DUNDEE UNIVERSITY REVIEW OF THE ARTS

London Calling

Sara Sheridan
(Polygon, 2013); hdbk, £16.99.

“Very few of us are what we seem,” according to Agatha Christie. This statement expresses the tension between the way that English golden-age detective fiction is popularly understood and what it actually has to say about polite society. The line, on the one hand, has the air of homely folk wisdom and offers something of a cliché, playing into the image of the “cosy” murder mystery as a form characterised by familiarity and adherence to convention. The subversive subtext that underpinned Christie’s work – that polite bourgeois society is murderous and artificial – is foregrounded in Sara Sheridan’s Mirabelle Bevan series.

Guy Ware
(Comma Press, 2012); pbk, £7.95

Identity is the prevalent theme in Guy Ware’s debut collection of short stories, You Have 24 Hours to Love Us. Various characters struggle with the urge and pressure to re-define themselves according to either society’s notions of identity  or their own. Throughout his collection, Ware examines how individuals define and differentiate themselves from others. Perhaps the most effective aspect of You Have 24 Hours to Love Us is the placing of ordinary and relatable characters in extraordinary situations.

Crashin' The Real

Deb Hoag
(Dog Horn Publishing, 2009); pbk, price: £8.85.

Deb Hoag's humorous and modern recasting of fairy tales is on display in Crashin' the Real. The protagonist Eve Petra, a gonzo columnist from a bygone era, is fired from her job for setting the secretary’s desk on fire. Distraught, she then decides to take her marijuana smoking grandmother along on a journey to find the meaning of life. Along the way, Eve meets  characters, each with their particular traits and peculiarities who help her find what she is looking for. These moments of epiphany  lead her to get over the tragic incidents that shaped her life.

Noughts and Crosses

Malorie Blackman
(Corgi Children, 2006); pbk £6.99.

Imagine a world where the great land mass of the Pangea is still intact and human history has taken an entirely different route. A world where geo-political circumstances have resulted in African nations developing into colonial powers and Europeans becoming a marginalised and dominated people. The inversion of the power hierarchy Blackman imagines in Noughts and Crosses offers a simple message: differences between people are learnt and not inherent. The larger themes of racial tension are wrapped up in an adventure tale that deals with the troubles of growing up and teenage angst.

Last Night Another Soldier

Andy McNab
(Corgi, 2010); pbk £1.99.

If you are looking for literary or thought provoking prose, look elsewhere. If you are young, (probably) male and inspired by war stories, this is likely to be right up your street; though it might not occupy you for an inordinate length of time. This is a straightforward war story which could come from any era; it’s just the means of killing and the arena of war that has changed.  Last Night Another Soldier may be met with nostalgia by a certain generation brought up on Commando comics in the 1960s and 1970s.  

Little Face

Sophie Hannah
(Hodder & Stoughton, 2006); pbk £7.99.

New mother Alice Fancourt lets her daughter out of her sight for the first time in the three weeks since Florence’s birth. When she comes home  two hours later, Alice is horror stricken to find the door ajar, her husband napping, and Florence taken from her cot and replaced with another baby. Echoing the paranoia of the characters in Don Siegel’s Cold War science-fiction film Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Alice believes that her baby has been kidnapped and then replaced with another infant, identical to hers whilst others claim that she is mad and suffering from a severe form of post-natal depression.

The Reader

Bernhard Schlink
(Phoenix, 2010); pbk £8.99.

Bernhard Schlink’s  The Reader met with much critical acclaim when it was  published in his native Germany in 1995.  Since then, it has won  literary awards in Germany and France, been translated into thirty nine languages, and adapted for the big screen. The Reader also  finds itself a staple on high school reading lists in Germany and beyond.  So what’s all the fuss about?  What message does this novel convey which keeps it in the public eye? 

The Knife of Never Letting Go

Patrick Ness
(Walker, 2008); pbk £7.99.

What is it with teenage fiction these days? Their sheer thematic ambitiousness - the Holocaust, betrayal complicity and guilt, disability,  violence, war, terrorism and even planetary consciousness - has led to crossover audiences; no longer do adults have to be defensive about reading titles as varied as the His Dark Materials trilogy, The Book Thief, The Curious Incident of the Dog at Nightime, Holes and even The Hunger Games. Patrick Ness’s young adult fiction is right up amongst the great and the good.

Damage

Josephine Hart
(Virago,  2011); pbk 7.99.

On the final page of Josephine Hart's debut novel, Damage, the first person narrator addresses the reader; the intervention is a last-minute attempt to frame the narrative again on the narrator's terms: “For those of you who doubt it – this is a love story.”  The urgency of the plea to make us see things his way electrifies Damage, a memoir of sexual obsession and disaster.