The book was published in 1996 but the mood of the opening pages took me further back, to the early work of Mike Leigh: wonderful television films like Nuts in May and Abigail’s Party, with their fascinated, unnerving and nerve-raw take on aspiration, usually represented by Alison Steadman (coincidence, surely?) The heroine of Dreamhouse is herself a Steadman-like figure called Celia whose lifetime ambition, to celebrate her forthcoming marriage by holding an engagement party, is about to be realised. Celia shares a house with three other people, two of whom, inconveniently, have decided to host their own parties the same evening. Unlike Celia, they live in a world where bottom drawers are less important than mind-altering substances and feminist cinema. What can possibly go wrong?

The premise is farcical, but also appalling, for Celia at least, and the novel develops both the horror and the farce as though there were no significant difference between the two. Which is rarely true in real life, but is certainly true in certain forms of art and recreational drug use. Habens skilfully yokes both to the chariot of her novel, which runs amok within the walls of the shared (dream)house as it transforms itself into an inverted wonderland. Alice’s descent, for example, is paralleled by Celia’s ascent as she climbs the stairs to the first floor. There, she finds herself in a themed fancy-dress party and it will surprise no one to learn that the theme is Alice in Wonderland. That Celia is dressed in an improbably old-fashioned pale blue dress and has long blonde hair only adds to the confusion. In one sense, the novel is driven by this sort of muddle and displacement, like the finest Feydeau. Who people might actually be becomes contingent on a host of externalities: dress, place, expectation. Even gender is called into play, as the novel fills with competing Alices of both sexes and Celia’s one true self, as much a mystery to her as it is to anyone else, is called upon to define itself.

Celia is an anagram of Alice (I hope this isn’t giving too much away – I’m slightly ashamed to admit that I didn’t cotton on to this myself but had to wait until I was told…) and Dreamhouse, in its disarmingly inventive way, is itself an anagram of Lewis Carroll‘s Alice books, their elements, or some of them, being taken up and rearranged with the casual disregard for identity, and logic, of the original works, and with all their wit and delight in wordplay multiplied tenfold. Because, for sheer linguistic exuberance, Habens gleefully outdoes her inspiration by weaving wordplay – puns, assonance, spoonerisms, half-rhymes – into the very stuff of the writing. Everything, from Carroll to Joyce via music hall innuendo, gets tumbled into the mix. Here’s an example:

‘Within a matter of minutes my trousers were terrified and trying to come off. I hurried to help her remove her dress too, frightened little bit of flimsy that it was, for she was bellowing “Get off! Get off!” at the bottom of her voice. But I couldn’t get the frock off fast enough for her; it was frozen with fear, and some of the bottons got pulled off in the panic. Well, by this time she was everywhere. She came at me with open legs. Her body was all over my hands. She rammed herself at my rod, so soft I thought she would swallow me up.

Linguistic high jinks but beneath the dazzle is the description of what might have been a rape; and once again, this disjunction – this arbitrariness, if you like, within the language itself – between what’s said and what’s meant is at the very heart of what’s going on. In the dreamhouse nothing is stable, least of all the subjects concerned, as their clothes, their limbs, their members begin to do their feeling for them. The final court scene, towards which everything converges both within the novel and in its status as parody and anagram of the Alice books, is an absolute joy, told with an hallucinatory energy that would have left the Victorian don reeling. But it’s also the point at which the world outside this ersatz drug-induced wonderland comes back into play. It’s a world on the brink of chaotic involution; the fact that Glenda Jackson appears at one point – to refute the notion of sexual crime as a crime against property rather than the person – only adds to the general feeling that something larger is about to break through, something more real than apparent, or less topsyturvy. Connections begin to be made. There’s a death, a real death…

At times, the energy of Dreamhouse is simply too much to absorb. Nothing, in the end,  is more exhausting than something that is itself inexhaustible. And for all its Aliceness, and its playful quizzical vigour, Habens’ novel is driven by something more than the final impossibility of defining what we mean by identity, and the fun this might produce. Like Tim Burton’s recent film based on the Alice books, it aims to do more and ends up doing slightly less. In both cases, it’s a question of narrative imperative being stronger than the kind of epistemological questioning Carroll engaged in. For all the visionary élan of Burton’s film, his need to simplify the story into good and evil plays against, and ultimately defuses, the gleeful relativism of the original books. In Habens’ case, the very real plight of Celia, of who she is and of what she might become, runs counter to the very procedures that give the novel its form, its charm, and its startling originality. In this sense, the novel is too rich a concoction for its own good; a concoction in which the parts of the book can begin to seem greater than the whole. But to say this is simply to recognise – and acknowledge - the book’s ambition, which is immense.

Bear with me.

Sarah’s good with titles, taking scraps of everyday language and holding them up to be looked at more closely, not entirely trusting them, certainly not at face value; it’s a technique she stretches to the limit within the books as well. Tell Me Everything is no exception. It’s an imperative, and it has a touch of threat but also a sense of wheedling. We’re asked to be told everything by inquisitors and by lovers, by children who can’t get to sleep and think we may have the magic word that will make that happen. We tell people everything because we trust them or because we’re afraid. But everything isn’t always synonymous with the truth. In the end, everything might just be the story that best fits the bill. Molly, the sixteen-year-old heroine and narrator of the novel, learns in the first few pages of the novel that stories have the power to change lives, often unpredictably, and that the people to whom they’re entrusted aren’t necessarily always worthy of that trust. What follows may look like a textbook case of unreliable narrator, but Sarah makes it more interesting, and less textbook, by letting us in on the secret, at least in part. Molly knows when she’s lying – the stories she tells have a very specific role to play in her new life, which depends on their ability to charm as much as Scheherazade’s once did. She’s making herself a new life by making up an old one. At the same time, her ability to see what’s happening around her is clouded by what parents tend to call an over-fertile imagination, as though that were possible. Everything is grist to the ever-grinding mill of Molly’s creative remodelling of the world as one story tumbles over, and changes the nature of, another. The best stories are often produced by withholding information, and that’s something else both Molly and her creator know full well. Everything, in other words, in its own good time. Even, as the last resort, the truth.

Molly has things in common with Verity, the narrator of Sarah’s first novel, Something Beginning With (another simple, and brilliantly apposite, title). She’s young (though not as young), looking for love, and friendship, and purpose. The basic material the novel draws on isn’t that far from the world of Bridget Jones, but the novel couldn’t be less like BJ’s Diary, or anyone else’s. Whatever the packaging might suggest (and Sarah was signally ill-served by her original UK publisher; the edition pictured here is, once again, published by the Friday Project), nothing could be less chick-lit(e) than this novel, from the epigraph by Barthes (“The alphabetical order erases everything, banishes every origin”) to the Reading Index at the end, which, like the book itself, is both playful and thoughtful. Barthes’ comment is relevant not only to this novel (arranged, for those who haven’t read it, in alphabetical order), but also to the way in which Molly uses stories to cancel her past and start again. Stories, like the alphabet, find structure where otherwise no structure would exist. And there’s something arbitrary about both until they suddenly become natural. What makes this novel such a joy, among other qualities, is the fact that the story structure is woven so skilfully into the anti-narrative structure of the alphabet. The first three entries are Ambition, Ants and Attitude, the last three Zest, Zoology and Zzzz. Even better, these entries cross-reference to other entries further down or up the line. At the end of Attitude , the reader is invited to see Dreams, Impostor Syndrome, Wobbling. It’s hard to resist, and, finally, how you read the book depends on the kind of reader you are. Whatever you do, from the moment the choice is offered, you find yourself obeying Barthes’s injunction: ‘Cut! Resume the story in another way!’ Verity (and the irony of the name will not be lost, or side-stepped) is self-deluding and astute at the same time; like Molly she’s both the artificer and the victim of her fate. The structure of the book, so arbitrary on the surface and yet so subtle, also provides the sort of intimacy one might expect from a diary or letter, as though we were being enabled to watch the actual process of Verity’s making sense of things, or trying to, from the disparate scatter of objects she finds in her head. One of the unexpected bonuses of the book is the way its form allows what appear to be digressions: nostrils and weaning in Japan spring to mind  - in one sense the book looks like nothing but digression – and yet everything is pertinent, everything pulls its weight. Not a word – or letter – is wasted.

Sarah’s most recent novel, Getting the Picture, was first published last year. It’s an epistolary novel and makes more than a passing nod to one of its most illustrious predecessors, Les Liaisons dangereuses, not only in the epigraph, but thematically as well. Like Laclos’ great novel, it contains more than a simple exchange of letters (intimacies?) between two people. It’s an interesting form to choose, and it’s not hard to imagine – on the basis of Sarah’s earlier novels – the kind of fun that can be had with it, the possibility it offers of stories that fail to mesh, or that mesh all too well into something none of their tellers might have contemplated. Getting the picture is the hardest thing in the world to do when what we are is an integral part of that picture. It’s the old ethnological problem, but it’s intrinsic to the nature of story-telling as well, and the letter is – or was – perhaps the most basic unit of written story-telling available to us. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the lengths to which Sarah takes this. Epistolary novels generally involve dialogue between two or more characters, but what this book contains, almost entirely, are letters that are never answered, often for very good reasons, or whose answers are concealed from the reader, only becoming visible through the filter of those who receive them, and respond, not always happily. This creates enormous scope for humour, misunderstanding and intrigue, all of which are exploited to the full. The book is a kaleidoscope of contiguous, closed elements that nonetheless play off – and with – one another, to comic and moving effect. The full picture, denied to the characters in the book, gradually comes into focus to its reader. There’s a gentle humour to some parts of the novel, and a genuine malevolence to others; and it isn’t always clear which is which. It’s the darkest of the three books, and not because it’s set in a residential care home; perhaps the darkness comes out most insistently, and creepily, in the book’s portrayal of obsessive love, something that – it occurs to me now – is at the anxious, over-eager and possibly unworthy heart of all three books’ main characters. Together, they’re a great achievement, as dense and light – and deceptive – as the perfect tiramisu.

All These Little Worlds doesn’t disappoint; it’s a more assured collection than its predecessor, with a set of funny and poignant stories that flag up the Fiction Desk series as one to keep an eye upon in the coming years.

Oh yes, and Scott Pack has some nice things to say about my contribution here.

The next volume will be out in the new year, which would make an annual subscription an ideal Christmas gift now, wouldn’t it?

You can read what we both have to say here.

I’ve been thinking about plagio because I’ve recently finished reading The Flight from the Enchanter by Iris Murdoch, in the Penguin edition whose cover is reproduced here, which I’ve owned since the 1960s, and hadn’t read since then. It was odd to see how much of the book I remembered, odd to imagine the effect it must have had on me as a provincial schoolboy and to compare that book with the book I was reading now. Books have their own enchantment, and can take us over in ways that aren’t always beneficial, and I wonder how much the world this novel portrays – a world both recognisable and utterly foreign – helped shape the world I imagined I would find when I grew up and began to make my own life. In the opening chapter, a young woman called Annette – seen swinging from a chandelier in the cover illustration – walks out of her finishing school with the intention of educating herself. She tells the headmistress, I shall go out into the School of Life. Re-reading this, I found myself remembering entire scenes as though I’d read them yesterday. Other sections had the same effect; moving on I had the sensation that the the book, its arms wide open, was coming forward to meet me. I’m sure this is because the world it describes is the world I so fervently wanted to find myself a part of. A world of other-worldly academics and small magazines and unorthodox sexual relationships. A world in which the serpent – Mischa Fox – appears not only threatening but strangely vulnerable and guileless, as though knowledge, or whatever the enchantment might be, is both innocent and guilty. There’s a touch of Dorian Grey about it all, in a knowing post-Sartrean way, as though the portrait were as illusory as faith. A School of Life indeed.

Fox is the obvious enchanter and much of the novel is concerned with the flight from – and towards – him of most of the main characters, held in a web of their own and of Fox’s making, as anxious that others should be saved from it as they are to define their own distance and belonging. But there are so many other enchantments: the desire to crack a dead language that might have nothing finally to say but the routine business of a dead, perhaps ignoble world; the rented room in which two brothers make love to a young woman, daughter of a famous suffragette, while their mother slowly dies in the corner; the foolish, unrealisable ambitions of the brother of the woman, hopelessly tied to a review for which there is no future, whose only value lies in its resistance to Fox and his cunning, genuinely vulpine assistant, Calvin Blick; the anguish of a seamstress whose flight will be horribly interrupted and transformed, like that of Icarus, into fall. All of the characters are, in one way or another, enthralled and, inevitably, what enthrals can also, and often does, lead to disaster. But to be disenchanted is to lose faith, is to be free, and that’s something Murdoch’s characters can’t quite accept either, however genuinely threatened they might be. Their achievement of the good, in some cases, isn’t just hard-won; it also rings slightly false, as though they suspect they’ve been sold a pup.

As I do. Because, second time round, the novel strikes me as being oddly bloodless, the characters, for all their variety and charm, little more than marionettes in the hands of a very able puppet-mistress. And it’s striking that the winds of menace - alluring and chilling – should blow so resolutely from the east until one remembers that the novel was first published in 1956, the year of the brutally suppressed revolution in Hungary, and only four years after Murdoch left the Communist Party for the second time, the first time, in 1942, being for purely professional reasons. The social details, the factory in which Rosa works, for example, are creakily unreal, as is the Kafka-with-water government ministry in which another character struggles to maintain his position against the wiles of his young assistant. There’s an overwhelming sense of the novel as intellectual construct that surely wasn’t there when it was written, over fifty years ago, a construct that hovers on farce and is, occasionally, rather nasty. The suicide of one of its minor characters is particularly chilling, for all its expectedness. Which is not to say, of course, that the book has no value. It’s a novel that absolutely repays the effort, and pleasure, of reading it. But what it says may no longer be what its author hoped it would say. In the world of Goldman Sachs and Rupert Murdoch, and Silvio Berlusconi, Mischa Fox seems endearingly small fry. It’s hard to imagine anyone being plagiato by a man of his charm, or damaged by the ruthless and unpredictable charm of his wealth. And there’s something about the book that reminds me, although it probably shouldn’t, of Gabriel Josipovici’s small masterpiece, Only Joking, if only because the world the latter describes also has something about it of artifice, and of attention to a sort of reckless playfulness that was modernist then and that, in these post-modern days, still has something to say that’s both menacing and comic.

It would be hard to fault the author’s own description of her novel. Out of Sight is relentless in its examination of damage and the havoc it wreaks. At the start of the novel, Patrick/Patrice Hinde, the central figure (I hesitate to use the word ‘hero’), is a happily-married practising homoeopath , with a wife, Belinda, a musician whose playing allows him to ‘relax his guard’, and one small child, a son called Daniel. Gradually, as we learn about Patrick’s background, a childhood of isolation and emotional deprivation divided between boarding school and his harsh and unyielding grandmother in France, it soon becomes clear to what extent this happiness is hard-won and, potentially, fragile. A visit from his English father, a retired multinational executive, and French mother, a woman devoured by irrational anxiety, throws the inadequacies of his own past into relief, with disastrous consequences.

The opening scene, in which Patrick talks to one of his patients, provides a rapid overview of one of the novel’s central themes:

‘It’s about past emotional trauma, do you remember? [...] An inherited predisposition. It may be in your life, or your family, or even your distant ancestors, something that leaves a residue which has a negative impact on the vital force.’

In the case of the novel, the predisposition for trauma may be in Patrick’s past, and in that of more than one generation of his family, as we discover towards the end of the story, but what triggers it, and provides the impetus for the novel, is something Patrick himself does. It’s an act that’s both utterly comprehensible and inexplicable, and I’m not going to say what that act is here, because one of the many pleasures of the novel is its extremely skilful building of narrative, and emotional, tension. What the book is concerned with, principally, is the devastating effect a certain kind of forgetfulness, in one specific instance and in a larger, more lasting and wilful way, can have on an individual, whose propensity for guilt and self-blame is already highly developed. One of the tenets of homoeopathy is that, however much the original substance is diluted, something of it survives – that water has a memory of what it might have once contained – and there’s a determination to Patrick’s forgetfulness that transforms it into a sort of deeper homoeopathic memory of what’s been forgotten, a memory that won’t be cancelled. If nothing else – Patrick’s self-administered remedies certainly seem to have little medical validity – the novel confirms homoeopathy’s metaphorical value.

I should admit here that my own views on homoeopathy are in line with those of Patrick’s father, sceptical to the point of hostility. This may be part of the reason I feel it’s hard to find much to like in Patrick. He’s sanctimonious, priggish, hypocritical (He still felt guilty that he drove here every day from Brighton – he who counselled his patients to live natural, organic and carbon-neutral lives), and although it’s clear that he’s attractive to women, it’s hard not to see this as as more than a sign that some women like men who are slim, prepare a mean risotto and are sufficiently troubled to represent a challenge; brutally, he’s the kind of man who seems to need looking after.

In the second part of the novel, which forms its core, Leonie, refugee from a failed affair in London and working in the tourist business in provincial France, meets and falls in love with Patrice, as he’s now known, for the reasons I mention above. It’s an odd courtship and Leonie’s willingness to put up with some fairly unpredictable behaviour is convincingly – and often sensuously -described. But Patrice’s refusal to forgive himself, his essentially self-centred stubbornness, looks set to stymie Leonie’s hopes. The final section of the novel, set once again in the UK, brings the story to an unexpected but satisfying close and, once again, I’ll leave you to find out what that is by reading the novel yourself. I found it gripping and frustrating at the same time, a sure sign that the book is doing something unexpected, and doing it well. If I have a criticism, it’s that the writing sometimes feels a little over-determined, as though the author doesn’t quite trust her readers to read between the lines. I wondered as I read whether Isabelle’s considerable experience as a successful writer of television drama, in which dialogue obviously takes precedence, might not have left her with an unfulfilled urge to fill in some of the gaps between the talk, to tell as well as show. For a novel in which silence plays such a fundamental and disingenuous role, it’s a temptation that must have been hard to resist.

Both the admiration and the feeling of emulation (which implies, if nothing else, a sort of similarity of intent and approach) have remained with me, strengthened by Parks’ non-fiction work, which seems to me to offer one of the most articulated and grounded responses to modern-day Italy I’ve come across, and one that I recognise, and would corroborate, on an almost daily basis. More recently, as I’ve felt that my own work hasn’t had quite as much attention as it deserves – because this is no place for false modesty – it’s been a source of comfort and anxiety to note that Tim Parks is also – in my opinion and that of others – consistently underrated, despite having been shortlisted for the Booker. One of the ways I make myself feel better in bookshops that don’t have a single copy of any of my books is to edge along the shelves a little and see how much Parks they have – to my shame, I’m usually gratified to see that he’s also absent.

But it’s the work that counts, and I’d be lying if I said that Parks hadn’t also had an effect on my own writing, if only because he showed me a way of mediating other non-English influences, above all Thomas Bernhard, a writer Parks himself acknowledges as an influence and one he approached – as I did – through Italian translation. I’m fascinated by the way both writers have developed, in their very different ways, a flexible, inclusive syntax,  taut and yet capable of absorbing the most extraordinary amount of information and internal contradiction. German and Italian, Parks’s second and – I imagine – home language (as it is mine), are both syntactically far richer than English, which is both a blessing and a curse, as inflection extends the space available to the sentence but fixes relationships within it in a way that a looser and potentially more ambiguous grammar, such as English, doesn’t. Bernhard uses this richness most typically as a framework on which to hang the most wonderful, exhilarating virtuosic rants. Parks, on the other hand, although ranting is certainly part of his – or of his characters’ – repertoire, often seems to stretch syntax to the limit as part of a process of qualification, negation, reiteration, a having-it-both-ways that comes as close as anything I know to what the utterly non-linear business of thinking/being is actually like. It’s also a language that cuts across cliché, unpredictable, often to hilarious effect, constantly alive to itself and what it might be saying.

I’m talking here primarily about the three novels of Parks that I like best, Europa, Destiny and this one, Cleaver. They’re driving, obsessed novels that worry every idea until there seems to be no life left in it, only to have it start back up again the minute it’s been dropped. Europa, an account of a trip to Strasbourg to present the case of foreign language teachers in Italian universities made by one of their number is, by turns, comic, astute, obscene, enraged, detached, often in the same paragraph-long sentence. Destiny, which also has an Italian setting of a sort, contains the most concentrated example of the kind of highly textured writing I’m talking about. This is what Parks himself has to say about it:

I would write by hand, as ever, rewrite every few pages on the screen, then start an immensely long process of writing into what I already had, cutting sentences in two and moving them about, intercutting maybe three or four thought patterns, all syntactically coherent, but only just hanging onto each other with all the interruptions. It was an exhausting business, but great fun to do and very exciting because I had the impression, perhaps illusory, that there was an authenticity to it, that it caught the sense one has of being trapped in one’s head at moments of furious obsession: a sort of grim hilarity.

Quite. It’s interesting that he should have done this on paper – interesting that he should always write by hand, come to that -as I’d have thought it was a technique that’s encouraged by the use of the computer, the way it allows you to intervene so easily on existing text. There’s an old-fogeyish aspect to the central character of both Destiny and Cleaver (and the narrator of Europa is hardly a new man), and it’s tempting to see Parks’ own refusal to blog or use social networks as stemming from a similar disdain for the modern. (He might, of course, simply have a better use for his time – he’s certainly one of the most prolific, and consistently interesting, writers around.)

Like the other two novels, Cleaver is essentially an internal monologue, albeit in the third person (Europa and Destiny are both first person). The protagonist, Harold Cleaver, is a successful television journalist and documentary maker who runs away from his career and family after the publication of a book by his son, which he sees as a violent and unjustified attack on him as a father, public figure and man, and a ‘memorable’ interview with the President of the United States. He’s a vain, overweening, self-justifying sort of character and the language Parks adopts to create him - shorter, less complex sentences than we’re used to –  enacts the sort of fractured, self-referential world in which he’s been living before his flight to the South Tyrol, a world of distraction and relativism. It’s a world he’s fleeing from in his lumbering, clumsy way, hurt and confused, and in search of – what? Oblivion? Peace?

One of the answers he offers to this question – a question he continues to badger himself with throughout the book – is silence. The silence he seems to be after is not only an escape from the noise of the world, out of which he has made a substantial career for himself and to which he has substantially contributed, but also a refuge from who and what he is, either through greater understanding of the self, which would involve a process of inner questioning that is constantly undermined by Cleaver’s jumpy and defensive analyses of his own actions (his meditations on his son’s book are both spot-on and horribly wrong-headed), or through its abnegation. Abnegation of the self then, but in what sense? How far is the self a physical thing? So much of Cleaver’s self has been defined by his unrestrained consumption, of women, wine, food. His self-imposed isolation in an unheated mountain hut, the former home of a Nazi sympathiser, can’t just be about the psyche; it’s also about the flesh.

Because the battleground on which Cleaver’s fight with himself is played out is not just that of the beautiful but inhospitable mountain landscape surrounding his new home; it is also that of his own body. One of the many joys of the book, in fact, is the way in which Cleaver’s attempts to rise above the noise level, in both senses, are impeded, or at best conditioned, by the body and its small but crippling inadequacies. There’s a particularly gruelling scene of minor domestic surgery towards the end of the book that serves as a fitting climax to the various disasters his corpulent and over-indulged flesh (at the start of the novel at least) is heir to. By the end of the novel, the sexually avid, domineering, often comic media giant is almost unrecognisable, pared-down and bearded, and dangerously close to death. His treacherous, ungrateful son, who appears at the end of the novel for what is, in part, a reconciliation and, in part, a re-enactment in reverse of the Oedipal struggle between the two, assumes that his father has been busily producing the great work, his masterpiece: the kind of thing one does as the culmination of a life, if only to rebut his own son’s version of it. But Cleaver, who has thought about death a great deal during the novel – his own and, more importantly, that of his favourite child, his son’s twin sister – has other plans. I’ll leave you to find out what these are by reading the book, which, in the figure of Cleaver, achieves an almost Shakespearean grandeur – and bluster. But I will say that the final paragraphs arrive at a sort of calm – Our games are over, Cleaver muttered - that would have been unimaginable at the outset.

(Bear with me, some book reviews are on their way.)