It is highly likely that, like me, you are a re-reader of Jane Eyre. Why? The melodrama is risible; the coincidences beggar belief; the transformations in situation and fortune are almost like a fairytale. And yet something draws you back. Surely it must be the conviction of Jane’s narrative voice, her flinty unwillingness to be misused, her determination, her luck of survival, her daring to even consider love, but also her resolve not to submit to anything less than the equal marriage of (unfettered) true minds and hearts. It is Jane alone who draws us back. What a curious and singular character she is.

It is certainly true that Jane encounters her fair share of repugnant individuals in her short life. Nothing redeems the behaviour of Mrs Reed or her children, and Mr Brocklehurst is a sorry substitute, fixated as he is on an economic spiritual ideal of education mostly suited for shaping souls for the next life and not the one before them. But Jane also has luck. Whether it comes in the form of the inspirational Helen Burns, or perhaps her best mentor, Miss Temple, Jane somehow attracts the succour of the good and just individuals she meets. Even the otherworldly St John Rivers is counterbalanced by his more amiable sisters.

But of course it is Mr Rochester who fascinates Jane, and she him. He is both ugly in form and, at least initially, ugly in character – officious, peremptory, and dismissive. More ugliness lies beneath, too much perhaps. Rochester tempts fate by enticing Jane into a liaison that can only blacken his character. He tempts fate, and fate intervenes.

Brontë’s world is heavy with the clash of dark and light, good and—not evil perhaps, but—sullied nature. My temperament leads me to prefer Austen, but every once in a while, I find it necessary to come back and re-read this gripping tale. Recommended.

The narrator of Anne Tyler’s The Beginner’s Goodbye, Aaron Woolcott, is crippled in his right arm and leg as the result of a childhood virus. He always tells everyone that he can get by just fine. Which he does. Unfortunately his real crippling lies deeper; a lifetime of fending off solicitous mothers, sisters, and sympathetic young women has left him, perhaps not surprisingly, isolated emotionally. With the sudden and unexpected death of his wife, Dr Dorothy Rosales, who is literally flattened when a huge tree comes crashing through the sunroom of the house, Aaron finds himself bereft. But of what he is bereft?

In typical Tyler fashion, this novel is filled with unusual individuals who are presented as run-of-the-mill. Dramatic action, even action as dramatic as trees crashing through houses, is muted. Interior thoughts and self-doubt predominate. And there is a gentle sprinkling of light humour and passing psychological insight.

Somewhat unusually, there is a ghost lurking in this novel. Not the much talked about visions of Dorothy that Aaron experiences periodically during the year following her death. Rather, it is the character of Dorothy herself. She is endlessly enigmatic and always just out of reach. Who is this woman? She is an Oncologist of Hispanic origin with a respected medical practice. She is curiously muffled emotionally and strangely unpractised in social interaction. Very curiously (but entirely unexplored in the novel) even after years of marriage, Aaron has never met Dorothy’s family. Aaron’s call to her brother with the news of her death is his first occasion of speaking to him. I wanted to learn a great deal more about this woman. Alas, this is Aaron’s story and he either doesn’t know anything more about his wife, or doesn’t want to know.

As ever, when you try to situate a new Anne Tyler work within the range of her (now 19) novels, you find that it fits somewhere in the middle. As do all of the others. Gently recommended (for lovers of Anne Tyler novels).

More than 50 years after its original publication, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird is just as angular and opinionated as ever. It is a world filled with haints, hot steams, incantations and secret signs that Jean Louise—otherwise known as Scout—and her brother, Jem, must negotiate. But there are worse things in Maycomb than imaginary night frights. And better. On one side are formidable aunties, and equally formidable neighbours, though it takes Scout and Jem a fair bit of time to determine just which side those are on. By the time they are face to face with the worst of Maycomb (and possibly of mankind) they have learned a thing or two about the better as well. And at the top of the better column, undoubtedly, is their father, Atticus Finch.

Lee does such a good job painting a believable picture of Alabama in the 1930s that it begins to seem almost unbelievable that men like Atticus or children like Jem and Scout could emerge from such an environment. Where does their strength of character come from? How are they able to hold to their resolve come what may? And how does Atticus continue to place himself in other men’s shoes day after day and not end in self-loathing?

I suppose that To Kill A Mockingbird was intended for a child readership, but its content and themes are more than serious enough to give any adult pause. And if you missed out on this classic and are coming to it late in the game, as I have, then you may want to take a moment to imagine your younger self reading this novel. And you may also wonder whether that younger you would have developed more strength of character, more resolve, and more fellow feeling than you have as a result. Maybe.

Writing this novel has to be considered an achievement, or possibly a feat. The inspired choice of five year old Jack as the narrator presents innumerable challenges that Donoghue meets valiantly. It also has advantages. It allows her to treat of a situation so horrible that one rather wishes it were not even imaginable let alone possible. Through Jack’s naïve eyes we persevere, if only for his sake. But it is hard going, claustrophobic, and emotionally stifling.

The second half of the novel opens up new possibilities. Here things begin to lose direction, to meander, to go this way and that without a clear purpose. Maybe that is to be expected, but it may also have something to do with the downside of Jack’s narrative voice. Once his world expands the voice becomes much less persuasive, either too knowing, fey, or twee. It’s a risk for any writer, I think, though Donoghue does manage to present at least a few brilliant moments. I especially liked the utter incomprehension of what has occurred found in the voice of a woman commiserating with Jack’s grandmother: ‘”Well, I don’t know. I spent a week in a monastery in Scotland once…[and]…it was so peaceful.” I also liked Jack’s step-grandfather or ‘Steppa’ who seems to have a natural connection with Jack.

The ending is something of a disappointment, if only because the emotional and narrative closure it brings seems antithetical to the psychological scars the atrocities committed would have induced. Of course if closure is what you are looking for—the tidy settling of our exfoliated emotional skin like dust in an unused room—then Donoghue’s otherwise intriguing tale will fully satisfy. I just wish the focus of such a narrative feat truly were unimaginable.