DEBUTS – Nov 07, 2019

DEBUTS

DELAYED RAYS OF A STAR

DELAYED RAYS OF A STAR by Amanda Lee Koe (Bloomsbury £16.99, 400 pp)

by Amanda Lee Koe (Bloomsbury £16.99, 400 pp)

A photograph taken of a chance meeting between three real-life young women in Berlin in 1928 inspires this novel.

Used as the frontispiece of the book, it shows Marlene Dietrich, a brash German trying to break into the film business; Anna May Wong, an up-and-coming Chinese-American actress; and Leni Riefenstahl, an ambitious young director of Nazi propaganda films.

The novel traces the women’s subsequent lives and careers, creating a vast historical canvas spanning from the 1920s to 2003 and crossing continents.

Through these different female perspectives and the numerous subsidiary characters, some real, some fictional, Koe examines various issues of the time, all of which have resonance today.

An ambitious and dazzling debut that’s entertaining and thought-provoking, too.

THE AGE OF ANXIETY

by Pete Townshend (Coronet £20, 272 pp)

THE AGE OF ANXIETY by Pete Townshend (Coronet £20, 272 pp)

THE AGE OF ANXIETY by Pete Townshend (Coronet £20, 272 pp)

Ten years ago, Who guitarist Pete Townshend conceived ‘a magnum opus that would combine opera, art installation and novel’: an ambitious concept of which this novel is one part.

A rockstar-turned-actor disappears after filming on a Cumberland moor to reappear as a hermit and painter of angelic visions. 

Walter, a young musician working the pub rock scene, suffers debilitating auditory hallucinations that emanate from the crowd. 

Narrator, ex-addict and agent to Outsider Artists, Louis Doxtader, brings the two men together with life-changing results. 

At the same time he reviews his own life, peeling away its layers to reveal the truth.

Setting his novel in the milieu he knows in all its excess, Townshend directs a cast of memorable characters while examining themes of creativity, genius, music and love.

IN LOVE WITH GEORGE ELIOT

by Kathy O’Shaughnessy (Scribe £16.99, 400 pp)

IN LOVE WITH GEORGE ELIOT by Kathy O'Shaughnessy (Scribe £16.99, 400 pp)

IN LOVE WITH GEORGE ELIOT by Kathy O’Shaughnessy (Scribe £16.99, 400 pp)

Published to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the birth of Mary Anne (Marian) Evans, aka novelist George Eliot, this sensitive fictionalisation of what the Victorians considered a scandalous life is thoroughly absorbing.

Having fallen in love with George Henry Lewis, a man married with three children and an advocate of free love, Marian is shunned by her family and many friends when they set up home together.

She begins writing under the pseudonym George Eliot, enjoying huge success with her first novel, Adam Bede. 

Eventually, she has to end the speculation over the author’s identity and start living with her new-found celebrity. 

Less intriguing for me was the interwoven counterpoint of two women in contemporary London, one who’s writing a novel, the other a revisionary critique of Eliot.

However, using research and quoting from Evans’s original letters and diaries, O’Shaughnessy evokes the intimate and unconventional domestic existence behind Eliot’s public success.