Innocence – Penelope Fitzgerald

Innocence has a great opening chapter, really startling and setting up the themes beautifully. Sadly, though, it loses its way somewhat after that, or rather I lost my way in it. There are flashes of interest, but I had to try rather too hard to find them.

The Comforters – Muriel Spark

E.F. Benson meets John Fowles is not a mash-up I ever expected to encounter, but that is what the divine Spark came up with in her debut. It’s an astringent mix, but it works in places.

I liked this introduction of a character, previously alluded to as the Baron:

“It is quite a common thing,” Willi Stock said. “Your brain is overworked”. This was the Baron speaking. He stood by the electric fire with its flicking imitation coals, sipping Curacao.

Notre Dame of Paris – Victor Hugo

There is an awful lot wrong with this novel. The story doesn’t start until page 200, the plotting makes no sense whatsoever and the focus veers about wildly. So why does it still captivate? I can only ascribe it to a combination of Hugo’s rambunctious style and the iconic characters of the saintly hunchback, the beautiful gypsy and the corrupt priest.

The ending surprised me. It’s very different from that suggested by the various spoofs I’ve seen over the years.

The Big Money – John Dos Passos

When I did the Observer Top 100 Novels thing, I ticked the masterful USA trilogy off as read without actually having got round to volume 3. The shame! The degradation! Consider me duly shamefaced.

Still, it’s not as if the final instalment differs greatly from the first 2. We have the same mixture of partially interwoven character arcs, impressionistic "camera eye" sequences, potted biographies of major figures of the time (Hearst, the Wright brothers) and "newsreel" snippets of headlines and popular songs. Familiar though it is, the effect is still exhilarating.

I had forgotten how fond Dos Passos is of compound words. On the first page we get the intimidating “Linoleumsmelling companionway”.

The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer

We’ve all seen the WWII movie in which a mixed group of young American men (Mexican, Italian, WASP etc) go into war together. Some of them turn out to be heroes, some cowards, and the first one to mention his girl back home in Wichita gets his head blown off.

This book, published at a raw time in 1948, pretty much epitomises the format. There’s barely a memorable sentence in it but Mailer’s storytelling verve is evident in this, his first book. The more arty flashbacks are clearly influenced by Dos Passos.

I found the euphemistic swearing rather endearing (a lot of “fugging”), but at the time it was enough to provoke the Sunday Times into running a front page leader demanding that the novel be banned in the UK. Oh reactionaries, when will you ever learn?

The Happy Prince and other stories – Oscar Wilde

These short stories for children are, of course, beautifully written and show off Wilde’s great imagination. A couple of times they are burdened with excess religiosity, but generally the morals are sound (except in the case of The Devoted Friend, the punchline of which is that moral tales are a terribly bad idea). I liked the final story about an overbearing firework, the kind of conceit the metaphysical poets would have gone for.

The Assistant – Bernard Malamud

A sad story about individuals setting goals for themselves and then, through misfortune or personal shortcomings, failing to achieve them. The setting is a Jewish run store in 1950s Brooklyn, which lends an interesting cultural angle.

This is an excellent novel, but there is a problematic approach to sexual violence that I think would not get through the editorial process these days.