There’s something to be said for the contemporary novelist having a background in psychology. While the mass-market thrillers and romance novels that pack the supermarket shelves are happy to remain plot-driven page-turners, the modern literary novel prides itself on its ability to unravel the thoughts and emotions of its characters rather than relying on narrative thrills, to show us what Barton Fink memorably termed ‘the life of the mind’. One need only look at the works of Ian McEwan or Paul Auster to see that contemporary fiction is as much about internal ponderings as it is about external events.

Patrick McGrath’s novels have always been distinguished by his ability to work his way into damaged and abnormal psyches, and, as you may have guessed from the title, Trauma is no exception. The story of Charlie Weir, a psychiatrist specialising in trauma victims in New York City, it shows that even those who analyse people for a living can’t always see inside their own heads. Charlie could use a few sessions on his own couch.

Admittedly his life is more chaotic than most, although it’s not so far removed from reality that we can’t identify with him. Charlie’s marriage has fallen apart following the death of his brother-in-law, a war veteran who Charlie was treating for post-traumatic stress syndrome. Charlie’s ex-wife Agnes blames him for her brother’s suicide, and he is now abandoned to a life of solitude and self-recrimination. Following the death of his mother he reopens an ill-advised fling with Agnes, but at the same time he is introduced to Nora, a friend of his brother’s who he begins to date. Nora has issues of her own, and she often wakes up in the middle of the night suffering from horrific nightmares; naturally, it isn’t long before Charlie offers to treat her for what he diagnoses as an underlying trauma.

It’s not immediately obvious where McGrath is heading with Trauma, as Charlie’s life meanders between these various threads, and even once the narrative has finished you may be left wondering what it was all about. Fortunately McGrath’s prose style makes for easy and engaging reading, and in Charlie Weir he has created an intriguing and troubled central character, rebounding from a lifetime of failures, poor choices and traumatic events. Even if you can’t see the point in this expose of a fictional psyche, you can’t helped being dragged into Charlie’s own particular circle of hell.

In fact Trauma works far better as a thesis than it does as a novel, as Patrick McGrath seems determined to push the modern novel’s obsession with psychological realism further than any of his peers. Conventional plotting is largely sacrificed in favour of the complex puzzle that is Charlie Weir’s brain: Trauma doesn’t unfold as a series of events so much as a sequence of revelations concerning its narrator’s mental state. For some of you this will be an infuriating diversion from the more conventional approaches to plot and narrative, but you have to admire McGrath’s ability to dissect the psyche of his central character so acutely that we feel we know him better than he knows himself.

As for those mass-market thrillers, Trauma is as far from them as Freud’s The Interpretation Of Dreams is from this year’s latest John Grisham paperback. And that can only be a good thing.

Reminiscent of Borges in its maze-like complexity of shadowy figures and surreal situations, A Thousand Deaths Plus One is as unpredictable a work as it is intricate in construction. Sergio Ramirez’s novel is essentially a work of intrigue. In 1987 the author found himself in Warsaw on a state visit. Ramirez was vice-president of Nicaragua from 1984-1990. This visit to Europe serves as the fuel that feeds the plot of the novel.

While in Poland’s capital, Ramirez, who doubles as the narrator, discovers the work of a compatriot photographer named Juan Castellon. Castellon, he is pleased to discover, had worked in Europe from 1880 to 1940. The author becomes curious as to the identity of this Nicaraguan photographer and the circumstances that brought him to Europe. The action of the novel begins with this otherwise inconspicuous revelation. The animated plot sequences and narration oscillate between Ramirez’s description of the world around him, his psychological desire to understand Castellon and Nicaraguan history, and Castellon’s own part in telling his side of the story.

A Thousand Deaths Plus One is a complex fictional yarn that does not easily telegraph its punches. Employing occasional Borges-like narrative techniques: “I believe I recall, but this could be a fabrication of my memory…” the author weaves a multi-layered story that after a while makes it next to impossible to separate truth from fiction. As it turns out, Castellon, who came to Poland in 1929 by way of Barcelona, was a friend of the Nicaraguan writer Ruben Dario. This friendship serves as a vehicle to introduce cultural and historical snippets of that Central American nation, or what the author refers to as “a country that does not exist.” As a form of storytelling, this entanglement works very well. Only pedants will concern themselves with the historical authenticity of the events and characters that Ramirez unveils or concocts, as the case may be.

The story traces both the author and Castellon’s exploits throughout Europe, and how these eventually are linked to their homeland. Without question, Ruben Dario, the poet and originator of the Spanish-American literary movement known as Modernismo, serves as the link between the author and his main character.

Also of considerable interest is Ramirez’s use of a prologue and epilogue in the novel. The former is by Ruben Dario, while the latter, which is much more interesting, is Castellon’s seemingly final clarification of the events of the novel. The use of an epilogue as a literary technique brings to mind the brilliance of Miguel de Unamuno in his majestic nivolas, novels in which he employed similar tropes. Perhaps appropriately, A Thousand Deaths Plus One ends with a dream sequence where Castellon tells us, “And my final recollection then is that of a dream. Last night I dreamt I had returned to Nicaragua in some future time, at the end of the century.” This closes the circle of A Thousand Deaths Plus One, as it were, by releasing Castellon into the pen of Ramirez, as author/narrator.

Borges is that rare writer, one who can truly change your outlook forever. To read Labyrinths or Ficciones is to experience the universe anew, to find a poetry in mathematics, a mysticism in reason. In tales like "Funes the Memorious", "The Library of Babel" and "The Garden of Forking Paths", Borges explores the concept of infinitude. A child with endless knowledge, a library that goes on forever, the constantly diverging paths of reality which make possibility itself endless. In doing so he finds a beauty in the concept perhaps unique in literature - the master poet-in-prose of the infinite. The prose he captures these dizzying absolutes within is understated, mellifluous and simple, dreamlike and factual, making the fantastical real, and the prosaic extraordinary. In "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", he describes a man re-writing Cervantes' work, word for word, without reading the original, and makes the idea seem not just possible but inevitable, and beautiful. In "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" another world - one whose inhabitants inhabit a realm of pure thought - floods from the pages of an encyclopaedia to overwhelm our own. Borges not only makes us accept this could happen, he makes us welcome it. The highest philosophical concepts of time, space, reality and perception are rendered malleable and human, the arcane loses its abstraction while retaining awe.

In 1957, after he had written most of the stories which make up Labyrinths, Borges undertook the task of penning a compendium of descriptions of fantastical beings - dragons, unicorns, phoenix and the like. Such an obscure, niche-laden, listing exercise would probably be seen as treading water at best in most other authors, - and in the case of most other authors the accusation would probably be accurate. You can't readily imagine James Joyce publishing a list of his favourite fairy tales for example, nor a joke book by Samuel Beckett. What could be a mere whimsical addendum to a body of work from another writer instead becomes a wonderful vista on the gifts of Borges. This is not a case of "he could write about anything and make it wonderful" - the old "I'd listen to him sing the phone book" cliche - for Borges, style and content are inseparable. Rather, the format of a scholarly researched compendium allows him to brandish with a flourish the outstanding knowledge and learning which pepper his writing, while the subject of the fantastic complements completely the strange insights which inform his vision.

The expected exotic are all here, the dragons, the unicorns, the nymphs, the phoenix and the salamander. What Borges brings to his description of these creatures, which many readers may think themselves already familiar with, is the learning which marks much of his best work ("research" is somehow an inadequate word) immense, profound, yet somehow worn lightly. European medieval manuscripts, the scrolls of ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Persians, the musings of esoteric Victorians, and the lore of all world religions casually surface and recede as the moment demands.

Thus we learn that eastern dragons are associated with both emperors and Confucius and have saliva of medicinal qualities:- "Buddhists affirm that Dragons are no fewer in number than the fishes of their many concentric seas; somewhere in the universe a sacred cipher exists to express their exact number."

The Phoenix, we see was conjured of by the Ancient Egyptians in their dreams of eternal life, and alluded to by Tacitus and Pliny hundreds of years later as they fixed the intervals of the fiery bird's visits as once every 1,461 years. We learn that in England once Christianity vanquished the older Norse gods that they didn't just lie down and die, but instead corrupted and withered into Trolls, while the beautiful Valkyries became witches. These witches were also known as Norns or Fates, grim augurs of the future the memory of which survives in the weird sisters of Macbeth.

References to Tacitus, Pliny, Terulius, Propertius, and St Ambrose remind us that the most learned men of the day considered all these "imaginary beings" as "real", believed in every bit as much we today accept the existence of exotic fauna we have only seen on television screens. These beings informed the landscape of the mind, which in turn became the landscape of history, and therefore the world. The Nordic Elves who shoot the invisible arrows which cause common itches, their Scottish counterparts the Brownies, who rather more winsomely turn up and tidy around the house, the Harpies, who we learn "wielded weapons of gold - lightning - and milked the clouds" , all these dwelt in the minds of our ancestors in a more profound sense than the mundane insects, cats and cattle which walked among them.

While descriptions of these more familiar fiends and fairies are captured marvellously (in both senses) and show us far more of the subjects than we could have imagined, Borges comes still more into his own with narrations of the more outlandish creatures. Here is Kujata, a huge bull from Islamic folklore, with 4000 eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths and feet. Kujata stands on the back of the great fish Bahamut, "All the seas in the world placed in one of the fish's nostrils would be like a mustard seed placed in the desert". Under Bahamut is water, and under the water darkness, "and beyond this men's knowledge does not reach". The uncanniness of cosmology is brought to us with a quiet aplomb, as it is with the "Fauna of Mirrors" where we learn that the people of Canton believed another hostile world was behind every reflective surface, the people of whom are enslaved into copying our actions for now, but whose turn to rise will come, and whose uprising will be heralded by.... a rogue yellow fish you may see in the mirror that shouldn't be there. That such a potentially risible, laughable notion instead haunts the memory is further testimony to Borges' mastery.

Occasionally the book has guest spots from other authors - mainly Kafka and C S Lewis - which, good as they are, simply serve as contrast to the particular visions of the grand editor. Elsewhere in the bestiary we meet Haniel, Kafziel, Azriel and Aniel, a four headed creature surrounded by rings full of eyes, as envisioned by the prophet Ezekiel. One of its heads is that of an ox, one of man, one of lion, and one of eagle, "each one went in the direction of its face, so imaginable as to be uncanny." Borges is adept at describing things, which, in terms of physical human description, cannot be described. When H P Lovecraft does this, he horrifies. When Borges does it, he simply entrances.

With all this talk of mystique and wonder, you could be forgiven for thinking this book a po-faced thing. Not at all. Borges is always aware the things he describes are as ridiculous as they are sublime, and a wryness sometimes peers through. Of the strange visionary Swedenbourg, who wrote with incredible vividness of the celestial beings he claimed to know - "as the English are not very talkative, he fell into the habit of conversing with angels and Devils." When the allegorical nature of some of the creatures is a little too heavy handed for his tastes, he is not above mocking it. (The hippogriff is the combination of a griffin and a horse which denotes the impossible - Luis notes the Greek scholar Servius somewhat milked this by inventing the "fact" that griffins must hate horses). Sillier creatures like the Squonk, ( of Aboriginal folklore, which cries to itself until its body disintegrates) appear with a mordant dryness. The entire "Fauna of the United States" are of a somewhat facetious nature, such as the axehandle hound - shaped like an axe, and which eats only axes. But what Borges never does is pour contempt on the fantastical - he knows its importance too well.

Borges knew that while the religions may be wrong in their claim to give us morality, they and their myths have more far more valid claim in giving us a sense of wonder, helping the impossible peer in, making life, rather than existence, possible. It is in no way a betrayal of rationalism to find a sense of transcendent mystery and awe in the Moslem Jinn (people of fire, as angels are of light and men of earth), the Jewish Golem, (a kind of ancient clay android), or the angelic hordes of in the Christian-informed visions of Swedenbourg. They don't exist, never have, and countless crimes have been committed in the names of the theologies which conjured them up. But these are beings without which the world of the mind, the world we inhabit, would not exist. Part of Borges' very real genius is to illuminate these corners of what makes us human, with a wisdom so acute it meets itself round full circle so as to appear childlike, an endless loop of wild possibility.

Not bad for a book about about dragons, witches and gnomes eh? No, he's not bad this Borges.

Over the last few years Chuck Palahniuk has revelled in the sordid, the grotesque, and the downright dirty like a particularly literate pig in shit, and for many readers his decision to set a novel within the pornography industry must have seemed like a marriage made in Heaven, or at least the more carnal parts of Hell. He seemed to have reached his high (or low) point with the short story 'Guts', which also made a gruesome appearance at the start of his pseudo-horror novel Haunted, but Snuff threatened to eclipse even that snippet of filth when it came to bodily fluids, disgusting urban myths and the deviant imagination.

Unfortunately Snuff comes as something of a disappointment after all that expectation, a few muffled grunts in a dimly lit room when we were hoping for a glorious pop-shot. There's still plenty to keep the Palahniuk fans happy, including a vast number of his trademark factual asides and fictionalised urban mythology, but somewhere in the mix the story goes missing. If you strip out the non-fiction snippets and deviations from the main narrative, you're actually left with a story that could have been told in a handful of pages. Snuff would make a great short story, but as a novel it feels thin and drawn-out.

We should attempt at least a brief description of the book's events, although it's hard to summarise the minimal plot without revealing everything in one ill-judged full-frontal shot. Legendary porn actress Cassie Wright is intending to make history with a 600-man gang-bang, and the event is to be captured on film with the explicit intention of reviving her flagging career. The narrative flits between four characters in the waiting room, where the 600 prospective porn stars stand around in their jockey shorts awaiting their thirty seconds of fame: there's Sheila, Cassie's assistant and right-hand woman; Mr. 600, also known as Branch Bacardi, a veteran porn star; Mr. 137, also known as disgraced TV presenter Dan Banyan; and Mr. 72, a young unknown who claims to be Wright's abandoned child.

As events unfold there are a few surprises thrown in, particularly when it comes to the relationship between Cassie Wright and Branch Bacardi, but these are largely secondary to the constant stream of anecdotes and factoids about the porn industry, Hollywood starlets, and the history of human sexuality in general. There are even parallels drawn to Valeria Messalina, the wife of Roman Emperor Claudius, but there's no disguising the fact that most of Snuff exists as a vehicle for a potted history of the sex industry as seen through Palahniuk's distorting eye, along with an entertaining list of fictional porn movie adaptations in the margins (Chitty Chitty Gang Bang is a personal favourite).

As such Snuff is entertaining enough, but on the strength of Palahniuk's other work you'd have to say that he could do better. The fragmentary narrative device doesn't always work, especially when the characters' voices all start to bleed into one, and as the plot races along to its premature conclusion you can't help wondering if you've missed something along the way. While Fight Club and Survivor treated us to a wonderfully skewed version of the world, driven by a sense of anger and injustice, Snuff often feels like nothing more than a collection of dirty schoolboy stories.

Of course, Chuck Palahniuk is such a master of the English language that he manages to make the most sordid sex act or human degradation resonate with a warped minimalist poetry, but it's not quite enough to hide the hollowness at Snuff's core. Even at his worst Palahniuk is still more interesting than the vast majority of contemporary novelists, but Snuff falls a long way short of the pornographic masterwork that we'd all hoped for. Like every porn movie ever made, this is a novel that eschews plot in favour of titillation and plenty of naked flesh - and ultimately it pays the price.

Some books change your life and From Lee to Li: An A-Z Guide of Martial Arts will not be one of them. But it is fun and straightforward. I won't add that it's unlikely to trouble the Trade Descriptions people because Lee and Li both begin with L - but Adams to Yuksa lacks the oomph of alliteration, I guess. You'd buy this book for the scruffy younger brother or the dad who habitually rents Steven Seagal DVDs. It's not a book with a scholarly bent, so serious martial artists might turn up their noses, but there's plenty of interest for anyone who has picked up nanchaku and spun it around pointlessly or tensed in sympathy as Jackie Chan crashed through a skylight.

From Lee to Li is written by Ben Stevens, a lifelong martial artist (according to HarperCollins) and author of The Gaijin's Guide to Japan, gaijin being the somewhat pejorative term used in Japanese to describe foreigners. It's published by The Friday Project.

As an A-Z, how comprehensive is this book? Well, one problem is the that Stevens combines two groups: great warriors in the history of martial arts and famous movie stars. For another, Stevens is somewhat elastic in his definition of martial arts. He writes, on several occasions, that any learned fighting skill (be it with empty hands or rice flails) can be termed a martial art. This explains the somewhat odd inclusion of Robin Hood (archer, boxer, wrestler, quarter-staff twiddler extraordinaire) and likewise some English boxers and Russian wrestlers. All to the good...so why don't we find an entry on Muhammed Ali?

We do, however, get a bevvy of martial arts stars. Stevens dutifully repeats the legends surrounding such stalwarts as Jean-Claude Van Damme, who almost kicked a Hollywood producer in the face to land his earliest and perhaps best role, that of Frank Dux in Bloodsport, and others, including the American actor and karateka Chuck Norris. Of course, while Norris' backstory is interesting, it pales against those now-famous Norris aphorisms (not authored by Norris himself) like 'Chuck Norris doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants' and 'Chuck Norris's tears cure cancer. Too bad he never cries.' Priceless. But some influential Western martial arts stars aren't included. I would have liked entries on Brandon Lee and Dolph Lundgren.

As for the Asian stars, the usual suspects are present and correct. Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan get treated to longish articles but, arguably, these only scratch the surface. Lee's article, in particular, could have been bolstered with more on the revolutionary aspects of his Jeet Kune Do style. Sammo Hung is included, but what about Yuen Biao, the third member the of Chan-Hung-Biao triumvirate? Other overlooked stars include Toshiro Mifune, who is surely worthy of a mention, too. While considered a traditional actor, he was a pillar of Akira Kurosawa's early jidaigeki works such as Rashomon, Yojimbo, and Sanjuro, in which kenjutsu and iaido feature heavily.

As well as modern-day heroes, Stevens includes many legendary characters who made contributions to the creation of particular styles. Some my personal favourites are absent, however, including Matsaaki Hatsumi, the modern ninja master, and Sosui Ichikawa, the goju stylist.

This book is a little like a finger buffet for a sumo wrestler. In its attempt to be light, it can lack depth. Any fan of martial arts or the movie genre is likely to know a great deal more about, say, Jackie Chan than Stevens covers in his brief article. So the emphasis is on trivia rather than information. It is not encyclopedic or comprehensive. It's a book to open at random and browse. At times, it pegs the Jumpers for For Goal-Posts meter: martial arts - you know; isn't it, mmm? marvellous; 1980s video boom; dubbed dialogue; wax on? wax off? But, overall, it's a fun book and does (most of) what it says on the tin.

Tales of Galicia is set in the south-east corner of Poland a few years after the fall of Communism. A time of upheaval certainly but, as the name of the volume implies, this part of the world is no stranger to social change. A mountainous region, once called Galicia, it rolled down into modern Ukraine before being annexed by the Polish. The image of a ghost territory haunting the contemporary map is an apt illustration of Stasiuk’s exploration of boundaries and demarcation. Around here, cultural identity is a history of flux and capitalism is just the sequel to earlier religions, armies and political ideologies.

The book opens on the very cusp of change, with Józek "driving the last tractor". Soon there will be "red Zetors: soundproof cabs, built-in radios, twenty-first century" but, for now, the narrator describes a kind of captive present – "motionless time" – which gives no space for imagination or, consequently, the very concept of the future. "People who have been disinherited live in the present. If they possess any kind of past, then it is a memory just as uncertain as the future." This generation of 40-somethings finds itself, then, in a present which is simultaneously constrictive, apparently eternal yet about to come to an end. Realities overlap or are inherently multiple.

Stasiuk’s metaphysics may be knotty but they are also economical and direct, complex ideas presented in fewer words than it takes to explain them. His poetic density manages to coax these notions from the material conditions in which his characters exist. Tales of Galicia is very much a work of the pub and the soil, and philosophy is a blunt fact of existence rather than something tacked on. These characters have rough hands and tongues loosened by cheap alcohol. Without sentimentality, Stasiuk imbues his drinkers and murderers with inherent dignity and the phlegmatic presence of cattle – unfashionable ideas that crackle to life thanks to his intellect and descriptive rigour. The writing creaks like a leather strap, rises like steam.

Each tale traces the effects of change. New products flow in, ironically from Russia, with a kind of holiness to them. They give shop windows the miraculous shades of stained glass. "Sky-blue – Blue Ocean Deodorant – this is the colour of the mother of God, of the firmament, and like white it represents purity." Social status is upended as Władek, "on a fairly low rung in the village hierarchy", becomes an entrepreneur and ends up outdoing religion: "One Mary, one Joseph, one Pope, compared to such quantity, such variety…".

The stories are threaded by Kościejny, who begins as narrator, dies mid-way through and returns to haunt the latter half of what has now revealed itself as a novel. Kościejny crosses several other thresholds – from observer to subject, stranger to local, outsider to insider. Likewise, the book itself changes constituents as multiple fragments become a single, unified work and genres rub up against one another. We might normally expect this tactic to undermine metaphysics but, as translator Margarita Nafpaktitis notes, this is an attempt to articulate "what Stasiuk calls the 'fissure in existence,' where boundaries dissolve between the natural and the supernatural, and where passage can be made from one side to another". Nafpaktitis’ translation is a work of poetry in itself, her afterword providing the best introduction and review you could want.

Stasiuk crosses and recrosses the line not to find the point where untenable boundaries collapse but to map a liminal space and open up pathways into the spiritual. If this sounds absurd, Stasiuk offers literal examples. In a masterly story/chapter called Place, a church has been dismantled and moved into a museum. What remains is more than a patch of disturbed ground: "places cannot be carried off. A place does not have dimensions. It is both a fixed point and intangible space. That is why I still wasn’t sure if it had really been taken away". The soul of the building remains, another ghost. The story ends with Kościejny explaining the absent building to a tourist. "You’re standing at the threshold", he says, indicating the doorway of the church but also the metaphysical point of crossing. What we get is a smudged boundary around people and things. Another word for the thick border between here and there is an aura.

Within this ecotone, everything is liquid – time, place, consciousness. There is even a slipperiness in the use of Polish grammar and verbs which, Nafpaktitis admits, does not survive the jump to English. But Stasiuk’s poetry is pitch perfect and so organic it makes most other novels look melodramatic and artless in comparison. As part of Prague’s excellent Twisted Spoon series, it is also a handsome, tactile publication. It is often said that a book is haunting. Thanks to Stasiuk's skill, Tales of Galicia has a rare soul that is likely to linger.

Broken Glass is a derelict who drinks at a bar called Credit Gone West in the Trois-Cents district of the DR Congo. As a disgraced school teacher and unrepentant drunk, he is an unconventional narrator, the kind we might find in Camus novels. The words you are reading, he explains, are jottings made in a notebook given to him by the bar's proprietor, Stubborn Snail, intended to leave some kind of legacy for Credit Gone West. For Stubborn Snail, all talk about Africa's oral heritage is worn out and reality too motley for neat phrases: "this is the age of the written word, that's all that's left now, the spoken word's just black smoke". Mabanckou's novel explores the space between. In describing the events of this dive and through confessions of its resident barflies, Broken Glass' notebook becomes a suitably messy dissertation on two themes: how scoundrels justify themselves through the stories they tell and the wider interplay of African literature within its alleged oral purity and colonization by the French.

Early on, Broken Glass recounts a preposterous anecdote about how the opening of Credit Gone West provoked a governmental crisis, the crux of which is a battle for the pithiest slogan to win over the people. As the President's advisors race to find him a suitably historic phrase, it is a good excuse for Mabanckou to trample on the great quotes of history, exactly the kind that Stubborn Snail is tired of. "Shakespeare said 'To be or not to be, that is the question', and the chief negro said 'no, no good, we've got past wondering whether we are or whether we aren't, we've already settled that one, we've been in power here for twenty-three years, next!'" This kind of verbal slapstick is typical of Mabanckou's irreverence. When the President finally gets what he wants, his quote ends up as the butt of a joke.

Similarly, each local lush approaches Broken Glass to give account, as if narrating their hard-luck stories for his book will dignify such miserable lives. Each insists on their singularity despite interchangeable catastrophes, and each has someone to blame for their misfortune. Luckily, Mabanckou has the grotesque imagination to create characters like the Pampers guy, who comes to the bar wearing nappies, and the Printer, who brandishes a copy of Paris-Match as if he were its proud editor. By telling their stories, they associate themselves with success that was only ever anecdotal. It is a verbal climb up the social ladder, wordy airs and graces to pretty up the truth. All dialogue is reported, filtered and absorbed into the relentless stream of the narrator, who is not shy about offering his opinions. As such, the novel sustains an ambiguity between the written and the oral. Everybody, Mabanckou implies, is an unreliable narrator. It comes with the territory. He even has Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye turn up, mumbling his outdated adolescent crap. Ripped out of context, Broken Glass doesn't have much time for him.

Broken Glass himself is a reader of books but not a writer, and something of a lazy narrator, disguising what pleasure he derives in case Stubborn Snail starts to bully him into writing more. This allows Mabanckou to take enormous liberties with style and get away with things that 'good' writing does not do. The notebook form is rendered as one long sentence, organized with breaks and white spaces. There are no full stops, capital letters are rarely used and sometimes a single sentence flows on for pages. It grants Mabanckou a flexibility of rhythm and focus and gives the novel enormous energy. A single anecdote can pour out in a torrent or a section can flit between subjects without a breath. The style is restless.

Broken Glass is one of those novels where the original can be glimpsed beneath the translation. I suspect the frisson created by French with Congolese speech patterns has lost some of its impact in the jump to Helen Stevenson's English. As Laila Lalami explains in her excellent insider's comparison of the two, Mabanckou's puns are very specific. It must be fiendisly difficult to translate such specific post-colonial collisions. African literature has moved on from a simple 'them and us' binary in terms of their former French occupiers. These characters have been forged within such messy contexts. Most of them express distain for other blacks. "I'm no racist," the Printer says before talking about his white wife in Paris and their suburban life "well away from the negroes". 'Independence' is another worn-out concept for Stubborn Snail to mistrust. The losers of Credit Gone West still ingratiate themselves with a bourgeois existence that has spat them out and dumped them back as drunks. Similar to Brel's Jacky, they would sell out repeatedly in exchange for the briefest glimpse of a shabby glory.

Aside from its idiosyncratic punctuation, the most startling thing about Broken Glass is its literary punning. The novel is a torrent of gags about French literature. Mabanckou refers to it as a kind of love letter to the writing that shaped his own. However, this intertextual torrent is something of a wind up, giving its narrator a kind of literary Tourette's, as if he's spent too many drunken years engaged with books he doesn't remember correctly. You can play spot the allusion but it gives no insight. As such, all the carefully constructed masterpieces of literature are submerged into the character's monologue. They're quick laughs for us and give no barrier against the chaotic, shitty forces we live by: "this jumble of words," writes Broken Glass at one point, "is life". The novel makes a break from literary decorum and revels in its bad behaviour. It's irreverence recalls Céline (Mabanckou duly introduces a character with the same name) and Rabelais (a pissing contest is a clear tribute).

The novel is fluid and any stability we might expect from literature is unmoored. Any aspiration to dignity (or bourgois respectability) are scrambled by chaos and failure. This is what gives Broken Glass its energy and life. Its use of language is liquid, both an endless stream of wine and the drunken delirium it inspires. The novel has a looming, zooming, unhinged perspective. It staggers and lurches. It doesn't surprise me to learn that Mabanckou is a fan of Tutuola. But this liquid also resembles a river and the waters of the Tchinouka have a special significance for the central character, as if everything flows towards them. Reality itself never stops this churning and flowing. At one point, Broken Glass calls the French language "a river to be diverted".

Born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Alain Mabanckou is now in his early 40s and spends much of his time teaching French literature in California. He has written six novels and six volumes of poetry. Only Broken Glass and African Psycho have so far been translated into English but his reputation in French is very strong. He is something of a dandy and has a wicked, engaging personality. Broken Glass is a difficult novel to analyze. The torrent of words seem intended to complicate the big statements of literature. You get carried along by its raging waters. Witty, silly, funny and vivid, it is an insouciant novel in the very best sense.

The "coming-of-age" teenage novel is now a well-weathered archetype, every bit as established in the literary pantheon as the state of the nation diorama, or the star-crossed romantic tragedy. A teenage narrator has the potential to reflect the world in a purer and starker state. At the same time, the self-righteous certainty and ignorance endemic to adolescence can clash against this purity with a jarring clang .Those writers in this genre emphasising the former fact aim for the profound and lyrical, the majority home in on the latter and aim for comedy. Catcher in the Rye can be regarded as the apotheosis of the first outlook, the Adrian Mole series the standard-bearer of the second. Submarine, the first novel of Swansea born poet Joe Dunthorne, first released in 2008 and now making its way into paperback aims to capture both these aspects. Does it succeed?

15 year old Swansea boy Oliver Tate is clever, obsessive, solipsistically single-minded and doggedly literal in his grappling with the world. Oliver sees life as a series of black-and-white logic puzzles which can be solved as soon as the correct equations come to hand. New words are memorised on a daily basis (forming the book's chapter headings, including autarky, decollation, fastigium and quidnunc ), people are slotted into different categories like so many enzymes in a petri-dish. Minute details of his neighbours and school mates appearance and lives are mulled over with clinical detail. Fixated on minor detail (observing during kisses that his girlfriend Jordana has been drinking semi-skimmed milk) Tate is also given to rather outre' similes of the mind (bottles in a bottle-bank for instance are likened to the piled corpses of Holocaust victims. )

At times, the cold analysis hot-wires with the fever of his rampant imagination and the classification goes awry. A local physiotherapist is classed as a "pansexual" (attracted to everything), a local Muslim family re-categorised as far more exotic Zoroastrians, both on equally flimsy evidence. With the pansexual physio, Tate books an appointment and puts the accusation to him. Here is a lad who likes to see things through.

High among Oliver's lists of to-do are achieving penetrative sex with Jordana, and attempting to heal the perceived rift in the marriage of his progressive parents, those of the type given to "improving" holidays. Dad is a teacher, puffed up with over-emphatic jollity and prone to clinical depression, his mum seemingly tiring of this forced contrast and seeking attention elsewhere. The re-emergence of her past boyfriend Graham, a new-age capoeira teacher spurs Oliver to take increasingly drastic action, exploding into a spiral of chaos.

Last year's hardback release of Submarine plunged through an ocean of plaudits, "excellent", "brilliant", "the sharpest funniest, rudest account of a troubled teenager's coming of age since Catcher in the Rye", "Adrian Mole for adults, with a more complicated protagonist, truer to life and infinitely funnier." Well, let's begin therefore with a churlish pissing on the parade, and start with the negatives. There are very few great novels, and Submarine is not one of them . Whilst engaging with both the teenage novel-models I banged on about at the beginning, its default mode is the latter. The occasional note of grating whimsy, the perennial flaw with the teen comedy genre, is not therefore altogether absent. Furthermore, Oliver's mental voice is set to an odd pitch, clipped, detached and pedantic. While certainly funny, it can sometimes be hard to see whether this emotional distance hinges on a slight affectation on his part - a deliberate ploy of making himself slightly stranger for the reader - or a genuine dislocation bordering on, if not straying into, outright autism (which is why at times I thought the narrator of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time was a closer model than the Holden Caulfield or Adrian Mole.) Finally, while bustling with amusing and arresting set pieces, none grabs you so hard you either laugh out loud or achieve a moment of the truly sublime.

Pissing over with. Submarine may not be great, but is very good. It is consistently funny, with a flair for evocative description which puts Dunthorne's background as a poet to fine use.

And while his voice may seem just a little too strange to be true, the obsessions of a teenage mind are captured expertly, the (un)healthy obsessing and pondering, the snagging of the mind on seemingly irrelevant words and images. It often rang very true with this here former teenager at least. It's also bold and interesting and characterisation to not cast Tate as the pure lovable outsider in the Mole mode either. Tate's forensic instinct for survival means he has managed to offset his social inadequacies enough to worm his way into the entourage of "Chips", a popular bully in his school's hierarchy, and is quite happy to join in the sadistic taunting of overweight outsider Zoe. ( In typically over-hyper-efficient style he writes a "how-to" guide for her in how to avoid bullying, re-created in full, the shifts of style in the book are another strength).

The consequences of Tate's clinical outlook on life are not just slapstick funny, but at times quite darkly humorous too. The unthinkingly uncaring treatment of Jordana when she discovers her mother has cancer is the clearest example - "treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen" he reflects at this point with quite breathtaking callousness. The fact he sees himself as the wronged party following her angry reaction tests the very limits to how we can sympathise with the self-obsessed little scrote.

But sympathise we do, because the figure drawn from these lines of absurdity, brilliance, malignancy, is one captured very well. Every other player is finely crafted too. The earthy charm borne through rough self-confidence of thug Chips; the bumptious but essentially loveable dad all the more poignant in his naffness, the bad girl Jordana who melts into more pathetic humanity amid her own heartbreak...there are plenty of opportunities to teeter over the brink into broad comedy caricature, and Dunthorne always manages to avoid them, in the same way that, while set in the early 90s, inane observations about ooh-aren't-the-mobile-phones-big-yo-ho-ho are avoided too. He reveals himself as a minor master observer in the subtle comedy of manners. And he proves that, yes, he has succeeded in combining the poetically profound and lamentably laughable sides of the teenage condition.

In the creation of Oliver Tate, Dunthorne has managed to marry the sublime and absurd sides of the teenage tale, and shown better than most that there isn't necessarily too much difference between the two. He has also revealed a real flair for mood and language which should evolve further in another novel, without the inherent limitations of this genre. So, nice one Joe, let's have another one.

A Clockwork Apple - Belinda Webb

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Many people first read A Clockwork Orange when they're very young, and fall in love with it. When did you first read it, and what was your reaction?

Actually I came to it fairly late, I read it just a few years ago, I was in my twenties. I didn't want to read it before, I thought it was a boy’s book - a book about boys who were violent for no reason, which had nothing to say to me. Talk about judging a book by its cover! When I did finally read it, from the first page, the language just amazed me.

The book seems to take a fairly even inspiration from both Orange and Manchester itself. Which inspired you more?

Moss Side is the stronger influence. Moss Side, Hulme and Chorlton-on-Medlock, these areas around Oxford Road, not far from where we're sitting. Poor areas right next to a massive student population. Populations which may as well come from different worlds.

The lively contempt Alex shows for the "Blytons" [her slang word for the respectably and middle-class] was presumably inspired by this.

Yes, that and the novels of Enid Blyton herself. Growing up reading books like Mallory Towers, about all these girls playing hockey in boarding school...in a way it just served to remind me this is the kind of education I would never have, it made you feel worse in a way. That's not to say I didn't enjoy them, but the contrast was so massive.

Your Alex is violent, but not nearly as violent as the Alex of Burgess, which makes for a very different dynamic to the book which inspired it.

Yes, her violence is much more just about expressing anger, justified anger. The Alex of Clockwork Orange is much more sadistic. That suited Burgess who was posing questions about the nature of choice, about choosing between two evils. My Alex comes more from my own experience. The choices she makes I see as positive.

How much of you is there in Apple’s Alex?

Well, I was a bit of a nightmare to be honest, but at the same time I was the oldest girl in a family of seven trying to keep it together. Like her, I was angry rather than rebellious, rebelling implies you've got something constructive to rebel against. I didn't go around beating people up, and I wore Dr Martens rather than ballet shoes! But like her, I was an autodidact, always looking for something new.

Whereas Clockwork Orange has the fictional behaviour-control of the ludovico technique, the Bill and Bob technique of your book is a direct attack on the very real techniques of Alcoholics Anonymous and the self help industry in general.

My book isn’t a prediction, but looking at how things could go if we follow America in this way, as we do in so many other ways. The addiction “industry” is massive in America, whole communities are leaving this sober, denying life. It preaches that nothing is about social conditions, it just says you’re morally defective in some way.

Your Alex is a symbol of autonomy against this deterministic outlook?

It's about more than autonomy. It’s been said the characters of the Scottish writers Kelman and Welsh are informed a great deal by existentialism, determining your own way no matter what the consequences, and no matter what structures are in place. That’s true of Alex certainly, she’s in tune with her inner existentialist!

The invention at work in the language is probably the books biggest achievement. Have you always been into playing with language in this way?

On one level it’s a really juvenile thing, playing with words like toys. Its like a puzzle thing, playing with puzzles. But on another, language is so vital, so important. Noam Chomsky talks about how language informs power structures, how the words you use both signify and inform your politics, where you’re coming from. It all comes together in the book.

Your language is inspired by Burgess’ “nadsat”, but at the same time is very different to it. Once again, its nothing like a pastiche.

Burgess was a very intelligent man, and a linguist, he was drawing from other languages, Russian, Spanish, Italian. I know English and that’s all I know – I think that’s enough to be getting on with! I looked at English words which we no longer use for whatever reason. Latin too, which has long been the preserve of the elite. Once again, as with her intellectual passion, I wanted Alex to reclaim these things for normal people.

The Mancunian dystopia you explore is female dominated, with males largely obsolete. Is female domination a bad thing, or is this one positive aspect of an otherwise grim future?

Not it's not positive. The perspective of the book is I’d say humanist rather than feminist, and the fact men are on the way out is drawing on the marginalisation of men today in working class communities like Moss Side. Male lives are wasted and that’s not a good thing.

Some readers might be surprised to see a book set in Moss Side with little mention made of race, and the characters would seem to be white.

Moss Side has become synonymous with black people but there is a large white working-class population as well, which gets overlooked I think. There are other immigrant descendants, like the Irish, my ancestors, too. I was writing drawing from my own background, race wasn’t really an issue I was dealing with. Class on the other hand is.

Is there a straightforward political message in the book?

Yes, again, class. Tony Blair’s ridiculous lie that we’re all middle-class now, he clearly never visited Moss Side. That’s a message I wanted to come over clear. Alex here is a voice that is otherwise not heard.

You’ve been involved in creative writing projects with teenagers in both Moss Side and Brixton. What’s the main advice you would give to young writers?

I think the fact the way I write is not in a mainstream voice is the main thing, and I hope this encourages young people. People should write in their own voice and not be deflated. My sister went on a creative writing course and it was –you must write in this way and that way. If you’re going to write in that way you may as well be in a factory, dryly sticking different bits of formulae together. It may sound like a platitude or a clich้, but staying true to your own voice really is the most important thing in writing.

Belinda Webb's blog is at belindawebb.blogspot.com

A Clockwork Apple - Belinda Webb

See all books by Belinda Webb at
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A Clockwork Apple - Belinda Webb

See all books by Belinda Webb at
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As you may guess from the title of this first novel by Belinda Webb, she isn't shy in acknowledging its chief influence. This Apple shares with Burgess' Orange more than merely its title. Once again we have a teenage gang leader by the name of Alex, indulging in artful thuggery and vicious wordplay against a fantastically dismal dystopian background (though the gang are girls not boys). Despite this however, and despite the plot itself mirroring the arc of its forbear point by point, stage by stage , what Webb has achieved in this dynamic debut utterly transcends mere homage or pastiche. This is a fruit which takes on a flavour all of its own.

As this Alex, - an andra rather than an ander - tears her way through a vividly familiar south and central Manchester, it is soon clear much of the book's strength comes from the contrasts and diversions from Burgess' tale of moral tale of ultraviolence, which are every bit as starkly engraved as its defiantly obvious similarities. Thus, again we have Alex the teen-gang leader of four swaggering cohorts in crime (garage overalls and ballet pumps the uniform here) , bile-filled, struttingly contemptuous of authority and environment, parents and surroundings, anything other than themselves. Alex and the girls run riot in their urban Bosch-scape, clashing with other gangs whilst showing society an infernally ornate v-sign. Alex's own authority is in turn questioned by her own gang, who attempt a putsch. The coup is quashed, leading to resentment and revenge, bitterness and betrayal. The gang violently rob a bourgeois household and a death ensues. Alex is sold out by the cohorts, arrested and battered. Following the failure of conventional imprisonment, a freakishly new form of "treatment" aimed at ending the problem of anti-social behaviour at its mind-source is employed, and free will itself ends up on trial.

So much for the similarities - a great tale we should all know. But the intrigue and achievement is where it differs. First off, the environment is not the non-specified spartanly statist austerity as imagined by Burgess, but the very real environs of the south central Manchester both he and Webb hail from, where the grey poverty strewn sprawl of Moss Side and Hulme uneasily rubs against University-land. Cast years into the future with retrospective new place names to match (from the Amis and Eagleton Campuses to the Tony Wilson and Thatcher Streets) the locations are all lovingly laid out for those that know them, giving the Apple both a satirical edge and a grounding in actuality not found in the Orange. Further off, the dystopia here has skewed in different directions than in Burgess' vision. This is a world where men are, though not wholly, largely absent. Seemingly a genetic dead-end, the remnants do little but linger, predatory yet lethargic, like vicious sloths, or maybe stunned lions. It's the girls that rule the roost and run riot, though their freedom is a pyrrhic victory over patriarchy at best. When the clash with the forces of mechanistic determinism comes, the nemesis arrives not in the form of a sci-fi mind control technique, but in the more prosaically sinister form of the "Bill'n'Bob Method", a straightjacket of touchy feely psychobabble satirically filched from the pseudo-religiosity of Alcoholics Anonymous.

A greater difference still is the Alex of this book. Burgess' Alex had a penchant was for classical music, Webb's Alex is for writing and literature, and crucially, ideas. Riffs on Marx and Nietzsche, Dickens and Lessing, Gaskell and Wolstonecraft segue into the narrative with a forthright style, wit and vigour that seems effortless. Burgess' character was a cold fish, his beautiful language masking an emptiness in his actions, a psychopathy designed to frame the author's dilemma on the nature of free will in as stark a way as possible. The violence of and rebellion of Webb's character is more clearly a darkly realised thirst for freedom, a rampage that cannot be impeded, rather than a revelling in causing pain for its own sake. Tangled though it is in thuggery, it is something rather more life affirming, self-affirming than the grim sadism of its forbear. The Alex of the Apple is someone you can actually like, indeed, I found it impossible not to. Both author and protagonist have a more moral defence of freedom than their inspirations, a sense of class justice, a Robin Hood reparation, a visceral hatred of the "Blytonesque" bourgeois. Ultimately, it's a more beautiful defence of freedom too.

On paper, a brief synopsis of this book may make it seem something of an interesting but ultimately whimsically and futile exercise. But you have to read it. The ideas, interesting as they are, become secondary to the sheer power, the vibrancy, verve and drive of the writing. Webb brilliantly captures, as did Burgess, the narrative voice of rebellious youth, its beautiful cockiness, its transgressive freedom. She does not simply copy or adapt Burgess' "nadsat" language but derives a wonderful imaginary lexicon of her own, drawn more from modern slang and Edwardiana and Victoriana than the Russian influences of Burgess. (Galimatious -nonsense, pilgarlick - a poor wretch, phrontistery - thinking place, tintinabulate - ring or call). This excellent evocation is realised not only by this argot, but moreso in the finely found naturalistic rhythms of a bright and gobby teenage brat of a girl. This is language utterly mastered, the cadences perfectly pitched and placed, a pin-sharp voice beguiling and battering the reader with an exuberant synthesis of wit and vigour, intellect and aggression.

Reworking an old novel can seem a masturbatory conceit, using it to promote your own philosophies, adding insult to the original presumptuous injury. Burgess himself came unstuck with this in penning his frankly dreadful 1985 decades after he wrote A Clockwork Orange, a feeble ransacking of Orwell's grave to peddle his own increasingly Blimpish view of the world. Such projects show up stale writing even more clearly than in a "purely original" work. Webb has, emphatically, not fallen into this trap. The zest for innovation she has taken from the source text takes her work into transcendent realms which couldn't be imagined by the original writer. The inspiration of spirit overtakes and becomes more important than the emulation of idea. Crucially, those with no knowledge of the original could find great joy in the writing here, perhaps the truest test. With this dazzling debut, Belinda Webb has managed to avoid the myriad pitfalls of pastiche, whimsy and showboating to create a novel of real beauty, of wit, intelligence, radiance and relevance. Read.

A Clockwork Apple - Belinda Webb

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