Untitled Books

Anna Goodall recommends her current favourite read from Clerkenwell Tales

Being surrounded by and talking about books all day I've found myself picking up and reading things I probably wouldn't have tried if left to myself.

So far I've read Restless by William Boyd, a finely wrought espionage thriller; A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks - no comment; and I'm halfway through the hugely entertaining Leviathan by Philip Hoare, the history of his lifelong obsession with the whale. I also have an ever-increasing 'To Read' list: Summertime by Coetzee, James M Cain's Mildred Pierce, Edward St Aubyn's Mother's Milk ... and the list keeps growing every time I go into work.

But it is Let The Great World Spin, Colum McCann's novel set in 1970s New York that has most caught my imagination. The novel sets a series of personal stories, histories, confessionals almost, from eight individuals, against the backdrop of one day in New York in August 1974 - the day Philippe Petit walked between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre.

The novel, which is in open-eyed love with the city of New York, in awe of it, use the towers as its centrepiece, and our knowledge of recent events inevitably informs our reading of these stories whose own historical backdrop in the mid-seventies is the Vietnam War, Watergate, the technological revolution and social inequality.

The novel begins with the story of Corrigan - a radical Irish monk, a Christ-like figure who emigrates from Dublin to New York, and ends up in the Bronx amidst prostitutes whom he befriends and tries to protect. Corrigan is a magnetic person and much-loved but, unlike the other characters who tell their stories with frankness, he remains oblique to both his friends and the reader, serving as a symbol of the nature of belief... or maybe just of gravity.

Other voices include Tillie and her daughter Jazzlyn, two sharp-talking hookers and junkies that Corrigan helps in the projects, Park-Avenue privileged but unhappy Claire who has lost her son in Vietnam, her husband the wealthy judge Solomon Soderberg, and a little computer hacker called the Kid.

McCann switches voices, tenses, and tone almost effortlessly, (though some voices are inevitably more successful than others) and spins the complex personal histories around the dominant city's presence:

The city was bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants too. [...] It accepted whatever came its way, the crime and the violence and the little shocks of good that crawled out from underneath the everyday.

Against this, Petit's walk is like a symbol of hope to the churning complex life beneath him - as if he has defied time, gravity, and cast aside both past and present. Does the world stop spinning for him as he hangs in the air? As Solomon thinks to himself, 'He [Petit] had made himself into a statue, but a perfect New York one, a temporary one, up in the air, high above the city. A statue that had no regard for the past.'

And the characters are all struggling with the past: with grief and loss, and with their memories. They all cherish a memory of when they were at ease, happy, untroubled and they polish it in their minds until it gleams. Meanwhile the city has no regard for any of it, but relentlessly pushes them forward.

In the New York Times McCann, just prior to the release of the novel in America, was discussing Ulysses (which is referenced quite heavily in LTGWS) and how he found his own family history amidst its pages. The obsession with continuity and the past informs his own novel a great deal, and what he writes about Joyce's masterpiece also does well to describe a key element of his own writing: 'The messy layers of human experience get pulled together, and sometimes ordered, by words.'

What's hot: Black Water Rising by Attica Locke, American Wife by Curtis Sittenfield, and Nigel Slater's Tender are our bestsellers this week. London's Strangest Tales by Tom Quinn is still incredibly popular, as are the Faber 80th anniversary editions. Plus there seems to be a lot of interest in getting back to nature with Red Sky at Night: The Book of Lost Country Wisdom by Jane Struthers selling fast.

Who did we spot: Ali Smith, poet Tim Wells, architect Maxwell Hutchinson, Nick from the Kaiser Chiefs and Jake Arnott.

Anna Goodall

Friday, 18 December, 2009

• RSS Feed