A false sense of reality
Isobel Montgomery www.theguardian.com
<p>Isobel Montgomery and Jemima Hunt on Skin |  Mr Foreigner |  The Quiet American |  Dolce Agonia  | Anita and Me  | Make Believe</p>
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the Guardian
Skin, by Jeremy Poolman (Bloomsbury, £6.99)

Janek Janowiec flags himself as an unreliable narrator from the start, but just in case his story lulls the reader into a false sense of reality, he drops in a tale of canoeing with Karol Wojtyla when the call comes from the Vatican. What Janowiec calls the "reorganisation" of his life story, others would label lying. Sitting in his Krakow attic before his trial - as this is a central European fiction, both charges and court are obscured - Janowiec confesses, in a roundabout way, his and his father's collaborationist pasts. The nastiness, when he finally tires of holding back the truth, is awful indeed, but Poolman's purpose here seems more about how the tale is told than what is revealed. Though his creation of a Polish mentality wavering between bitter humour and self-pity seems plausible, one is unsure whether Poland's catastrophic 20th-century history has been coopted for anything more than literary game-playing. IM

Mr Foreigner, by Matthew Kneale (Phoenix, £6.99)

It's no surprise to find that Kneale did a stint teaching English in Japan before settling down to write, but it is a shame that this debut novel has been reissued on the back of the Whitbread prize-winning English Passengers. Daniel Thayne, an English teacher in Tokyo having an affair with a student, Keiko, dreams of photography rather than fiction as a career. His dead-end job is matched by a dead-end relationship in which both sides have lost hope of bridging the cultural divide or even relishing their differences. This is Japan, however, and when they discover what is going on, Keiko's family attempt to make Daniel shoulder his responsibility. At times a thriller, at others a comic tale, the novel makes much of the otherness of Japanese culture and Daniel's inability to read its signals. But the occasional wry insights into the arrogance of the lone foreigner give little indication of what Kneale's rich imagination has since achieved. IM

The Quiet American, by Graham Greene (Vintage, £6.99)

A little more than a decade ago, Greeneland did not seem a distant place. While the cold war still simmered, his stories of spies and shady types who were exiled to the sort of countries you wouldn't pick for a holiday had immediacy. Rereading him now, however, the Continental hotel in 1950s French-run Saigon seems more like the setting for a costume drama. From the opening scene of opium-smoking to the colonial khaki, Fowler's compromised Catholicism and Pyle's Red-paranoia, The Quiet American comes from a vanished time. What sticks are the cinematic descriptions that Greene (a film critic from the dawn of the talkies) uses habitually, and that every Hollywood Vietnam script has borrowed since. The morally messy and outwardly cynical Times correspondent Fowler may be a shambling colonial relic, but Pyle, the eager young American with clean-cut views on how to save the Vietnamese from communism, is the more dangerous figure. IM

Dolce Agonia, by Nancy Huston (Vintage, £6.99)

It's Thanksgiving in New England, and a group of friends have gathered around the turkey to catch up. Huston introduces us to sultry Patrizia, unflappable Katie, a couple of curmudgeonly university professors, Leonid the housepainter, who has since become a friend, Hal's new wife Chloe, and - among the others who come and go - Sean, a poet whose glass, bottle, cigarette and ashtray are the "accoutrements of his being". All the friends have secrets. Sean's, however, is about to bring the sky crashing down on their heads. And as if this cruel twist of fate were not harsh enough, the voice of God weighs in every other chapter or so to confirm what some of us had suspected all along. Free will is a human construct designed to make us feel better. "I know where they're headed and what paths they'll take to get there," begins the prologue in heaven. The problem is, so do we. JH

Anita and Me, by Meera Syal (Flamingo, £6.99)

I had expected the humour, but was surprised by the tenderness of comedian Meera Syal's semiautobiographical novel. The 1997 winner of the Betty Trask Award, it has now been turned into a film, and it's not hard to see what all the fuss is about. The story of nine-year-old Meena, the daughter of first-generation Punjabi immigrants who have settled in a Midlands mining town, it contains everything we have come to expect of Syal: a send-up of British culture and Indian family life, the desire for acceptance, and - to top it off - a 1970s backdrop. Anita is Meena's classmate. Impossibly cool and blonde, she represents everything that Meena - who would rather celebrate Christmas than Diwali, and prefers fish and chips to dhal - wants to be. Syal turns her perceptive eye to the peculiarities of everything from bingo to teenage comics, but takes special delight in describing saris. "It puffed outwards in a resigned sigh [like] a piece of sky." JH

Make Believe, by Joanna Scott (Vintage, £6.99)

One minute he's bowling along in the back of a car, watching the world through the window; the next thing he knows, he's "dangling upside down like a wet pair of jeans on the wash line". So begins the tale of little Bo, who loses his mother one dark, wet night in a crash, which he, miraculously, survives with only a lacerated spleen and a butterfly bandage on his cheek. But who will look after him? Bo's father was killed before he was born, so now a judge must decide whether he is to be raised by his mother's mother and father, Marge and Eddie, or by his paternal grandparents. In an attempt to turn the story into a fable about how extraordinary ordinary life is, Scott scrambles the order of events in the same way that a detective might reconstruct a victim's last known movements. A scene from family history circa 1930, the year Pluto was discovered, is suddenly thrown in. It's all a little confusing. JH