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This tale of a minor novelist from cradle to edge of grave is constructed from short chapters that overlap time like pleats. Each chapter is also a minibiography that advances the novel's nameless protagonist through the stages and principal themes of his life: the confusions of parental and brotherly love and sex, lapsed Catholicism and sex, failed marriage and sex, friends and sex, thwarted career and sex, money and sex.
The prose style is as laconic as an investigator's dossier. Yet each page glistens with details of growth and change that readers should find familiar though freshly perceived. Simmons notes, for example, that his character is put off by certain signs of age, particularly "a looseness around the eyes so that they do not. express his moods."
Throughout, the writer's mood reflects a stoicism warmed to body temperature by an irrepressible sense of romance and self-amusement: "As he gets older, he will sometimes try to inquire into his deepest wishes, hoping to find a weariness with life that would make death less fearsome, but can't." In a secular age, that is Simmons' deceptive and effective way of saying grace.
EYE OF THE NEEDLE by Ken Follett Arbor House; 313 pages; $8.95
Ken Follett's novel has a simple purpose deftly carried out: it is a crackling good yarn. The Needle is die Nadel, code name for a Nazi agent in World War II Britain. He loathes his sobriquet because—violating a rule of code names—it carries meaning as well as identification. He dispatches his victims with a stiletto thrust upward into the heart. Die Nadel happens upon a secret of great import: the truth that the Allies will attack at Normandy, not at Calais.
While die Nadel (real name: Henry Faber) scurries to get his information out of the country and into German hands, British intelligence closes in. The ultimate battle is played out on Storm Island, bleak outcropping of rock in the North Sea. There, escaping from Aberdeen in a fishing boat, Faber is shipwrecked. Between him and a rendezvous with a U-boat stand the island's four occupants: a shepherd, an ex-R.A.F. pilot who has lost his legs, and the amputee's wife and child. Faber stalks them.
Follett's plotting is crisp, but it does not get in the way of his people—nicely crafted, three-dimensional figures who linger in the memory long after the circumstances blur. The final fadeout, in a teatime epilogue years later, is for that reason eminently satisfying and, for a sometimes brutal novel, touched with just the right note of tenderness.