The Modern Library by Colm Tóibín, Carmen Callil Page B

easy to pick on a boy called Piggy. They talk in a mixture of school talk and attempted adult talk, but this changes as the novel goes on. The older boys take control. ‘Apart from food and sleep, [the smaller boys] found time for play, aimless and trivial, among the white sand by the bright water. They cried for their mothers much less often than might have been expected; they were very brown, and filthily dirty.’ They try to keep a fire lit, they eat fruit, attend meetings and hunt pigs. The pig-hunting scenes are particularly graphic and bloodthirsty. Leaders emerge, and slowly a war breaks out between them; two of the older boys get killed and they begin to hunt another, just as a ship arrives.
    Golding has created the unbrave new world of these small boys so convincingly that when the first adult speaks at the end of the book, it seems like an odd intrusion.
    William Golding was born in Cornwall and was an English teacher in Wiltshire for many years. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1983. His other books include Pincher Martin (1956), The Spire (1964) and Rites of Passage , which won the Booker Prize in 1980.
    Age in year of publication: forty-three.
     
     

Nadine Gordimer 1923–
     
1979 Burger’s Daughter
     
    Nadine Gordimer is known for her implacable opposition to the enduring apartheid regime in South Africa rather than her extraordinary talent as a stylist or as a novelist who writes better than any of her contemporaries about states of sexual longing and desire. Burger’s Daughter is the work in which her talent at dramatizing the conflict between public and private life, the individual and the family, history and destiny, escape and entrapment, is best displayed.
    Rosa Burger is the daughter of Marxist parents who have been martyred for the cause of a new South Africa. The novel tells the story of her desire to be true to her parents’ legacy and her efforts to escape it. It is written in her own voice and the dry voice of a reporter; it takes us through her childhood and her parents’ lives, through the years after their deaths, followed by a wonderfully described sensuous sojourn in France, and then the inevitable return. Even though much of the novel deals with cool surfaces, scenes viewed from afar, moments snatched from memory, Rosa Burger, like many of Gordimer’s characters, seems desperately real and exact, alive and memorable.
    Nadine Gordimer was born in Transvaal, South Africa, and has always lived in South Africa. All her short story collections are wonderful and her strongest novels include The Late Bourgeois World (1966), The Conservationist , which won the Booker Prize in 1974, and A Sport of Nature (1987). She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991.
    Age in year of publication: fifty-six.
     
     

Alasdair Gray 1934–
     
1981 Lanark: A Life of Four Books
     
    No great Scottish novel emerged from the First World War, nor from the Second. It seems to have taken the unlikely figure of Margaret Thatcher to fire, and perhaps infuriate, the Scottish novelists’ imaginations.
    Lanark seethes with political rage and is jammed with surrealist invention. It tells the interconnected stories of Duncan Thaw, a young Glasgow artist who draws, and is drawn, in the realist tradition, and the figure Lanark, his science fiction doppelgänger, who comes to the page in full Borgesian dress. Thaw’s Glasgow is a place of tenements, canals, middens, Catholics and Protestants, and the man himself is common and depressed, a Fifties lad filled with civic wonder. Lanark’s vision of Glasgow is called Unthank, a fiery, darkened, collapsing industrial nightmare, like an illustration from William Blake. Lanark is given to odd skin complaints and strange encounters, and his travels through the underworld give vent to some of the best thinking about citizenship ever to appear in a novel.
    Gray is a master of shade and counterpoint. Thaw’s world and Lanark’s world open on to each other in the