UFO Info Week-End

Miranda Seymour turns fact into sinister fiction in The Telling Murray Ferdinand Dennis dramatises Caribbean immigration in Duppy Conqueror Flamingo and Derek Beaven discloses

Miranda Seymour turns fact into sinister fiction in The Telling (Murray); Ferdinand Dennis dramatises Caribbean immigration in Duppy Conqueror (Flamingo); and Derek Beaven discloses 1950s English secrets in Acts of Mutiny (Fourth Estate). Rupert Thomson confirms his talents with Soft (Bloomsbury), as does Nicola Barker in Wide Open (Faber). Alison Lurie returns with Last Resort (Chatto), John Irving has A Widow for One Year (Bloomsbury), as John Updike tries SF with a novel set in 2020, Toward the End of Time (Hamish Hamilton).
Yet, as Valentine Cunningham argues on page 8, the home side is displaying plenty of grit Some New Year contenders feature on these pages. The most-discussed newcomer looks likely to be Naeem Murr with The Boy (Fourth Estate). But brace yourself for a slew of clubby, druggy and footie BritLit novels, some of which will make their publishers blush well before the Millennium Dome opens.Among the ever-fertile Irish, brilliant playwright Sebastian Barry makes a fictional entrance with The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (Picador) and Carlo Gebler drops into bandit country for How to Murder a Man (Little,Brown). Elsewhere, Beryl Bainbridge battles through the Crimean War in Master Georgie (Duckworth) and Lucy Ellmann asks, intriguingly, Man or Mango? (Review).

William Boyd releases his long-awaited Armadillo (Hamish Hamilton), Hanif Kureishi seeks Intimacy (Faber) and Martin Amis gathers up his short stories in Heavy Water (Cape). Alan Warner gives a voice to The Sopranos (Cape) and Howard Jacobson proclaims No More Mister Nice Guy (also Cape). Shena Mackay enhances Cape’s strength with The Artist’s Widow, while Alan Hollinghurst casts The Spell (Chatto).Joanna Trollope will walk off every shelf with her stepfamily saga, Other People’s Children (Bloomsbury). DeLillo leads another pack of heavy-hitting US novelists into our bookshops next year. Most eagerly awaited will be Toni Morrison with Paradise (Chatto) while Russell Banks resurrects the body of abolitionist John Brown in Cloudsplitter (Secker); Jane Smiley also revisits the Civil War in The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (Flamingo).

“Even though the risk posed by such possibilities is impossible to assess and cannot therefore easily be quantified, it would not perhaps be prudent to ignore entirely unexpected possibilities in weighing the action that may be necessary.” Not the voice of a prophet.. How do you trump all those party bores who gush about the glories of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (Picador)? Just mention how much you enjoyed the novel that beat DeLillo for the Pulitzer: Steven Millhauser’s equally panoramic Martin Dressler: the tale of an American dreamer (Phoenix House). The ever-more complex structural understanding of populations is not imaginary The refinement of the maths of climate isn’t a mirage. Things are now understood about the evolution of pathogens that used not to be. It just means that the things they know cannot be reduced from a matrix of variables and assumptions to something simpler.So Andrew Goudie cannot say whether global warming is happening, or how much He can only suggest we prepare for surprises.

But that doesn’t mean the specialists know no more than a guesser. Genetic Manipulation is the simple one; Robert Winston gives a neat, reassuring commentary on the next turns in the medical road, all of which are already envisaged by doctors and only need their practical i’s dotting and ethical t’s crossing. With Population (John J Clarke), Disease (Matt Ridley) and Climate (Andrew Goudie), we arrive at topics where numerical data exist; where firm predictions are frequently demanded and the refusal to deliver them becomes more interesting.The styles are different – you won’t find anything in the others that quite resembles the brutal humour of Ridley’s plague’s-eye view of human behaviour – but they share an impressive commitment to explaining the toolkits used by medical, demographic and meteorological forecasters.Critics make much of the inability of all three to get things right decisively more often than a “naive forecast” – the guess that tomorrow will repeat today’s temperature, and so on. Felipe Fernndez-Armesto manages to be incredibly fluent by virtue of instant value-judgements on Religion, which he prefers in the form of unapologetic mainstream monotheism on speaking terms with liberal tolerance. His recommendations of Arab-Israeli co-operation and greater democracy will not surprise anyone.In Men, Dave Hill makes a witty and likeable plea for the burlier half of the human race to reinvent themselves. He is absolutely certain that when a religious impulse takes a tacky shape, it can itself only be trivial or funny.Last, there is the scientific core to the project. The most vividly realised future here is the one he wants us to avoid: a vision of men in self-inflicted redundant, lifelong boyhood.