Theologian Tom Wright understands hell as a process of dehumanization as people reflect the image of God less and less and come to resemble the things they worship. I don’t agree with him, but if he was looking for a modern day Dante’s tour of such a hell, he would find it (without Dante’s genius) in Hanif Kureishi’s Something To Tell You.

There is not a nice character in sight. Jamal is the narrator, and perhaps the most detestable of them all. Now a famous middle-aged therapist, he obsesses over his first love thirty years earlier, which ended with him murdering someone. Meanwhile, his hedonistic playwright best friend Henry embarks on an affair with his hedonistic underworld sister Miriam, and we are mildly amused by a clash of manners. Jamal himself vacillates between his estranged wife Josephine, a prostitute named Goddess he likes to confide in and his former lover Lisa, who’s always ready to get into bed with him. Things are complicated further when three of the figures from his past return.

We learn about halfway the ‘terrible secret’ in Jamal’s past, and from then on it feels the drug-addled sex-obsessed characters are dragging themselves sluggishly from scene to scene. They’re not entirely self-focused; as left wing intelligentsia they do complain about Blair’s Britain from time to time, but the complaints are not very convincing.

I’ve been trying to put my finger on my own snobby, classist tastes in film and fiction – the fact that I tend to be bored by ‘kitchen sink’ working class realism, my resonance with John Fowles’ line in his journals about ‘to hell with the inarticulate hero’. I would have said that I tended to identify more with middle class characters, with articulate middle class angst. This book proves that I can’t generalise too much; it reminds me of how boring the middle class can be.

Thirteen years after Charles Frazier’s American civil war novel was at the top of the bestseller list, I’ve finally read it. Or listened to it, actually. Frazier himself has been reading it to me in the car for several weeks now, and he has a beautiful voice, well suited to the story he has to tell.

In one strand of the story, I journeyed with Inman as he faced obstacle after obstacle on his way home to his fiancee, Ada. It had an episodic feel to it; no particular progression to the various encounters – they just happened, as he comes across friend and foe and in between. In the other strand of the story, Ada is helped to look after the farm she has inherited by the plucky Ruby. I loved Ada for her deep intelligence, impracticality and compassion.

[spoiler alert]

It’s a novel with the same kind of meditative beauty and innate violence as Cormac McCarthy’s work, but I thought Frazier’s world was a less cold one, that he had to give Ada and Inman the happy ending they deserved – that the reader deserves.

But he doesn’t. Inman returns to Ada only to be shot down, almost randomly, a few pages from the end. I don’t think Frazier should have done that, not even if the source history he was vaguely working from demanded it. It undercuts the long journey toward reunion that forms the rest of his novel. We know McCarthy’s world is cruel; we expect it. But your world, it seemed a little kinder.

Yet there are antecedents. So many moments of chance, and of good luck falling Inman’s way; maybe Frazier was only trying to balance things out. At one point Frazier is shot and even shallowly buried. Later, another character is also shot and left for dead. Both of them survive. Despite all the driving power of chance in the narrative, moments like these stretch credibility.

Yet it is a beautiful book, rightly canonised, which has much to say about life, as well as telling a familiar yet beautiful story.