The type settles around his neck, a heavy internal bond of black metal like the chain of a slave. When it is needed, though, the type spits itself out of his skin ready to be used as puissant ammunition against the British in India – our very own letters, used against us.Here, metaphor and prose are welded with a hypnotic quality that marks this certainly overreaching, but also shade-offering and fruitful book as the start of something as rewarding as it is challenging. There is a combination of grandeur (in the mythic sections) and poignancy when Chandra’s voice is at its most individual:”Then I remembered the Saturday night movies at Mayo, all of us sitting on the rising steps of the cricket pavilion, the canvas screen planted on the boundary line, the beam of light from the projector piercing the darkness, the desert breeze across our faces, the Indians on the screen, and us cheering for the cowboys.”And while on the subject of cricket; it is typical of this book’s self- satisfied insistence of tone that the nasty, redfaced, cricket-crazy, imperialist, cow-rib-guzzling American grandee with whose daughter Abhay sleeps and after whose wife he lusts must be called William James.. If, by some extraordinary confluence of time, fate and nautical misfortune, Truman Capote, Arthur Miller, Harper Lee and John Grisham all washed up on a desert island together; and if, once there, they decided to collaborate on a book, they might well come up with something like this.

Provided, of course, they didn’t argue over syntax and eat each other first. David Guterson’s majestic debut novel, winner of the 1994 Pen/Faulkner award for Fiction, is an exquisite hybrid, weaving strains from both classic and populist American literature into a fruitful and gloriously original whole. Nail-biting courtroom drama blossoms into a Milleresque exposition of small-town bigotry and redemption, presenting the reader not only with a page-whizzing narrative but a revealing scrap-book of pre- and post-war Americana.
Set in 1954 on a snow-lashed island in the Pacific North West, the novel revolves around the murder trial of a Japanese-American fisherman, Kabuo Miyamoto. As prosecution and defence grapple for the souls of the jury, those most closely associated with the case – Miyamoto, his wife Hatsue, one-armed journalist Ishmael Chambers – wander backwards through a tangled collective history, scouring their memories for intimations of the present. Courtroom disclosures unfold beside, and merge into, extended snapshots of the past – Hatsue and Ishmael’s childhood romance; the vicious wartime internment of Japanese-Americans; the loss of Ishmael’s arm to a Japanese machine-gun shell – so that the immediate, legal search for truth broadens into a wider reckoning with what has gone before.Driven by Guterson’s mesmeric, quasi-biblical prose, this is, in part, a novel about cultural polarisation, the seemingly unbridgeable divide between white and Japanese Americans.

“The whites are tempted by their egos,” explains Hatsue’s mother, Fujiko “We Japanese, on the other hand, know our egos are nothing. That is the fundamental difference.” In the book’s heart, however, lies less a story of cultural conflict as one of cultural redemption. Just as Ishmael is burdened by an aching, scar-tissued stump of amputated arm, so his fellow protagonists, American and Japanese alike, carry with them a burdensome dead weight of cultural bigotry. “What I see is the same human frailty passed from generation to generation,” opines Kabuo’s defence lawyer “We hate one another We are the victims of irrational fear. And there is nothing in the stream of human history to suggest we are going to change this.”Human history, however, is not all.

Cedars leaf and fall irrespective of human endeavour, and snow tumbles whatever the disposition of Man. “All human claims to the landscape were superseded by the snow. The world was one world, and the notion that a man might kill another over some small patch of it did not make sense.” There are forces greater than those of history, Guterson tells us, and the chains of the past need not be unbreakable. His characters struggle not just against each other, but against their respective backgrounds, seeking to confront the past’s misdeeds, redeem them, and then move onward.It is a message of profound optimism – minutely plotted, eloquently delivered – and one that will have Capote, Miller, Lee and Grisham kicking themselves for never getting shipwrecked on that desert island.. PHILIP KERR has written a book about a silvery tall building with a mind of its own that traps and tortures its occupants. Its reviewer is sitting sealed in cool canned air, behind toughened glass and smart- card doors, halfway up Canary Wharf Kerr must be thinking: I’ve hit the bullseye. His idea, already sold to Hollywood, did not come by chance.

Kerr had noticed that towerblocks and computers still make a lot of people nervous; he had watched the claustrophobic indoor bits of Die Hard and Terminator 2; he had read critics of modern corporate fortresses like Deyan Sudjic and Mike Davis. The whole project seems to have been planned, researched and marketed with the intricacy of the fine-framed monolith that provides its setting and plot.
Unfortunately, the opening 50 pages are about as lively as a board meeting. Kerr describes the genesis of the Gridiron in the kind of over-fussy technical detail that Tom Clancy fans read to while away long flights: “As drawings manager Kay’s function revolved around the computer and the Inter-graph design system, which made her the guardian of the database…”The building has been commissioned by a shady Chinese company which wants to use it for industrial espionage, but we learn far more about its design firm’s office politics than we do about that. Very obviously, the Gridiron’s architect is set up as a megalomaniac, awaiting his nemesis. And his bitter subordinates are introduced in a bewildering cloud of titles – like many thrillers this lacks memorable people – and each of them says things like “memo all this to the client.”Once Kerr has set up his scenario, however, his writing starts to relax and linger. He catches the eerie hums and rattles of an empty office block as the Gridiron awaits its first tenants.