Reading for pleasure

The Undertaking

Audrey Magee (Atlantic Books: £7.99; e-book £1.90)

This debut novel is outstanding. It is tautly, sparsely written with much dialogue. Katharina Spinell and Peter Faber simultaneously marry photographs of each other, she in Berlin and he in the Russian campaign, entering an undertaking, but when they meet, love blossoms. They look forward to a life together in the rapidly advancing Nazi state. Peter finds himself in the thick of the tragedy that was Stalingrad, while through her father's connections, Katharina enjoys the life of those close to the top of the regime. The book is littered with contrasts, fear, joy, deprivation, ostentatious excess, despair, hope. The author uses this to stunning effect, as she demonstrates through the characters' reactions to the diminishing realities of life as the end of war approaches and fear foreshadows the future for both Katharina and Peter. A harsh, hard, but wholly realistic view of life told from a profoundly human perspective. Brilliant.

The Restless Supermarket

Ivan Vladislavić (And Other Stories: £10; e-book £4.19)

What an extraordinary novel. A whole reflection on the process of change in South Africa expressed through the medium of a retired proofreader, the Café Europa, his favoured watering hole and the upheaval in Alibia, a fictional town portrayed in a mural on the wall of the Café Europa.

I recently reviewed Double Negative, by the same author. A fine but challenging work. It did not prepare me for the laugh-out-loud quality of The Restless Supermarket. The central character, Aubrey Tearle, has spent much of his life on subsequent editions of the Johannesburg telephone directory. Proud of his craft, he plans to pull together his knowledge and resources into The Proofreader’s Derby, passing on the essential life skills.

The Café Europa changes by stages after Tearle first takes up his place at table 2. Different type of people are allowed entry. The regular background music of Mevrouw Bonsma is slowly supplanted by television and fruit machines. Attempts to turn back the tide are fruitless. Tearle believes that the perfection of proofreading can support the established order. In a surreal middle section he and his fellows try to do just that, with the titular supermarket being transformed from merely a name causing irritation, to a pedantic wordsmith, into a pawn literally able to be moved and reassembled in a way more conducive to Tearle’s vision of Utopia.

His inability to turn back the tide comes to a head at the closing night of the café. He lives to tell the tale; there is hope and a future; but nothing, as we know, will ever be the same again.

As a lover of words and unashamed pedant, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. My vocabulary has been very much enhanced as a result – indeed I cannot remember my Complete OED being consulted so much in such a short space of time. Tearle is both morally upright and faintly ridiculous, in a Tom Sharpe sort of way. His supporting characters are gently engaging, and nicely eccentric. This is probably my book of the year.

Jeeves and the Wedding Bells

Sebastian Faulks (Arrow Books: £7.99; e-book £3.49)

Six years ago Sebastian Faulks looked danger in the faced and laughed. He accepted the daunting challenge from the Ian Fleming trustees to write a new James Bond book to commemorate the centenary of Fleming’s birth. The result, Devil May Care, received widespread acclaim. Many applauded the fact that the work did not descend into pastiche.

If it would be simple enough to poke fun at Bond, one might think it almost impossible to create a new adventure for Bertram Wilberforce Wooster without some sort of parody. It is a mark of Faulks’ skill that this, his homage to P G Wodehouse, could easily be passed off as an original Old Master, albeit that traditionalists may find the ending unsettling. The story is as daft as Gussie Fink-Nottle, as crisp as an evening shirt ironed by Jeeves and as satisfying as one of Anatole’s luncheons. It opens with Bertie, aka Mr Wilberforce, collecting a morning tea tray below stairs to take to his employer Lord Etringham – yes, you guessed, aka Jeeves.

A problem which Wodehouse himself faced was that he could not assume his reader was at all familiar with any of his regular characters; however, no one was better at the three line pen picture. Faulks comes up to scratch. So the terrifying Aunt Agatha is “so deeply imbued with shades of darkness that in the aftermath of bloodletting even Vlad the Impaler might have yielded her first dibs with the stake and mallet”. And nothing set in the country would be complete without its cast of locals. In the vicinity of Melbury Hall (which almost inevitably has to be broken into at some point) is The Red Lion, “with a handful of low-browed sons of toil who looked as though they might be related to one another in ways frowned upon by the Old Testament”.

The ability to make a person laugh out loud using the written word is a rare gift. Wodehouse had it: so does Faulks. I pay homage to this homage.