‘A brilliant, bracing novel’: The best Literary Fiction out now – CALL ME ISHMAELLE by
CALL ME ISHMAELLE by Xiaolu Guo (Chatto £18.99, 448 pp)
The hot genre right now is the reboot: from Percival Everett’s James (his take on Huckleberry Finn) to Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (an update of David Copperfield), we’re awash with classic retellings, often addressing blind spots of race and gender.
Chinese-British author Guo follows suit in this beguiling remix of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s 19th-century whaling epic – this time narrated not by the original novel’s Ishmael, but Ishmaelle, an orphaned Kentish girl who runs away in disguise as a boy for a life at sea during the US Civil War.
Amid a welter of incident, the story’s jeopardy and heart-wrenching hardship mingle with a sense of glee as Guo challenges Melville’s assumptions, as well as our own, by giving Ishmaelle a cosmopolitan cast of colleagues on deck. If you’ve not read the original, fear not – this rollicking escapade stands alone.
TILT by Emma Pattee (Borough £16.99, 240 pp)
Blame Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 hit The Road for another trend that shows no sign of drying up: novels that splice the tumult of parenthood with the kind of apocalyptic disaster found in science fiction (think Diane Cook’s The New Wilderness or Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song).
Set over one day in Portland, Oregon, it kicks off when an earthquake hits just as the narrator is in IKEA to buy a cot for her unborn baby.
As she seeks shelter from the chaos, the novel unspools as a frantic mix of high-octane escape narrative and downtempo reflection on how pregnancy altered her relationship with her husband, now missing in the wreckage.
It’s a killer set-up. But while there’s no shortage of drama, much of it runs on familiar lines – which I didn’t mind, until the cop-out ending.
THE ASSAULT by Harry Mulisch (Serpent’s Tail £10.99, 208 pp)
Mulisch, who died in 2010, was a titan of Dutch literature, admired by JM Coetzee and John Updike. Here, in a fresh printing, is his best-known novel, The Assault, a knotty tale of post-war guilt, first published in 1982.
Opening in German-occupied Holland, it turns on the killing of a Nazi collaborator outside the home of the book’s young protagonist, Anton, whose family are swiftly murdered in reprisals.
The rest of the story navigates the aftershocks of that startling violence, following Anton down the decades into middle age as he encounters various people connected to the bloodshed.
Their crisp exchanges are at the heart of a philosophical thriller, with new light continually cast on the pivotal trauma until the very last pages.
It’s a brilliant, bracing novel that, for good and ill, seems unlikely to lose relevance any time soon.