Blake Morrison

It’s tempting to read They as a timely intervention in our own culture wars, even in respect of its title. The likes of Nadine Dorries wouldn’t recognise themselves as the enemy. But if obliged to read the novel they would find it a challenge – not because of its length (a bare hundred pages) or its politics, but because of its rebarbative form.

The war is over in A Passage North but its impact is still being felt; damaged limbs can be repaired or replaced with prosthetic ones but injuries to the mind persist. His character’s sufferings are proof of that. Her history is the history of what Anuk Arudpragasam has called ‘the government’s systematic destruction of Tamil society’, which by the time of the war’s conclusion, in 2009, had claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilians.

As a detective you have to watch your step, in order that your operations remain clandestine, and no detectives in literature have ever watched their steps as literally as Okotie’s two detectives. Much of the first novel is taken up with Marguerite’s efforts to walk along the top deck of a bus and descend its stairs.

Lawrence Osborne’s novels include all the props associated with thrillers: guns, heists, bribes, spiked drinks, assumed identities, ghostly visitations and suitcases stuffed with banknotes. But the plot is only a fraction of the story. These are novels about place, with a fanatical immersion in everything that defines a place (terrain, weather, architecture, traffic, food, noise, smell), an immersion reproachful of those, whether colonisers, expats, sex tourists or ‘beg-packers’, who don’t make the effort to observe and engage.

The frustration of the dozen voices composing the narrative of Summerwater is easy to under­stand: male, female, young, old, Scottish, English, they’re fed up with the weather, because it’s August and this is their holiday and they don’t want to spend it cooped up. But something doomier lies beneath the surface.