A more interesting question might have been: was the comic novel ever alive? Is there something distinctive you can point to that can be called “comic fiction”? And are those two questions, or a different way of phrasing the same one? The late Philip Roth was rightly praised for his humour – David Baddiel said he was funny in the way a standup was funny – but none of the obituaries called him a “comic novelist”. Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels are very funny, but you probably wouldn’t call them comic novels. AL Kennedy is extremely funny, but, again, doesn’t seem to merit the label “comic novelist”. Others seem to travel more in that direction, but it’s a matter of fine judgment where the line is crossed. Anthony Powell? Evelyn Waugh? Ronald Firbank? Malcolm Bradbury? Vladimir Nabokov? Stella Gibbons?
At the outset of The Immeasurable World, William Atkins explains how his first trip to the Empty Quarter of Arabia was occasioned by the end of a love affair. “The woman I’d lived with for four years had taken a job overseas,” he writes. “I would not be going with her. The summer before, in the name of research, I’d spent a week with a community of Cistercian monks.” His flight to the deserts of this book is thus framed not as discovery but recovery; his impulse is an ascetic one, rather than voyeuristic or sybaritic. Atkins is not in thrall to deserts – in his words “dead”, “forsaken” places – but loves them for their austerity, and the clarity of thought they grant. From Oman to Australia, from China to Arizona, deserts offer him allegories of humanity’s mistreatment of the planet, and of one another.
Into the shifting sands of Oman he follows the stories of Wilfred Thesiger, Bertram Thomas and Harry St John Philby, mesmerised by a stillness in ceaseless motion: “The desert … leaves you dazed,” he writes, “and yet it quickly becomes apparent that, just as the desert is not silent, it is far from being still.” In Australia he visits the Maralinga nuclear test sites, superbly described as “a ruined place whose silence is less tranquillity’s than that of a battlefield where the killing has just ended”. The British director of nuclear testing, William Penney, saw in the undulating Australian desert “the appearance of English downland”. In Atkins’s imagination those outback dusts merge with the blood-red circles on cold war maps – the ones predicting the radii of nuclear devastation.
In some novels King has stumbled with endings, tending to focus too much on the supernatural. Here, he understands that less is more. There’s no reliance on portals to distant lands or repetition of incantations. Instead we’re given solid detective work that pieces together the mystery of El Cuco while connecting it to Terry Maitland. The otherworldly is kept to a minimum, allowing readers to envision horrors on their own.
Helen DeWitt's story collection Some Trick, her third book, arrives with great anticipation. A polyglot with a PhD in Classics from Oxford, DeWitt wields an immense intellectual palate that, in each of her books, she uses to cynically delight her readers.