High tension, quiet plot

By Maggie Fergusson

FICTION The Lighthouse by Alison Moore,Salt, paperback, out now. Rarely can so much tension have been packed into so quiet a plot. Futh, manufacturer of synthetic smells, takes a walking holiday in Germany after the breakdown of his marriage. His walk is circular, and so are his thoughts, revolving relentlessly round his unfaithful wife, abandonment by his mother, the childhood abuse he suffered from his father. One longs for him to lose his grip and so break the cycle. Instead, helplessly tossed on waves of memory and inarticulated anxiety, he combats mental collapse with nerdish, cagoule-wearing precision, regularly itemising his luggage, carefully masticating his food. He is trapped, and the reader feels trapped with him. Moore works in miniature, layering tiny details—greasy croissant flakes, stubble clinging to a hotel bath—to build an atmosphere of foreboding as she inches towards the point where "Psycho" meets "Barton Fink".

A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks, Hutchinson, hardback, out now. Victorian workhouse boy, 1930s schoolmaster, neuroscientist, French peasant, musician: the life stories explored here diverge so widely in time, place and circumstance that to jam them together and call them "A Novel in Five Parts" seems, at first, perverse. But it's precisely this fragmentary structure that enables Faulks to enact and interrogate his themes, and bind the book into a coherent whole. Does human identity end with death? Are we essentially alone, or intimately linked in a web of connection transcending time and space? The stories vary greatly in quality, at worst verging on the banal, but by the end of the fifth—a heartfelt tale of love, loss and the price of creativity—it's clear that they add up to something considerably more moving and thought-provoking than the sum of their parts.