Jonathan Coe

‘High concept’ is a phrase coined by Hollywood to describe films whose central premise or selling-point is so strong and simple that it can be summed up in a few words: Ivan Reitman’s Twins (‘Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito as twin brothers’) is the classic example. Such films are revered in the movie business because they are thought to be childishly easy to market. Tintin in the New World is, by the same token, a ‘high concept’ novel, for its premise can be stated even more succinctly: ‘Tintin grows up.’ In Tuten’s hands (and with the personal blessing, we are told, of his friend and mentor Hergé), the cherub-faced, boundlessly intrepid teenager achieves a miraculous release from his forty-year pre-adolescence and is made to undergo a swift, bruising rite of passage into adulthood. Hair sprouts on his chest, his voice breaks, he gets his first erection and to his own wide-eyed bewilderment finds himself in the midst of an awakening that is at once sexual, romantic and political.

The triumphs of this novel are at once tiny and enormous. Tiny because, like its predecessor A Strange and Sublime Address, it tells only of a placid and uneventful life, a life of domesticity, routine and small daily rituals, in which a ride on a bus or a rendezvous in a café is the closest we are likely to come to adventure; enormous because Chaudhuri has once again turned this unspectacular material into something enchanting, studded with moments of beauty more arresting than anything to be found in a hundred busier and more excitable narratives. Part of the reader’s exhilaration, for that matter, derives from our awareness that the substance of the book is so perilously thin: as we watch Chaudhuri weave such intricate patterns from it, the pleasure we take in his daredevilry is analogous to the excitement of hearing a virtuoso raag singer performing an act of controlled improvisation.

Samuel Beckett was one of the first to realise that in a predominantly agnostic and sceptical age, nothing could be more irrelevant than the novel whose plot continued to imitate the workings of a benign deity: the writer’s new task, on the contrary, consisted in finding ‘a form that accommodates the mess’. Half a century has gone by since then, and still, both in and out of the mainstream, novelists are struggling to adapt their narrative strategies to the demands of a reality which, as any glance at the newspapers will remind us, grows daily more grotesque and unmanageable. In particular the threat of terrorism begins to look forever closer and more insistent when passed through the media’s magnifying lens, and any writer seeking to address this subject must face up to the possibility that tidy endings are not to be relied upon: that our lives (our narratives, in other words) run the perpetual risk of truncation by sudden, unexpected acts of violence which are dauntingly inexplicable in terms of cause and effect. In the words of Howard Beamish, one of the central characters in Penelope Lively’s new novel, reality ‘has never been quite so devastatingly random’.

One of the more disarming sentences in Francisco Goldman’s impressive first novel-comes near the end, when his hero-narrator, Roger Graetz, takes a bus journey up into the Guatemalan highlands and stops off in a village just as the Indians are packing up their market in a dirt plaza. Brooding over what he knows about the village – how the army has only recently allowed nuns and priests back in, how the Indians have refused to return to the rectory because of all the people who have been tortured to death there – Roger finds himself tiredly incapable of outrage, and almost catches himself responding to the story with a jaded shrug of the shoulders: ‘Poverty, soldiers, nuns and priests, torture’ he reflects, ‘what else is new?’’

This is Alasdair Gray’s funniest novel, his most high-spirited, and his least uneven. All of which does not necessarily make it his best, but certainly means that we have a nice surprise on our hands when you consider that Gray has spent much of the last few years publicly and gloomily announcing the death of his fictional imagination. That process began in 1985, with the postscript to Lean Tales, the short story collection he shared with Agnes Owens and James Kelman. ‘A director of a London publishing house,’ he wrote (in the third person), ‘asked him if he had enough stories to make another collection. Gray said no. There was a handful of stories he had intended to build into another collection, but found he could not, as he had no more ideas for prose fictions. From now on he would write only frivolous things like plays or poems, and ponderous things like A History Of The Preface or a treatise on The Provision Merchant As Agent Of Evil In Scottish Literature From Galt To Gunn.’