Tony Webster doesn’t get it, and he never will. That, at any rate, is the opinion of Veronica Ford, his one-time college sweetheart. It is an opinion that Tony, late in life, has come to share. But unbeknownst to Tony, and possibly to Veronica, there is no culpability associated with not getting it. And in some sense, here, ignorance is bliss.

Julian Barnes’ short novel has the feel of an extended short story. The opening section presents the nostalgic story that Tony likes to tell of his life, expansive in recounting his school friends and their various approaches to the driving forces of Eros and Thanatos (love and death), and the moral implications of action and intention; rather more compressed as the story moves into later life. Mingled with the early motifs and ceaselessly reiterated is the distinction between characters and events (i.e. story) on the one hand and the narratives we construct to convey same. Of the many formulations of history provided in the text, perhaps one left unstated might be “the narrative we construct of our past”. In the second, longer, part of the novel, Tony’s narrative of his past life undergoes severe and frequent transformation. As new facts come to light, whether as documentation or retrieved memories, Tony is forced to adjust his conception of himself and his friends, most especially Veronica, but also Adrian. Tony is constantly deciding what people and events are parts of his story, his narrative. And the sense of an ending, if there is one, is simply where the narrative stops being revised.

So much is compressed into this short novel that you may, like me, have longed for Julian Barnes to have been a bit more expansive. Tony is the only character revealed at length and he is, seemingly, an unreliable witness. But his very unreliableness is unreliable. For he is as reliable as his sources, never wilfully deceptive. One feels he would certainly “get it” if only some of the other characters were a bit more forthcoming. Like me, you may find the juvenile moral calculus employed by Adrian to be both implausible and impracticable. Moreover, muddling Camus and the analytical consequentialists is, I fear, just muddling. Nevertheless there is plenty here worthy of reflection. And certainly Barnes’ prose rarely puts a word wrong. One just rather wishes there were more of it. Recommended.

There is something succulent in the late novels of Barbara Pym, like deliberately over-ripened fruit, or a haunch of game hung for an extended period. One feels that Pym knows her characters almost too well, and that she may not particularly like them. Yet she spends time with them, and invites us to do the same: slightly distasteful women, ambiguous and calculating men, vapid gentlewomen, and the ever-charming clergyman (here occurring only as a brief fellow train traveller sharing a table for tea). So how does Pym take a character one doesn’t particularly like, such as Leonora Eyre, and in the space of a single short chapter render her entirely sympathetic, even pitiable? Only exquisite mastery of her craft could explain Pym’s remarkable affect upon her reader.

The elegant Leonora is ageing more or less gracefully. She enjoys the attentions of men, both older and younger, whilst knowing how to keep restrictive commitment at bay. She may always know the right word or gesture, but like Henry James’ prose, which is alluded to, she can come across as cold. Of course that suits some English men perfectly, especially those who would be somewhat overwhelmed by a real passionate relation with a woman. Sexual relations, which are subtext in the early Pym novels, are rendered explicit here. However, they remain curiously unreal, no doubt because they were never Pym’s object. And that raises the question, what really is Pym’s object in this novel? The answer lies in the reading, and I suspect will change as you read it again and again. As I will. Always recommended.

Turnabout is fair play. In Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, a precise and delicate series of dramatic scenes are presented that paint the relationship between Mari and Jonna, lifelong friends, artistic colleagues, travelling companions. They tolerate each other’s minor manias, accommodate their idiosyncrasies, make blunders and rectify them, and contribute to each other’s art – writing (primarily) in the case of Mari, visual art in the case of Jonna. But most of all they remain open to the almost priceless small acts of kindness that are possible when love, respect, and friendship are the deep foundation of a relationship.

Such spare descriptive writing seemingly insists on transmuting into symbolism. For example, Mari and Jonna share a well-weathered boat named Viktoria, and fathers that were each named Viktor. But even here, Jansson refuses to accept mere symbolism opting instead for the transformative effects of nostalgia. In like fashion, their experience of the American west in the segment set in Phoenix follows hard on the heels of a discussion of the B-movie western. You might be thinking Baudrillard, but don’t. As the hostess of the Phoenix bar says, “Give these ladies some space…They’re from Finland.” That sounds like good advice. Recommended.

Grief changes everything. For Helen, whose husband, Cal, died in the Ocean Ranger oilrig disaster in 1982, grief suffuses her life. Everything she does, her children, including the one on the way at the time of Cal’s death, her work, her connections (or lack thereof) with others, all of it is enveloped in grief. But it’s more than that, because grief changes even what has gone before. It tinges the memory of her time together with Cal with foreboding and a previously unrealized sadness. It gets in all the cracks; it is in the very air Helen breathes. And it isn’t just Helen. The loss of their father affects each of her children, though perhaps her son, John, is most palpably affected. At one point, a seer grips his arm and states ominously, “You’ve lost someone in the past,” continuing a moment later to complete the vision, “Or you are going to lose someone in the future.” Well, yes, that about covers it.

Lisa Moore’s style is distinctive and well practiced. Those familiar with her short story collections, Open or Degrees of Nakedness, will find the same fractured and faceted narrative structure here. There the glimpses she provides, mirrored by her fragmented and suggestive sentences, work brilliantly to create a mood and imply a whole life, a whole story. Whether such a style is as suitable for a novel is debatable, though it certainly works well enough for her first novel, Alligator. Here, however, everything seems muted, monotone, a bit depressed. That works well, of course, with the overall presentation of grief. But it does tend towards a single note. Sections with different characters as leads all sound the same and the characters begin to bleed into one another.

If grief changes everything and everything is grief, then sooner or later the reader, and one suspects also the characters, will start discounting. We start looking past the grief just as we look through the air to see the things that stand out. And what stands out here are the ties of family, the bonds of love, the blunders we make and how we rectify them, and the in-built drive to create new life and new love. Grief may be everywhere, but we get through it. Recommended.

From the first page of the lyrical long first section of Beloved, the reader knows she or he is in the hands of a master storyteller. Morrison paints a harrowing picture through Sethe, Paul D, Stamp Paid, Baby Suggs, and, of course, Beloved herself. But Morrison’s prose never settles. It is always on edge, its images just beyond clarity. Long before Paul D is told explicitly of Sethe’s past, the reader has guessed what lies at heart of the eerie haunting of 124 Bluestone Road, Sethe’s defining action.

A reader might well ask why Morrison does not end the novel at that point. I suspect the answer is that her goal is something other than American Gothic. This is tragedy, more Greek than Shakespearean. Thus the lyricism gives way in the shorter second section to a sequence of viewpoints (Stamp Paid’s, Denver’s, Sethe’s, Beloved’s) that problematize Sethe’s earlier dramatic action and Paul D’s visceral reaction to knowledge of it. This is not justificatory; it is about seeing the act for and as what it is. Sethe’s life and the lives of those around her have been destroyed as a consequence of her action. In part, it is those consequences that help us to see really see Sethe’s awful choice.

The third section of the novel brings the transformed understanding home in the form of the chorus of the thirty women determined to exorcise 124 Bluestone in order to rescue Sethe. And especially in the return of Paul D, prepared to acknowledge now that his initial reaction had been unjust.

Having finished reading Beloved, you will want to start reading it again immediately. That sounds like a good idea. Highly recommended.