s Essex Girls: For Profane and Opinionated Women Everywhere (Serpent’s Tail) spans only 90 pages, it is full of delights. Perry celebrates some forward-thinking women who have been largely written out of history, including the 19th-century campaigner Harriet Martineau. Perry places these writers in a tradition of independent-minded women from Essex, a far cry from the cliched pejorative image of that county’s “hyper-sexualised and irredeemably vulgar woman”. 

Other non-fiction highlights include Hilary Mantel’s scholarly magazine essays – with musings on everything from Madonna to Marie-Antoinette – that are collected in Mantel Pieces (4th Estate). Wendy Hitchmough’s The Bloomsbury Look (Yale Books) is an in-depth look at the visual creations of the group of writers that included Virginia Woolf and EM Forster. The book features fascinating unpublished photographs. 

My favourite history book this month was Margaret MacMillan’s brilliant and stimulating War: How Conflict Shaped Us (Profile Books) that explores the way war has influenced human society. Hermione Lee’s 1000-word biography Tom Stoppard: A Life (Faber) has some sparkling anecdotes.

The hugely talented entertainer Victoria Wood said when she was 14 that she was "born with a warped sense of humour". Her path to stardom was rocky and her intriguing life story is told by biographer Jasper Rees in the excellent Let's Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood (Trapeze). The book is packed with enlightening anecdotes and revealing interviews with her family and closest friends. A real treat.

Finally, a wholehearted recommendation for two imaginative collections of short stories: John Lanchester’s Reality and Other Stories (Faber) is like a Tales of the Unexpected for the digital age, while Kevin Barry’s That Old Country Music (Canongate) offers an original, wonderfully off-beat and insightful view into modern Ireland. 

Novels from Stuart Turton, Sigrid Nunez, John Banville, William Boyd, Don DeLillo, and Roddy Doyle are reviewed in full below.   

The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton ★★★★★   

The Saardam, a ship sailing from Batavia in the Dutch East Indies to Amsterdam in 1634, is the brilliant, claustrophobic setting for the bulk of Stuart Turton’s intoxicating thriller The Devil and the Dark Water. 

Turton conjures up a vivid picture of the depravity and stench of a 17th-century voyage. The crew are a bunch of “murderers, cutpurses and malcontents, unfit for anything else”. The sailors “washed their clothes infrequently, and when they did it was with their own urine”. Even a refined, famous traveller such as Samuel Pipps, the greatest detective of his time, is reduced to having to wipe his arse with a piece of rope. 

Pipps is being transported to the Netherlands to be executed for a crime for which he may be innocent. As he is locked away, in the bowels of the ship, he is unable to solve the dangerous mysteries that begin to afflict the vessel that is being followed by a ghost ship. 

Strange symbols appear on the sails; a mysterious leper stalks the decks and passengers start to become possessed by a demon known as Old Tom. Can Pipps’s loyal bodyguard, Lieutenant Arent Hayes, solve the brutal murders before the ship descends into anarchy? As well as the threat of deadly storms, there is the constant menacing possibility of open warfare between the crew and the “black-hearted” musketeers of the United East India Company. 

I enjoyed Turton’s inventive debut The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and his rollercoaster second book is also full of neat twists and nifty clues. There are some great villains – the callous Governor-General Jan Haan with his “empty, ink-blot eyes”, the violent Guard Captain Jacobi Drecht, the scheming Chief Merchant Reynier van Schooten – and terrific heroes, especially the gentle (and gory) giant Hayes. 

With Pipps locked away, Hayes turns to Haan’s wife Sara Wessel for help. Sara knows from awful experience that “men are dangerous”. She has come close to being beaten to death on three occasions by her husband. She has had to protect her daughter Lia from being hunted as a witch (it was a dangerous time for young women to display supreme cleverness). 

The sexism of 17th-century society is one of the deeper, darker themes explored in the novel, which is also a story of wealth disparity, avarice, and how power corrupts.  

Over 550 pages, The Devil and the Dark Water overflows with wonderful descriptions, neat similes, and enough horror, mystery, and crime to keep anyone enthralled.  

 ‘The Devil and the Deep Water’ by Stuart Turton is published by Raven Books on 1 October  

What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez  ★★★★★   

Sigrid Nunez will turn 70 in March 2021. She grew up in the housing projects of New York City’s Staten Island, the daughter of a German mother and a Panamanian-Chinese father, who toiled seven days a week as a kitchen worker. Nunez brings a wealth of life experience and wisdom to What Are You Going Through, a gloriously meditative novel about friendship, death, and the bleak state of the world. 

Nunez has earned well-deserved acclaim in recent years – her previous novel The Friend won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2018 – and she has long been an ambitious, far-sighted writer. A decade ago she wrote about a flu pandemic in Salvation City. 

Her latest novel takes its apt title from French philosopher Simone Weil. What Are You Going Through is the story of a terminally ill woman who has opted to euthanise herself, and the friend who stays with her through this final task. Both women remain nameless, emphasising the universality of a story that explores the truths of living and dying, and display a winning kind of humour and endurance in the face of such a grim situation. 

The novel mentions Henry James’s famous letter to his grief-stricken friend Grace Norton (which is well worth looking up, if you don’t know it) and it’s intriguing to see how these two old friends help each other. The dying old woman, who rails against the ugliness of the term “bucket list”, finds solace in nature – “there’ll be birdsong in heaven, if heaven exists,” she remarks – whilst the atmosphere of impending doom makes the narrator more sharply aware of everything, even provoking the feeling that she is going through a kind of rehearsal for her own death. 

The narrator’s views on life are wry and acerbic and the novel constantly surprises. In one aside, she recalls watching an Austrian documentary on religion called Jesus, Du Weisst (“Jesus, You Know”), in which people basically moan at God about their lives. She remembers the verdict of filmmaker John Waters, who said that if there really was a Supreme Being who had to listen to people’s prayers all the time, he would go out of his mind. 

In the opening pages, the narrator attends a talk at a college given by a famous academic, who gives a bleak, gut-wrenching verdict on the imploding planet. She ruminates on his stern face; “that look that comes to many older white men at a certain age: stark-white hair, beaky nose, thin lips, piercing gaze. Like raptors.” We later discover that the man is her ex. He tells her that he has completely lost faith in people doing the right thing; he bemoans a world that has “normalised propaganda and deceit as political strategy”. 

The novel constantly balances moral dilemmas; is it the right thing to assist a friend with such an end-of-life wish? But although it encompasses so much sorrow, it is also a true pleasure to read, a novel bursting with wit, warmth, and human empathy.  

‘What Are You Going Through’ by Sigrid Nunez is published by Virago on 1 October, £16.99  

Snow by John Banville ★★★★★   

John Banville, who won the Booker Prize in 2005 for The Sea, is a master of the sort of immaculate, stylish prose that continues to infuse Snow, his eighteenth novel. 

Detective Inspector St John Strafford (introduced with a lovely simile about his hair, which “had a tendency to fall across his forehead like a limp, gleaming wing”) is sent from Dublin to Ballyglass House in Wexford to investigate the savage murder of a popular local priest. 

The setting – a decaying country house around Christmas 1957, during a spell of brutally cold weather delivered by a “big-bellied” sky – adds to the atmosphere of a dark, engrossing murder mystery. Banville injects a knowing playfulness into his tale of “the body in the library”, with sly references to the “costume characters” that Strafford, a subtly drawn protagonist, has to probe in a quest to get to the truth of what happened to Father Tom. 

The characters include a feral stable boy, a grumpy housekeeper and, at the centre, the stiff, upper-class Colonel Osborne and his strange secretive children Dominic and Lettie. When the detective interviews Osborne’s “dotty” etiolated wife – she discovered the mutilated priest – “he felt as if he were trying to unwrap some delicately breakable thing from fold upon fold of unexpectedly resistant tissue paper”. 

What makes the novel so engrossing is that the crime is a starting point for a deft, penetrating study of the elaborate rituals of class and religion in post-war Ireland, a time and place when a person was judged by their choice of whiskey: Protestant Bushmills or Catholic Jameson’s. As the investigation becomes increasingly complicated, the answers seem to be as blinding as the snow, which continues to fall in flabby flakes, “the size of communion wafers”. 

There is a memorable scene when Strafford, who was brought up as a member of the Church of Ireland, crosses swords with Archbishop McQuaid, a sly man, used to organising Catholic cover-ups. This, Snow makes clear, was an era of rampant sadism towards children from Christian Brothers institutions and depraved behaviour from priests who were “a law unto themselves” in post-war Ireland. As well as a gripping thriller, the novel is a moving portrait of the pain and suffering of victims of abuse – along with a disturbing, bold first-person interlude that examines the self-justifying rationales of the guilty – in which Banville offers a mirror to our modern age, where abuse at the highest levels can still be covered up. 

In Snow, Banville has taken a classic crime construct and produced a subtle, incisive novel that is superb to the last drop – a clever coda set a decade after the murder.  

‘Snow’ by John Banville is published by Faber on 1 October, £14.99   

Trio by William Boyd ★★★★☆  

Trio is set in London, Brighton, and Paris in the pivotal year of 1968. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had recently been assassinated, Vietnam was raging, and there are riots in the French capital. The book explores a turbulent world through the intersecting lives of three characters: producer Talbot Kydd, novelist Elfrida Wing and actress Anny Viklund who are involved in making a Swingin’ Sixties movie in Brighton called Emily Bracegirdle’s Extremely Useful Ladder to the Moon. 

All three main characters have secrets and problems that are about to turn their lives upside down. Boyd keeps the plot racing along – bringing in minor characters who include a perverted actor, dodgy film financiers, and a CIA operative hunting a terrorist bomber – yet for all the twists, the real delight is in William Boyd’s wry portrait of a bygone age, an evolving era in terms of drugs and sexual rights. 

Struggling novelist Elfrida, who is drowning her writer's block in vodka, is particularly strong and through her struggles, Boyd captures some of the more downbeat truths of a supposedly glamorous era. When Elfrida visits a King’s Cross pub, she casts a gimlet eye on her surroundings; the blinking machines, boldly patterned carpets, and green wallpaper adorned with etchings of historic martial triumphs. “It was suitably depressing and seedy, which was what she asked of pubs. Spirits should be lowered on entry so that spirits could raise them anew, was her rationale.” 

This is the 16th novel from the man who penned Any Human Heart, and Boyd’s usual sure touch is evident throughout this tender, gently comic work.  

‘Trio’ by William Boyd is published by Viking on 8 October, £18.99   

Love by Roddy Doyle ★★★★☆   

Roddy Doyle, one of the more perceptive chroniclers of modern life, has always been good at capturing the tragi-comic despair of middle-aged manhood. His new novel Love, based around two old friends who go on a massive session across the pubs of Dublin, has echoes of an earlier novella called Two Pints. 

Davy, the narrator of Love, is back in Ireland from England and out with his old pal Joe, who has some shocking news. He has left his wife Trish for old flame Jessica, a woman whom both men, now in their late fifties, knew decades before when they were teenage friends. 

In this dialogue-driven novel, Doyle, 62, explores the malaise of late middle-age, a time of the “quick indignities” of growing old, when “day-to-day life smothers the ache, the sense that there’s something missing”. 

Doyle pulls off a clever trick. Joe and Davy’s sometimes irritating conversations go round in circles – they evade real revelations at first – but he slowly teases out the hidden truths and misunderstandings that are part and parcel of such a long-standing friendship. In the midst of their long boozy night out, the reader is also privy to Davy’s internal monologue, and the secret resentment he has held towards Joe about “trotting behind him, letting myself be his sidekick”. 

There are frequent flashes of humour, always part of the fabric of Doyle’s work, music references galore (Emmylou Harris, Joe Jackson, The Last Waltz) and moments of poignant nostalgia, especially about the joy of falling in love for the first time. 

Some of the best moments are the flashbacks to Davy’s unpredictable, in-your-face wife Faye. Through her sharp, astute opinions, we gain a deeper understanding of Davy’s sombre upbringing and the reasons he and Faye were desperate to get out of Dublin in the first place. The true depth of Joe and Davy’s loving friendship reveals itself in the final, tender, moving section set in a hospice. 

When I interviewed Doyle nearly a decade ago, he told me, “I just wish more middle-aged men would buy bloody books.” They could do a lot worse than start with Love.  

‘Love’ by Roddy Doyle is published by Jonathan Cape on 15 October, £18.99    

The Silence by Don DeLillo ★★★★☆  

Don DeLillo’s The Silence depicts the response of five individuals when the world’s computers collectively fail. One of them, a poet called Tessa Berens, utters an understandable plea: “What is happening? Who is doing this to us?” 

The author said he began writing the short novel in 2018, before the coronavirus outbreak, although the story of a shutdown is acutely appropriate for this period of social dislocation. “I started with a vision of empty streets in Manhattan,” said DeLillo. “The idea of the silence grew from sentence to sentence, from one chapter to the next.” 

DeLillo, the author of 17 novels and a recipient of the National Book Award for White Noise and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Mao II, brings an urgency and power to his reflections on what he calls “the mass insomnia of this inconceivable time”. 

The quintet of characters – a retired physics professor called Diane and her husband Max, an Einstein expert called Martin and the married couple Jim Kripps and Tessa – are due to meet for a New York dinner party on Super Bowl Sunday in 2022. Jim and Tessa are delayed because their plane has to make an emergency landing. The dramatic turn of events is caused by the same unknown electronic catastrophe that takes out all digital screens. 

The fractured conversation (“shadowed in disquiet”) that the five individuals end up having ranges from American football, to bourbon and Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity. DeLillo brilliantly captures the controlled panic and unease of people who are dealing with a new reality that suddenly feels “like the wrong kind of normal”. DeLillo’s observations are unsettling. “Isn’t it strange that certain individuals have seemed to accept the shutdown, the burnout? Is this something that they’ve always longed for, subliminally, subatomically?” he writes. 

Max, who spends some of the time just staring into the blank television screen on which the Super Bowl should be showing, ventures out to see the “bedlam” in the streets, a consequence of the world being plunged into a sudden dark quarantine. This is not a flattering portrait of our modern artificial society and what DeLillo calls “human slivers of a civilisation”. Max talks about people staring into their phones at all hours, mesmerised and consumed by their devices. “We’re being zombified,” Max says. “We’re being bird-brained.” 

Six months into an era of lockdown, where mass anxiety about “what is happening” is the new normal, The Silence is a tough read. DeLillo’s new work contains the sort of prescient, disturbing observations that are enough to make anyone seriously worry about our future in this troubled “realm of mortal existence”.  

‘The Silence’ by Don DeLillo is published by Picador on 29 October, £14.99