Debut fiction roundup reviews
The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard, The Collaborator by Mirza Waheed, Pub Walks in Underhill Country by Nat Segnit
All three debuts this month blur the boundaries between memory, imagination, fantasy and delusion. Easily the most intriguing is Hannah Pittard's The Fates Will Find Their Way (William Heinemann, 12.99). Instead of giving voice to one individual, Pittard, an award-winning American short-story writer, chooses to adopt the collective voice of a group of male adolescents; or, more precisely, memories of their teenage years filtered through their perspectives as much older men. As with a Greek chorus (or, more recently, Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End), the voice expresses itself as a single "we," although various members of the group are also, at different times, portrayed from the outside as they are seen or remembered by the other boys.
Again and again, the plot circles back to a single incident in these boys' lives: the disappearance of the 16-year-old Nora Lindell. Different scenarios for what might have happened to her are played out, often with alternative permutations: in one, she falls pregnant and absconds to Arizona; in another, she gets into the car of a stranger who wishes her harm; in yet another there's the suggestion of suicide. Numerous characters claim phantom sightings of her years afterwards; several also claim to have been the last one to see her before she disappeared.
It's a startling piece of work for all sorts of reasons, not least the uneasy impression of collective guilt that seeps through the narrative, and the sense of paralysis that seems to have gripped the boys' inner lives since Nora's vanishing. Pittard powerfully evokes the intense contradictions of adolescence: the capacity to feel dread, boldness, vulnerability, nostalgia and desire in a single instant. In one fumbled, troubling early sexual encounter with a boy a few years older than her, Nora's sister Sissy says terrifyingly pr! ecisely that she knew what was happening, and "yet felt something like homesickness at the bottom of her stomach". It is an unflinching account of the dark undercurrents of youthful sexuality; of the messy, often brutal reality of our instincts; and of the dreamlike coating that time applies to our memories.
Mirza Waheed's The Collaborator (Viking, 12.99) is another tale of lost innocence, this time set in the valleys of Indian-controlled Kashmir during the early 1990s. The narrator is the only one of his peer group in his village not to have crossed the nearby border into Pakistan to join the guerrillas fighting for Kashmiri independence not because he was unwilling to, but because his friends never asked him to come, or even told him of their intention to go. He is the only young man left when the Indian army move in, and assign to him the lucrative but soul-destroying task of collecting weapons and valuables from the bodies of the fighters killed nearby.
Wazeed, who himself lived in Kashmir during the peak years of the separatist violence, writes with a melancholy lyricism that is in sharp contrast to the jarring, gruesome realities he describes. It is a dogged, yet beautifully realised account of horror, grief and the psychological trauma of war.
In terms of tone, subject and setting (the West Midlands), Pub Walks in Underhill Country (Fig Tree, 12.99), by Nat Segnit, could not be more different. Yet this story, too, is in its own way about nostalgia, memory, love and loss. Billed, accurately, as a "novel in 15 rambles", it is written, superficially, as a hiking guide, full of tips about good pubs, conveniences, scenic trails and local history.
The narrator is Graha! m Underh ill: a keen rambler in every sense of the word. But in fact the novel proves to be something more: an account of the breakdown of Graham's marriage to his beloved Sunita and possibly something darker too. Each chapter, with names such as "Malvern to Ledbury" or "Shakespeare Country", relays more and more of the mounting tensions in Graham and Sunita's relationship, Sunita's questionable relations with other men, and Graham's remarkable capacity for self-delusion.
Graham is a pathetically, often hilariously, unreliable guide; a semi-tragic figure who brings to mind TS Eliot's J Alfred Prufrock in his nervous digressions though, to begin with at least, he displays considerably less self-knowledge than Eliot's hero.
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