Literary fiction out now: The Quantity Theory of Morality by Will Self, The Daffodil Days
The Quantity Theory of Morality is available now from the Mail Bookshop
The Quantity Theory of Morality by Will Self (Atlantic £18.99, 368pp)
Self’s testing new novel circles around a bunch of floundering, boozy, self-obsessed Londoners, including a chap called Will, who endure a carousel of lunches, opera trips, villa holidays, weekend parties, bed-hopping and a funeral, on repeat.
The story is told five times from different perspectives. In one iteration the characters are all female; in another we are treated to a running commentary on each male character’s penis size.
We also meet, once again, Zack Busner, who proffers his thoughts on the current crisis in morality, and an AI bot called Margaret (after both Thatcher and Atwood).
Meanwhile, England is hurtling towards an anti-Semitic dystopia. Self’s Rabelaisian rush of baleful invective and puerile wit is as pummelling as ever, but there is no mistaking the novel’s overarching mood of irrevocable decline.
The Daffodil Days by Helen Bain (Bloomsbury £18.99, 256pp)
What more can there possibly be to say about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes? Perhaps it depends on how you say it.
Bain recounts the couple’s by turns idyllic and tumultuous stay in a Devon town (a few months afterwards Plath would kill herself in London) backwards in this ambitious novel.
Moreover, she tells it entirely from the perspective of the townsfolk whose lives occasionally intersect with Sylvia, at home with children Frieda and newborn Nicholas while Ted spends increasing amounts of time in the city.
Bain’s style is both old-fashioned and radical, sucking us fully into the humdrum rhythms of small-town rural life while offering only elliptical glimpses of the couple themselves.
Yet Plath can’t help but emerge in dazzling life nonetheless – difficult and brilliant, maternal and tragic. A cleverly quiet, unassuming novel about two people who were anything but.
Mare by Emily Haworth-Booth (Granta £16.99, 288pp)
There are an awful lot of novels about new motherhood. There are considerably less about non-motherhood. Mare is the latter, the story of a married 39-year-old childless woman who strikes up an arrangement at a local stable to co-parent a mare two days a week.
Soon she is taking riding lessons and dreaming of the horse, her growing obsession throwing into sharp relief her own maternal ambivalence and occasional yearning.
And then she discovers she is unable to become pregnant. Haworth-Booth writes her story in staccato, limpid yet self-conscious paragraphs that can’t disguise its autobiographical underpinnings – to the extent one wonders why she didn’t simply write a memoir.
But this is an affecting portrait of love and care in its many forms, written with a calm, incantatory beauty.