A comedic war novel, Eve Babitz’s tale of sex and drugs, and a dog who comes back from the dead ... humour can be found in the strangest places
Everyone knows that writers such as Lorrie Moore, Jonathan Coe and Paul Beatty are funny, so in this list I’m including a few titles that might be expected to crop up in a neighbouring category: “Great War Novels”, say in the case of James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. Jones is not much read today – and it’s easy to see why in the unlikely event that you get through From Here to Eternity– but I was curious aboutThe Thin Red Line because of Terrence Malick’s masterly film. Well, the novel is recognisably the source, in that it takes place during the American assault on Guadalcanal in the second world war, but one slowly realises (almost disbelievingly, given the film’s stately cadences) that the book is actually a very violent comedy: “a sort of nonsensical hysteria of cruel fun”, as one officer sees it, more akin to Tarantino than Malick.
“Hysteria of cruel fun” is also an apt description of the bonkers world of Ivy Compton-Burnett. In scope (English upper-class households between the wars) and form (almost entirely dialogue), novels such as A House and Its Head and Manservant and Maidservant get by on the most meagre of narrative rations. Imagine the Wodehouse books, with Jeeves and Wooster stranded at the precise moment, in Gaspar Noé’s Climax,when the cast begin to notice that the punch has been spiked. Since this dread realisation can be expressed only within the clipped register of class and period, a tightly repressed mania holds sway. Relief takes the form of howls of laughter from the reader.
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