Salamander, by Thomas Wharton (Flamingo £6.99)
If all the reverent twittering over Tolkien has left you thoroughly sick of mysterious castles and epic voyages, this tale of a printer's quest to create the ultimate book should restore a little of your faith in fantasy. Wharton (heavily influenced by Borges) has set himself the task of writing an eighteenth-century conte philosophique in the manner of Candide or Rasselas, while spicing things up with a few more characteristically modern descriptive flourishes. The result is certainly a complete and authentic vision, a piece of period sci-fi as grand in its scale as it is intricate in its detail. But though the book is strong on crazed aristocrats, porcelain robots and fiery piratesses, there's not one fully formed human being to give a really compelling emotional edge to the flow of adventures. Salamander is lots of fun but it might have followed the contes more closely by being a little shorter.
The Long Home, by William Gay (Faber £6.99)
Despite the earlier appearance in the UK of his excellent follow-up, Provinces of Night, this is William Gay's first novel. The same piece of backwoods Tennessee is the setting, now seen a decade earlier, back in 1943, when menfolk were menfolk and whisky was lighter fluid. Once again our hero is a slightly bookish young man with abandonment issues, Nathan Winer, battling the local villain (who this time also shot his pa) for the hand of a haughty dark-haired teen beauty with a mother of easy virtue. It's an ordinary story but, as before, it is Gay's marvellous evocation of feud-and-drink America that makes the book such fun. The Long Home is thinner on laughs than Provinces of Night, whose subtlety and assurance it cannot always match, suggesting that Gay is still an improving writer. But this is powerful fine storytellin' none the less.
Caravaggio, by Christopher Peachment (Picador £7.99)
Biographers the world over must long to do this. To stop fretting about dates and indexes and plunge with unencumbered gusto into their subject as Christopher Peachment does here with his first novel. Caravaggio, the cover tells us, contains 'many inaccuracies' - not least the opening statement that 'I, Caravaggio, did this'. And what fun this fictionalised Caravaggio is - a roaring, whoring fighter and genius who recounts the story of his life from painting prodigy to atheist outlaw, hunted across Europe by church, state and mafia with irreverent abandon. His rampant ungodliness will not play well with the pious, but it brings the exuberant spirit of the Renaissance (too often a dusty schoolroom abstraction) thrillingly to life. As Anthony Burgess did for Kit Marlowe, so Christopher Peachment shows us how a good writer can make a figure from history human again - authentically or otherwise.
Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years, by Sue Townsend (Penguin £6.99)
In 1983, Adrian Mole was a revelation, the gawky intensity of modern adolescence given shape for the first time. A decade later, Mole is a bearded newt conservationist in Oxford. He is writing a novel, Lo! The Flat Hills of My Homeland, and, to his credit, reads The Observer books pages. He is also in therapy for his still unrequited lust for Pandora, although he has found a girlfriend, Bianca. Even in 1993, when The Wilderness Years first appeared, the obsessive trainspotter type, of which the adult Adrian Mole is a regulation example, was an exhausted cliché. Since then, Alan Partridge and Bridget Jones have already had - and lost - their time in the Zeitgeist. It is a brief pleasure to reacquaint oneself with the old characters, and Townsend's natural wit is still sporadically in evidence, but Mole, however much we want to like him, is just another Eighties has-been making an embarrassing comeback.
