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DAVIES, Robertson

Canadian novelist, journalist and playwright (1913-1995)

The deceptively gentle, expansive tone of Davies' satires belies their extraordinary subject-matter: it is as if Jane Austen had reworked Rabelais. Davies' books are comedies of manners, many set in small university towns riven with gossip and pretension. Tempest-tost (1951) is about an amateur production of Shakespeare's The Tempest all but sabotaged by the unexpected, lacerating love of the middle-aged leading man for the girl who plays his daughter. A Mixture of Frailties (1958) describes the chain of bizarre events after a woman leaves money to educate a girl in the arts, unless and until the woman's son sires a male heir. The Deptford trilogy (1970-75) begins with the throwing of a stone-filled snowball, and spirals out to cover three 20th-century lives, interlocking in a dazzling, bizarre mosaic, involving medieval (and modern) saints, big business, Houdini, Jungian analysis, touring freak-shows and a barnstorming company of travelling actors.

THE 'CORNISH' TRILOGY  (1982) The books in this trilogy, about members of the wealthy, eccentric Cornish family, are The Rebel Angels, What's Bred in the Bone and The Lyre of Orpheus. Hovering over the events, as puppeteers loom over marionettes, are guardian angels, devils and spirits of medieval mischief; we humans are not alone. Alternate chapters of The Rebel Angels are told by Father Darcourt, a professor of Biblical Greek at a small, Roman Catholic, Canadian university, and Maria Magdalene Theotoky, a research student. The university is a quiet place, dedicated to placid scholarship and barbed common-room gossip. But Ms Theotoky is researching Rabelais, and the plot suddenly erupts with priceless manuscripts, bizarre lusts, devil worship, scatology, and a storm of passion and deceit against which no grove of academe could stand unbowed. What's Bred in the Bone is the life-story of Francis Cornish, art expert, multi-millionaire, wartime spy and loner, whose search for himself, and for love, is hampered by his guardian devil Maimas. The Lyre of Orpheus tells of the recreation, in 20th-century Canadian academe, of a lost Arthurian opera by the devil-inspired 19th-century romantic composer E.T.A. Hoffman. The style in all three books is urbane, placid narrative, but the contents are sown with mines. If Jane Austen rules the tone of Davies' early trilogies, in this one Rabelais keeps blowing raspberries.

The books in The Deptford Trilogy are Fifth Business, The Manticore and World of Wonders. Davies' other novels include Murther and Walking Spirits and a third trilogy, in a similarly urbane and hilarious vein, set in a small Ontario university town, The Salterton Trilogy. The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, The Table Talk of Samuel Marchbanks and Marchbanks' Almanac are collections of humorous journalism, and Davies' plays include A Jig for the Gipsy, Hunting Stuart and the political satire Question Time. Happy Alchem is a posthumous collection of his engaging, erudite writings on theatre.

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Robertson Davies, A Leaven of Malice

To The Rebel Angels : Anthony Burgess, Enderby's Dark Lady David Lodge, Small World

To What's Bred in the Bone : Richard Condon, Any God Will Do Thomas Mann, The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man

To The Lyre of Orpheus : D.J. Enright, Academic Year Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

To Davies' work in general : Peter Ackroyd, English Music John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany Aritha Van Herk, No Fixed Address

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SINCLAIR, Iain

British writer (born 1943)

For the last 25 years, Iain Sinclair has been conducting his own intense, idiosyncratic, fictional study of the topography, history and inhabitants of his adopted city, London. His work does not often make easy reading. In Sinclair’s imagination there are interconnections between the most disparate phenomena and the city is a net- work of links between people (past and present), buildings, sites of numinous significance, books, rituals and power structures. This, and his highly wrought, linguistically inventive prose, make demands on the reader but the rewards are considerable. Lud Heat, influential on Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, is a mixture of prose and poetry which centres on the London churches of the architect Nicholas Hawksmoor. Sinclair’s first novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) follows the antics of a group of seedy, unscrupulous book dealers as they try to track down arcane editions of Victorian novels and joins to this a sequence of meditations and revelations about the Whitechapel murders of Jack the Ripper.

DOWNRIVER  (1991) Sinclair’s finest novel to date, as ambitious to encompass the possibilities of London as Joyce’s Ulysses is to memorialize Dublin. Built around twelve interlocking tales centred on the Thames and the life surrounding it, and incorporating characters from Victorian boatmen and visiting Aboriginal cricketers to Sixties gangsters and nuclear-waste train-drivers, Downriver is an extraordinary, ebullient celebration of the splendours and squalor of the city.

Sinclair’s other novels are Radon Daughters, Landor’s Tower, and Dining on Stones. Lights Out for the Territory is a collection of essays, London Orbital an idiosyncratic account of walks around the M25. Rodinsky’s Room (written in collaboration with the artist Rachel Lichtenstein) is an exploration of the Jewish East End focused on the mysterious disappearance of a reclusive scholar from his room above a synagogue in Princelet Street.

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Landor’s Tower (Sinclair deserts his usual setting of London in a story set entirely in the borderlands of England and Wales).

Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor Michael Moorcock, Mother London Paul West, The Women of Whitechapel Chris Petit, Robinson Nicholas Royle, The Matter of the Heart Maureen Duffy, Capital

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ACKROYD, Peter

British writer (born 1949)

Ackroyd is a biographer as well as a novelist -- his Dickens is 1200 pages long, sumptuously detailed, and acclaimed -- and his fiction benefits from a researcher's eye for extraordinary and revealing detail about the past. Often, he blends a modern story with a historical one, and characters from the past move in and out of the contemporary narrative like ghosts. He sets many stories in London (he is the author of London: A Biography), and superbly evokes its people and atmosphere, both today and in different periods of the past.

HAWKSMOOR  (1985) This remains the most exhilarating and adventurous of Ackroyd’s explorations of a London in which past and present endlessly intertwine. A contemporary detective (the namesake of the seventeenth-century architect) is driven towards a mystical encounter with forces from the past through his investigations of a series of murders in London churches. Part of the narrative is written in a prose which demonstrates Ackroyd’s chameleon-like ability to mimic the English of past centuries and its rhythms.

THE HOUSE OF DOCTOR DEE  (1993) Matthew Palmer, a contemporary 29-year-old, inherits an old London house which once belonged to (the real) John Dee, a scientist and alchemist of the time of Elizabeth I whose life's obsession was to create a 'homunculus' (a kind of cross between test-tube baby and devil). Each chapter of the book alternates between the modern story and Dee's own narrative, and the links are first, the house and its Clerkenwell setting, and second, the fact that homunculi were believed to live for thirty years, and then to disappear and be reincarnated -- so that the overriding question is, 'What is Matthew's real identity?' The modern story is an engrossing combination of mystery and ghost-story, and Dee's narrative, told in a resounding pastiche of Elizabethan English, catches both the social life and manners of the age, and the obsession of a 'scientist' whose work leads him to flirt with the occult.

Ackroyd's other novels include: Chatterton (about the 18th-century literary forger who committed suicide at the age of 17), The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde and English Music. He has also written poetry, prize-winning biographies of T.S. Eliot, William Blake and Shakespeare and, in addition to his London ‘biography’, Albion, a characteristically idiosyncratic investigation of the English imagination.

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Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (blending the stories of the real Dan Leno, 'the funniest man in England' in 19th-century music-hall, such literary figures as George Gissing and Karl Marx, and the mysterious serial killer of the 1890s nicknamed the 'Linehouse Golem')

The Lambs of London (n which he provides his own fictional version of the lives of Charles and Mary Lamb)

To Hawksmoor : David Liss, A Conspiracy of Paper Iain Pears, An Instance of the Fingerpost; Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

To The House of Doctor Dee : Anthony Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

To Ackroyd's work in general : Robertson Davies, The Rebel Angels (first novel in the 'Cornish' trilogy) E.L. Doctorow, Waterworks Rose Tremain, Restoration Michael Moorcock, Mother London Iain Sinclair, Downriver

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