Books of the Year 2009

Beckett, Tóibín, Mantel and Bolaño feature in this year's list
Julian Barnes, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Nagel, et al

This is a selection of pieces from the TLS Books of the Year

JULIAN BARNES
The main literary event of 2009 was the death of John Updike. Generous to the last, he left us two posthumous books: in prose, My Father’s Tears, and in verse, Endpoint (both Hamish Hamilton), an account of his last years – and days – of grateful, tender looking around. He was still writing in his final weeks (“Days later, the results came casually through: / the gland, biopsied, showed metastasis”) and correcting proofs on his deathbed. Over here, death afforded him no courtesy, and the stories received several reviews of impudent stupidity; the longer view will see them as a fit end to the staggeringly rich arc of story collections which began fifty years ago with “The Same Door” (1959). In part-homage, Everyman usefully reprinted the full version of “The Maples Stories”, one of his keenest anatomies of the marriage problem.
Everyman also publish Updike’s final reworking of the Rabbit quartet, retitled by him as Rabbit Angstrom. Rereading confirms it as the greatest American novel of the second half of the twentieth century. An Angstrom is a hundred-millionth of a centimetre: a fitting name, since Updike, apart from his many other virtues, simply saw in finer detail than most of his contemporaries.
ALEX CLARK
People have queued up to praise Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate), but it can hardly be said too frequently what a brilliant novel it is: brimming with invention, conceived with a powerful intelligence and executed near-flawlessly. The result was to make us see a set of people and historical events from an entirely different perspective and to render them far more comprehensible to us than a more ostensibly straightforward retelling. I also loved Iain Sinclair’s work of non-fiction, Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (Hamish Hamilton). Despite being a longstanding fan of Sinclair’s work, I really began this because I live in the part of London that he describes, and feel I know it well; a few pages in, and I realized how little I have really come to grips with its peculiar pockets and byways. I don’t imagine it’s required reading at Hackney Town Hall, but it certainly made the streets around me seem alive with histories hitherto largely untold, and brought home the strange psychological bond we form with our little patch of town.
To read the TLS review of Wolf Hall, click here.
To read the TLS review of Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire, click here.
TERRY EAGLETON
Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso) may not be the greatest work of genius to have appeared this year, but it is certainly one of the bravest. Sand, who teaches history in Tel Aviv, argues that the Jewish people, far from constituting a distinct ethnic group, descend for the most part from converts whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Only under the sway of a historiography which arose on the back of European nationalism – what Sand calls “mythistory” – could these disparate groups be welded into a single nation. One major item of mythistory was the idea of exile, on which Sand writes a coolly demystifying chapter. Only by acknowledging a real rather than mythological past, he argues, can the intellectual foundation be laid for a new vision of Israel’s political future. It is gratifying to learn that the book lingered for a long time on Israel’s bestseller list.
SEAMUS HEANEY
The most bracing read was The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1940 (Cambridge), a portrait of the Dubliner as a young European with a hard gemlike gift for language, learning and mockery. Beckett’s genius exercises itself most exuberantly in the correspondence with Thomas MacGreevy, another Irish poet more at home in Paris, his senior but his soulmate. Constantly Beckett is veering between certainty about his need to write and doubt about the results, all expressed in prose that is undoubting, delighted and demanding. Which might be one way of describing John Banville’s The Infinities (Picador), a novel (if that is the word for a work that flaunts its Ovidian art so mischievously) where the gods are not so much ex machina as in flagrante and where this author once again surprises by a fine excess. Surprise abounds also in Paul Durcan’s Life Is a Dream (Harvill Secker), the poet’s selection from his variously heartbreaking, hilarious, Hibernia-baiting work done between 1967 and 2007. Durcan’s copious bitter-sweet clowning is a way of telling the truth slant, but William Golding’s 5,000-page journal seems to have told it direct, and as such was a valuable source for John Carey’s compelling, revealing and very readable William Golding: The man who wrote “Lord of the Flies” (Faber). This is “official” biography but nothing seems to have been off the record.
To read Allan Massie's review of William Golding: The who wrote "Lord of the Flies", click here.
SIMON JENKINS
There is no let-up in the stream of books on present discontents. On Iraq and Afghanistan there has been a predictable surge, evenly divided between the wars’ foregrounds and backgrounds. Best of the former is Stephen Grey’s Operation Snakebite (Viking), a devastating account of the battle for Musa Qala in Afghanistan in December 2007. It explains why the world’s most sophisticated armed forces are being defeated by the world’s least sophisticated, when the latter feel they fighting for a cause (and a homeland).
As for whether British troops are indeed the most sophisticated, Richard North’s Ministry of Defeat (Continuum) begs to differ. An admirable investigation of Britain’s most rotten ministry, it helps explain the questionable performance of British troops and especially their equipment in Iraq, with tales of incompetence worthy of the trenches. Heaven help us in a real war.
A different sort of front line is charted in Gillian Tett’s brilliant Fool’s Gold (Little, Brown). The war is the credit crunch and the theatre of operations the trading floor of J. P. Morgan. Anyone who thinks these antics need no further regulation should read Tett first. An elegant overview of the same events is supplied by the economic historian, Vince Cable, disappointing only when he attempts a cure. But then he is a Liberal Democrat spokesman.
Those eager for distraction on the home front can turn to Michael Bloch’s enjoyable biography of James Lees-Milne (John Murray). This picture of a mildly eccentric Briton incidentally relates a conservation epic, Lees-Milne’s virtually single-handed rescue from catastrophe of the finest portfolio of historic houses in the world, those of the National Trust.
FERDINAND MOUNT
The Italian Front in the First World War has been eclipsed by the horrors of the Western Front, but in fact the casualties in the slush and scree of the Italian Alps were just as appalling as they were in the mud of Flanders, the war aims as squalid and confused and the generals even more stupid and sadistic. Mark Thompson’s The White War (Faber) manages a perfect balance between gripping narrative and sober analysis. It picks up the unfinished business of the Risorgimento and helps to explain both the rise of Mussolini and the incoherent state of Italian politics to this day.
The long reflective essay on contemporary themes is a presently endangered species. (One can imagine a modern publisher turning down Lord Macaulay saying “Sorry, Tom, it’s just a lot of essays”.) Tony Judt is the master of the form on both sides of the Atlantic. In Reappraisals (Heinemann), there is a compelling ease about the way he leads you through the topic – Blair’s Britain, the Hiss case, the Fall of France – while you murmur “yes, that’s exactly how it really is”, until you find yourself at a destination which you had not quite expected but which is unarguably the right one.
THOMAS NAGEL
János Kis’s Politics as a Moral Problem (Central European University Press) is a superb study of the problem of dirty hands in politics, particularly democratic politics – the moral dilemmas that politicians face in achieving, maintaining, and exercising power. This is a particularly acute form of the moral problem of ends and means. The book discusses the philosophical background in Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, Weber and others, and examines a number of recent examples from European politics. Kis is a philosopher, but his political experience includes negotiating the transfer of power in Hungary in 1989, as leader of the primary dissident party, the Free Democrats.
Stephen C. Meyer’s Signature in the Cell: DNA and the evidence for Intelligent Design (HarperCollins) is a detailed account of the problem of how life came into existence from lifeless matter – something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin. The controversy over Intelligent Design has so far focused mainly on whether the evolution of life since its beginnings can be explained entirely by natural selection and other non-purposive causes. Meyer takes up the prior question of how the immensely complex and exquisitely functional chemical structure of DNA, which cannot be explained by natural selection because it makes natural selection possible, could have originated without an intentional cause. He examines the history and present state of research on non-purposive chemical explanations of the origin of life, and argues that the available evidence offers no prospect of a credible naturalistic alternative to the hypothesis of an intentional cause. Meyer is a Christian, but atheists, and theists who believe God never intervenes in the natural world, will be instructed by his careful presentation of this fiendishly difficult problem.
GRAHAM ROBB
I finally caught up with The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek (Allen Lane), in which the congenially authoritative Barry Cunliffe explains how a fourth-century bc inhabitant of Marseilles managed to circumnavigate Britain. Pytheas’s lost work, On the Ocean, must have been the book of the millennium. An equally perilous journey is undertaken by the unforgettable heroine of Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (Viking). Novelists whose prose is described as “flawless” can be a chore to read. Tóibín’s perfection is simply the unobtrusive vehicle of his surprisingly complex adventure.
André Guyaux’s Pléiade edition of Arthur Rimbaud’s Oeuvres complètes (Gallimard) was a welcome addition to the mountain of scholarship that would have appalled and embarrassed the boy from Charleville. There was a rare sense of academic fun in David Coward’s modern morality tale of Ken Deede – Voltaire Reloaded: Candide left, right and centre (lulu.com) – and in Corry Cropper’s Playing at Monarchy: Sport as metaphor in nineteenth-century France (Nebraska), which contains this piece of advice from the sports journalist, Eugène Chapus: “Appear to know nothing of your profession, and avoid technical terms at all times”.
To read Graham Robb's review of Rimbaud's Oeuvres complètes, click here.
ALI SMITH
The final parts of two great European novel trilogies were published in English this year: Jan Kjærstad’s Wergeland trilogy with The Discoverer (Arcadia), and Javier Marías’s Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell (Chatto). Kjærstad’s trapeze act of interconnection makes life force out of its endgame; translator Barbara J. Haveland navigates this irrepressible Norwegian voyage through the universe with a studied lightness. Marías is simply astonishing. The concluding volume of his mighty Spanish trilogy about power, surveillance, morality and mortality is even more gripping than its predecessors. With its contemporary longsightedness and unique ethic-aesthetic agenda, Your Face Tomorrow seems to me unparallelled in literature – as, in its own right, does Margaret Jull Costa’s translation. In The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, Volume Five, 1922–1923, edited by Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott, (Oxford), Mansfield’s uncharacteristic repetitiveness coupled with a forced faux-brightness make it clear that she’s dying, and “governed by the Furies”. But its real revelation is the humour, liberation and unforeseeable uplift in her very last letters, from Gurdjieff’s freezing cold commune in Fontainebleau. “Do send Lit. Sups”, she wrote Murry. “They are so good for lighting fires.” And Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (Viking) isn’t just a book for Christmas; a work of such skill, understatement and sly jewelled merriment could haunt you for life.
To read the TLS review of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, click here.
To read Ruth Scurr's review of Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn, click here.
EDMUND WHITE
Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (Picador) was my favourite book of the year, though in some ways it falls short of the same author’s The Savage Detectives. What both books share is a romantic fascination with literary people. The first section of 2666 is about four literary scholars – three men and one woman, each person from a different country – all devoted to studying the same contemporary but utterly mysterious German novelist. The three men end up having sexual alliances with the woman, and the erotic game of musical chairs they play is both touching and mesmerizing for the reader. In later sections of this massive novel, Bolaño becomes obsessed with an endless series of murders in the north of Mexico – which surprisingly finally links up with the German novelist and his frightening son.
Whereas so much long contemporary fiction is a struggle to get through, Bolaño is always interesting. If the first and foremost requirement of fiction is that it be interesting, then there is no other contemporary writer as pleasing and successful as Bolaño.
To read Michael Saler's review of 2666, click here.