The best-written recent releases
Read the opening pages from our picks below
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IN TODAY’S ISSUE
—The opening pages of Alive in the Merciful Country by AL Kennedy, our next pick from the recent releases in literary fiction. The full list of books considered is here.
—The opening pages from Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway.
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A person becomes what they need to be so they can meet their time. That’s my theory. Of course, you need luck to make that work. And some people have no luck. That’s why we’re supposed to have mercy.
Exactly when you’re reading this is a matter for conjecture. Still, I think that I’m safe in assuming very many things will be appalling and will remain appalling or become more appalling after that. More comfortable circumstances may not appear, because as a species we fail to impress.
Sorry about that. I don’t know what we were thinking.
But also – perhaps we’ll be thriving. Or perhaps we will be just about to thrive, all poised. Perhaps we will be learning and somehow living inside the fires we have lit, being happy and not consumed. Afterwards, we might walk out of the storm and into existing gently, building gently. We’ll move on and rarely look behind.
That’s the hope, or something like it. You do have to hope, don’t you?
I read once about an experiment with mice confined in awful little tubes filled with water. Left to themselves, the mice would paddle and paddle to keep afloat, but it wouldn’t take many minutes before they would be utterly exhausted and close to drowning. At which point, researchers observing what I have to assume was their idea of a reasonable and necessary experiment would have to fish the mice back out.
The funny thing was that when the terrifying researchers returned those same mice to the water torture tubes – because of course they did – the little creatures would swim and swim and swim, for twice as long, ten times as long and on and on. Somewhere in their tiny mouse brains they trusted that when they were desperate they’d be saved, and this let them endure. I am unable to say if this was good news.
Nonetheless, I do hope. And I also mean well. You need to, these days. If you are in any way thoughtful, you are obliged to mean and act really well, really forcefully, really every single day, because everything that’s loudest and most rewarded is entirely the opposite.
And Oakwood School means well, too. We still all recite the Oakwood Primary Promise every morning before we do anything else, just as we would on a normal school day. We sit up proud at our computer screens with our various rooms behind us, our various wandering pets and our various chaoses, just out of sight.
We are friendly and helpful, we’re kind and polite,
We mend and don’t break things, we do what is right.
We grow every day in our beauty and light,
We learn and we’re brave and we sleep well at night.
On any given day, almost none of this is true for me. I like to believe the kids are doing better. We’re trying to make progress anyway. That’s what matters.
Oakwood is a school where the fees paid by comfortable parents of comfortably disturbed and neglected children subsidise the wits’ end parents of wits’ end and embattled children and everyone mostly aims to do their best. There are also very normal kids here, of course, although normality levels fluctuate. Tony was rock steady and nowhere near any kind of drowning tube until last month. Then his grandad died alone and hidden inside the coma that doctors had slightly hoped would hide Poppa from death. No one was there to hold a hand or speak a word as he was leaving. His ventilator, doubtless, bailed away calmly throughout the process, because ventilators are machines and can’t get upset.
It all gave Year Five a horrible lot to talk about. We got scared. We’re rallying now, processing, but I can catch flickers of the darkness under glances. Things smear and press against our windows at night like maniac faces. Not that we often mention the possibly maniac things behind the faces in case they hear us say their names and then take an interest.
COMING SOON
—More of the best-written recent releases in literary fiction.
—Han Smith and Kia Corthron answer our questions on style.
—The best-written works on the shortlists for the Gordon Burn Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Awards.
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Prologue
The boy was wild and perfect, standing on the central table and clapping his hands. He had the eyes of a saint, Frau Möller recalled afterwards, an earthly saint like Francis, or a great thinker like Galileo. She had noticed him when he came in, past her little alcove by the door. She was not there to oversee the youth club. The young were specifically enjoined by the Party to organise themselves. Spaces were to be set aside for self-education and cultural awareness, and music was a part of that. If these gatherings became rowdy and inappropriate – if they were not strictly what had been envisaged by the committee – that was no concern of hers. She was employed only to keep the coats and close up. She had no other role.
But the boy had caught her attention because he was beautiful. She did not think he was German; he did not look German. If she had to guess, she would say he was from further east, perhaps even Odessa. He had what she called in her mind an Eastern face, with wide cheeks and high, hard edges. The beauty was more than physical, but it was also physical, of the kind that is rare in men but extraordinary when possessed. She had seen it before and was sorry for it. Men with that beauty were often fools because they rarely if ever heard the word ‘no’. People made way for them and cosseted them without ever realising what they were doing, because the beauty was itself a form of compulsion. And also, sometimes, hurt them, for the same reason. Frau Möller had seen that too.
It was not a good night for music. The band was not good quality, but had agreed to come at the last minute because a Yugoslav group – probably no better – were supposed to be playing but had not arrived. Drugs, Frau Möller had heard: hashish in a guitar case. That was musicians: if it was not one thing it was another.
But the boy had not cared if the music was good or bad. He wanted only to have a high time and he had carried the whole club with him, the way such people do. He had begun to clap along with the indifferent guitar until others did as well, then to urge the band to be bolder in their choices; then to dance, and he had found a pretty girl to dance with and then all the boys were dancing with her and then all the girls were dancing with them. He had bought expensive drinks and then he had climbed up on the refectory table that ran across the middle of the room and begun stamping his feet. The beer in his hand splashed over his half-open shirt, so that he looked as disgraceful and salty as Aphrodite coming up out of the sea in the main room of the state museum, and the whole dingy little den had pulsed with the rhythm of a heart, and only then was he satisfied. He sprawled in a chair, looking up at the pretty chaos he had made, and Frau Möller watched his wild eyes and wondered if he were crying.
And when, at the height of the feast, three men had entered – serious men, older and quite humourless – they had not cared about the dissolute behaviour in front of them, just about the boy. They had beckoned him over and said something, and he had not been alarmed. He had nodded: of course. He would be delighted to accompany them. He had expected them earlier. Would they like to have a drink first? Which to her amazement they had, everyone drinking together. And then – after that one drink – they had all left in good order, the boy sharing a joke with her on the way out, of which she remembered only the punchline: ‘But, of course, Mutti, because until now everything was satisfactory!’
Still laughing, he had gone out of the door into the Prenzlauer cold.
Set in the missing decade between two iconic novels starring George Smiley, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, this is an extraordinary, thrilling return to the world of spymaster John le Carré, written by the author’s son and acclaimed novelist, Nick Harkaway.
