The Modern Library

by Colm Toibin

  L. P. Hartley was born in Cambridgeshire. In later life he divided his time between London and a house near Bristol. His reputation also rests on the Eustace and Hilda trilogy: The Shrimp and the Anemone (1944), The Sixth Heaven (1946) and Eustace and Hilda (1947). The Go-Between was filmed by Joseph Losey in 1970.

  Age in year of publication: fifty-eight.

  Shirley Hazzard 1931–

  1980 The Transit of Venus

  Novels about obsessive love are always absorbing; this one adds intriguing analyses of serious moral issues. Two sisters, Caro and Grace, come to England from Australia in the 1950s. Cook’s discovery of Australia is said to be a by-product of travelling to Tahiti in 1769, to watch the transit of Venus. Caro’s trajectory across the old world encompasses a cast of interlocking characters and a galaxy of moral predicaments. In this ambitious narrative, science, politics, international affairs and corrupt American governments contend with a particularly felicitous selection of venal bureaucrats and tedious academics.

  Caro loves and is loved by three very different men, and so her transit becomes a study first of obsessive love, and then of passion in all its forms. Overarching these human concerns Hazzard places the unwilled determinations of an ironic fate and the importance of truth in private love and in public life. Although this rich mix can sometimes teeter on the edge of excess, the classic structure of the novel, and Hazzard’s piercing eye, fixed on the treacheries of people behaving badly, always give her moral puzzles charm. Most characteristic is her way with words, ranging from the constant staccato of witty epigrams to the lambent notes of those professing love, an accompaniment to a romantic melodrama on the grandest scale.

  Shirley Hazzard was born in Sydney, Australia, and lives mainly in New York. Other novels include The Evening of the Holiday (1966). The Transit of Venus won the US National Book Critics Circle Award in 1980. The Great Fire (2003) won the American National Book Award and the Miles Franklin Award.

  Age in year of publication: forty-nine.

  Roy A. K. Heath 1926–2008

  1978 The Murderer

  The Murderer is a powerful novel in which murder and mental breakdown are dealt with coldly and dispassionately. It tells the story of two brothers, Galton and Selwyn Flood, in contemporary Guyana. It is told through the eyes of Galton, who seeks independence and is uneasy with friends and family and crowds. Selwyn has no difficulty settling down with his wife, whom Galton slowly grows to hate. Galton is always watchful and uncertain; it is only after much hesitation that he marries Gemma, whose father owns the boarding house where he stays when he leaves home. He takes her to live first with a friend, with whom he falls out, and then in a tiny, dark room in a crumbling building.

  The novel is closer to certain French classic novels such as Camus’ The Outsider or Sartre’s trilogy The Age of Reason than any English or American novels. Part of the novel’s power comes from its spare existentialism, but the other part comes from the prose style, which is graceful, old-fashioned, almost Latinate. The dialogue, on the other hand, is pure Guyanese vernacular, and the gap between the two, between the sense of distance in the prose and intimacy in the dialogue, makes the novel chilling and tense and deeply original.

  Roy A. K. Heath was born in British Guiana, where most of his novels are set. He lived in London. The Murderer won the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979.

  Age in year of publication: fifty-two.

  Joseph Heller 1923–1999

  1961 Catch-22

  ‘It was a vile and muddy war, and Yossarian could have, lived without it, lived forever, perhaps. Only a fraction of his countrymen would give up their lives to win it, and it was not his intention to be among them.’

  This novel is set among the American forces in Italy in 1944. Most of the troops are completely insane as well as lazy, greedy, bureaucratic, thieving, bossy, venal and mad for power. All of the generals and colonels are utterly incompetent. The enemy is barely contemplated, nor the effects of the bombing missions. The enemy is sleeping beside you in the tent. Heller explains the meaning of Catch-22: Catch-22 means that if you ask to be let off the bombing missions because you are crazy, so you must be sane, and therefore you can’t be let off the bombing missions. The writing is seriously funny, the jokes often intricate and absurd. Everyone has a story to tell – for instance, a Native American whose family, no matter where they go, manage to camp on a valuable oilfield, so that the oil companies begin to follow them around. The novel combines a comedy that is often slapstick and throwaway and at times silly, with images of soldiers who go on bombing missions screaming through the night, and images of a moral universe which has been turned on its head. Catch-22 is a dark and disturbing anti-war book as well as a great comic novel.

  Joseph Heller was born in Brooklyn and was still living in New York when he died. His other novels include Something Happened (1974), Good as Gold (1979), and the sequel to Catch-22, Closing Time (1994).

  Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.

  Ernest Hemingway 1899–1961

  1952 The Old Man and the Sea

  The style is taut, laconic and yet infinitely expressive. There is an emotional depth somewhere in between the words. Within Hemingway’s simple sentence construction and his diction, which can seem innocent and naive, like an early Miro painting, there are odd, disturbing silences.

  The story of The Old Man and the Sea is simple: an old fisherman in Cuba has had a run of bad luck. One day he goes out alone and catches a giant marlin; he holds it for two days and nights, letting it pull him out into the open sea and then slowly reining it in, letting it circle, and then killing it and tying it to the boat. On the way back to dry land, the marlin is attacked by sharks who eat its flesh, so that the old man arrives on shore exhausted with nothing except the fish’s skeleton attached to the boat. There is a great deal of very convincing and not too technical information about the process of fishing; the famous terse style is ever terser as the story proceeds, so that the narrative grips you, every turn the fish makes holds your attention, it feels as though it is happening right in front of you.

  The ideas of endurance and futility behind the story are so elemental and stark that the novel has a simplicity and a power which overcome any lingering sentimentality. It remains one of Hemingway’s masterpieces.

  Ernest Hemingway was born in Chicago and in later years lived largely in Cuba. His other novels include The Sun Also Rises (1926) (UK: Fiesta 1927), A Farewell to Arms (1929) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954.

  Age in year of publication: fifty-three.

  Georgette Heyer 1902–1974

  1950 The Grand Sophy

  Georgette Heyer was a stern realist. She wrote romantic comedies, entertainments set in the Regency period in England, when women concentrated entirely on the essential business of getting married, hopefully for love, preferably with rank or money attached. Immersed in the world of Jane Austen – for whom similar considerations ruled the day, influenced too by Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Georgette Heyer was also a fine Regency scholar. Her novels are a meticulous recreation of that world of manners down to the smallest detail of social code, dress, food, conveyance and language.

  In Heyer’s milieu lack of looks is always a disadvantage, but Wit and Style make up for it. Requiring an eligible husband, Sophy arrives in London in a chaise drawn by four steaming horses, accompanied by two outriders, a groom, a splendid black horse, a monkey, a parrot and an Italian greyhound. This arrival is impressive, but how can Sophy find a husband when she lacks beauty and has a mind of her own, a wretched thing in a woman?

  The resolution of such predicaments was always Heyer’s subject matter; her originality lay in the precision and charm of her writing style and in her taste for the wit and frivolities of the period. She was a phenomenon. Widely imitated, within the genre of romantic comedy she was unequalled, and one of the best entertainers of her time.

  Georgette Heyer was born and liv
ed in London. Amongst the best of her fifty-seven novels are These Old Shades (1926), Cotillion (1953) and Venetia (1958).

  Age in year of publication: forty-eight.

  Carl Hiaasen 1953–

  1987 Double Whammy

  Florida produces a variety of miscreants that surpasses anything else in the United States. Carl Hiaasen is the chronicler of this Miami world, the Damon Runyon of its language, circumstances and astounding way of life.

  In Double Whammy we enter – deeply – the world of competitive bass fishing, a territory of strange clothes, much swearing, companies such as the Happy Gland Fish Scent Company and the flotsam and jetsam of men at fishy sport, which in this case means cheating and murder. An episode with a dog, its head, a wrist, and a man named Thomas Curl begins on page 224 and continues, an inspired running sore of a gag, to the end of this marvellous thriller. Hiaasen is a highly moral writer. His heroes, private eye R. J. Decker and the raw-squirrel eating giant, Skink, are twentieth-century Crusader knights who take on American capitalism in all its glory – the lust for the last dollar, the pollution of the towns, the pollution of the waters, the corruption of politicians and TV shows, particularly those featuring fundamentalist religious crooks such as the repetitive fornicator the Reverend Charlie Weeb, of the Outdoor Christian Network.

  Carl Hiaasen is an acerbic thriller writer, inventive and bizarre. His chilling black comedies, with their split-second timing, off-beat dialogue, raging laughter and death, are knowing and provocative records of the way we live now.

  Carl Hiaasen was born in and lives in Florida. An award-winning investigative journalist, his other celebrated thrillers include Native Tongue (1991), Strip Tease (1993), Lucky You (1997), Basket Case (2002), Skinny Dip (2004) and Nature Girl (2005).

  Age in year of publication: thirty-four.

  Patricia Highsmith 1921–1995

  1955 The Talented Mr Ripley

  The art of Patricia Highsmith is cool and detached; this adds power to her depiction of quiet violence and of murderers who could almost be ourselves. This strange identification of reader with murderer – a kind of inverted murder mystery – gives her thrillers an hypnotic attraction.

  This novel was the first she wrote about the more than talented Mr Ripley, a neglected and loveless child who grows up to ensure that he compensates for such deficiencies by letting nothing and no one stand in his way. His distinguishing characteristics are his charm, his anxiety to please, and luck, which in this instance whisks him to Italy to coerce the wealthy young Dickie Greenleaf into returning to the USA to take up his responsibilities. The relationship between Tom Ripley and Dickie is one of those troubled tugs-of-war between men in which Patricia Highsmith so eerily excels: fretful, duplicitous, overwrought.

  The tension is electric, and Tom’s murder of Dickie – in which every ounce of water and blood, every slow motion of struggle is felt almost physically by the reader – is only the beginning of a chase which twists and turns as Tom veers towards his unexpected fate. This is a classic psychological thriller, sinister yet cajoling, swathed in Highsmith’s macabre wit.

  Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and lived mostly in Europe. Many of her novels were filmed; her first, Strangers on a Train (1950), by Alfred Hitchcock. She wrote five novels about Tom Ripley. This novel was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll.

  Age in year of publication: thirty-four.

  Oscar Hijuelos 1951–

  1989 The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

  This is a novel, written in effortless prose, about Cuban musicians and their families in New York in the 1950s. It throbs with sex, with the pain of desire, with the allure of bodies, with the pure, unadulterated, exotic pleasure of coupling. It is the only novel in this list which makes mention of ‘that muscle up at the high end of a woman’s thigh, that muscle which intersected the clitoris and got all twisted, quivering ever so slightly when he’d kiss a woman there’; for this alone, the novel is mandatory reading.

  It tells the story of two struggling musicians, Cesar and Nestor Castillo, authors of a song called ‘Beautiful Maria of My Soul’, and their lives in the new country and their memories of the old. It is full of pure style and gorgeous flourishes, like the dance music our two heroes play – tangos, boleros, melancholy tunes. It reads as though it was written in one single hot afternoon. Hijuelos places an aura of huge sadness around his characters’ lives, especially that of Nestor, the younger brother, who is eaten up with ennui, despite his enormous sex drive. It is one of the few great books about immigrants to the United States, grappling with the new language and the old ties of affection, the women steady and ambitious, the men hard drinking, locked in the old world and all the more attractive and interesting for their displacement.

  Oscar Hijuelos was born in New York, the son of Cuban immigrants. His other novels include Our House in the Last World (1983), The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Monez O’Brien (1993), Empress of the Splendid Season (1999) and A Simple Habana Melody (2002). The Mambo Kings won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize and was adapted for film in 1992 and as a broadway musical in 2005.

  Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.

  Russell Hoban 1925–

  1980 Riddley Walker

  Written in the bastardized fragments of a ‘worn-out’ English, Riddley Walker is set in a brutal tribal world, thousands of years after a nuclear apocalypse. The twelve-year-old Riddley is led by a pack of wild dogs to help an imprisoned mutant, the Ardship of Cambry. Releasing him involves Riddley in a struggle to regain, by shamanistic and alchemical means, the secret of the bomb. On one side are the politicians, the Pry Mincer and the Wes Mincer, travelling showmen, who retell and decode the fragments of ancient stories. On the other are the mutants, whose damaged genes retain some shadows of the bomb that made them. Unknown to both is a simpler secret, the formula for gunpowder. The key is a yellow powder, ‘Salt 4’. In the battle for its possession, the Ardship is killed and the Pry Mincer deposed and blinded. Nevertheless, a bomb is made and exploded. Riddley, rejecting all power, except the power of story, becomes a travelling showman, with a new tale to tell.

  This is a strenuously, fiercely imagined book. Hoban uses scraps of legend – Punch and Judy, the Green Man, St Eustace – to construct a mythology of original power. Riddley’s humanity provokes in the reader a kind of despairing sweetness. The language, which requires concentration, is both brutal and visionary: the effort to understand it becomes an effort to understand something much larger. Riddley Walker, which is often compared to A Clockwork Orange, releases a strange, raw, spiritual sense that cannot be found in smoother fictions.

  Russell Hoban was born in Pennsylvania, but settled in London in 1969. He has written many children’s books including The Mouse and the Child, and his adult books include The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (1973), Turtle Diary (1975), Angelica’s Grotto (1999), Her Name Was Lola (2003), Linger Awhile (2006) and My Tango with Barbara Strozzi (2007).

  Age in year of publication: fifty-five.

  Alan Hollinghurst 1954–

  1994 The Folding Star

  Edward Manners, an Englishman in his thirties, goes to teach in a Flemish city – Bruges perhaps? – and like Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette falls obsessively in love. Luc Altidore, one of his pupils, is his adored object, a shadowy, unknowable, golden young man, longed for, lusted after, whilst Edward’s other worlds continue imperviously. There are the men he meets at gay bars; another pupil, Marcel, and his father Paul Echevin, curator of the museum devoted to the great Symbolist painter Orst; an entirely different, pastoral, domestic life appears when Edward returns to England for the funeral of his first lover.

  Edward’s hunger for anonymous sex – for sex whatever – confronts in both a comical and affecting way the idealism of obsessive love. Edward possesses Luc but only for a moment; Luc seems to drift away, eternally elusive, a face glimpsed in a misty glass, unobtainable. Love is trailed by loss, with betrayal waiting in the wings. An
d shame – or worse, a Nazi past, menacing and tragic – turns romantic love to stone.

  There is a mellow beauty to the form and structure of this novel, echoed in its melancholic, elegiac atmosphere. At the same time it is candid, comic, utterly contemporary, with a sly sense of the absurd. This is a luscious and continually fascinating novel; reading it is like contemplating one of the great paintings of the Flemish Old Masters.

  Alan Hollinghurst was born in Stroud, Gloucestershire, and lives in London. His other celebrated novels are The Swimming Pool Library (1988), The Spell (1998) and The Line of Beauty (2004) which won the Man Booker Prize.

  Age in year of publication: forty.

  Kazuo Ishiguro 1954–

  1986 An Artist of the Floating World

  Kazuo Ishiguro’s considerable skills as a novelist are especially evident in An Artist of the Floating World and The Remains of the Day (1989). The novels stand as a fascinating diptych about the atmosphere which created the Second World War, about the small sets of collaborations which make up a society. The former deals with Japan, the latter with England.