Set between the years 1898 and 1922, C is the story of Serge Carrefax, born on the estate of Versoie in Lydium in southern England, to a father who experiments with wireless and runs a school for the deaf-mute, and a mother who oversees the production and trading of silk from the estate. Serge’s older sister, Sophie, is obsessed with the natural world, especially with insects, while Serge grows up smitten by wireless and radio. A mysterious madness takes hold of Sophie and she kills herself by taking cyanide. The adolescent Serge journeys to an eastern European spa town, Klodebrady, to seek a cure for the black bile that seems to be blocking his insides and affecting his vision.

Cure effected, he is enlisted by his godfather, Widsun, into the RFC during the Great War as an ‘observer’: he becomes a wireless operator in spotter planes that fly over German territory. This section, titled ‘Chute’ – all four sections of the book have titles beginning with C – is the one where McCarthy’s inspiration from the Italian Futurist, Marinetti, and his ‘Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ (1909), is at its most transparent and conspicuous. Serge aspires to the condition of machines, of becoming one with them. He finds flying an intensely erotic experience. It is at the war front that he develops a taste for both cocaine and heroin, a habit he pursues in London after the war is over. Then in 1922, Widsun packs him off to Egypt to compile reports on a potential Empire Wireless Chain that is being set up. And it is here, where the ancient and modern worlds rub up against each other, and a dizzying variety of cultures and histories collide, that McCarthy’s own vertiginous and dazzling work of occluded, unperceived affinities, begins to make those spectral connections apparent. Insects and incest; catacombs, crypts, encrypting; dead siblings; sex and death; patterns, micro and macro – all start coming together in this polyphonic echo chamber of a novel.

The word ‘experimental’ to describe this densely, exultantly imaginative book is being bandied about with great abandon and it is not only misleading but also wrong. Beckett’s prose work is experimental, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch is, the novels of BS Johnson are, Pale Fire makes the grade as does Kelman’s Translated Accounts; the defining feature of a truly experimental work is its form. While C is unquestionably brilliant, usefully denting the model of the psychological realism that is the dominant mode of our conservative times by its unique, disorientating glance at modernism, it is less experimental than its predecessor, Remainder, or any of the novels mentioned above. It takes no risks with form and structure, using the realist frame for its own subversive purposes. Instead, it’s the constant ripple of subterranean correspondences, the whispery yet omnipresent symphony of codes and signals that provides the matrix of the book, that kinks it into a new thing. He writes under the shadow of Ballard – there are allusions to both Crash and The Unlimited Dream Company – in his central theme of the hinge and overlap between subjectivity and technology while works of figures who belong to or are great influences on the modernist movement, such as Freud, provide its theoretical underpinnings. At times, the book diffracts Derrida, at others, early Barthes and Lacan; this is not only a deeply literary book, but also equally literate. I suspect it’ll keep critical theory geeks happily fishing in it for years.

In the heady triangulation between humans, technology and ciphers, C seems to be a pointer to one way in which all meaning is created: the selection of certain elements from an infinite set and then bracketing them off. The selection can be arbitrary, as systems of signification usually are, but who can deny the power, poetry and wit of C in its attempt to posit technology, particularly in its protean forms of signals and waves (wireless, radio, Morse), encryption, transmission, as one of those systems, like language, that creates the human? It is written in prose that is precise, radiant, approaching poetry repeatedly, with a sustained ease of transaction between the minute and the massive.

A kind of archaeology of modernism, C is truly modernist in its ludic nature, in the games it plays, both within the boundaries of its fictional world and also in the numerous conversations that that world sets up with discourses, texts and worlds outside it. It is an intensely deliberate act that the book’s end should come at 1922, the year of publication of two crucial modernist texts, The Waste Land and Ulysses; C inserts itself, slyly yet confidently, into the history of modernism. This is a genuinely exciting and spookily beautiful book, a new kind of joy.

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Thirty-six years after that opening, June, now afflicted by terminal bowel cancer, packs up her successful antiques business in New York and sets out on a journey to Italy to discover her son, Nicholas, who has disappeared from her life and subsists, it is intimated, on petty thieving. In this mission she enlists the help of Hector Brennan, a hard-drinking, brooding guy who works as a janitor in a Korean supermarket mall. Hector, it emerges, served in the war in Korea in 1951 – for him, this service is a way of salving the guilt he feels for being responsible for his father’s death – and stayed on in the country afterwards. He meets June, a teenager then, at the New Hope orphanage, where a kind Korean pastor gives him work as the institution’s handyman. He eventually brings June to the USA and marries her in order to give her an American passport. But, before that departure from Korea, a vital story, involving Sylvie Tanner, an American missionary’s wife (and a heroin addict), who attracts both Hector and June in intense and destructive capacities, has to be told. By the time Hector and June leave for the USA, their lives are bound by several accretions of devastation and tragedy. Now, three decades later, the tentacles of that damaged past reach out again to embrace June and Hector. It is characteristic of a novel about pitting the human spirit against vast historical forces, especially against the destructive, all-consuming force of war, that a crucial chapter should be set on the site of a bloody battle in 1859.

Recalling the best of Hemingway’s thematic concerns at times, The Surrendered is a brilliantly written meditation on the residue of the individual and the human left behind in the crucible of conflict. Its prose, a thing of stately yet precise beauty, often rises to the level of plangent poetry. Here is an example: ‘[Hector would] rather deal with the horror of a rotting body visibly shifting and radiating a sickening warmth from its hold of maggots than that clean red proxy of life.’ That ‘clean red proxy of life’ captures, in all its metaphorical accuracy, the mocking irony of a sign of life turning to a sign of the end of life, an easy transformation in the fields of war.

What detracts from this magnificent achievement, at times, is the overdone fatalism and sulky defeat of Hector, one of life’s ‘surrendered’ persons, biding his time for the inevitable with a resignation bordering on inertia. Weak, too, is the overdetermined and predictable triangle between June, Sylvie and Hector. And yet, it remains an uncompromising and moving novel, especially in its final scene, where June hands Hector a kind of redemption that completes, with poetic obliquity, the ruptured arc of their pasts.

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So, when an offer arrives, of driving to the northernmost inhabited point in Britain, in the Shetland Isles, to sell eco-friendly toothbrushes (wooden handle, boar’s hair bristles) to the residents there, Sim jumps at the opportunity in the hope that some salvation might lie in this attempt to reconnect with the wider peopled world outside. Not the least part of the attraction is to visit, en route, Caroline and Lucy in Kendal. There is an errand, too, to be run: retrieving a file from his father’s flat, uninhabited for decades, in Lichfield. It is one of the hoariest tropes in the arts that a road trip is also a trip down memory lane and Coe obliges but a lot less straightforwardly than one would fear. As the man in the car becomes emblematic of the isolated, enisled modern man, and Sim’s past begins to get filled out for the reader (and, indeed, crucially to Sim himself), the main narrative is intercalated with four paratexts: a letter to Poppy, Sim’s fellow-passenger on a long-haul flight, written by her uncle; a short story written by Caroline; an essay written by Alison, one of Sim’s childhood friends, as part of her degree in psychology; and, finally, a piece by Sim’s father. These four pieces, while adding mosaic brilliance or the cleverness of a jigsaw puzzle (take your pick) to the story, remain ultimately too contrived to convince. Yes, they give information in oblique and surprising ways to the reader (and to Sim himself; he’s nothing if not a reincarnation of Ishiguro’s baffled, ignorant, wilfully unseeing central characters) but they are also, obtrusively and irritatingly, tricksy devices.

An early sounding of the Donald Crowhurst story – a Walter Mitty-type figure who fooled the world temporarily into thinking that he had circumnavigated the globe in a single-handed yacht in 1969 – acquires heavy strings and brass as the novel progresses and connections between Sim’s own journey and Crowhurst’s, both underpinned by existential crises, come thick and fast. In a novel that often feels overcontrived and overplotted, this business of Sim turning into a modern-day Crowhurst is one of the most laboured and incredible. By the time the pieces about Sim’s past fall into place, including a key revelation about his father and an identical one about his own self, showing that alienated father and son are far closer than one could have ever imagined, the clockwork-like artifice of the plotting has robbed it of any credibility or emotional impact. The final chapter, a postmodern sleight of hand, is fatally irritating.

And yet Coe manages to sound some plangently truthful chords in exploring Sim’s loneliness. The desolation at the heart of the book (and the nation) is sometimes played as comedy – and some of it spot-on too – but more often as anguish. Sim frequently works as an effective and moving barometer of a fractured, empty, miserable society, high on its plethora of consumer choices, low on the ‘Only connect’ principle, while at other times the impulse to comedy detracts from the emotional impact. Did we really need the four pages on spam porn to emphasise that Sim has no friends?

Not a single of Jonathan Coe’s novels since his acknowledged masterpiece of 1994, What a Carve Up!, that crazed, raging, manically and tragically hilarious dissection of Thatcher’s Britain, has come close to matching it. It is a fact that Coe is not unaware of: subsequent books attempted similar state-of-the-nation novels – The Rotters’ Club (2001) took in the seventies and The Closed Circle (2004) the early Blair years – but the magic seemed to have gone. This, too, is an honourable stab at another state-of-the-nation novel, let down by pat, outrageously confected plotting and silly games.

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As the book burrows into the lives of these individuals, much in the manner of Altman’s Short Cuts, a pattern emerges of their intersections and the original spark of the novel’s dynamo, the slap, gets sidetracked – we reach the conclusion of the consequences of the act long before the end – to concentrate instead on the very soul of multicultural Australia in the twenty-first century. Far more important events, tensions, animosities, fissures and relationships unfold in this book, which could well be one of the most successful state-of-the-nation novels of our times.

A book of such wide scope and canvas cannot be without its flaws: the prose can be clunky in places, the frequent sex scenes are uniformly awful, some characters are more interesting and convincing than others, while the soap structure somewhat traduces the novel’s ambitions. But these are only murmurs against a genuinely important, edgy, urgent book that hunts big game. Nothing escapes Tsiolkas’s lacerating gaze: the casual racism that blights Australian culture; the fractures of an uneasily assimilated multicultural society; the contradictions and inconsistencies of liberalism; the crisis of masculinity. The novel keeps readers constantly on their toes, pushing boundaries, questioning lazy assumptions, provoking and, above all, smuggling in unease under the guileful blanket of a gripping read.

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And what a life it is! A disciple of Linnaeus, the great taxonomist, Sparrman travels first to the East Indies and China as ship’s doctor, collecting plant and animal specimens unknown to Europe. Then he joins Captain Cook, on the Resolution, on his voyage to the Antarctic, which is followed by a journey to the interior of the Western Cape. This journey into the wilds of the karoo provides some of the most electric pages in the book, describing with exquisite attentiveness the landscape, the flora and the fauna but also the horrifying canker of slavery, seen firsthand. The return to Sweden in the late 1770s was always going to be a great anticlimax for him, despite being appointed the curator of the Cabinet of Natural History of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, and he becomes a victim of pettiness and bureaucratic corruption but personal salvation arrives in the form of a late-blossoming love that sustains him for over twenty years. He dies a bankrupt, laid to rest in the anonymity of a common grave.

Alternating between first-person accounts in Sparrman’s own voice, a substantial portion of which is sewn together from his letters and his published work, and a third-person narration from Sparrman’s point of view, the book is a subtle, breathtaking achievement. As historical fiction, it effortlessly and magisterially prises open worlds unknown. As prose, it achieves a luminosity and pared precision that is the true domain of poetry. As a novel, it is a work of assured moral energy. Make no mistake, this is a great European novel.

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It is 1799 and in a tiny artificial island, Dejima, connected to Nagasaki by a Land Gate that is rigorously guarded by the Japanese, a rag-tag collection of officials of the Dutch East India Company carry on the corrupt private trade which the newly arrived Chief Resident, Unico Vorstenbosch, and his head clerk, Jacob de Zoet, try to clean up. The magisterial Vorstenbosch and the diligent, flame-haired Protestant, de Zoet, go about their business, a large part of which also involves forcing or cajoling more copper out of the Japanese. Japanese copper (‘the bride for whom we Dutch have danced in Nagasaki’, as Vorstenbosch has it) oils the wheels of the Dutch colonial project in Batavia and without that copper, the import of which has fallen by nearly 5000 piculs in 9 years, the Dutch face insurrection, the end of the profitable trade in coffee and, finally, surrender to John Bull, the other colonial power that is beginning to get rapacious about East Asia.

But negotiation with Japan is an infinitely, elaborately tricky and frustrating business, for the country, governed by the isolationist sakoku (‘closed country’) policy from 1639, the beginning of the Edo period, is suspicious of foreigners, unbendingly intolerant of Christianity, and has in place the most stringent of rules enforcing the unlawful (this slippery word is open to interpretations) mingling of foreigners with the Japanese and fearful punishments for the transgression of these strictures. In a context bristling with such sanctions, de Zoet begins to fall in love with Orito Aibagawa, a Japanese midwife training in Western medicine under Doctor Marinus, the Dutch doctor stationed at Dejima (a delightful creation, he). Against all odds, a halting interaction begins. An apparently minor player, Ogawa Uzaemon, one of the fleet of interpreters engaged to deal with the Dutch on Dejima, agrees to be a clandestine go-between in the delivery of a fan – a strictly verboten act – from the Dutchman to the midwife. (Uzaemon has already saved de Zoet’s life on two occasions and a friendship could have blossomed between the two men in a less hostile situation.) As a restless Vorstenbosch bullies and demands answers and solid commitments from the inscrutable and ceremonial Japanese, de Zoet’s world turns upside down in two plot twists that will leave you winded. It’s best left to readers to discover one; the other, while not giving away anything, involves the kidnapping of Ogawa by the men of Lord Abbot Enomoto, the powerful and sinister lord of the Kyôga Domain.

Part 2, set in inland Nagasaki and the Kyôga domain, and (almost) entirely away from the Dutch who dominated Part 1, brings about the sudden shift in gear that Mitchell is so magically marvellous at, complete with gradual and shocking illuminations of what has gone before. Orito takes centre-stage in this spooky, menacing and, at times, horrifying section unfolding in the remote Mount Shiranui Shrine. Here, Lord Enomoto presides over the Order of Mount Shiranui, a nunnery of deformed and mutilated ex-prostitutes, all brought in to produce babies fathered on them by Enomoto’s acolytes. There are shades of The Handmaid’s Tale in this episode and, once again, it wouldn’t do to reveal the awful purpose of this baby-farm, which, tellingly, does not have a single infant in it. As the true reason for her abduction, and the villainous way through which it has been effected, dawns on Orito, she attempts to escape. Threaded through is yet another storyline: Ogawa Uzaemon engages a troop of men to storm the mountain temple and free Orito. Yet again, Part 2 ends on some shocking twists, but this time they are somewhat predictable, their effect rather muffled.

For Part 3, the final section of the book, we move from the Dutch and the Japanese to the English, from land to sea, where Captain John Penhaligon and his frigate Phoebus are closing in on Dejima with the intent of ejecting the Dutch and establishing long-desired trade relations with the sealed-off country. India has recently become a British colony and Penhaligon has been dispatched by the Governor-General from Bengal to prise open Japan. On board is a Dutch ex-Chief Resident of Dejima, now in collaboration with his national enemy, the English, in order to settle some old scores on the island. The Captain, too, is driven by private ghosts – the onset of crippling gout, haunting anguish at the death of a much-adored red-haired son, the reckoning of posterity. Penhaligon’s initial idea of diplomacy with the Japanese using the Dutch fails, so he falls back on the last resort of the imperial bully: arms. As the Phoebus opens fire, Jacob de Zoet is left defending the Dutch flag on Dejima’s watchtower and, in another countermarching movement, the resolution to the story of Lord Enomoto nears its chilling end.
And then, in two short codas, Mitchell brings back the delicate ache of the unfulfilled love story, ending his vast symphony on an exquisitely elegiac minor key of a sonata. A bustling, panoramic, densely peopled novel then, whose emotional impact is perhaps weaker than number9dream, its architecture and reach perhaps less daring than Cloud Atlas but, on its own terms and in comparison with almost everything being written now, vertiginously ambitious and brilliant. In fact, this superlative brilliance can, on occasions, paradoxically give the novel a surface feel of grand artifice or self-conscious performance.

That quibble apart, Jacob de Zoet is executed on a vast canvas, every inch of which is worked with exhilarating skill and precision: a dragonfly is described as ‘jade-and-ash’, the detritus of a debauched New Year meal is picked to the last fish spine and blancmange gobbet, ‘needle-tips of birdsong stitch and thread the thicket’s many layers’ in a winter wood, wisteria ‘in bloom foams over a crumbling wall’, snow is ‘scabby and ruckled underfoot’. The deep-focus lens of his prose can tell you that a tea-tray is made of walnut wood, catch the decorative detail on the sleeves of a haori-jacket, without overwhelming you with information or ornamental-detail overload. How on earth does he do it? He can write as thrillingly about large-scale events (such as naval warfare or maritime trade in the eighteenth century) as he can about the private, micro world – the shade of a flower or the exact press of guilt in the heart. Such fluent and masterful command of both domains, macro and micro, large-screen, epic exuberance and eloquent minutiae, infolding one into the other, seems the stuff of a genius’s gifts, not the laborious world of craft and toil.

Not the least astonishing facet of Mitchell’s art is the supple effortlessness he brings to creating worlds entire, credible and fully-formed with such copiousness of detail and imagination that one is compelled to allow to pass through one’s mind the absurd thought that he was an inhabitant of Japan in 1799. Where a novelist such as Penelope Fitzgerald buried all the homework necessary for the writing of a historical novel, Mitchell revels in the transubstantiation of the research into a superabundance of physical, real-world details that never, not for one moment, reads as research. What Adam Thirlwell has provocatively said about Tolstoy as a miniaturist applies equally to Mitchell: the huge tectonic plates of history shift and grind away yet the minute attention to, say, the salty slang of seadogs, the crippling beating a slave is subjected to, or the ‘volcano-ash glaze of the Sakurajima cup’ from which two adversaries drink sake are the grounding details that convey the larger forces of history with tangible immediacy.

Like shot silk, which gives out different colours, depending on the angle of seeing or the light, Jacob de Zoet, turned one way, is a thriller with a glittering seam of a love-story running through it (or is it the other way around?), and twisted another, a sumptuous historical novel on the collision and miscegenation of cultures caught at a particular crossroads of history. Its dominant twin tones of lush yet restrained romantic yearning on one hand and high excitement and suspense on the other give way finally, in the last few pages, to what has really been the hidden controlling emotion: melancholy.

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In his twenties, he was a sharp man whose work on Einstein’s photovoltaics led to the Beard-Einstein Conflation, a contribution to quantum theory so significant that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. But all that is far behind him. Now, he is little more than a lazy bureaucrat, sitting on committees, lending his weighty name to institution letterheads, even acting as the titular head of a desultory New Labour centre on research into viable solutions for global warming. A trip to Spitsbergen in the Arctic, along with a team of artists, to observe global warming firsthand, allows him to get away from the worst of the avalanche in the disintegrating marriage, only for him to discover on return that Patrice is now having an affair with the over-eager, annoying, ponytailed nerd, Tom Aldous, from the Centre. Here, a set of plot twists, improbable coincidences and thrillerish elements for which McEwan, fatally, seems to have such a penchant provides the armature for the future motion of the narrative. It would be churlish to give away this veritable mountain-terrain of twists, some immediate, some deferred, but suffice it to say that McEwan lays the foundation for the builder, Rodney Tarpin, with whom Patrice was involved before her affair with Tom Aldous, and a lethal form of the revenant of Aldous, to reappear later.

Fast forward five years. Beard is now involved with a kind-hearted woman, Melissa, and has been made to leave the Centre after a media controversy which seems to have been inspired by the Larry Summers affair in Harvard in 2005. He is using Aldous’s substantial research on photovoltaics, notably the younger man’s work on splitting the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen and using the former to power the world, to reinvigorate his career and become the guru for a new, clean, efficient energy, thus solving the global climate change crisis. To this end, he has convinced a raft of people, this time in the USA, to set up a site in the New Mexico desert where he can stage a demonstration that will effectively power the nearest small town, Lordsburg, on solar power for an entire day as proof of the miracles of the new energy. But all the debris that Beard leaves in the wake of his disastrous life, both personal and professional, accumulate, reach critical point and cascade into the mother of all reckonings in the end. The comic light flickers and dims shut.

While not the train-wreck that was Saturday, Solar is light years away from a successful novel. What trips up Solar is the comedy. Instead of the principle of harmony and reconciliation that felicitous examples of the genre have at their core, it would appear that McEwan’s understanding of the comic mode is wholly congruent with farce, slapstick, pub comedy, sitcom, even bedroom farce. Take, for example, the egregiously tacked-on setpiece of the Arctic episode that serves only to emphasise the ‘comedy’ aspect of the novel, especially in the ridiculously juvenile moment when Beard’s penis freezes along his zipper as he is taking a piss in sub-zero temperature. This will perhaps appear to be funny to readers with a mental age of eight. Much of these ‘comedic’ moments in the book – and particularly strained is a misunderstanding over eating crisps between Beard and a passenger on a train, and another one involving fighting the urge to vomit while giving a speech – are akin to being held down and tickled to elicit laughter. The upshot is as clear as radioactive glowing: McEwan is emphatically not a comic writer in his chosen modes. Far more successful, witty and intelligent is the send-up of the drivel and politically correct thuggery emanating from humanities departments that Beard falls foul of.

Solar suffers from other problems. Having Beard as the focal consciousness of the book means that not a single other character comes even halfway alive. The women, Patrice, Maisie (his first wife), Darlene (his woman in New Mexico), are especially woeful: they’re hardly more than names on the page. This unrelentingly singular point of view palls after a while. And the clumsy structure – clunky ways of filling in backstories; obvious elisions that we know are being suppressed for future, more dramatic, release; an oversignalled, hamfisted strewing of clues that will take in only gullible children – draws unwelcome attention to McEwan’s tendency, now somewhat of a tic, to stake everything on that one major plot twist. This may make for gripping reading but it comes at the price of credibility, surely a damaging cost for such doggedly and conservatively realist fiction to pay, especially when these plot manipulations traduce the novel’s moral energy as well. Stripped of these, Solar’s only point seems to be that humans are fallible creatures. To borrow from Wolfgang Pauli, another physicist, this is not even banal.

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Kirpal Singh is travelling back to Kashmir to cook for the wedding of Rubiya, General Kumar’s daughter. Fourteen years ago, when he was only twenty, he had left the job of chief chef to the General (subsequently Governor of Kashmir) and has not been back since. Now, he has a growing tumour in his head and a sick, dying mother in Delhi. This slow train-journey to Kashmir is also a journey back in time for Kip and the memory of his time there unspools and provides the bulk of the narrative. Why did Kip leave Kashmir so abruptly, without any explanation?

As a nineteen-year-old man, Kip goes to an outpost of the Indian military in the shadow of Siachen Glacier in Kashmir, ostensibly to see the place where his father, a much-loved and respected army officer under General Kumar, had died in a plane crash. Kip is made apprentice to the head chef there, a Chef Kishen, who takes the young man under his wing and guides him through the fundamentals (and beyond) of cooking. Mixed with these lessons are some fearful drivel about love and sex. The virginal Kip makes advances on a nurse in the military hospital, only to be rebuffed. Chef Kishen, in an act of foolhardiness, banishes himself to the glacier, a worse-than-Siberia outpost in the war of attrition between Indian and Pakistan, where the cold reduces the soldiers to shadows of themselves, to even insanity. Kishen leaves behind his red diary, into which he was always seen to be scribbling. This diary plays a vital role in the book.

Then one day a ‘terrorist’, an ‘enemy woman’ from across the Indo-Pak border, is swept up on the banks of the river. Kip is initially called in to act as interpreter but things become progressively muddier as he finds himself attracted to her. Suddenly, his long-held conviction that India is on the right side of this endless war is shaken to the core. It wouldn’t do to give away the shocking revelations that Singh has so cunningly withheld for slow, almost oblique release towards the end but their impact is deadly: they lift the lid on nothing less than corruption in the military and state-sanctioned abuse, things that are never reported in the Indian media. The denouement, consisting of Kip’s final reckoning with General Kumar and the grown-up Rubiya, is both shocking and devastating.

The great strength of this brave book is its technique of indirection in imparting information to the reader. Singh comes at things aslant, seemingly casually; when their importance is revealed, it comes to the unsuspecting reader with the weight and shock of an unsuspected explosion.

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For years, Safran Foer was an omnivore, then a vegetarian ‘who from time to time ate meat’, assuming that he’d comfortably, and without too much compunction, ‘maintain a diet of conscientious inconsistency’. In this formidably researched, furious yet admirably lucid and unclouded book, Safran Foer accounts for his conversion to vegetarianism. Throughout, he demolishes logical inconsistencies, hypocrisies and untenable positions with ferocious glee. Take this, for example: ‘The choice-obsessed modern West is probably more accommodating to individuals who choose to eat differently than any culture has ever been, but ironically, the utterly unselective omnivore – “I’m easy; I’ll eat anything” – can appear more socially sensitive than the individual who tries to eat in a way that is good for society.’ Touché. There are scores of these scattered throughout the book but these are almost asides in Safran Foer’s bigger picture, which is a diptych, as it were. The first panel of this constitutes an underpinning inquiry: what explains the denial, cognitive dissonance or disconnect inherent in meat- and fish-eating, that is, knowing the hows and whys and whats of meat-production and choosing to erase, forget or subdue that knowledge in front of a plate of meat? The second, related question is: do we really know the truth about how an animal ends up as steak or chop or bacon on our plates? For the larger part, Eating Animals concentrates on the second question and the information that emerges from that query will shrivel your soul.

As a prelude to that metamorphic tour and a kind of beginners’ reference point, Safran Foer constructs a basic dictionary in the chapter ‘Words/Meaning’. There are some uncompromising definitions, each one a revelation. See ‘cruelty’: ‘not only the wilful causing of unnecessary suffering, but the indifference to it. … Cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. Or to choose to ignore it.’ Terms such as ‘bycatch’, ‘feed conversion’, ‘stress’, ‘instinct’, ‘species barrier’ (superb, this one) are deconstructed with a cold anger while the entry on KFC is a gem of a demolition job. Most of us know a little about battery hens but did you know the blood-curdling ways in which food and light deprivation are used to get birds to lay more eggs? So you think free-range is better, right? Well, read on and be educated: ‘One can reliably assume that most “free-range” (or “cage-free”) laying hens are debeaked, drugged, and cruelly slaughtered once “spent”. I could keep a flock of hens under my sink and call them free-range.’ And ‘organic’? It ‘doesn’t mean anything in terms of welfare issues. You can call your turkey organic and torture it daily.’

Part of the project of Eating Animals is to cut through the bullshit the food industry has fed people for decades, along with their (literally) toxic products, and the lies, omissions, ignorance they have disseminated. Safran Foer takes a massive wrecking ball to this concerted project of misinformation, corruption, silence, and the programme to keep people as ignorant as possible about factory farming. Myths trotted out regularly – a vegetarian diet provides sub-optimal levels of protein; factory farming is all about providing the world’s billions with affordable meat; the cost-effectiveness of industrial production of meat – are savagely picked apart in Safran Foer’s journey to his target destination: factory farming. From that clarion call – ‘We have waged war, or rather let a war be waged, against all of the animals we eat. This war is new and has a name: factory farming’ – the book becomes an indictment, a shocking illumination of what has been kept from us, sometimes with our own collusion.

A caveat here: Safran Foer concentrates exclusively on the baneful scenario in the USA, which is much worse than anything that obtains in the UK or in Europe, but let’s not get complacent: we’re not far behind in this race to the south. True, a lot of this stuff has been done elsewhere, and done with more objective rigour, such as in Peter Singer’s revolutionary Animal Liberation (oddly, not referenced anywhere in the book), or with the oblique ambiguity of great art as in J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, even Disgrace. The 2008 film, Food, Inc., by Michael Kenner, took on the American food industry along lines that Safran Foer follows here. But there can never be enough of angry exposés of the meat industry and of the many things that Safran Foer brings to the debate is a scrupulous balance: for every visit to a factory farm or to Smithfield, the largest pork packer in the USA, he also visits what are called ‘family farms’, where people still try to produce meat in less cruel, more sustainable ways, with an eye on both animal welfare and quality of meat. In the chapter ‘Hiding/Seeking’, he breaks into a poultry battery farm in California with a seasoned ‘activist’, documents the harrowing experience of chickens there, then lets three types of people speak ‘straight to the camera’: the activist, the factory farmer, and Frank Reese, a poultry farmer who is trying to do it right from the beginning to the end. In his chapter on the pork industry, ‘Slices of Paradise/Pieces of Shit’, he visits Paradise Locker Meats, a slaughterhouse in Missouri that tries to kill pigs more humanely than factory farms, then Paul Willis, a farmer who coordinates pork production for Niman Ranch, USA’s only supplier of non-factory pork, and finally focuses on how the hell-on-earth that is Smithfield deals with the faeces of the 31 million hogs that it butchers annually (281 pounds of shit for every American citizen). In the following chapter, he lets Bill Niman (of Niman Ranch), his wife, Nicolette (a vegetarian rancher), and Bruce Friedrich of PETA speak directly, creating a calibrated yet ultimately divergent set of attitudes towards animals that brings into sharp relief the difference between animal welfare and animal rights.

The sections entitled ‘The Life and Death of a Bird’, ‘Our New Sadism’ (on how pigs are treated at factory farms) and ‘The Truth about Eating Animals’ are so bleak and shocking that they will fill you with shame, horror, anger, disgust. Just one question from the whole artillery of facts that the book bristles with: did you know the real costs of cheap meat after you take into account only a few of the costs that factory farms externalise, such as environmental depredation, pandemics (swine flu virus, for example), a barrage of illnesses, all of which are passed on to the consumer to pick up? The incipient hope he holds out for a ‘wiser animal agriculture and more honourable omnivory’ becomes weaker and weaker with the narrative’s progress as it culminates in Bill Niman being driven out of his namesake company because his own board wanted ‘to do things more profitable and less ethically’. Yet his argument that the factory farm, being ‘radically unsustainable’, will one day ‘come to an end because of its absurd economics’ seems both rationally feasible and touchingly optimistic at the same time.

It is towards the end that Safran Foer reveals the gloves-off polemical side of the book and asks tough, unavoidable questions. His attitude is unflinching, as it necessarily has to be for advocacy of this kind, and if a stray note of self-regard and self-importance sounds here and there, it can be all too readily overlooked for he is clearly fighting on the side of the angels. His moral clarity is incandescent, his arguments unimpeachable. Which carnivore can answer this question he poses: ‘How easy is it to avow a responsibility to the beings most within our power and at the same time raise them only to kill them?’ And when he writes, ‘We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animals?’ what answer are we going to return in the private darkness of our souls?

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A reductive, but not wholly inaccurate, way of summarising the novel would be to see its plotline as centreing on the question of whether Keith and Scheherazade are eventually going to have sex. But this is Amis so a vast freight of bombast and portentousness is tacked on to a story of getting laid. Chief among these is a quasi-historiographical enquiry into the cost of free love, female promiscuity, carnal liberation, all of which came of age in that crucial year (or decade). As Amis writes, ‘Something was churning in the world of men and women, a revolution or a sea change, a realignment having to do with carnal knowledge and emotion.’ For a true reckoning of the fallout from the sexual revolution, we’ll have to wait until the summer of 1970 is over and the novel brings us to the present day Keith, a ‘respected critic’ and veteran of three marriages, totting up the cost to himself and to Western society in general. This reads like a completely different book sewn together, badly, with the more substantial story of the ‘hot, endless, and erotically decisive summer’. Unsurprisingly (in at least two senses, one of gender history and the other of its fact of being an Amis novel), the costs are paid by women while the self-pitying is indulged in by the men. So much has been said, justifiably, about Amis’s plastic women, all tits and arse and ‘boxes’ and unfulfilled lives, that it seems redundant to point out that The Pregnant Widow hardly bothers to stray from the old ways by creating even the ghost of an interiority for a female character.

Other dud notes abound. Keith is a student of English Literature who is making his way through the classics, so this becomes an excuse to have the book mediated through a potted history of the English novel, particularly Clarissa and Austen’s work. Allusions to Richardson and Austen, including plot devices, locutions, literary critical jamming, bring to the book an added ballast of pretentious knowingness, shading off into almost a metafictional friction at times. This feeds into one of the most damaging qualities in the novel, the way its characters, especially Keith, go about riffing portentously in a way that reminds readers unrelentingly how mindful they are of their places and significance in that particular point in history. Self-important riffs and a compulsive tendency to ‘tell’ and hector readers instead of ‘showing’, features that have marred Amis’s fiction for the last twenty-odd years, proliferate alarmingly here too. Here’s a sample: ‘Leafing through the glossy pages [of a Mayfair brothel’s brochure], he felt the brothel goer’s mad power – that of choice. Power corrupts: that is not a metaphor. And writers were instantly corrupted by the mad power of choice. Authorial omnipotence did not go with the definingly fallible potency of the male member.’ I wonder what Austen, so generously thanked in the ‘Acknowledgements’, would have had to say about that.

All this puerile strutting sits disjointedly with what the novel strains – and there is a lot of straining in Amis, for weighty sentences, lofty thoughts, Importance – to be, a meditation on ageing and mortality, a raging against the dying of the light. Too frequently for comfort, or art, the over-striving leads to baroque misfires instead of mots justes (‘insomniate’, anyone? Or ‘spangled, stratospheric suicides’?), importance to a flatulent self-importance. Even the stage-managed revelations and narrative twists (who is the first-person narrator who keeps butting in occasionally? Will Keith get off with Scheherazade?), instead of quenching suspense, seem only brimful of bathos. There is an orthogonal feel about the book, as if nothing on the pages is relevant or necessary: the only response it can elicit is ‘So what?’

Amis’s early books – The Rachel Papers, Money, even parts of London Fields – were characterised by a high hit-rate of swaggeringly clever sentences, some dangerously sharp observation and articulation, but even they were far less than the sum of their sporadically brilliant parts. Now the tide seems to have gone out so completely that the odd bit of glittering gem on the detritus-strewn shore only serves to show up the surrounding impoverishment for what it is.

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