Gregory Currie’s account of narrative is firmly rooted in neo-Gricean pragmatics. He believes that pragmatic inference—inference to the intended meaning behind the words—is ubiquitous in the comprehension of narrative. For “narratives are artefactual representations” that typically emphasize “the causal and temporal connectedness of particular things, especially agents,” which together constitute the story that the narrative communicates. In this way the intentions of the author, or implied author, are made plain to the perceptive reader. It is intentionalism, certainly, but not the fallacious sort debunked by Beardsley; it has no forensic goal, but is just “a common-or-garden activity over which we usually exercise little conscious control.”

If narratives typically concern themselves with causal and temporal connectedness, it will be no surprise to find that they often serve an explanatory function. This is seen vividly in historical narrative (or narrative histories), but fiction also partakes. And it may also account for the reciprocal and mutually supporting relationship that Currie sees later between narrative and Character (by which Currie means “the idea of character as property, as inner source of action, something related to personality and temperament”).

In the final chapters, Currie embraces Character scepticism. This might be seen as an instance of a broader challenge to folk psychological (or folk narrative) concepts. It is possible that Character scepticism also has its roots in neo-Gricean pragmatics, though Currie does not draw the connection. In any case, it is a troubling position for the reader who may have casually accepted Currie’s fine distinctions and close argument as he elaborated a plausible account of narrative. For along with Character scepticism goes scepticism for virtues and much of the machinery of moral psychology.

Running almost in parallel with the main argument of Narratives and Narrators is a series of appendices to chapters that present a speculative evolutionary account of how certain features of the practice of narrative might have arisen. It seems strange until one returns to the earlier noted explanatory power of narrative. By the end of the book Currie is exploiting his evolutionary story to underwrite his Character scepticism (where other arguments seem to have fallen short). But this seems illegitimate; here a speculative evolutionary account confers the impression of a causal explanation for why Character might have arisen as a practice even though (pace the Character sceptic) there is no such thing. I suspect Currie’s philosophical opponents may find room for disagreement here.

Currie claims that nearly everything we may want in terms of literary criticism and the expressive impact of narratives can be sustained even in the face of extreme Character scepticism. I am not so sure. But I am sure that any serious analytical philosophical discussion of narrative in future will do well to engage Currie’s position directly and forcefully.

Through a series of vignettes, Tove Jansson evokes summer on a tiny island off the coast of Finland. Sophia—an earnest but tempestuous little girl—spends her summers with her grandmother and her father. Her mother is dead, and one of the first questions she puts to her grandmother is, “When are you going to die?” Grandmother is wise and wily and immensely patient, but equally wilful as her young charge. Sophia is as quick to anger as the summer storms and just as quick to see that anger dissipate. With her grandmother she struggles with friendship, love, and ever-present fear.

Sophia’s father is a silent presence working at his desk or gardening or placing the fishing nets, but he does not speak. The focus is entirely on Sophia and her grandmother.

I am fascinated by what Jansson is able to accomplish with her simple, concrete, but thoughtful prose. At one point the grandmother admonishes a visitor, “Stop talking in symbols…why do you use so many euphemisms and metaphors? Are you afraid?” Certainly Jansson is unafraid to face head on the anguish of loss and impending loss. She follows the solution that Sophia and her grandmother arrive at on many occasions, which is to invent stories that incorporate the people and events confronting them, rendering them manageable. “It was a particularly good evening to begin a book,” notes the narrator, and I think you will agree when you take up this one. Certainly recommended.

Love, I suppose, is a state of wonder. Sometimes numbing, sometimes bedazzling, sometimes painful, sometimes blissful, sometimes singular, sometimes plural, sometimes filial, sometimes paternal, and sometimes conjugal—love is a perennial challenge for a novelist. Ann Patchett obviously loves a challenge. And since a writer’s ambition ought to know no bounds, she picks up the challenge of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Dante’s Inferno, and Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. To these she adds some dilemmas of medical ethics, participant observer anthropologists, and ethnobotanists. And I’m only just scratching the surface of this rich text. Indeed there is so much here to think about and discuss and reconsider that I doubt any consensus of opinion will form on this novel for some time. That’s as it should be. But love, I think, is a central core around which the other themes swirl.

Marina Singh is a physician turned pharmacological scientist. She suffers from unresolved father love, which transfers to a kind of worship of a former professor with a powerful personality, Annick Swenson, whom Marina later must seek out deep in the Amazonian rain forest. Her task is to check on the progress of Dr Swenson’s research into an infertility drug, as well as to verify the demise of her former colleague Anders Eckman, who preceded her in a similar quest. There is something unsettling about Marina’s awe of Annick Swenson. But she is not alone. Other scientists are equally in thrall, as is an entire tribe, the Lakashi. Such adoration, however, seems to be transitive since Annick herself previously experienced it for her own former professor, and late paramour, Dr Rapp, the discoverer of the Lakashi tribe and, more importantly, the variety of pharmacological treasures which they steward. It is unsettling because such love may imply a corresponding dislike of the self. And to some extent it feels either implausible or unsavoury this late in the day.

An equally niche form of love might be found in the paternalism that underwrites the non-interventionist ethic of the participant observer anthropologist and the ethnobotanist. Dr Swenson insists on leaving the Lakashi in their natural state, despite having lived with them, on and off, for fifty years. (Her scientists have never bothered to learn the language of the Lakashi.) Yet at the same time she is secretly involved in research on a malarial vaccine which she knows would potentially lead to a population explosion in poorly developed countries where it might significantly reduce the child mortality rate. It’s a difficult dilemma, and Patchett is wise to give us no easy answer.

These are merely two of the aspects of love canvassed here. There is so much more in State of Wonder, that all I can do is urge as many of my friends as possible to read it, if only so that I’ll have someone to talk to about it. It is not a great novel, I think. Its virtue resides in its, and its author’s, ambition. Which I admit to being a bit in awe of. Long may she continue picking up the challenge. Highly recommended.

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.