Menu #1 - A World Not Quite Our Own

Starter

Time's Arrow - Martin Amis

Serving suggestion: Devour all at once, with a glass of something sweet to balance out the bitter taste.

Time's Arrow is flawed, but thought-provoking. It is a unique premise: told from an unknown consciousness inside the head of another man, witnessing this man's life entirely in reverse from death to birth. It questions our assumptions about life beautifully; the narrator repeatedly voices his frustration at this life that doesn't make sense. He sees servants paying their masters, doctors injuring the healthy and sending them bleeding on their way, troubled women running backwards from shelter to shelter until they are horrifically cured by violent rape. It is disturbing. It is frightening. It is very, very sad.

Amis's novel is fantastically evocative, but it is not perfect. For example, the narrator continually shows surprise at people walking backwards, and yet as this is all he has ever seen, it should surely pass unnoticed. It is a shame to find signs of carelessness in a novel like this, as it turns the premise into a convenient vehicle, when it is so close to being a work of art.

3.5/5

Main Course

The Age of Miracles - Karen Thompson Walker

Serving suggestion: Outside in the sun. Bring supplies, you won't be moving for a while.

In the middle of the current overkill of end-of-the-world thrillers, The Age of Miracles manages to stand out as something totally new. Perhaps it's the lack of action sequences; this is not an explosive apocalypse, but a devastatingly slow extinction of life on Earth. 

When the Earth's rotation begins to slow, days turn into weeks, and years lead towards the end. Humans fail to unite in the face of danger, instead violently judging each other. Birds fall from the sky. Food runs out. A generation of scientists with the answer to everything flounder, and fail. 

And in the midst of this, 11 year old Julia struggles through middle school, loses friends, watches the disintegration of her parents' marriage, grows up too fast, and too slowly. The story is beautifully told. It is a horror, it is a political commentary, it is a fantasy, and first and foremost it is a bittersweet tale of a childhood in which 'firsts' are replaced with 'lasts'.

5/5

Pudding

A Possible Life - Sebastian Faulks

Serving suggestion: Slowly in the evenings with a glass of wine. And when you've finished, start again.

I found this novel absolutely mesmerising. It is made up of five short stories, separated by oceans and centuries, and yet intangibly linked. It is not until the third/middle story, set in the near future as scientists make a revolutionary discovery about the human consciousness, that Faulks really begins to spell out for the reader why these stories fit together. And through these stories, and their blink-and-you'll-miss-them connections (a building, an experience, a realisation), Faulks paints a portrait of mankind as beautifully connected, and hauntingly unoriginal. 

The last story of the five is perhaps the strongest. Its ending does not hit the reader, but instead slowly settles, a sad yet gently reassuring loneliness, that will make you want to search through the pages from the start, looking for an answer to the intriguing and provoking reality at which Faulks hints. 

Many novels make the reader think; A Possible Life stops thought, and allows the reader to be. 

4.5/5

-Emma Oulton