BOOKS

PROPERTY by Valerie Martin (Abacus)
Manon Gaudet is unhappily married to the owner of a Louisiana sugar plantation. She misses her family and longs for the vibrant lifestyle of her native New Orleans, but most of all she longs to be free of her suffocating domestic situation. The tension revolves around Sarah, a slave girl given to Manon as a wedding present from her aunt, whose young son Walter is living proof of where Manon’s husband’s inclinations lie. This private drama is played out against a brooding atmosphere of slave unrest and bloody uprisings. And if the attacks reach Manon’s house, no one can be sure which way Sarah will turn…
Beautifully written, Property is an intricately told tale of both individual stories and of a country in a time of change, where ownership is at once everything and nothing, and where belonging, by contrast, is all.
http://www.orangeprize.co.uk/2003prize/winner/index.html

THE LITTLE FRIEND by Donna Tartt (Bloomsbury)
Although the Cleves generally revelled in every detail of their family history, the events of ‘the terrible Mother’s Day’ were never, ever discussed. On that day, nine-year-old Robin, loved by all for his whims and peculiarities, was found hanging by the neck from a black-tupelo tree in his own garden. Twelve years later, the mystery – with its taunting traces of foul play – was no nearer a solution than it had been on the day it happened. This isn’t good enough for Robin’s youngest sister Harriet.
Only a baby when the tragedy occurred, but now twelve years old and steeped in the adventurous daring of favourite writers such as Stevenson, Kipling and Conan Doyle, Harriet is ready and eager to find out and punish her brother’s killer. Her closest friend, Hely – who would try anything to make Harriet love him – has sworn allegiance to her call for revenge. But the world these plucky twelve-year-olds are to encounter has nothing to do with child’s play: it is dark, adult and all too menacing.
In Donna Tartt’s Mississippi, the sense of place and sense of the past mingle redolently with rich human drama to create a collective alchemy. Here eccentric great aunts bustle about graciously despite faded fortunes and a child’s enquiring mind not only unearths telling family artefacts, but stirs up a neighbourhood nest of vipers and larceny. The Little Friend is a profoundly involving novel which demonstrates how the imaginary life embraces what literature we read, what special places we inhabit and what kindred souls we recognise, to help crack open even the darkest secrets life has hiding for us.

ANY HUMAN HEART by William Boyd (Alfred A. Knopf)
AT 17, Logan Mountstuart starts a journal. He faithfully keeps it, except when he can't bear to, until his death at 85. It records, mostly at a cool panoramic distance but with plunges into close-up shattering, his life as a minor British writer, art dealer, spy, chance acquaintance of dozens of the famous, repeatedly ill-fated husband and lover, and broken-compass navigator through the mild pleasures and harsh poisons of English life over most of the 20th century. At times he may suggest Flashman, Zelig or even Baron Munchausen. But Logan's creator, William Boyd, is multifaceted and inventive, and he plays a deep game under his agile card tricks. Ultimately Logan is a stoic Everyman, his inborn snobberies weathered away through years of misadventuring and misapprehending.
Do not mistake my extravagantly deluded clowns, Boyd tells us: unless we too are extravagantly wrong-footed we are not human. Nearing 60 and beginning to fade, Logan is accosted by the outraged New York father of a girl he has bedded. ''Loser!'' the man yells, his ultimate insult after a string of others. And Logan reflects:

''But such a curse doesn't really have any effect on an English person -- or a European -- it seems to me. We know we're all going to lose in the end so it is deprived of any force as a slur. But not in the U.S.A. Perhaps this is the great difference between the two worlds, this concept of Loserdom. In the New World it is the ultimate mark of shame -- in the Old it prompts only a wry sympathy.''

So, for much of the time, does ''Any Human Heart.'' Wry sympathy ought not to be much of a hook to haul us through an account that for long stretches -- the book lasts nearly 500 pages -- is not particularly sympathetic or even particularly exciting. Yet hauled we are and, despite some becalming, pleasurably. Boyd endows his narrator with no special quality of perception or sensibility as he recounts his sorties, ambitions, exuberant gains, painful reverses and long-term decline. What he does give him is integrity of voice if not of spirit, the lightest mockery of his own inconsequentiality and a gracefully chiseled play of sentence and phrase. Then, periodically, jolting the reader into disoriented attention, the even current is churned by a whirlpool.

Logan was born in Uruguay, where his father ran a corned-beef plant before his transfer back to Birmingham headquarters. Boyd has in mind (part of his book's generosity is the great variety of things he has in mind) that British superiorities, whether aesthetic or of class, often float up through the generations from the equivalent of the corned-beef factory. Logan's school days -- what English roman-fleuve could possibly lack an account of them? -- are described largely in terms of the private (and ironic) challenges that Logan and his friends Peter and Ben assign themselves. Unathletic Logan, through a mix of recklessness and scheming, wins a place on the rugby team. Peter seduces, or gets himself seduced by, a local farm girl. Ben, a Jew, tries and comically fails to convert to Roman Catholicism.
All blithe enough, except for the whirlpool. Facing expulsion for one of his escapades, Logan is summoned by the headmaster, who breaks the news that his father has died. No expulsion, therefore. Instead, he gets a violent beating. It's a moment of fulminating shock: the old Spartan, public-school myth of stoic endurance, playing fields, empire and so on magnified into insane savagery. His psychic wound, never healed, partly cripples Logan for the rest of his life -- even as it partly claims him -- until a gradual odd deliverance near the end.

Logan's blitheness begins to be marred by shallows of depression. One of these turns a promising Oxford start into mediocre failure; two unhappy love affairs don't help. (Boyd's deeper game is to show how easily Logan's lofty veneer is cracked.) Then a spell of good fortune. His study of Shelley is published to high literary acclaim; a subsequent sexy novel, deplored by the literati, makes a lot of money.
Logan floats among intellectual and social circles. After a brief, bleak marriage to an earl's daughter and miserable rustication on the earl-provided estate, he finds the closest thing to enduring love with a second wife, Freya, and their daughter. Making frequent visits to Paris, where the intellectuals honor him for a study of several obscure French writers, and where his schoolmate Ben has started a an art gallery, he buys a small Juan Gris for £50 and starts a valuable collection of his own.

He is atop the world (the journal form subjects him to the day's delusory perspective) and is clearly headed for a fall (we readers see farther, if only by turning pages). There will be many falls, in fact -- including the worst imaginable. In their declining arc they are too various and intricate to detail here; only at the end, after a lifelong slow conversion by ordeal, does he achieve words for them:
''My personal roller coaster. Not so much a roller coaster -- a roller coaster's too smooth -- a yo-yo, rather -- a jerking, spinning toy in the hands of a maladroit child, more like, trying too hard, too impatiently eager.''

Boyd jiggles the yo-yo; he is a writer who, without undermining his story, keeps us suspicious of what he is about to do with it. There are the Zelig moments, for instance. At Oxford Logan gets wise advice from the future novelist Anthony Powell; at a party he is kissed by a man who may or may not be Evelyn Waugh. At another party he scolds Virginia Woolf for snobbery. In Paris, and during the Spanish Civil War (when he's a correspondent), Ernest Hemingway lends him a friendly hand. Picasso sketches him. He offers James Joyce a verbal discombobulation for ''Finnegans Wake.''
And so, when he allows the Duke of Windsor (the abdicated Edward VIII) to play through on a golf course, we assume it's another amiable Zeligry. In fact it leads to an intense wartime adventure. Recruited into British naval intelligence (by Ian Fleming, of course), Logan turns up in the Bahamas, where the duke, whose pro-Nazi sentiments worry Churchill, has been sent as governor to keep him out of trouble. Logan's job is to befriend and keep an eye on him. Trouble erupts, nonetheless. (Boyd elaborates fascinatingly on a forgotten bit of history.) The duke, petulant and lethal, turns on Logan, and he becomes a scapegoat. Parachuted into Switzerland on another tortuous mission, and possibly betrayed by those who sent him, he spends two years incommunicado in a villa used by the Swiss to jail embarrassments.

Years later, he plays a marginal though dignified role in Nigeria's civil war. Still later, destitute and scrabbling to survive on a tiny pension, he hawks newspapers in London for a violent anarchist group. They send him on a hapless courier mission to an underground contact -- in Switzerland of all places. (Boyd, in whose books people's lives and characters angle about in continual change, has no use for a country where bland force is applied so that nothing will change).

Quite deliberately, though, what the author conveys with the tautly intricate staging of each of these stories, and the intriguing cloudiness he veils them in, is not the thrill of Logan's exploits but their futility. It is only at the end that genuine excitement, so long withheld or rigged, makes its entry. We read of the humiliations of British genteel poverty and of Logan's threadbare expedients. A face emerges from the masks when we were wondering if there was one.

In bereft old age the voice simplifies and deepens: relinquishing his maze of purposes, Logan retains only one or two. He has moved to the Midi, where his penury pinches less and his slender means go farther. Boyd makes his love of France not only evident but alive. The beauty of place, of light, of manners -- the villagers are tactfully helpful to an old man whom they honor as an écrivain -- extend Logan's resources far differently than the dog food that stretched his diet in London.

''I am I and my circumstances,'' the Spanish saying goes. In the village the ''I'' dwindles and the circumstances swell. We see Logan no longer as the verbs and adjectives of his journals' actions and attitudes, but as a human noun, subjected. The approach of death, held by existentialism to give meaning to existence, infuses something better than glory: the dignity of a naked life quite free of the strivings and pretensions it sought to clothe itself in.