LITERARY BENT – Writing at its best

Anthony Burgess (1917 -1993, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Burgess) was a lapsed Catholic from Manchester who was not merely a prolific writer but composer as well. His Catholic background left defining influences in his thought and Earthly Powers (1980) is an epic investigation of human fallibility, the exercise of power, and of corruption. On his eighty-first birthday, retired gay writer […]

Catherine Vernon heads up the family bank in Redborough. She has been jilted in her youth like Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, and as a result casts a jaundiced eye on just about everything. Her iron will has brought her to prominence and losing control over any event in her purview is not to be

71 year old Coleman Silk, Dean of Athena College in New England, has been driven from his position by mischievous accusations of racism. After the death of his wife he takes up Faunia Farley, an illiterate milkmaid and cleaner at the college, who is half his age and has suffered a terribly battered life. Approaching the

There is not much of a plot to this novel of 1955. Humbert Humbert, European emigree literature professor, develops an obsession with 12 year old Dolores Haze, the daughter of his landlady. They take a road trip together after landlady Charlotte (and briefly Humbert’s wife) is killed by passing traffic. In gorgeous, lyrical and seductive prose (over which

Rubashov is an ex-Commissar of the People in a thinly disguised world of Moscow Show Trials (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moscow_Show_Trials) in this 1940 novel from Arthur Koestler. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Koestler) This is pretty hard-to-read stuff as we are taken deeper and deeper into the solitary agonies of Rubashov in prison, and as he is being ‘interrogated’ (i.e. psychologically tortured and beaten) by

How should the anti-hero, Bird, deal with the intrusion into his life of a brain-damaged child? Welcome to the sordid underbelly of Japan. It’s all a long way from the hyper-ordered, law abiding, civil society that we imagine. Oe’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenzabur%C5%8D_%C5%8Ce) striking and vivid language matches perfectly the depravity into which Bird descends in his attempt to evade

American couple Port and Kit Moresby seek to escape the corrupting influences of the modern world by travelling into the Algerian Sahara. Wherever you travel, though, you never really escape yourself. The exotic landscapes, and the trials within them, only serve to intensify the couple’s mutual estrangement. Latch this onto a pervasive mood of threatening

McCullers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carson_McCullers) takes us to a Georgia mill town in the 1930s. The characters she portrays yearn for something beyond the sun baked tedium of small town life. The central character is John Singer, a deaf-mute, through whom we meet and are made to enter into the lives of the dispossessed. There is a remarkable surety of

Meet identical twins Dora and Nora Chance in this rollicking family saga revolving around the British music hall scene. Witty and pulsating with imaginative power, this is sure to entertain you. Published by Angela Carter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Carter#Biography) in 1991, this was her last novel. 256 pages in Vintage Classics paperback edition. ISBN 978-0099981107 Angela Carter