The Modern Library

by Colm Toibin

  Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield and lives in London and Dorset. Her body of work includes the trilogy The Radiant Way (1987), A Natural Curiosity (1989) and The Gates of Ivory (1991).

  Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.

  Maureen Duffy 1933–

  1962 That’s How it Was

  There is a nobility about this semi-autobiographical novel. Though it captures a particular time and place of poverty – the East End of London before and during the Second World War – its sense of longing is universal. It is also an unusual addition to the literature of tuberculosis, that disease which infiltrated so many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century families, so often recorded in novels of the time. Most remarkable is the dogged poignancy of its portrait of the love of a child for its mother.

  Louey Mahony, one of eight children in a family decimated by TB, falls for an Irishman, Paddy, who leaves her with an illegitimate girl Paddy of her own; the child tells us this story. Poverty and bombing are not the only problems Louey has to face: Louey’s TB is of the slow, struggling kind, and Paddy grows up mostly in other people’s houses, or, when Louey marries again to give a home to Paddy, with an illiterate stepfamily, peace and money always in short supply. Paddy rages, and escapes, but always her eye is on her mother Louey: resolute, neat as a pin, loving, a good woman who is allotted absolutely nothing by the country she lives in. There is an elegiac quality about this novel, and an anxious yet lyrical strength in Duffy’s writing, which fits like a glove the love story she tells.

  Maureen Duffy was born in Sussex. She is a poet and biographer, and her fiction includes The Microcosm (1966) and Love Child (1971).

  Age in year of publication: twenty-nine.

  Daphne du Maurier 1907–1989

  1951 My Cousin Rachel

  Some of the most satisfying entertainments of the Victorian age were novels such as Mary E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Mrs Henry Wood’s East Lynne, which sensationally used domestic circumstances as the setting for intrigue, secrets, violence and death.

  Daphne du Maurier is the direct descendant of this tradition, and My Cousin Rachel a great achievement in this genre. On an estate in Cornwall in the nineteenth century, Ambrose Ashley raises his nephew Philip with servants, dogs, neighbours, tenants – but no women. Ambrose, in Europe, encounters the beautiful Rachel Sangaletti, marries her and in six months is dead, having sent a sequence of troubling letters to Philip accusing Rachel of extravagance – and worse. Philip, the image of his uncle in every way, is possessed by hatred for Rachel until she comes to stay: small, large-eyed, an enchantress, she bewitches Philip entirely.

  My Cousin Rachel follows every twist and turn of a heart obsessed; du Maurier’s considerable artistry is rooted in her control of hypnotic detail and psychological tension so that even the removal of a vase of flowers takes on a sinister significance. Simultaneously she mocks and reverses our conventional expectations of the sexual desires that drive men and women, always leaving questions in the air. Resolutions unresolved: that was her hallmark, as was providing entertainment of the highest order.

  Daphne du Maurier was born in London and lived mostly in Cornwall. Many of her stories – ‘The Birds’ (1963) and ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1938) – and novels were filmed, the most famous being Rebecca (1938).

  Age in year of publication: forty-four.

  Bret Easton Ellis 1964–

  1991 American Psycho

  American Psycho is both a morality tale and a comedy about capitalism and materialism. The abject consumerism of the protagonist and his friends who work on Wall Street, their obsession with brand names, chic restaurants and new trends, and their vicious snobbery are combined with elaborate descriptions of the murdering and dismemberment and torture of women.

  The cold, dispassionate tone in which the violence is described has been much misunderstood: the tone of American Psycho has the moralistic edge of Swift, suggesting a connection between the obsessive consumerism and right-wing politics of the Reagan years and pathological misogyny. Easton Ellis’s crime, perhaps, is to make all this too funny, too readable, too entertaining. His use of lists in the book is inspired, and his sense of New York as the home of the ruling class gives the book a deeply political edge. The book is written in short, titled chapters, like entries in a diary; the narrative is snappy; chapter openings are superbly gripping and interesting. Writing about murdering women in a ‘snappy’ and ‘gripping’ style is unlikely to endear the author to many people, but this is an important and disturbing book.

  Bret Easton Ellis was born and raised in Los Angeles and lives in New York. His other books are Less Than Zero (1985), The Rules of Attraction (1987), The Informers (1994), Glamorama (1998) and Lunar Park (2005).

  Age in year of publication: twenty-seven.

  Ralph Ellison 1914–1994

  1952 Invisible Man

  Like John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, this charismatic novel follows the adventures of a man in search of the meaning of his existence. Our hero lives in the United States, where most people are white: white people can be seen. He is black, part of an amorphous mass, and he comes to see that, black, he is invisible. He tells us his story, and as one event follows another we watch him being led deeper and deeper into a realization of just how angry a black man in America should be.

  In his travels as a black man in a white land, his idealism encounters all the temptations of his generation, and as each one comes his way, it is found to be a fraud – ‘white’ education, Communism and other radical ‘isms’, gambling, drink, sex, crime, adapting to a white society, fighting white society – all these ploys and distractions are shown to be deadly. Ellison plays with every myth about the black man – rape, for instance – and dismisses each one. He brings this about by concealing his message in a narrative as compelling and engaging as all the great storytelling novels. Picaresque in its vision, and in its insistence, finally, on the necessity for acceptance if not forgiveness, this profound, angry book is one of the great American novels of the post-war period, still resonant today.

  Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma and lived mostly in the USA. This, his only published novel, won the National Book Award in 1953.

  Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.

  Jeffrey Eugenides 1960–

  1993 The Virgin Suicides

  Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, The Virgin Suicides, is exciting, accomplished and beautifully written. The style is rich, the sentences are carefully modulated, the tone is relaxed and knowing, cynical and humorous, as though F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nabokov and the Coen Brothers had met on the lawns of some grand American suburb.

  The novel, narrated by a man in early middle age, tells the story of the five Lisbon sisters, teenagers much sought after by the local youths, who commit suicide in the same year. The narrator becomes a sort of detective, or historian, gathering details about the lives and deaths of the girls, going over and analysing certain encounters with them, or glimpses of them. This is a novel alive with desire, with memories of desire, with fading desire. The mating rituals of white suburban America become, in a superbly controlled narrative, both infinitely sad and infinitely funny. The intensity of the dissection of each detail, as though the antics of the Lisbon family were of immense national importance, gives the novel’s dark laughter a manic edge. The novel is full of asides and minor digressions, all of them fascinating and perfectly chosen, some of them funny enough to make you laugh out loud.

  Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and lives in New York. The Virgin Suicides was his first novel, his second Middlesex (2002) won the Pulitzer Prize.

  Age in year of publication: thirty-three.

  J. G. Farrell 1935–1979

  1973 The Siege of Krishnapur

  There is, in J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, an odd and original mixture of melancholy and hilarity. He is interested in the comic possibilities of the English character abroad as the colonists try to create order from chao
s but instead create only further chaos. In The Siege of Krishnapur our heroes find themselves in India in the years after the Great Exhibition when the Victorians believed that they could spread progress. The Indians, however, are getting ready to revolt in the Mutiny.

  Farrell loves set scenes: the mad sermon during the siege, the fallen white woman to whom no one dare speak, the natives gathering daily on a nearby hill to watch the trouble, love and poetry in a hot climate, knives and forks and spoons in a cannon. There is a sensational argument between two doctors about the cure for cholera; one dies from his own remedy. Farrell’s sense of detail never fails him, and his research into Victorian beliefs, or methods of warfare, to give just two examples, offers the novel credibility without overburdening it. He manages a light tone while remaining alert to the weight of his subject; this novel is a brilliantly dark comedy.

  J. G. Farrell was born in Liverpool and lived in London until a few months before his death. He was working on his novel The Hill Station (1981) when he was drowned off the south coast of Ireland. The Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker Prize in 1973. He also wrote Troubles (1970), which won the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010, and The Singapore Grip (1978).

  Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.

  William Faulkner 1897–1962

  1962 The Reivers: A Reminiscence

  This book was written at the end of Faulkner’s life, but there is no sign of any loss of energy, or flaws in narrative skill, or waning of sheer enthusiasm. It uses a rambling style full of parentheses and subordinate clauses, as though someone were telling a story and constantly interrupting himself.

  It is clear that the story is being told in the early 1960s about events in the early years of the century when old systems of manners and morals and landholding still obtained in the Southern states. Enter a motor car which is purchased by our narrator’s grandfather. The narrator is eleven years old, but he is wise even then, and watchful. The car is driven by Boon, his grandfather’s black servant, and when all the adults in the family go away for a funeral, our narrator, Boon and a man called Ned travel without permission to Memphis. The roads are appalling, and Ned is not entirely sane. Slowly, we realize that our narrator is telling the story of a few crucial days in his own education, when he mixed with people – including a number of prostitutes – outside his own class, when he witnessed confusion, nights in strange beds, homesickness, possible disaster, a racism which was new to him and an extraordinary amount of highjinks. When he gets home to his ordered upbringing, full of old patrician values, he has changed. The style, however, for all its rambling, has a sharpness and a sophistication, and the reader has a right to feel that as Faulkner lay dying, he must have taken pleasure in creating this novel.

  William Faulkner was born in Mississippi and divided his time between there and Hollywood. His novels include The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950.

  Age in year of publication: sixty-five.

  Sebastian Faulks 1953–

  1993 Birdsong

  This novel, one of the most popular of the 1990s, received the most nominations from our readers as their favourite novel of the last fifty years.

  An elegiac, romantic work, it is both a heart-breaking evocation of life in the killing fields of the First World War, and a passionate account of an anguished love affair. Faulks interweaves these two central narratives with the love stories of generations of one family, the birth of children, and the power of love, sexual and otherwise, so that hope flutters through the story like the thin but exquisite song of the birds from which this poignant novel takes its name.

  Faulks’ hero, Stephen Wraysford, is an unwilling survivor: through his sad eyes the agonizing years of battle follow, one after another, and he sees every man with whom he has shared this holocaust blasted to oblivion. Most powerful is the recreation of the underground tunnels which lay beneath the battlefields, constructed at terrible cost, and which Faulks, with consummate skill, presents as an underground Hell, the inevitable punishment for humanity so fruitlessly at war. ‘Jack saw part of Turner’s face and hair still attached to a piece of skull rolling to a halt where the tunnel narrowed … there was an arm with a corporal’s strip on it near his feet, but most of the men’s bodies had been blown into the moist earth.’ And thus Birdsong is also a testament to the millions of men who were slaughtered in the abattoir of Flanders Fields, a reminder to later generations never to forget ‘the pity of the past’.

  Sebastian Faulks was born in Newbury and lives in London. Birdsong was his fourth novel, one of a French trilogy which began with The Girl at the Lion d’Or (1989) and concluded with Charlotte Gray (1998). His other novels include On Great Dolphin Street (2001), Human Traces (2005), Engleby (2007) and the James Bond novel Devil May Care (2008).

  Age in year of publication: forty.

  Penelope Fitzgerald 1916–2000

  1995 The Blue Flower

  This is a novel about the illogicality of love, and much else: dialectics, philosophy, food, medicine, eighteenth-century surgery (fatal), mathematics and gossip. It fairly hums with absorbing personal and philosophical considerations. The impoverished young nobleman Friedrich (Fritz) von Hardenburg, later known as Novalis, the great eighteenth-century German Romantic poet and philosopher, falls in love with Sophie von Kuhn. She is twelve when Fritz falls in love with her, fifteen when she dies of tuberculosis. Sophie is silly and uninteresting but Fritz’s love is not. Embedded in a German world of family and food notable for its unquestioning brutishness – geese, for example, were killed after being plucked alive, twice – Sophie inspires Fritz’s writing, philosophy and his Romantic quest, symbolized by his book, The Blue Flower. The scene in which Fritz reads the opening chapter of this early work to the uncomprehending Sophie is only one of the episodes in which absurdity and heartbreak cannot be separated.

  Penelope Fitzgerald was a writer with an ironic, dry wit, and an exquisite, elliptical prose style. Everything she wrote seemed effortless: her timing, her obliquity, her knowing way of telling us little but implying much. This conciseness nevertheless produced a tumultuous and convincing effect, so that whilst Death stalks its pages, The Blue Flower, crowded with seductive personalities, glows with laughter and fizzles with interest and ideas.

  Penelope Fitzgerald was born in Lincoln and lived in London. The Blue Flower won the US National Book Critics’ Circle Award in 1998. Her other novels include The Beginning of Spring (1988), The Gate of Angels (1990) and Offshore, which won the 1979 Booker Prize. A story collection The Means of Escape appeared in 2000 and her selected writings A House of Air in 2003.

  Age in year of publication: seventy-nine.

  Thomas Flanagan 1923–2002

  1979 The Year of the French

  In 1798 the people of County Mayo rose up to join the small force sent by the French Revolutionary government to support Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen in their fight to liberate Ireland from English rule.

  To the Irish, the English were ‘Big Lords’, the absentee landlords, Protestant persecutors; to the English, the Irish were savages, traitors, Catholics. It is a rare writer who can project dispassion into this gruesome relationship. Flanagan does so, his vast knowledge of the period pouring through the voices of a handful of men of the time: we see what happened through their eyes, their passions and suffering. They in turn reveal to us a cast of thousands, so that every sound and vision of 1798 erupts before us – the battles, the beddings, the slaughter, the boozing, the poetry, the hangings, the generals and the English at war, and at their ease.

  For the Irish, ease is their music and poetry, which flows through the dramatic pages of this great epic. Even in the thick of battle Thomas Flanagan has a remarkable way of using the particular eloquence of Irish English so that we understand why, two hundred years later, few remember Cornwallis’s victory over the rebels at Ballinamuck (the place of the pig), whilst the
Irish songs about the year of the French are still sung today.

  Thomas Flanagan was born in Connecticut, and lived in both Ireland and America. He won the 1979 US National Book Critics Circle Award for this novel.

  Age in year of publication: fifty-six.

  Richard Ford 1944–

  1986 The Sportswriter

  Richard Ford has a special ability to create complex moments in his narrative where something difficult – a feeling, a memory, a desire or an action – is explained and understood, and then he allows the explanation not to be enough, he preserves a sense of mystery and strangeness about what his characters feel and how they are motivated.