Stephen Wall

Susan Minot’s volume is a slim one, and some of the pieces in it will not placate those who complain that short stories are too often too short, rather as one might hold it against the sonnet that it’s over after only 14 lines. Brevity can be the soul of more qualities than wit, and it would be a dim view of Webern to say that he lacks Schubert’s heavenly length. It’s true that minimalism has its own lacunal rhetoric, and leaving things out for the sake of it can be as tiresome as putting them in for the same reason, but Susan Minot has enough tact to ensure that her ellipticality doesn’t seem evasive. At their best, the attenuation of her stories persuades you that it’s the result of genuine compassion rather than a merely modish parsimony of materials, a sort of nouvelle cuisine of the conte.

Death’s Darkest Face is Julian Symons’s 27th crime story, and its appearance coincides with an award (the Diamond Dagger) for his long service to the genre. This isn’t quite enough for his publishers, keen to promote the book as a proper novel rather than another addition, however distinguished, to their crime list. The implied claim that, despite the format, it’s serious stuff not only revives old and no doubt perennial problems about how to take this sort of fiction, but also echoes the author’s concluding comment that, in this case, he’s been less interested in puzzle than personality. There’s some disingenuousness here, since the mystery is quite elaborately contrived and its solution, or solutions, artfully withheld. All the same, the appeal of Death’s Darkest Face goes well beyond eventually finding out how the crime actually happened and who done it.

In his new novel William Boyd returns to Africa, the scene of his first successes, but not to the west of A Good Man in Africa or the east of An Ice-Cream War. Brazzaville Beach goes for the centre – and appropriately so, since the questions it raises are more searching than before. They’re pursued with a narrative fluency and clarity of design that rewards and deserves attention.’

Craiglockhart Hydro – an Italianate pile near Edinburgh – opened in 1880, but it figures in literary history because it was taken over as a military hospital in 1916. Wilfred Owen was sent there, and so was Siegfried Sassoon. That their meeting, and the place itself, had a catalytic effect on Owen’s poetry has long been recognised. When, in her new novel, Pat Barker shows Sassoon and Owen discussing the diction and title of the latter’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, she is following manuscript evidence of Sassoon’s suggestions and Owen’s revisions. But although Sassoon plays a crucial role in Regeneration, he does so more as a refractory soldier and reluctant patient than as a writer; he is only one of a number of the shell-shocked who otherwise have no memorial. The real hero of the story and the main source of its considerable interest is the doctor who treated him.’

There have always been novels with a highly developed sense of their own means of production. When, at the end of Mansfield Park, Jane Austen said she’d let other pens dwell on guilt and misery, she was being literal as well as figurative. A pen was what she wrote with. Dan Jacobson’s and Michael Frayn’s reliance on, respectively, a word processor and a tape recorder needn’t be put down to Post-Modern self-consciousness. Novels naturally like to keep up with the technology on which they rely, but an appeal – however disingenuous – to external machinery and allegedly objective documentation is thoroughly classical. In skilled hands, such honesty about the narrative’s status paradoxically enhances rather than undermines its authenticity, although we know, and it knows, that such candour is entirely specious.’