SIX OF THE BEST, by Bruno Noble

Writers talk about books they love…

What does one look for in a novel?  For me, it’s ideas and fine writing.  I gave a friend a book by John Updike once, and he said he hated being pulled out of the story to think, Oh what, a beautiful sentence this is!  But not me.  I like to wrap fine sentences around my neck like a scarf.  I don’t object to being interrupted as I read and re-read a sentence that has arrested my attention.  As for ideas, by that I mean being given the opportunity to change one’s mind, being provoked, and maybe going so far as to have one’s life and values changed.  The best novels not only form or change a life but give pleasure on the way too.

Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire (1759)

Candide is a rollicking read, a wonderful satire on religion and theologians, philosophy and philosophers and on governments and warmongers.  The tone is set on the first page, when Cunégonde espies Dr Pangloss giving Paquette a ‘biology lesson’ in the gardens of the castle of Thunder-ten-Tronckh, which leads to her flirtation with Candide, his expulsion from the castle, and a journey that takes him around the world witnessing all the brutality it has to offer – war, earthquakes, shipwrecks, thievery, disease, rape, murder… All the while, Dr Pangloss is at hand to explain to Candide that ‘all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’, thus lampooning Leibnitz’s idealism and his attempt to solve the problem of evil.  Throughout, Candide and his friends try to ameliorate a situation only to worsen it so that, by the end, Candide learns the lesson that the best way to live is for us each ‘to cultivate our own garden’.  If we each do the best we can for ourselves rather than meddle in the affairs of others the world will become a better place.

A novel about race, class, sex and colonialism but also so much more: it is the existentialist novel.  After Miss Adela Quested freaks out (not a term Forster uses) in the Marabar Caves and accuses Dr Aziz of sexual assault, she withdraws the charge at the end of a trial.  So what happened in those caves?  Nothing – nothing or no thing happened.  Miss Quested loses it (again, not a term…) faced by the void the caves presented her with, by the certainty that there is no God and no meaning to our lives – none that we don’t give it, anyway.  What she experiences is not sexual assault but ‘nothingness’, what Sartre would call ‘le néant’.  Released, having been found not guilty, a deliriously relieved Dr Aziz runs though the monsoon rains – symbol of rebirth for him and of a new post-colonial life for India – and through a cemetery, with its ornately carved tombstones and mausoleums of family members, writers and artists.  This is the most we can hope for, Forster is telling us: to live on in the memories of those whom we loved and who loved us, and in the art we leave behind.  For me, that’s enough.

I read Wild Palms in my 20s and loved it and re-read it in my 50s and loved it still, all the while struggling, in a way in which I hadn’t before, with Faulkner’s convoluted and uncompromising style.  Do we naturally become stupider as we age, or has the age of the soundbite and of the 140-character tweet reduced the level of our intelligence?  Besides the beguiling language and languid sentences, so evocative to my ears of the southern U.S. drawl, I particularly liked the novel’s structure of two parallel stories told in alternating chapters, of two tales that never touch – in simple terms of plot and character, that is.  One story tells of a hard, passionate love between a junior doctor and an adulteress that ends, in a snowbound landscape, in abortion, death and jail.  The other of a convict released to assist in the rescue of a flooded disparate population that ends, in this diluvial landscape, with his helping a woman give birth and saving her and her baby’s lives, and with his return to jail.  Wild Palms presents the human condition as a paradox.  ‘Laughter is the yesterday’s slight beard, the negligee of emotions,’ writes Faulkner, and anyone writing an early autobiography should snap ‘Yesterday’s Slight Beard’ up as a title.

Outer Dark is breath-taking – literally: it has the reader gasping at the casual violence and at the beauty of its language; it had me re- and re-reading a one-page chapter unwilling to believe that the nonchalant evisceration of one man by another is what I had just read about.  Rinthy has a child by her brother Culla, who abandons it in the woods and tells her it has died.  Her mother’s intuition – her milk-leaking breasts – won’t allow her to believe him, and so the novel follows Rinthy as she tracks the tinker who found the child, and Culla as he tracks Rinthy.  Her journey is one of motherhood and hope; Culla’s is one of guilt and despair.  They cross paths repeatedly with three horsemen – chilling, grotesque amoral men who come to symbolise sin or judgment or retribution or all of these and more besides.  This is a book that haunts its reader for years, and asks, where is the beauty in this world of ours, this world of inner dark?  The answer lies in the quality of its language, in the splendour of McCarthy’s writing – if a human being can write with such art and sensitivity – can create a thing of such beauty – surely there’s hope for us?

Great literature is vicarious travel.  Having read this first book of Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, I feel I have lived in Cairo in the 1910s; I can see, hear and smell the city then.  Palace Walk is set at a time of Britain’s formal occupation of Egypt and the mass demonstrations against its rule, which serves as a counterpoint to the authoritarianism we see al-Sayyid Ahmad exercise over his family.  He and his friends go whoring and drinking nightly, while demanding the highest moral standards of their wives and daughters.  I didn’t know that Egyptian women then only ever left their homes twice in their lives: once when married to go to their husband’s house and, from there, just once to visit the mosque before they die.  This is a novel that questions authority, shines a light on hypocrisy, raises issues of justice and awakens the feminist in all fair-minded readers.

This is the novel I have gifted more than any other novel.  It’s the historically fictionalised account of Robert FitzRoy’s and Charles Darwin’s voyages around South America on HMS Beagle and, as such, an adventure story, a ripping sailing yarn and a philosophical meditation on science versus religion.  The action set pieces are gripping and the descriptions of landscapes beautiful.  The debates on religion and the proofs of God when challenged by science appear fresh, as they might have done in the 19^th century when initially challenged by Darwin’s theory of evolution.  Besides being quite simply an exciting and thrilling read, it’s a psychological investigation into belief systems, its greatest strength being the way in which it has the reader understanding the difficulty people might have in changing their minds and world view.  What may seem obvious to us now – the evils of imperialism and racism and some of the misguided practices of organised religion – were novel ideas 200 years ago.  This is a book of action and of ideas – masterful story-telling that grips you by the throat and doesn’t let go till the last page.

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BRUNO STUDIED PHILOSOPHY AND FRENCH LITERATURE AT SOUTHAMPTON UNIVERSITY AFTER WHICH HE WORKED IN FINANCIAL MAGAZINE PUBLISHING, BANKING AND ASSET MANAGEMENT, WHERE, AMONGST OTHER THINGS, HE WROTE REGULAR FINANCIAL MARKETS REPORTS. HE GAVE THAT UP IN 2013 TO START WRITING WHAT HE’D ALWAYS WANTED TO WRITE: A NOVEL. A THING OF THE MOMENT WAS PUBLISHED BY UNBOUND IN 2018 AND HIS SECOND, THE COLLETTA CASSETTES, BY INDIE NOVELLA IN 2022. BRUNO IS A MEMBER OF COLLIER STREET FICTION GROUP AND IS NEARING THE END OF A CREATIVE WRITING MA AT BIRKBECK UNIVERSITY. INKSPOT PUBLISHING ACQUIRED THE RIGHTS TO THE COLLETTA CASSETTES FOR ITS (RE)PUBLICATION IN MAY 2025.