With her first book, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist Katherine Boo has prised open the world of people on the lowest echelon of Indian society, people whom the state and all its institutions – law and order, healthcare, education, security, the economy, the democratic process – have failed so absolutely and comprehensively that their lives are in free fall. How do they survive?

Here is the inside view – horrifying yet relentlessly truthful, as far away from povertarianism as one can imagine – of that half the story of the GDP figures don’t tell, of the ‘undercity’ as Boo calls it, of the gap, indeed the mutual exclusivity almost, between growth and development that the economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen have recently written about.

Set in a 6000-strong slum called Annawadi next to Mumbai airport, the book begins, in July 2008, with the immediate aftermath of the self-immolation of Fatima, a one-legged Muslim woman, who blames her neighbours, the family of Zehrunisa Husain, especially Zehrunisa’s eldest son, Abdul, and her husband, Karam, for pushing her to the barbaric act. At this point, the book loops back to January to unravel the chain of actions that has led to the burning of One-Leg (as she is called in the slum) and picks up the forward motion of the consequences 80 pages later, when the circus of police interrogation, detention and, finally, the judicial trial begin.

Boo has taken the old dictum from the genre of the novel, that character is plot, and focused each chapter on some of the individual residents of Annawadi, following the narrative arcs of their intersecting lives. The picture that emerges of the ‘exploitation of the weak by the less weak’ is so astonishing in its details, cross-hatching and depth that one’s first reaction is disbelief, followed by stunned silence. There’s Abdul, a laconic teenage garbage-collector, the principal earner in the Husain family, who finds himself accused by One-Leg of driving her to the brink. Abdul is gifted at sorting out rubbish; selling his day’s gathering to recyclers has even resulted in some savings for the Husain family. So it is vital for them to ensure that Abdul is not convicted of bringing about Fatima’s violent suicide.

Ambitious Asha is on the make: all she wants to do is become the slumlord of Annawadi and from there the small leap in the direction of politics would, she thinks, ensure her move up to the middle class. To this end, she has her finger in several corruption rackets, chief among which are a few scams involving the siphoning of government and private aid money. Asha knows how to play the system; ‘for the poor of a country where corruption thieved a great deal of opportunity, corruption was one of the genuine opportunities that remained.’

Sunil Sharma, a stunted twelve-year-old boy, who scavenges the rubbish heaps, like Abdul, finds a less oversubscribed spot to ply his trade: a narrow ledge seventy-five feet above the Mithi River. But unable to feed himself by scavenging, he turns to stealing. A more secretive operator, Kalu, steals metal scrap from the recycling bins inside airline catering compounds but keeps getting caught by the local police until he decides to enter into a bargain act with them, with shocking results.

By the time the book ends, three years later, most of these lives have run into the sands. How cheap, disposable and unknown these people’s lives are, you may think, but Sunil beats you to it: as he stands on the roof of a construction site from where he steals metal, he comes to the realisation that his may be a bad life but it was inalienably his and ‘that a boy’s life could still matter to himself.’

Boo takes us into the very engine-room of the undercity and shines a light on each of the cogs and ratchets, its unique catenation of cause and effects, its dynamics and webbed dependencies. The implicit question is not how to make these lives better; it’s a question that should precede it: what drives these lives and how. Before prescription there should be knowledge; Boo’s book provides the adamantine, unignorable, truthful kind. Horror stories abound. Of Sunil and his sister Boo writes, ‘Rats had bitten them both while they slept, and the bites had turned into head boils. But [the sister] had recently become a baldie, because her boils had erupted with worms.’ Fatima has drowned her sickly two-year-old girl, Medina, in a pail because the family cannot afford the ruinous cost of medical care.

And yet all this never descends into horrorism. Boo is unsentimental, unjudgemental, uncondescending, yet brimful of compassion brought about by what I can only call fellowship or a kind of commonality with her subjects. It is not a hand-wringingly angry book; she has moved beyond it, assimilating the anger into moral energy and pressing it into the service of – I keep returning to this term – unflinching truth-telling. Behind it lies the fiction of Rohinton Mistry or the reportage of, say, P. Sainath’s Everyone Loves A Good Drought, even Philip Gourevitch’s book on Rwanda. In a short, lucid and clear-eyed ‘Author’s Note’ at the end of the book, she asks, ‘If the house is crooked and crumbling, and the land on which it sits uneven, is it possible to make anything lie straight?’ The moral reverberations of that question can be deafening.

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The respectable relationship Alexander is in, the one that culminates in marriage, is with his beautiful fellow-student, Sonia. She is perfectly assembled: daughter of wealthy parents, intelligent, ambitious, focused almost exclusively on her work; architecture for her is a vocation, not a job. She is also earnest, humourless, driven. Alex himself notes that she ‘was incapable of passion, and I sometimes got the feeling she was watching herself while we made love, to make sure she kept her dignity’.

Just when you begin to think that Swiss author Peter Stamm’s Seven Years is Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage rewritten for our times, you wake up to one of the salient features of the novel: Stamm has allowed us very little, if any, entry into the heads of the two women, Sonia and Ivona, in this unflinching spin on that oldest of all stories. The interpretive space this gives the reader is seemingly inexhaustible. The triangulation between a man, his wife and his lover becomes a meditation, cool and pellucid, on what ties or unbinds a man and a woman, about whether desire fastens or liberates. Narrated by Alexander, the man who forms the third vertex of the triangle, Seven Years springs surprises that are retrospectively explosive for the calm surface of its austere, even parched, prose lulls us into believing, wrongly, that it is bleached of emotion.

It is a measure of the richness of the novel that one can ask endless questions about, among other things, why Alex and Sonia get married without ever managing to pin it down. Both, in their different ways, buy into the image or idea of a perfect bourgeois marriage with all its attendant trappings and trimmings; they are married to some cultural notions of marriage than to each other.

Despite breaking off his relationship with Ivona just before he gets married, Alex searches her out seven years later and they resume their encounters. ‘It wasn’t pleasure that tied me to her,’ he confesses; ‘it was a feeling I hadn’t had since childhood, a mixture of freedom and protectedness. It was as though time stood still when I was with her, which was precisely what gave those moments their weight.’ This time there are consequences: Ivona becomes pregnant. And there are externalities outside the control of Alex and Sonia when the global financial crisis sinks their firm. From here everything can only be, you would think, a series of unravellings. Well, yes and no; it all depends on the light your mind is shining on the book.

You could read Alex and Sonia’s marriage as an illustration of the ways class co-opts desire for its own fulfilment. The presence of Ivona is where the urgings of class trip up over a more fundamental desire loosed from the moorings of societal requirements. Yet this desire is not without its immense cost either, perhaps a greater one, as Alex realises, in a typically self-enclosed manner, by the end of the book. The cumulative emotional impact of this, especially when you consider Ivona, is quietly shattering. How many writers have written with this degree of brutal perceptiveness and wisdom about the indeterminate depths of heterosexual desire? Very few: Wharton, Roth (sometimes), James Salter, Kundera. Stamm inscribes his name in that august list.

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The motivation for the book is odd: to chivvy Americans not to believe in talk about the twilight of American power and to rouse them out of their despondency. It’s beating that old, old drum of American exceptionalism, so solidly in the territory of ideology, yet Robinson somehow thinks that discourses, hers especially, can be made to stand outside and above ideology. How exactly? In the best essay in the collection, ‘Austerity as Ideology’, despite using the term in a severely truncated manner to be co-terminous solely with economic thinking, ie, capitalism and communism, she shows with a clear eye how the ‘supranational power, Economics Pantocrator’ and the dominance of free-market capitalism have eroded our lives. Her sustained criticism of rational-choice theory comes from a place of great humanity and is stringent and unimpeachable. Yet in ‘Wondrous Love’, the most overtly Christian of all the essays in the book, the rallying of Americans into a sense of national pride again, falls on an unwillingness or inability to engage with global politics and America’s supremely powerful position in it in the last century. How can any such argument leave out geopolitics? Isn’t that elision itself deeply ideological?

And yet all this reference to God leads her down the path of generous, humane, inclusionary thinking. She speaks of the dignity of man and the essential integrity and mystery of each human life. Her belief in and insistence on the best of human nature is humbling and her call to cultivate and deepen this is surely a vital need in our history now.

A different kind of inclusivity lies at the heart of Jonathan Lethem’s collection of essays, occasional pieces, musings, reviews, arguments, homage, and miscellanea, The Ecstasy of Influence. It’s a mixed bag, serious and seriously playful meditations on how there is no privileged outside from which leverage can be brought to bear on postmodernism nestling against an eloquently purple (and lovely) riff on Donald Sutherland’s buttocks in the famous sex-scene from Don’t Look Now. Mixed, yes, but in the sense of eclectic; every single piece is compelling, stylish, impassioned, even throwaway ones such as half a page on the use of furniture in fiction.

The virtuoso title piece, playful and complete with a Waste Land-style ‘Notes’ (except funnier), encapsulates Lethem’s strengths and weaknesses. It is witty, infectiously enthusiastic in celebrating allusions, debts and intertextuality, passionate in its defence of cultural ‘borrowings’, but the substantial core of it is familiar Eng Lit territory. And yet it makes a new shape out of Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence as if a jazz master had inverted the book then transcribed and played it.

His immersion in and championing of science fiction, notably the novels of Philip K. Dick, some kind of a lifelong obsession, is both refreshing and necessary; in fact, bright seams of his love for sci-fi turn up everywhere in the book. At times a kind of self-regard and hipness creep into the book but they’re easily brushed off; who cares if the mind on display is so thrillingly alive and electric? You can forgive him anything for the angry attack on James Wood, ‘an unpersuasive critic whose air of erudite amplitude veil[s] – barely – a punitive parochialism.’ Ouch; but also: wow.

Lethem is marked by a consuming cultural voracity, which, in no way, is a sign of indiscrimination: his essay, ‘Against “Pop” Culture’, tries to demolish the idea of pop culture as something monolithic and, in its place, construct something where individual choices and tastes give a wide latitude of freedom to opt out. At one point he calls Slavoj Zizek the ‘hipster-provocateur of contemporary political thought’. Hipster-provocateur – the term will do rather nicely for Lethem himself.

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The story is almost elementally simple. At the age of fifteen, the narrator falls in love with a young girl, Saba, who belongs to a significantly upper class than him; her father is one of the chief political agents of the area and a match between the two is unthinkable. The boy courts her at a local wedding but is discovered and punished for it by the girl’s father. In a fit of temper, the boy snatches the switch from his hand and attacks the father. The next day he is picked up by the police, beaten up ruthlessly and locked up in a prison far from his village. In prison he is tortured for fifteen years until one day he’s released suddenly, without any reason. While behind bars, he dreams of the swooping, plunging flight of the swallows in his father’s pomegranate orchard. Then one day he thinks he sees ‘a flutter of the light at the window’. He watches closely and sees ‘a shadow pass, too quick to leave a shape’. Slowly, unbelievingly, he realises that there are swallows here. He feels something: ‘It was joy, and it was the most painful thing I have ever felt, because it reminded me of everything we no longer owned.’ It is unbearable enough to make you turn your eyes away from the page.

He emerges a broken man, literally, a creature so bent and twisted by what has been done to him that he finds it difficult to walk, breathe, eat, drink. He’s discovered, sick and disabled, by a kind man, Abbas, not far from his old home, now no longer belonging to his family, which has disappeared. It is Abbas who slowly nurses him back to some semblance of normality. As he rakes over the events that have brought him to the present moment, he asks what remains of the emotion that has provided him salvation in his darkest hour, his love for Saba; indeed, what is left of the core of his selfhood: ‘The boy I once was is a stranger to me, and sometimes I wonder if terrible experiences are enough to change a person – I mean fundamentally to change a person’s nature – or if they merely subdue it, and it endures there beneath, and will reassert itself in time.’

Written as a kind of gift-book addressed to his beloved Saba, the book remains faithful to its conceit of being penned by a man who is learning the language late in his interrupted life under the tutelage of his saviour, for the prose has a childlike simplicity, indeed innocence, about it. In this, it answers to a corresponding innocence in the narrator. The redemptive force in a book as brutal and bleak as this lies exactly here: that a man whose life goes through as harrowing a process of diminishment as Lear’s can still hold on to such gentleness, such unwavering belief in his love, is a Pascalian wager of faith.

One of the odd effects of the book derives from the oppositional counterpoint between what is being said and how it is being said: the style, pared down to the point of seeming blanched in places, is so simple that it feels like one is dipping one’s feet in a cold, pristine stream after a day’s arduous hike, while the subject matter, savage and excoriating, is the stuff of nightmares.

With the exception of two pages in which the Taliban and 9/11 are glancingly mentioned, Hobbs carefully keeps his fictional world free of political particulars, choosing rather to fashion something with the generality of fable. Towards the end of the book Hobbs acknowledges, with exemplary restraint and subtlety, the growing presence of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistani society: the world of the narrator, already so precarious and frangible, seems even more threatened. In the immensely affecting final pages, as the metaphorical resonances of the pomegranate orchard sound their plangent music and the possibility of a reunion with Saba recedes further, the narrator finds yet another redemptive strand in the selfless generosity and kindness of Abbas.

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‘Memory is not the opposite of forgetting’, Milan Kundera has remarked, ‘rather, it is a kind of forgetting.’ At times, Julian Barnes’s eleventh novel, The Sense of an Ending, winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, seems to be a slightly too exhaustive, and a good deal too heavy-handed, or oversignalled, if you will, an exploration of that thought.

Written from the vantage point of old age, which, it is hinted, are most likely the winter years of the life of Tony Webster, Barnes’s first-person narrator, the short, crisp, precise novel at first fools you into thinking that it’s a meditation on ageing and mortality and the treacherous domain of memory, a sort of wry, dry, appropriately diminutive English variant of the short novels Philip Roth has been producing of late: The Dying Animal, Exit Ghost, Everyman, Indignation, Nemesis. The title itself, a nod to Frank Kermode’s dense critical work, published in 1967, on how fiction attempts to give form to the flux that is time, is more deceptive than it appears. Rereading Kermode’s book nearly twenty years after I first tussled with it as a green undergraduate, I’m so struck by the hinges between Barnes’s novel and the earlier work that it is difficult to escape the thought that Barnes is opening up a conversation with the critical essay. Here is Kermode talking about how literature imposes a false paradigm on time:
“The clock’s ‘tick-tock’ I take to be a model of what we call a plot, an organisation which humanises time by giving it a form; and the interval between ‘tock’ and ‘tick’ represents purely successive, disorganised time of the sort we need to humanise.” Now read the first page of the novel.

Or this:
“We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it’s not convenient – it’s not useful – to believe this; it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.”

Or how about the following:
“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life.”

For a book that weighs in at 150 pages, just, much heavy weather is made of such faux-philosophising; the thoughts are not exactly original. It is these frequent passages that dupe us into thinking that the book is going to be one of those fictional meditations on time, such as Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, that jiggles the kaleidoscope of reality (and the possibilities of fiction) into a new shape. Not only is it no such thing but it also transpires that these oversignallings serve only to provide a respectable fig-leaf for that old, old friend: a literary mystery story. How English it seems, this commute from the lofty to the pedestrian, masquerading as profound. The mystery narrative has all the right ingredients – the unreliable/forgetful narrator; a suicide; a burnt diary; missing letters; a character who keeps saying to Tony, ‘You just don’t get it at all, do you? You never did’, a club-footed way of indicating to readers that they don’t get it either and that a Revelation is going to come along soon that is going to turn the fictional world upside down for them. (A not entirely irrelevant aside: Barnes has written, under the nom de plume Dan Kavanagh, four crime-fiction novels featuring a detective named Duffy.)

Three friends at school allow the newcomer Adrian to become part of their group. Adrian, they discover, has a sharper mind than theirs and has that quality so utterly rare among the English, of being serious about serious things, although the core of this serious new friend seems to be unknowable and unreachable. Part of this territory Barnes has traversed before, with witty astringency, in his first novel, Metroland. After school, Tony goes to university in Bristol and Adrian to Cambridge. At Bristol, Tony has a brief and rebarbative relationship – although non-relationship would be a more accurate term – with Veronica, who, shortly after their acrimonious breakup, starts going out with Adrian, a fact Tony only discovers when Adrian writes to him to ask him for permission to do so. Tony writes him a facetious card to the effect of ‘Be my guest’ and, later, a more considered, serious letter. He spends a year travelling in the USA then returns home to the news of Adrian’s suicide. From this point onwards Barnes masterfully compresses the events in Tony’s life that are not germane to this particular story – steady job; marriage to Margaret; birth of daughter, Susie; divorce; retirement – to two pages then moves on to Part Two, where the long shadow of the past with Veronica and Adrian falls over Tony’s life again.

A bequest of £500 and some ‘documents’ from the recently-deceased Sarah Ford, Veronica’s mother, whom Tony had met only once, on a weekend visit to Veronica’s family in the brief period they were seeing each other in university, reawakens the past and Tony’s curiosity, not least because the ‘document’, which Tony discovers from the solicitor is Adrian’s diary, has been withheld by Veronica. He doggedly pursues Veronica, whom he hasn’t seen since they split up, into giving them to him. The tension is ratcheted up. Why does Veronica give him only one page of Adrian’s diary? The page contains some pretty dodgy cod-philosophising, arranged like the propositions of a tract on logic to fool readers into thinking that they’re getting Wittgenstein redux. A later elucidation of the symbols used in the page serves only to highlight, unintentionally, the bathos involved in applying analytical philosophy to the events of a private life but more on this later.

Then there is Veronica, already an intensely annoying creature (and surely the character whose actions are the least credible), who does not help her cause, nor Tony’s, by repeatedly stating that he doesn’t get things, that he never did. To substantiate this, she gives him a copy of the serious letter he wrote to Adrian and Veronica shortly after finding out that they were going out. The letter, of which Tony has no memory, comes as a jet of cold water between his eyes. It is gratuitously cruel and petty, and Tony, thinking that this is what drove Adrian over the edge, is afflicted by severe remorse. Another round of determined pursual of the remarkably unyielding Veronica follows, this time to apologise and try to make amends. Nested disclosures follow and I’m going to reveal them because the final twist in the book is the weakest and its great defect. A laconic Veronica, refusing to offer Tony any explanations before, during or afterwards, takes Tony to see a group of what he assumes are care-in-the-community people – people with severe learning difficulties – on a pub outing. One of them, a goofy-looking man of forty but with the mental age of a child, seems especially pleased to see Veronica and calls her Mary. Tony’s persistent questions about who they are, why Veronica has brought him to watch them from her parked car, why the man called her Mary, what their condition is, are all met with steely silence and, finally, ejection from the car.

Tony, determined to find out the truth, follows the group on their next expedition to the pub and talks to their carer. Understanding finally dawns on him: the man who called Veronica Mary is Adrian and Veronica’s son. This causes him much anguish as one of the things he had written in that savage letter was, ‘Part of me hopes you have a child, because I’m a great believer in time’s revenge. But revenge must be on the right people, i.e. you two. … So I don’t wish you that. It would be unjust to inflict on some innocent foetus the prospect of discovering that it was the fruit of your loins, if you’ll excuse the poeticism.’ Be careful of what you wish for, they say; seeing his imprecation embodied like this curdles something in Tony. He writes a heartfelt letter of apology to Veronica again only to be told, yet again, that he still doesn’t get it. So the earlier twist wasn’t the last one, there’s a final turn still to come. In a chance encounter at the same pub some months later, Tony has another conversation with a carer who is minding the same group. It emerges that the disabled man is not Veronica’s son but Adrian’s son with her mother, Sarah. Like pieces in a giant puzzle, everything begins to fall into place for Tony: the goofy man’s condition; the cryptic remarks of Veronica and her taciturnity; Adrian’s suicide; that page from his diary; Sarah Ford’s bequest to Tony, which Veronica had called ‘blood money’.

What doesn’t make sense is the dissonance between the content or exact nature of the illumination and the feelings, indeed the existential crisis, it generates in Tony and, by extension, is supposed to engender in the reader. A man gets his girlfriend’s mother up the duff; the son born to them, at a dangerously late age, is physically and mentally damaged; the man in question kills himself: this may precipitate, if you are the extremely hypersensitive type, as Adrian clearly is, some grave predicament in the culpable man’s life – it’s hardly the stuff of what used to be called la condition humaine – but what are the chances that it induces in this man’s school friend an existential contingency of equal magnitude? For of such proportions it is; no page goes by, particularly in Part Two, when we are not treated to sombre assessments of the Big Things: guilt versus remorse; memory as fiction; the vast human capacity for delusion as a self-protective measure; selfishness that knowledge turns to self-flagellation; the nature of history and time; whether life is a series of accumulations and where responsibility features in it. They are wise, stylish, unpretentious, if predictable, and emerge organically from plot and character, but you wouldn’t expect anything less from a writer of Barnes’s calibre. It is when you stand back and ask yourself what has given rise to such meditations, the disproportionate nature of it can only lead to anticlimax; after all, Tony’s crime, if such it can be called, is of obtuseness and inadvertent insensitivity, venial matters in the grand design of things. It is true that Tony is an unreliable narrator but even here Barnes seems to be lagging behind the lethally effective revivifications of this other hoary old device in fiction that, say, Ishiguro’s novels or Zoe Heller’s Notes on a Scandal have achieved. After all, a lot of Tony’s ignorance is caused by Veronica’s cussed behaviour (but then if she did come clean from the very beginning there would be no novel).

Or is this matter of disproportionality, which has the unfortunate effect of making the book less than the sum of its parts, somehow Tony’s belated internalisation of a kind of intellectual and behavioural rebellion first sounded by Adrian in his first year at university when he baffles his friends and punctures an inalienable aspect of their Englishness by declaring, ‘ “I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious. I really hate it.’ ” But to be not only serious about serious things but to also overplay the serious hand to the extent that it brings about an incommensurability between fact and feeling: would that be a liberation from Englishness too?

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The inversion certainly goes towards explaining the minor-work feel that suffuses It’s Fine By Me. Set in Oslo in the hinge between the sixties and the seventies and narrated in the first-person by its teenage protagonist, Audun Sletten, It’s Fine By Me is a restrained tale of rebellion, fortitude and survival, a sounding of most of the themes that Petterson is going to keep returning to, deepening the scope and extent of his meditations, in his future works. We first meet Audun when he joins a mixed-school in Veitvet in Oslo; he refuses to take off his sunglasses indoors, lying to his teacher that he has terrible scars around his eyes. The reason for donning the sunglasses will surface much later in the book. At school, he strikes up a friendship with Arvid Jansen; this is the same Arvid who will become the protagonist of Petterson’s 2008 novel, I Curse The River of Time. The boys are united by a passion for reading – books by Jack London, Hemingway, Eldridge Cleaver, Irving Stone’s biography of London, all put in an appearance – and left-wing activism (Arvid is even a paid-up member of the National Liberation Front) and, later, a tender, understated bond of mutual protectiveness.

While it is hinted that Audun, his sister Kari and their mother have escaped from the shadow of a great threat to the safety of Veitvet, within the first fifteen pages we are told of the tragedy that struck the family after they moved to the city: the death of Audun’s fifteen-year-old brother, Egil, when he drove a Volvo into the River Glomma and drowned. Nearly the entire book takes place in the year after Egil’s death but the complex and dense layering of time that has come to be the structural signature of Petterson’s work, and of which Out Stealing Horses is the finest flowering, begins to germinate here so there is a carefully staggered narration of the damage in the Slettens’ past. But here, again, is the bathos to readers who have read Out Stealing Horses first: the past is nowhere nearly as damagingly awful as it is in the later book; neither is the fractured commuting between various levels of history, memory and the present, done with such seemingly miraculous artistry in Out Stealing Horses, the thing of perfectly-wrought intricacy that it will become in Petterson’s hands a decade on.

What rings out with the clarity of a perfectly-cast bell are other things: to begin with, the dammed rage of an adolescent, the impatience to be done with the transition and become a grown-up overnight. The mandatory accompaniments of brittle swagger and the carefully composed mask of nonchalance are perfectly captured. In the concluding section of the book, Arvid finally calls the bluff on Audun’s mantra, ‘It’s fine by me’, which has been a talisman to protect him from losing face. On the last page, the healing thaw begins as the veneer of perfect control breaks; Audun at last becomes an adult.

Audun leaves school just before finishing to start work in the rotary press section of a printing plant; much against his mother’s wishes, he decides on this, he tells her, in order to help her out with money. A snapshot of working-class life in one of the world’s most successful welfare states, the book is true to its contents by giving its readers the texture and feel of the ‘work’ bit in working-class: the scenes in the publishing factory, with its gallery of larger-than-life characters, are executed with not only a magical attention to detail but also with heart-swelling affection. At a time when the tide in socialist activism seems to have left, making it appear to be peculiarly retro detritus on the shores of history, these sections of the novel about ‘factory floor work’ can be piercingly affecting and nostalgic at the same time.

Humming away behind all this is Audun’s real ambition, one that he keeps well-hidden from the world – to be a writer. In a secluded forest with a view of a long, glittering lake in front of him, Audun tries to put Hemingway’s precept into practice: to write one true sentence. In giving him page after page of clear, glitchless and truthful writing, Petterson has wittily infolded two ambitions within a writer’s power to fulfil a character’s wish. Those long, falling arcs of luminous language are yet to come but the glimmers are all here.

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Set in what appears to be a studiedly timeless Middle East, at once ancient and modern, Habibi tells the story of two slave children, Dodola and Zam, who escape from the flesh-market and build a new life in a marooned barge in the middle of the desert. Dodola, nine years older than Zam, sells herself to passing caravans for food, something Zam, to his horror, witnesses one day. It is a scene that will mark him forever. Dodola is kidnapped again and sold to the harem of the decadent Sultan of Wanatolia, where she becomes his favourite mistress. The separation between Dodola and Zam, something that haunts both of them, carries distinct allegorical overtones of the separation of the soul from God that we find in, say, Sufi mysticism or the Song of Songs. When, years later, they are united, both are marked by some shocking changes, as is the world of environmental waste in which they find themselves, and their attempts to build another life together again founder on the cruelty of the world.

Did Paul Klee have Arabic calligraphy in mind when he observed that drawing was taking a line for a walk? On the evidence of Habibi, Thompson certainly does; the close symbiosis between Western representational art and the extremely stylised centuries-old Oriental tradition, chasing each other in a circle on the pages of his book, can be, at moments, nothing short of explosive. His study and deployment of Arabic calligraphy amazes, and not only in its more straightforward, decorative use but also in its metaphorical collisions with the story. An English-language graphic novel written and drawn by an American that manages to have an Arabic visual feel and responsibly convey some of the spiritual underpinnings of Islamic faith – this would be a memorable achievement at any time but at our particular juncture in history it is nothing short of vital.

Executed with enormous empathy and something that in earlier times would have been called divine inspiration, Habibi is an extraordinary milestone in the world of drawn stories. Who would have thought that black ink could make such complex, soul-filling music?

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But compared with that miraculously beautiful earlier book, in which memory and imagination fused into such a luminous whole, The Cat’s Table arrives stillborn. The first half of the book is taken up exclusively with the events and characters on board; the child’s point of view is not so much a child’s as the adult’s retrospectively constructing it from memory. Michael quickly forms an alliance with two other boys of the same age, Cassius and Ramadhin; the trio is inseparable except that the gentle Ramadhin, because of his weak heart, does not participate in some of the wilder escapades of the other two. The passengers on boards are a pied lot: the wallflowery yet mysterious Miss Lasqueti, who sits drawing, and reading crime paperbacks, which she flings overboard if they don’t engage her interest; a dumb tailor called Gunesekera; Michael’s cousin, the beautiful Emily de Saram, who is headed for Cheltenham Ladies’ College; Mr Daniels, a botanist, who is taking a huge and entire tropical garden, laid out in the hold of the ship, to England; an immensely wealthy man, Hector de Silva, mysteriously bitten by his own dog as a result of a curse, journeying to Harley Street to seek a cure for his hydrophobia; a deaf girl, Asuntha, who is afraid of water; a bawdy, worldly-wise Sicilian musician, Mr Mazappa, acolyte of Sidney Bechet; even a travelling circus, the Jankla Troupe. Towering above everyone is Niemayer, a sinister prisoner, padlocked and chained at his neck, wrists and ankles, who is brought out by guards every evening, when the deck is clear, for his daily airing. The stories of each of these colourful people emerge somewhat inorganically, one after the other, a lot of it in wanly inert narration.

This being an Ondaatje novel, there are some stunning, and slightly incredible, set-pieces, the literary equivalent of special effects: that garden in the bowels of the ship; a film screening on the deck; a spectacular fifty-knot gale, with deluge-like rains, that Cassius and Michael witness tied up to the railings in the Promenade Deck. Even the Orientalism-lite that he usually does so beautifully appears in a pallid version in the ship’s crossing of Aden. Hanging over everything is an air of slackness and dispersion, as if a magnetic core that binds everything into coherence, into direction, is missing. The problem with fiction centred on set-pieces is that, once the novelty value has worn off, the truth left behind in the crucible seems ashier than ever.

About halfway through the book, the adult Michael steps in and the immediacy of the child’s experiences recedes to become more self-consciously memory. The change of focus jars, particularly because the transition, telling the story of the untimely death of Ramadhin at the age of thirty, and Michael’s short, doomed relationship with Ramadhin’s sister, Massi, is strained, weak, unconvincing. A faux-profound preciousness that comes close to camp, never very far in Ondaatje’s fiction, creeps in here and, later, when he is writing about the cautious hearts of self-contained creatures such as Cassius and Michael, both, interestingly, artists. These are old clichés microwaved and served pretty but you do ultimately reach the unheated core.

The gap between what is and what a child or a first-person narrator sees and understands can be explosive in fiction; think of What Maisie Knew or Ishiguro’s novels. Here it simply refuses to fly largely because it requires the adult Michael to keep intervening and piecing together for us the momentous events that are part of the shortfall in the two understandings. ‘Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.’ But this clarification of all that has evaded a child’s knowledge has the odd effect of making not the adult-child dichotomies but the previous section, the one that is more undilutedly the eleven-year-old’s experiences on Oronsay, become drained of its lifeblood. The revelations have to do with a true illumination of Niemeyer’s story and how several passengers, notably Emily, Asuntha, Miss Lasqueti, and the Jankla Troupe, amongst others, were secret participants in his drama.

This aspect of the book, after it has settled into the change in gear despite the initial jolt, is gripping and succeeds in coaxing to wakefulness the sleeping narrative. The penultimate chapter, ‘Letter to Cassius’, all of one and a half pages, is again plumb in the centre of the kitschy territory Ondaatje falls into when he is peddling ‘truths of the heart’. And yet, as if to remind us what he can do when he is writing authentically, the final chapter, ‘Arrival’, is a compact piece of emotional truthfulness, grave and playful at the same time, beautifully written and moving. Would that all of it were cut from the same cloth.

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