NW
Zadie Smith
Hamish Hamilton, £18.99
Like a runaway tube train, Zadie Smith’s new novel is hard to alight from: once you start reading, you are caught up in its frenetic energy. But even as I was being hurled around the carriage, I found myself thinking that as soon as it was over I would immediately get back on and read it again.
For her fourth book Smith has returned to her own neighbourhood, northwest London, an area that includes Kilburn, Willesden, Cricklewood and West Hampstead, and the one she explored in her much-heralded first novel, White Teeth.
NW follows a small cast of characters, most of whom grew up on a bleak estate of council high-rise blocks and all of whom have tried, in various ways, to escape. The most successful, on the face of it, are two thirtysomething women, best friends Leah, who is first-generation Irish, and Natalie, whose family are black Pentecostalists.
Many of the characters are of mixed heritage, the children of the generation that came of age after the 1960s, when the rules relaxed a bit. Both Leah and Natalie are sexually freer than their parents and both make it to university, though they still face obstacles because of their class and gender. What’s more, they have grown up in a post-Thatcher Britain where the political divides of left and right have been blurred by a wash of money and consumerism. One of the council-flat tenants, an ageing leftie, laments: “Breaks my heart. Just watching all that reality TV, reading the rags, just shut your mouth and buy a new phone – that’s how people are round here these days.”
The book’s narrative, such as it is, begins when a girl, apparently in distress, comes to Leah’s door looking for help. But NW is not a straightforward, linear novel. It’s experimental and, like the neighbourhood, it’s jagged, tough, colourful, disorientating. You could get on at any stop. You have to make your way as best you can, figure it out as you go. You journey through chapters of various sizes and shapes. One, a stream of drug-addled consciousness about an apple tree and fertility and fruitfulness, has its words shaped like a tree on the page. The number 37 acquires an unusual significance. The chronology zooms forwards, then back; passages of dialogue arrive and depart unannounced.
Unlike some other writers who have tackled life in working-class Britain, it’s clear that Smith, literally, knows her place. And her people. These are not caricatures. The dialogue, with its urban slang – “chatting”, “blud” and the ubiquitous “innit” – sounds completely authentic.
And her talent for observation hasn’t waned. The estate’s five blocks of flats are connected by walkways and bridges and staircases and “lifts that were to be avoided almost as soon as they were built”. A bus stops and “the doors fold inward, an urban insect folding its wings”.
It is a bit unclear what, if anything, Smith is saying about society and about life. Some of the characters’ former schoolmates are slipping downwards, and though both Leah and Natalie have escaped the council estate, they are struggling: Leah with the pressure to have children, something she feels ambivalent about; Natalie with the fact that she was too busy climbing up into the middle class to figure out who she really is.
Maybe the point is that there are no easy answers. But all of modern urban life is in NW. And while I doubt she lives on a council estate, it's clear that Smith is not looking down on it from some eyrie up the hill in Hampstead. She still lives in the area she's writing about, and it shows . CATHY DILLON
The Wrath of Angels
John Connolly
Hodder & Stoughton, £13.99
A downed aeroplane full of incriminating documents of the damned; a primeval forest haunted by the vengeful ghost of a centuries-old little girl; a beautiful and ruthless fallen angel and her scarily repulsive “child”; and the return of that half-man/half-whatever soul-stealer known as the Collector – why, it’s just another crazy day in Charlie Parkerville. Thank goodness the melancholy Maine PI’s two best friends (a gay black assassin and his nimble-fingered Latino lover) are, as always, backing him up.
All that will make perfectly good sense to readers of John Connolly’s Charlie Parker series, although regulars will want a heads-up that the 11th novel is just about the most overtly supernatural of the bunch. There’s little detective work and virtually no mystery to solve as Parker and his crew gun up against the forces of darkness killing everything in their path to the lost plane.
For my money, Connolly hit his peak in 2007 with The Unquiet, the best of the Parkers. Of the four that immediately followed, one (The Lovers) almost hits it, one (The Reapers) is ambitious but curiously flat, and two (The Whisperers and The Burning Soul) are competent but routine. The Wrath of Angels isn’t quite as compelling as The Unquiet, but Connolly does return to page-turning form with his depiction of a moral world at the mercy of epic conspiracy and remorseless, primordial evil.
The novel's only real weakness, surprisingly, is that too much time is given over to the Collector. Connolly does invent an intriguing backstory for his eerie, shambling vigilante. But by taking him out of the shadows and stripping away the shadings, the most fascinating of Parker's many out-there adversaries becomes just another all-knowing super serial killer spewing sadistic one-liners. KEVIN SWEENEY
The Beautiful Mystery
Louise Penny
Sphere, £19.99
The captivating plot of the Canadian crime writer Louise Penny’s The Beautiful Mystery, the eighth book in her acclaimed series with Chief Insp Gamache, head of homicide at the Sûreté du Québec, revolves around a tiny dot. The existence and location of this dot have perplexed scholars of Gregorian chant for almost 1,000 years, as without it how can one sing the right notes to God?
The enigmatic dot is one of several intriguing questions that haunt Gamache’s investigation of the brutal murder of a prior in a remote monastery in the Quebec wilderness. Penny’s books have always delighted in their arcane knowledge of the politics, history and literature of the francophone province of Canada. As suggested by her evocative title, she attempts the mystery of the religious experience itself, as manifested in the silence and liturgical singing of the monks of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups.
Here, Penny abandons her usual setting of Three Pines, a hidden bucolic village along the US border populated by earthy, idiosyncratic characters, for the austere confinement of a remote monastery. Cloistered in the cells, corridors and chapel of Saint-Gilbert-Entre-les-Loups, the action evolves effortlessly (with sly nods to TS Eliot and Umberto Eco) into a fascinating meditation on tradition and loyalty to an institution, whether the church or the Sûreté du Québec, with terrible consequences, for the individual and the community, when that faith is tested by secrets and lies.
Penny deftly uses her novel’s isolated monastic setting to explore more fully the complex machinations that have increasingly ensnared Gamache and his partner, Beauvoir, in political infighting and corruption, notably in the superb A Trick of the Light and Bury Your Dead. She imbues her intricate characterisation, particularly the dynamic central relationship between Gamache and Beauvoir, with a psychological complexity and emotional urgency that are all the more remarkable for their expressive grace and exquisite lightness.
With a taut and twisty plot to rival the best of her previous books, The Beautiful Mystery is a compelling and compassionate whodunnit that also promises significant new developments in her award-winning series. Like PD James’s Dalgliesh and Fred Vargas’s Commissaire Adamsberg, Penny’s Gamache is that rare creation of literary crime, an all-too-fallible detective who struggles to solve the endless riddle of the human heart as he investigates baffling murder cases. JOCELYN CLARKE
