Today, we have three well-established novelists, with their latest works. For those immersed in literary and popular fiction, the names Matt Haig, Janice Hallett, and William Boyd will be very familiar, and it’s good to find them still in top form.
The Life Impossible by Matt Haig
As the author of The Midnight Library, How to Stop Time, and The Radleys (soon to be a film); Haig is avidly read and followed for his light sense of humor, and the degree of compassion and ‘malasakit’ he bestows on his protagonists. We readily identify with them, and invest our sympathies, recognizing that what they’re going through may be very similar to what we have encountered in our own lives. In this latest, his main character is Grace Winters, a 72-year-old retired math teacher in Lincolnshire, England. She’s a widow, and had lost her son in a traffic accident when he was 11. She’s surprised to find that a long lost friend, Christina, who she has not seen in decades, suddenly bequeaths her with a rundown home on the island of Ibiza. And it’s here that the real adventure begins.
Armed with a one way ticket, and no real plan, Grace lands on Ibiza, and soon discovers there’s a lot of mystery surrounding the life, and “death,” of her friend - and the St. Christopher’s medal Grace gave Christina all those decades ago. She meets the highly dubious Alberto Ribas, the man last seen with Christina; and encounters Christina’s estranged daughter, Leike - now a headlining DJ. The book can be described as modern form magical realism, as there are mind-altering experiences and transformative states of being described, but with the Haig trademark of making it all look and feel cozy. There’s hope and new beginnings, facing one’s past and letting go. And the looming La Presencia, a consciousness that exists in a specific spot in the sea beside Ibiza. It’s a love poem to the island.
The Examiner by Janice Hallett
Best known for writing mystery thrillers in epistolary novel form, such as The Appeal and The Twyford Code; here is Hallett once again taking us on a murder adventure. This time, the whole novel consists of e-mails, chat groups, message boards, and submitted university reports. Set at Royal Hastings University, we meet the six mature students of a Masters multimedia art course; and an external examiner is convinced that one of the students may have been killed, and he’s now being asked to assess a master class in murder, and how the others are covering it up. Hallett is wonderful at introducing us to the six students and making them, and the course instructor, such distinct individual personalities. Our loyalties and sympathies ebb and flow as we follow the story of the class, over one academic school year.
There’s the “overqualified” Alyson, the hapless Patrick, Cameron who’s bluffing his way, and the all-knowing Jem, who sculpts. Ludya and Jonathan make up the six, and from the outset, the two have things up their sleeve, and obviously aren’t just mature adults taking an arts course. Last assignment of the course is an installation for a local manufacturer of radio equipment; and this is where the mystery deepens and we’re left clutching at straws, in the hope of discovering what really happened in the course of this fateful academic year. The company involved with radio installations had military connections and it’s revealed how the members of the art course have their own axe to grind with the institution. As always, Hallett is brilliant with the reveal and tying up loose ends. Another feather in her cap!
Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd
While Any Human Heart and The Romantic are his more recent acclaimed novels, I’ve been reading Boyd since his Star & Bars (1984) and The New Confessions (1987). And of more relevance to this new work would be Boyd’s A Good Man in Africa (1983), and Solo (2013), when he was asked to write a James Bond continuation novel. With the central figure of Gabriel Dax, Boyd offers up the classic “accidental spy” tale. We first meet Gabriel in the 1960’s in the newly independent formerly Belgian Congo, where pure chance gifts him with an interview with Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba. During the interview, Lumumba talks of how the West is ready to get rid of him, and even names names, people in the young country connected to the West. Months later, after a coup, Lumumba is executed under mysterious circumstances.
Back in London, Dax finds that his tapes of the interview are a very hot commodity. There’s a woman (isn’t there always) named Faith Green who would seem to be affiliated with MI6; while other from the Foreign Office (including Gabriel’s brother) and the CIA, enter and exit with alarming regularity - all throwing Gabriel off-balance, as he tries to figure out if he’s a player, a mere pawn, or off the board completely. It’s a web of betrayals as he’s flown to Madrid and Cadiz, and on to Warsaw. There is a back story of how Gabriel was orphaned at the age of six when their home burned down, with his widowed mother dying in the conflagration. Boyd is an expert storyteller, and it’s wonderful taking on this genre of a spy novel and constantly throwing moral overtones into the narrative. A reading pleasure.