MOON COUNTRY

Peter Arnott, Vagabond Voices

After serving a long sentence for a robbery in which two security guards were killed, Tommy Hunter is back on the street. A changed man, with a chilling resolve, he has a plan, a gun and a bagful of money, and both the police and the criminal fraternity are one step behind him all the way. Whatever he’s up to, it’s got something to do with his children and the wife he’s suspected of murdering, but nobody can work out quite what. Moon Country works splendidly as a page-turner of a Scottish crime thriller, but Arnott’s omniscient narrator has a foot in literary fiction too, unafraid of flaunting his vocabulary or his knowledge of philosophy and politics to try to place Tommy Hunter in some kind of moral framework. A veteran of more than 40 plays, Arnott has taken to the medium of the novel in style, wringing maximum effect out of every line in this consistently compelling and very satisfying debut.

 

UNDERMAJORDOMO MINOR

Patrick deWitt (Granta, £12.99)

Expectations have been high for deWitt’s new novel after the marvellous The Sisters Brothers, and while not quite in the same league it’s still thoroughly entertaining. The setting couldn’t be more different, with deWitt turning his attention from the Wild West to a fairytale Europe that’s like the Grimm Brothers turned up to 11. Starved of affection, enamoured of liars and rather full of himself, Lucien Minor (Lucy for short) leaves his village to join the service of the Baron in his castle, where he encounters a succession of odd and often debauched characters who would have impressed Mervyn Peake, including the Baron himself, who shows up occasionally to dine on raw rats and frighten the staff. The signs are that this is going to be a coming-of-age story, but deWitt plays around with the genre, and our expectations, in a delightful comic novel that telegraphs loads of its jokes in advance, though not necessarily to their detriment.

 

I REFUSE

Per Petterson (Vintage, £8.99)

The Norwegian author’s poignant study of isolation and loss traces the paths taken by two estranged childhood friends, Jim and Tommy, who meet again by chance after 35 years. A shadow has been cast over both their lives by the morning in 1964 when Tommy’s mother walked out on her family, leaving him and his sisters to the tender mercies of their abusive father. Tommy fought back, but this led to the children being split up between foster homes. And yet, although Tommy lost the supportive warmth of his family, it’s Jim who turned out to have been the more fragile of the pair. Set in a small town near Oslo, I Refuse flits between past and present, Petterson letting his characters tell the story from their own perspectives, each plugging crucial gaps, before tying it all up in a suitably sobering conclusion to a book already laced with melancholy. A bleak story, but also one with great depth of feeling.

 

ROCKS

Joe Perry (Simon & Schuster, £9.99)

Dubbed Boston’s answer to The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith more or less created the template for American arena-rock, a winning formula they’ve been fine-tuning since the early ’70s. They’ve been through drug abuse, bad management, splitting up and reuniting, and central to it all has been the fractious relationship between guitarist Joe Perry and singer Steven Tyler, which Perry gives an illuminating account of here. For all the band’s excess, Perry, now 65, comes across as a level-headed and grounded chap, which he would doubtless attribute to the work ethic and pragmatic attitude instilled by his parents. It’s easy to warm to him when you discover that he was a shy kid with ADHD who idolised Jacques Cousteau and built his own diving bell from junkyard scraps. Not only that, but the fact it’s ghost-written by David Ritz (the Marvin Gaye biographer who sued to get a writing credit on Sexual Healing) puts it a cut above the typical rock memoir.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT