The Great Stink
by Clare ClarkPenguin, £12.99, pp. 358, ISBN 0670915300The Second Life of Samuel Tyne
by Esi EdugyanVirago, £10.99, pp. 278, ISBN 1844081060The Icarus Girl
by Helen OyeyemiBloomsbury, £16.99, pp. 320, ISBN 0747575487With an aversion to ghost stories I was surprised to find myself greatly moved by Strangers. Like the author, Taichi Yamada, Haidi is a scriptwriter. Orphaned as a child and divorced from his wife (‘the bond uniting us had become indifference,’ he notes with a professional writer’s economy), to save money he lives in his high-rise office, a deathly quiet place once emptied of its daytime inhabitants. The vacuity of endless ‘lighthearted promises and hollow assurances’ between media friends is matched only by his own sense of emptiness. Drifting between his desk and a beer, he is swift to pursue an emotional connection when it comes, even if it draws him out of the world of the living.
The coolly detached tone and narrative trickiness build up a minimalist reality as flimsy as the paper walls of a traditional Japanese house. The green Fifties suburb of Asakusa to which Haidi returns in the company of his long dead parents is layered over the soulless, shiny city in which he really lives — similarly Strangers’ final, superbly sneaky twist projects a new, darker version of the novel, leaving readers haunted, bereft of the love story we seemed to be reading.
Given a less grisly theme, Clare Clark’s prose would be, like Yamada’s, extraordinarily poetic; in The Great Stink, she instead maps Victorian London in as much queasy detail as possible, capturing the stench, the taste and the filth of a city ‘poisoning itself’. Deep in the sewers beneath the streets, William May, a surveyor and traumatised veteran of the Crimean war obsessively cuts himself, helping to construct a cleaner city as his own world comes crashing down around him. Framed for a murder, until his head becomes ‘clear as ice, thoughts caught on its frozen surface like fish,’ May, who of course harms only himself, is so filled with self-loathing that even he doubts his innocence. His lawyer’s attempt to seek justice turns the book into a page-turning thriller. If in the process, The Great Stink becomes a more conventional book than that promised by its evocation of extreme breakdown, it remains compelling.
A far quieter book is The Second Life of Samuel Tyne by Esi Edugyan, who counts Joyce Carol Oates among her fans. Both this and The Icarus Girl deal with folklore about twins and the African immigrant experience — in this case in 1970s Canada. Like Samuel Tyne, the gloomy but idealistic hero who moves his family from the city of Calgary to the tiny town of Aster, the novel drifts at a frustratingly slow pace. The action depends on Samuel’s bookish, withdrawn twin daughters Chloe and Yvette, but, with their father’s ponderous humanity dominating, they are forced to the edges of the novel. Time in Aster seems to Samuel to run on ‘regardless of man or season, a tyrant who sees the face of a friend in the crowd and still issues the order to fire’: in the context of Edugyan’s cumulative wealth of warm detail and insight, her plot eventually shocks with comparable cruelty. Accused of arson, the twins are locked away — is Samuel an everyman to be pitied or a passive villain? Edugyan refuses to say, leaving the reader to reconcile our fondness for a likeable dreamer with her unflinching portrayal of the mistreatment of the mentally ill.
It looks alarmingly as I’ve managed to indulge some sort of psychic SAD and find depression the theme in everything I’ve read — it is, however, a preoccupation of these startling first novels. Written when Helen Oyeyemi was 18 the only person likely to be made gloomy by reading The Icarus Girl is a frustrated novelist. Half English, half Nigerian, eight-year-old Jessamy Harrison is in thrall to her rich inner life and, always, as she puts it, ‘slipping into the gap between what is really happening to a person and what others think is happening’.
Consistently subtle, Oyeyemi exploits superstitions about ghosts and mixed race children as well as twins, so that The Icarus Girl rests tantalisingly on the edge of being a more terrifying story than seems plausible. The colourful motifs of her mother’s world that alarm and enthral Jessamy are seized upon to create fantastically energised, prose; though Jessamy’s huge ‘Icarus’ imagination is a gauzy screen through which we are allowed to see her parents, their struggles with each other and with a troubled child, it is Oyeyemi who creates such a deeply appealing and complex story. Just as a child like Jessamy might draw astonishing pictures, a precocious teenager might pull off flashes of lyricism or insight, but to create such a controlled novel is an exciting debut. Apart from her degree in Social and Political Sciences, I for one cannot wait to see what Oyeyemi does next.