I keep telling authors that if they want me to read their fifty-year-old classic novels, all they have to do is win an international literary award for a lifetime’s achievement. Fortunately Chinua Achebe recently saw the sense in this policy and won the second Man Booker International Prize, so I’ve responded by finally getting around to reading his 1958 debut novel, Things Fall Apart. (Now Doris Lessing, get your finger out for god’s sake, and don’t make me come over there.)

The book gives us, say the blurb and reviews I’ve read, an insight into white colonisation of Africa from the native’s perspective (Achebe has been critical of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness). But in fact this only happens in the last 50 pages of the book: though as the novel is only 150 pages long, that accounts for a third of it.

Before that the book is divided in two. The first third or so is dedicated to Okonkwo, a warrior and clansman of the Ibo people in Nigeria (Achebe’s own origins). Okonkwo is a larger-than-life character, and not always a likeable one. He “had no patience with unsuccessful men” and believes that “to show affection was a sign of weakness; the only thing worth demonstrating was strength.” All this he owes to his father:

Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness. … It was the fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his father. Even as a little boy he had resented his father’s failure and weakness, and even now he still remembered how he had suffered when a playmate told him that his father was agbala. That was how Okonkwo first came to know that agbala was not only another name for a woman, it could also mean a man who had taken no title. And so Okonkwo was ruled by one passion - to hate everything that his father Unoka had loved. One of those things was gentleness and another was idleness.

All this is amply demonstrated when Okonkwo takes the flimsiest opportunity to beat one of his wives, and Achebe neatly compounds our horror by having the villagers complain about this only because “it was unheard of to beat somebody during the sacred week.” He also plays with our expectations of ‘primitive’ behaviour (”On great occasions such as the funeral of a village celebrity he drank his palm-wine from his first human head”).

Okonkwo’s savagery can come to no good, and he lives to regret his bloody ways when he does something terrible even by his own standards because “he was afraid of being thought weak.” However it’s at this crucial point where the steam suddenly runs out of the story, and Achebe spends the middle third of the book illustrating various Ibo mores such as marriage customs and funeral rites. It robs the book of its narrative pull.

Only when the white missionaries arrive, as mentioned above, do things pick up again. We are given a tantalising psychological conflict, and it’s fascinating to observe the slow development of the inevitable. If we didn’t already know it, Achebe makes us aware that one supernatural belief system is the equal of any other, and emphasises again how a white, Western point of view is just one among many. The closing paragraph, not incidentally, is one of the finest I have ever read.

Jean Rhys is best known for Wide Sargasso Sea which I read several years ago, without realising that it would have helped if I’d read Jane Eyre first - as Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel of sorts, looking into the life of the first Mrs Rochester, Jane Eyre’s mad woman in the attic. Rhys had published four earlier novels and a couple of collections of stories in the 1920s and 30s, and slipped out of public sight and hearing so thoroughly that she was thought to have died. In 1957 an adaptation of her (then) last novel Good Morning, Midnight was produced for BBC Radio, and this led to people discovering that she was still alive and writing - she had accumulated another collection of stories and was at work on Wide Sargasso Sea, which was published in 1966, when she was 76 years old. I like in particular two supposed facts about her: that her only comment on her late flowering of success was ‘It has come too late’; and that she died reaching for her mascara.

Anyway, Voyage in the Dark was her third novel, first published in 1934. A lazy reviewerly way of describing it (cough) would be something like Patrick Hamilton meets John Fante! She has the former’s sense of London between the wars as a seedy place, closing itself over the heads of drowning loners, and the latter’s ability to make fairly plotless tales of life in the grim underclass seem vibrant and absorbing.

But cliches will not do, because Rhys never stoops to them, nor to sentimentality either. Her heroine (her pre-Sargasso novels were all largely autobiographical) is 18-year-old Anna, who has been brought to London from her home in the West Indies following the death of her father.

I didn’t like England at first. I couldn’t get used to the cold. Sometimes I would shut my eyes and pretend that the heat of the fire, or the bed-clothes drawn up round me, was sun-heat; or I would pretend I was standing outside the house at home, looking down Market Street to the Bay. When there was a breeze the sea was millions of spangles… Sometimes it was as if I were back there and as if England were a dream. At other times England was the real thing and out there was the dream, but I could never fit them together.

She becomes a chorus girl, trailing from town to town, “perpetually moving to another place that was perpetually the same,” from theatre to theatre, from boarding room to room (”This is England, and I’m in a nice, clean English room with all the dirt swept under the bed”). This last is because she rarely gets along with her landladies (”I don’t want no tarts in my house, so now you know”), and although she isn’t a prostitute, she does develop a difficult habit of accepting regular sums of money from men…

And there is not much more to the story than that. It’s just as well that the novel, at 160 pages, doesn’t overstay its welcome, and indeed Rhys’s vivid language - “It’s funny when you don’t want anything more in your life except to sleep, or else to lie without moving. That’s when you can hear time sliding past you, like water running” - makes reading it a greedy experience. From the terrific opening line - “It was as if a curtain had fallen, hiding everything I had ever known” - you know you’re in safe hands. It’s a shame that personal circumstances led Rhys’s pen to run dry for three decades, but at least her mascara never did.

Another stop in my journey through James Salter’s sparse output: two novels and a collection of stories down, two novels and a memoir to go. Not much to show for 82 years, you might think, but Salter’s words are so carefully chosen and polished - such quality raw materials - that each book carries more weight than others, and sinks in more slowly, and stays longer afterward. His novels are either about men and women - A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years - or about men and themselves - Cassada, Solo Faces. The Hunters, his debut from 1956, is in this latter category.

In The Hunters, Cleve Connell is battling not only himself but other men: friend and foe. He is a flight commander in the US Air Force in the Korean War, a breed “with that contagious passion peculiar to hunters,” where all that matters to a pilot is getting his first ‘kill’ - bringing down one of the opposing Soviet MIG aircraft. Once he has done that, all that matters then is getting his next four, so that he can become one of the ‘Aces’ with five kills under his belt (and marked on his craft’s fuselage in red stars). This special score would give an Ace

something he never possessed, a hard luster for his assurance. He had become full grown, immutable. If he had seemed frail, he was no sturdier, but that flicking slightness now had an infrangible quality, like cable. He was established. If still shadowed by the ordinary perils, there was one at least he was now fully beyond: disregard.

For others, like Connell himself, the first kill is still elusive. “All a man has to do is want to find them,” they are told. “The desire… that’s all it takes.” But Connell wants them badly, and resists the temptation to curse his luck. “Luck? There’s no luck involved.” To Connell, success in the air battles is a measure of his worth as a man, and his self-respect is dependent on the atrophying respect of his colleagues. How hard it is to take, then, when success clings to others, particularly the conceited - and talented - Pell (”but everybody calls me Doctor”). He despises Pell but dreads becoming like Abbott, who “had been a hero once, in Europe in another war, but the years had worked in irreversible chemistry. He was heavier now, older, and somewhere along the way he had run out of compulsion.” Even now, Connell, an experienced flight commander trying to learn how not to be the freshest and best any more,

had reached the point where a sense of lost time weighed on him. There was a constant counting of tomorrows he had once been so prodigal with. And he found himself thinking too much of unfortunate things. He was frequently conscious of not wanting to die. That was not the same as wanting to live. It was a black disease, a fixation that could ultimately corrode the soul.

As you can see from all the above, the great temptation when writing about Salter is just to let him do the writing. Although much less rich and luminous in its prose than Light Years, The Hunters is nonetheless relentlessly quotable, and addresses masculine concerns - of purpose, of place - that most literature passes over, without being macho or indelicate. He controls the pace expertly, from the rushes of battle to the doldrums of time in between. The dialogue is peppery and vigorous; the ending is perfect and satisfying. Even in his first novel, Salter achieves with lightness of touch and final weightiness the sort of invisible immortality his fighter pilots dream of: “The way to go is in an instant, reaching for that highest one of the stars and then falling away, disappearing, against the earth. I wouldn’t mind that, would you?”

Before now, James Salter was known to me only as the author of the slim novel A Sport and a Pastime which, in one of those odd cross-pollinations, came to my attention through being praised by a character in a John Irving novel (maybe A Son of the Circus). A Sport and a Pastime had the reputation of being ‘erotic,’ and if erotic comprises memorable phrases such as “he comes like a bull,” then it had that. But I recall not much more of it, and it was less Salter’s reputation than my feeble addiction to Penguin Modern Classics that made me pick up his 1975 novel Light Years when it was reissued this month.

Midway through the book the female lead, Nedra, who reads biographies of great achievers, reflects that “the power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark.”

The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?

And while reading Light Years may not be a life-changing event (but then again), illumination of the lives of others is precisely its achievement. The light of the title is present everywhere, and few chapters open without a reference to the light: of Rome, of New York, of Paris (“In the morning the light came in silence” … “The room filled with light” … “the river is spilling light”). And Salter illuminates the lives of his characters, the happily-unhappily married Viri and Nedra, with astonishing stylistic brilliance.

Viri and Nedra, prosperous and envied, are not faithful to one another, and their move from marital bliss to domestic blitz and beyond carries echoes of Yates (and has his ultimate tragedy), with prose less plain than his but equally unflinching and honest. The characters are not always sympathetic but when an author can set them wriggling on a pin like this, who cares? So relentlessly seductive is Light Years that each time I returned to it I felt like a teenage suitor: giggling, nervous, hot-faced with intimidation.

Salter’s ability to despatch a character in a few lines is extraordinary. Here he is (through Nedra’s biographies again) on Barcelona’s celebrated architect Gaudi, “who lived to that old age which is sainthood”:

In the end he was struck by a streetcar and left unattended. In the bareness and odor of the charity ward amid the children and poor relations a single eccentric life was ending, a life that was more clamorous than the sea, an everlasting life, a life which was easy to abandon since it was only a husk; it had already metamorphosed, escaped into buildings, cathedrals, legend.

Elsewhere, the writing put me in mind of Updike or Bellow without that restless density which can make their stuff a chore at times. However beautiful Salter’s flexuous prose (and it pretty much always is), the story remains open and fluent, full of air – and light. The narrative proceeds in jumps, impressionistically: a scene here, a set piece there, covering twenty years. Salter seems keen to show what he can do, demonstrating his wit early on with an exchange between Viri and a bespoke shirtmaker, then switching to reflective mood, social satire, and making some scenes impressively erotic without being explicit (particularly in Viri’s horribly realistic obsession with his sometime mistress, Kaya Doutreau).

Most impressive of all, perhaps, is a scene where a character’s father dies in a wrenching and arduous two-page stretch. It puts the tin hat on any questions about Salter’s ability and virtuosic brilliance, or about this being my book of the year so far. It begins like this.

It took a long time, it took forever; days and nights, the smell of antiseptic, the hush of rubber wheels. This frail engine, we think, and yet what murder is needed to take it down. The heart is in darkness, unknowing, like those animals in mines that have never seen the day. It has no loyalties, no hopes; it has its task.

Kobo Abe’s The Face of Another (1966) has a better cover than The Woman in the Dunes, but that cheap thrill is soon forgotten when ploughing through this turgid tome.

The blurb makes it sound almost thrilling, like an updated Invisible Man:

The narrator is a scientist hideously deformed in a laboratory accident - a man who has lost his face and, with it, connection to other people. Even his wife is now repulsed by him. His only entry back into the world is to create a mask so perfect as to be undetectable. But soon he finds that such a mask is more than a disguise: it is an alternate self - a self that is capable of anything. A remorseless meditation on nature, identity, and the social contract, The Face of Another is an intellectual horror story of the highest order.

But where The Woman in the Dunes (which immediately preceded The Face of Another in publication) managed to combine some fairly knotty metaphysical concerns with a driving storyline, this falters and trips over its own quasi-philosophical musings. These take the form of the narrator’s diary and additional notes thereon, and while the story begins to take a linear form after a confused opening, it pretty soon gets mixed up again and grinds away to little effect.

The main engine of the plot is when the narrator - who has suffered horrific slug-like lumpy scars to his face when splashed with liquid oxygen - decides to use the realistic mask he has created to disguise himself and seduce his wife. A great deal of time is spent on his attempts to get the mask right, but it gets lost in rather waffly stuff about the nature of one’s face affects the personality and psyche. Eventually I was glad to be rid of the thing.

The best thing about it are the forty-eight little iconic illustrations which begin each section, and which look like meaningless patterns to begin with, and then resolve themselves into different stylised faces and masks. One could profitably flick through and enjoy them, however, without wading through all the words in between.

It’s hard not to be intimidated by a book where none of the words in the title or author’s name seem to make sense. And so although I bought Homo Faber last year in the middle of a flurry of Penguin Modern Classicquisition, I’d put off reading it until now, and it was with more a “to get it over with” intention than anything more honourable. Certainly the cover, showing a still from the 1991 movie starring Sam Shepard and Julie Delpy (also referred to as Voyager or The Voyager), sets a new aesthetic low for these normally handsome paperbacks.

So I was pleasantly surprised to find the book rather enjoyable for the first 40 or 50 pages. Subtitled “A Report by Max Frisch” (pretension alert?), Homo Faber, first published in 1957, is narrated by Walter Faber, an engineer who deals only in the hard and real, and eschews emotion and feeling. “I can only report what I know.” So we get long paragraphs of animated description, broken by single lines of stark statements set alone, which could be immensely irritating but doesn’t affect the flow significantly. We also get some amusing (or not so amusing) examples of his autistic hyper-maleness:

Her supposition that I was melancholy because I was alone put me out of humour. I’m used to travelling alone. I live, like every real man, in my work. On the contrary, that’s the way I like it and I think myself lucky to live alone, in my view this is the only possible condition for men, I enjoy waking up and not having to say a word. Where is the woman who can understand that?

The book opens with Faber in an aeroplane which carries out an emergency landing in the Mexican desert. After that everything becomes somewhat nebulous, and I was never really clear from that point on how much of the narrative was happening thereafter, how much was memory, and how much was hallucination. Certainly there are few markings (and no chapter breaks) to distinguish time and place, and increasingly as the novel proceeds, Faber becomes obsessed with the three women in his life: lovers Hanna and Ivy, and his daughter Elisabeth, known as Sabeth. He dwells on love lost and seems to find love with his own daughter - but then again whether this was all really happening was quite unclear to me.

Some reviews on Amazon suggest it’s a story of a cold man thawing, a sort of This Book Will Save Your Life: but I found it much more introspective and gloomy, with more or less no humour in it, despite claims by some Frisch readers of his wonderful “irony.” I found it, after an interesting and even exciting opening, obtuse and impenetrable, ponderous and unsatisfying. So close to min points for Max.