Author: Andres Kabel

Colum McCann’s eighth novel, in a sequence of wildly eclectic novels, Twist, presents as some kind of thriller tackling the weird world of undersea cables but is really a most literary, elusive beast. A washed-up journalist travels to South Africa and then up the African coast with a huge ship that repairs breaks, captained by mysterious, super-capable John Conway. From the start we know Conway’s fate but what happens and why? Those mysteries are pursued with slow but graceful, unstoppable pace, the book digging into the journalist’s self-disgust and Conway’s unknowable past and even more unknowable future motivations. Ultimately, the novel is an ode to the riddles of the human heart and mind, but in the telling, it is an engrossing examination of the arcane world of ubiquitous, scanty cables straddling the globe down in the depths of the sea. The author’s style resembles the semi-poetic but precise beauty of his earlier novels but is even more clipped and roughly hewn, so that the read is both smooth and rocky. Only after the end, only after reflection on the questions unanswered, do we appreciate the mastery employed in Twist, and the book’s existential deepness. I cannot recommend Twist to everyone, suspecting some will find it murky and complex, but if you are up for modernity and soul-searching, it will amply reward.

Nobel Prize winning novelists tend to be oblique, highly “literary,” the type of writer we hope to sample and admire but tend to slide past. Thank goodness I did launch into We Do Not Part, the most recent book by the Korean winner of last year’s Nobel. When I say “launch,” perhaps I mean “wade into,” for the book’s introduction is a no-holds-barred, strange section in which the heroine, a novelist with terrible health, flirts with starvation and suicide, all alone. Until she receives a summons from an estranged longtime friend, in hospital with severed fingers… When the writer is bestowed a quest to go rescue the friend’s budgerigar on the remote southeast island of Jejun, the reader is quite unprepared for the phantasmagorical trip to reach the bird and, from there, the real topic of the novel, the unfurling of a documentary film project pursuing the 1948-1950 anti-communist massacres of tens of thousands, including, it turns out, the hospitalized friend’s family. If my description sounds unhinged, the novel does leap from the ordinary to the examination of genocide, yet Han Kang maintains pinpoint plot precision. The writing is lyrical and figurative, the prose lusciously descriptive, the scenes hallucinatory. The net effect is a stunning, angry, inconclusive examination of loyalty, art, morality, and amorality. We Do Not Part is a claustrophobic yet controlled semi-masterpiece.

An exuberant yet measured thriller, devoted equally to twisty action and characterization, Culprits is largely the child of J Blakeson, a director/screenwriter (I couldn’t find out what the “J” stands for) who has a pedigree in similar shows. The essential story idea is brilliant: a mastermind thief (Dianne Harewood, played with chilling menace and intelligence by Gemma Arterton) assembles a crack burglary team to steal a fortune from a seemingly impregnable fortress; a few years later, the team, living around the world with false identities, finds it is being hunted down (mostly by Ned Dennehy, evil-looking, as the evil Devil). What distinguishes Culprits is that it is told from the viewpoint of Joe (formerly David, codenamed Muscle), played thoughtfully by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. Joe is about to get married to his boyfriend (with two kids) in America and he provides the sense of humanity in the film, albeit a tenuous one, for Muscle lives up to his name as the eight episodes become steadily more crisply and amorally violent. The film romps around the world in high style, is beautifully filmed, and conforms to a back-and-forth-in-time script that works well. Culprits is, within the genre of the bloodthirsty heist thriller, a refreshingly kinetic and intelligent entry. Most watchable and a bit more than that…

Pitched for those in business, A Story is a Deal: How to Use the Science of Storytelling to Lead, Motivate and Persuade, by British author/journalist Will Storr, is equally a primer for writers and storytellers in general. The author, employing graceful prose and a clear logic, explores the history and nature of the story as it dominates our lives as humans. According to him, humans need stories all the time, for connection, for establishing and maintaining status, and for hope. Examples from all manner of spheres illuminate the book’s message, some of them direct, some of them unexpected. And the final section of A Story Is a Deal offers wisdom about how to start and sustain stories of any kind whatsoever. This is an exceedingly generous, helpful insight into something at the core of our beings. Recommended.

Knives Out was a refreshingly zippy Agatha-Christie-style pastiche film that has spawned a number of mimics. The Residence, its eight episodes all written by Paul William Davies, has a splendid conceit at its core: the chief usher of the White House is murdered during a state banquet and the entire audience is locked up while the super-investigator, in this case birdwatcher Cordelia Cupp (played with brio and nuance by Uzo Aduba), exercises Poirot-style mental gymnastics to tease out the well-hidden culprit. The cinematography is lush and stylised, the cast is admirable, and the dialogue crackles with wit. Can this constrictive dramatic notion sustain eight episodes? I must confess to doubts around episodes three and four, but after the midway point, The Residence takes flight and zooms home to a satisfying climax. First-rate entertainment fare.

A debut novel by Australian writer Diana Reed, Signs of Damage mines familiar, rich novelistic territory in exploring family dynamics and the mysteries of the past. When a family head dies, the funeral prompts his wife, two daughters, and various others to look back to a family holiday a decade and a half earlier in a French villa, when a visitor went missing for hours. The burden of epileptic seizures is explored with nuance. Jumping back and forth between present and past is handled deftly, and the characters hold great potential, but the plot labours the various unfolding secrets and the voice of the narrator lurches between people who sound much like each other.

Well-regarded Irish short story writer Roisin O’Donnell’s debut novel Nesting tackles head-on the blight of male domestic violence. Confused and unconfident Ciara flees her Dublin home (for the second time, she returned the first time), with her two young daughters, to escape the relentless emotional bludgeoning and dominance of her husband. A familiar story in these times, and at first, reading the author’s close-up narrative account, I experienced that sense of familiarity as an impost. But the prose is impeccably crafted, full of lovely scene setting detail, and once I settled into the rhythm, the novel acquired the impetus of a thriller. Will Ciara succeed against her husband’s unremitting, cunning campaigns to persuade her to return? By the three-quarter mark, Ciara dons the mantle of a hero with an impossible quest, and the finale is achingly tense. Nesting is a beautiful, important literary work.