A lost masterpiece

By Maggie Fergusson

NOVEL Happy Valley by Patrick White (Cape, hardback, out now). When this first novel appeared in 1939, reviewers including Graham Greene came together in a chorus of praise. Then Patrick White suppressed it. Reissued now to mark his centenary, it turns out to be a masterpiece. Happy Valley is a small Australian town, a microcosm through which White explores the passions simmering below the surface of apparently unexceptional lives. The only Australian writer to win a Nobel prize, he is brilliant on the gulf between thought and speech, and the sleights of mind we develop to cope with anguish. The spinster piano teacher withdraws from the "formless and volatile" present into an idealised past; the bullied child inhabits an imaginary future; the asthmatic schoolmaster harbours anger, finally released in the murder of his wife. White’s prose slides between dialogue and interior monologue, subtle but never obscure. "Will they read me when I’m dead?" he used to ask. They should.

SHORT STORIES Dear Life by Alice Munro (Chatto, hardback, out now). Hiding her craftsmanship under an easy, conversational style, Alice Munro uses the first ten stories in this collection to revisit small-town Ontario, and to reveal just how surreal real life can be. Every word pulls its weight (a wallflower at a party feels that everyone else is "equipped" with friends) as Munro homes in on the things that throw lives off kilter: the nuance of character that, slowly but surely, derails a marriage; the despair that drives a nine-year-old to suicide. She saves the best till last, closing with a quartet of stories that are, she says, the closest she will ever come to memoir. "The Eye", in which Munro’s capricious mother makes her visit the corpse of a nanny to whom she has become traitorously attached, is a gem.

PSYCHOLOGY Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks (Picador, hardback, out now). Hallucination need not imply insanity: this is what Oliver Sacks sets out to demonstrate in an "anthology" of his patients’ experiences. Some are gently amusing—an elderly lady who regularly "sees" figures in Eastern dress is delighted when diagnosed with "Charles Bonnet Syndrome"; most are alarming and poignant. One patient with "sundowning syndrome" is daily besieged by grotesque intruders as the light fails. But this is more than arm’s-length reportage. Writing with compassion, and weaving his tales together with literary reference and scientific research, Sacks places at the heart of the book a riveting confessional chapter about the drug-induced hallucinations he himself experienced as a young neurologist – his conversations with a spider, and the summer’s day he spent watching the battle of Agincourt played out on his dressing gown.

MEMOIR Trafficked by Sophie Hayes (Harper-Collins, paperback, out now). Misery memoir, or "mis mem", strikes me as a genre that too often panders to prurience. But by chance I met Sophie Hayes, was impressed, and felt compelled to read her story in full. British, well-educated and middle-class, she was not an obvious target for sex traffickers. But when her “boyfriend” took her to Italy, locked her up, stole her passport, and brainwashed her into believing that she’d be dead if she didn’t obey him, she was forced into prostitution, serving around 30 clients a night, seeing humanity at its most depraved—and, occasionally, at its kindest. Working with the United Nations and the Metropolitan Police, she now devotes herself to preventing other women from meeting a similar fate. Her cautionary tale ends in a triumph of tenacity over terror.

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