Books of 2014: Top Ten

So finally, we count down my top 10 books of the year. The good news is that they’re from a variety of sources and were read for a variety of reasons – some, in fact, for no apparent reason. With no further Apu, I’ll kick off with my number 10…

10) On Such a Full Sea – Chang-Rae Lee

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

Yep, this one I can’t really remember the reason. I believe it came up on a list of environmental dystopian fiction and it sounded interesting, so it went on my radar.

What a gorgeous book it is. I’m not sure what it is about English-language writers of Asian heritage (I’m drawing the comparison here with Ishiguro), but they really have a gift for exposing the beauty of our language.

Lee had me hooked from page one, writing of a missing young woman who, before her disappearance, occupied herself as a diver for multi-coloured fish in a speculative future version of Baltimore, where an unspecified global disaster (yes, familiar territory) has depleted resources and forced people to live in gated communities. An elite few youngsters are chosen each year to venture into the higher-status communities, and until her disappearance, our protagonist Fan was touted to be such a chosen one.

Lee plays quite an inventive game with the narrative voice here: the unidentified narrator is a member of the community left heartbroken and frightened by Fan’s disappearance, while simultaneously having the omniscience of hindsight to be able to narrate Fan’s own adventures.

Apart from the voice, the genre is also inventively hard to pin down: while it’s set in a dystopian world, the plot follows more of a picaresque structure, as Fan encounters strange characters and creatures living in a variety of hardships in this unhinged universe.

Throughout the book I had in my head that the title is taken from The Tempest. It’s actually from Julius Caesar, but it's almost disappointing to learn that, because the book conjures up a similar vision to The Tempest of nature’s chaos and man’s impotence in the face of its raw elements. This is a theme that, without realising, I seem to respond to very strongly (think Deliverance and its high position last year), but above all this book is just exquisitely written even in the face of its own dark cynicism.

9) Inherent Vice – Thomas Pynchon

#BookGroupReading

So I’m using the hashtag #BookGroupReading here, but I think the implication of that particular hashtag is that somebody else is responsible for my choices – thereby distancing myself from really poor examples of literature like, say, Michelle De Kretser. But Inherent Vice was, naturally, my own choice for the group, and so it might technically be more fitted to #BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason except that Pynchon is a very, very good reason to read anything.

So you might think I’m trying to justify inflicting Pynchon on my friends by placing it in such an exalted position in the top 10, but I did genuinely enjoy this book.

It’s got all of the Pynchon hallmarks: a convoluted plot that gets increasingly more convoluted as we go on; stoners and hippies; a 1960s/70s backdrop; and a large cast of idiosyncratic misfits caught in a web of post-modern silliness.

Although this is regarded by some as Pynchon’s first foray into genre fiction (and the soon-to-be-released film adaptation being coincidentally regarded as PT Anderson’s first foray into the same), there are many echoes of his previous work throughout: the relationship between Doc  Sportello and the LAPD’s Bigfoot Bjornsen is reminiscent of the relationship between Zoyd and Brock in Vineland, while Doc’s own noirish investigation into the underworld conjures up Tyrone’s search for the rocket and his nemesis in Gravity’s Rainbow.

But despite featuring all the Pynchon inaccessibility, this is probably his most readable work. Complex though it is, it makes no attempt to philosophise or even particularly satirise. It’s just the entertaining rollercoaster of a Pynchon plot, stripped back to just the action. Great fun.

8) Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

For whatever reason, I seem to have gotten myself a reputation that I don’t like sci-fi. It may just be me projecting these days (especially given the savaging I’ve given things like Ubik on this blog), but while I tend to steer clear of the sci-fi section in most bookshops – which don’t exist anymore anyway – there are certainly some fantastic examples of the sci-fi canon that really engage me. This is one of them.

I think what makes books such as this more than just pulp genre fiction is when they are able to ground their speculations in a relatable experience. Therefore cyberpunk fantasies like Snow Crash and Neuromancer do nothing for me, because their worlds are so far removed from my own and the kinetic action so intrinsic that the reading experience seems inadequate and I find myself just wishing to see it in cinematic form.

What Ender’s Game brings us is an elite, but otherwise ordinary boy protagonist who is touted as the saviour of human existence. High stakes, yes? But being still in his formative years, Andrew “Ender” Wiggin is forced to undergo a process of rigorous conditioning to prepare himself for earth’s final battle against the combative enemy, the “buggers”.

What ensues is a very complex psychological game whereby the commanders of the training school isolate Ender from his compatriots before slowly building him up as a resilient troop and, following this, a leader. The struggles that he is forced to endure are what drives the story forward, while his separation from his sister and the tumultuous relationship with his older brother form the emotional core of the story.

Beyond just having a relatable heart, though, Ender’s Game is also strikingly inventive, relating a nightmarish universe of territorial, life-or-death conflict with plenty of entertaining action that is both conceivable and intriguing. Card’s skill as a writer is a big part of the stimulating nature of this story, and he does the world of genre fiction a huge service with this masterpiece.

7) Amsterdam – Ian McEwan

#BookerPrizeWinners

Like Pynchon, Ian McEwan has gained himself a comfortable little camping ground near the top of my lists. With this, his 1998 Booker Prize winner, he has actually stepped closer to the summit than he got with Atonement last year.

Amsterdam is really a fascinating read – fascinating because it is deceptively light in tone, but also because it presents us with a mind-bending moral dilemma. While the story at its centre is of a tumultuous friendship between the composer Clive and the newspaper editor Vernon, the ambivalence of Clive’s story seems to be at the crux of the narrative.

While Clive is walking in the Lake District struggling to find inspiration for an upcoming commission, he overhears a violent argument between a man and a woman at the very time when he is struck by his musical epiphany, and rather than intervene he chooses to hide and commit the musical theme to writing.

The opposition between action and inaction, high art and human experience, is what dwells at the bottom of this particular powder keg, and as it’s a McEwan novel, you know that shit’s ‘bout to explode with devastating ferocity.

However, the big surprise here is that McEwan - despite his obvious violent hatred and disdain for all of humanity – doesn’t take us in the dark directions that other works of his have, but lets the action play out in the form of a farcical, actually amusing, manner. But this is all done without any uncharacteristic levity; hiding behind it all is a classically unsettling rant about the dark side of human nature and our bottomless capacity for anger.

6) The True History of the Kelly Gang – Peter Carey

#BookerPrizeWinners #AustralianBooks

Boy, talk about defiance of expectations. For a long time – i.e. pretty much since it came out – I looked on The True History of the Kelly Gang as the embodiment of everything that was wrong with Australian literature. It was a contrived attempt at making something bigger out of our very short and otherwise uninteresting history, which bored me at school. Also, fuck Peter Carey. That was my well-formed, rational opinion without reading a single word. And it was with an immense shoulder-slumped reluctance that I picked this book off the library shelf knowing that, if I were to make any concerted effort at reading all the Booker winners, I’d have to succumb to this at some point.

Reader, I loved it. Honestly, I was shocked about a hundred pages in to find that not only was I engrossed in the story but that I was heavily anticipating picking it up again each time I put it down. Even knowing the basic direction the story was going, I was captivated by Ned Kelly’s character, his voice, and above all, his mythology.

That is what Peter Carey is doing in this book: he’s taking an item of Australian folklore and singing new life into it, but at the same time he’s making the short and otherwise uninteresting history of Australia suddenly interesting.

Naturally, being a fan of the western genre, there’s a certain appeal to me in stories like this: frontiersman struggling to control the land and its elements in unfamiliar territory, while a frontier law – whose authority in practice is questionable - is in operation to the detriment of those renegades who try to forge their own identity.

Singlehandedly, with one fell, heartfelt swoop of a novel, Carey managed to reignite my flagging interest in Australian folklore, literature and even to some extent, culture. I don’t think I would have picked up the excellent The Secret River if not for my enjoyment of this book, so for that and whatever else is out there, I thank him.

5) All the Birds, Singing – Evie Wyld

#BookGroupReading

It’s probably a surprise to see this book up so high, for those in the know. Not only did I deplore this book’s forerunner for the Miles Franklin award, but this book has actual sheep shearing scenes in it. Given all my ranting about how Australian literature is nothing but cattle and paddocks, I wouldn't have expected myself that a sheep-shearing book would crack my top 5.

The fact is this book, chosen by Catie for our book group reading halfway through the year, was an incredibly satisfying and inventive read.

It’s devious, in the way Wyld weaves the story in two different threads: the present tense moves forward, while the flashbacks into the past leap backwards each time - a la Memento - to arrive progressively back at the origin of the story. It took me a long time to realise that was happening as each flashback brought us eventually back to the beginning of the previous one.

The writing is also beautifully haunting, but the winner here is purely the ingenuity of the story, and the way in which it cloaks everything in intriguing mystery before slowly but flamboyantly revealing the dark secret.

It raises the question as to whether I would have thought so highly of this book if not for the way it was structured. I would have to say probably not, but if it weren’t for the structure this would be a completely different book, and as it stands it’s a thoroughly gripping, clever read.

4) The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

#BookerPrizeWinners

So we return to another real mainstay of the top ten, yanking Ishiguro back from the disappointment of When we were Orphans and back where he belongs.

This doesn’t have the devious power of Never Let Me Go: in many ways it’s a fairly staid and flat narrative, but it is a heart-rendingly beautiful one, dripping throughout with Ishiguro’s pure prosaic charm and bursting with flashes of humour and irony.

Telling the below-stairs story of an English country house in the period leading up to World War II, The Remains of the Day channels the nostalgia of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited while also introducing the captivating and unheard voice of the butler of the household, Stevens. It's a very interesting device to tell the whole story through his eyes as he is intimately acquainted with his gentry employer but also far enough removed to dissect it all with a critical eye.

Similarly to Never Let Me Go, while the story and the characters were interesting, deep and well-painted, the real winner of the reading experience is just the fluid and languid tones of Ishiguro’s prose. As I said with Chang-Rae Lee, Ishiguro has a gift for unlocking the hidden beauty of the English language and it’s an utter joy to experience.

One additional note: I mentioned in my write-up of Graham Swift’s Last Orders of how the casting of the film adaptation seemed fine, with the film unseen. I also haven’t seen the Merchant Ivory film adaptation of this novel, but it didn’t take me very long in reading this book to recognise that the character of the housekeeper Miss Kenton could be played by none other than the inimitable Emma Thompson. Frankly if there has ever been a character more perfectly written for an actor, or an actor more perfectly suited to a character than Miss Kenton and Emma Thompson, I haven’t found them. Everything about her character in the book – the stiff-upper-lip, well-mannered, charming and devilishly cheeky voice and speech – it’s Emma Thompson to a T. I was relieved to look it up and ascertain that they had indeed made the only sensible casting decision, and while I’m disappointed to realise that Thompson lost the Oscar that year to Holly Hunter, it’s perhaps not so much a stretch for her to play such a charming character.

3) Villa Incognito – Tom Robbins

#BooksReadForAbsolutelyNoReason

Yes, this book was foreshadowed in my 20-11 post when I discussed Robbins’ other book, Still Life with Woodpecker, and I mentioned how much more I enjoyed this first taste of his work.

It is what it is. You are what you it. There are no mistakes.

Thus goes the mantra of this book and of the line of half-badgerish creature princesses that this story narrates. It’s a very typical bit of Robbins nonsense, whose slight divergence from coherence excites my imagination and again, celebrates the same spirit that I have always engendered in my own writing.

There’s not a great deal more that I can add to what I wrote about Robbins earlier, specific to this book. As I said in that review, I found this book an utter, silly delight. Robbins manages to slip in some subtly wrought digs at the post-Vietnam war era and America’s transition to modern politics in the shadow of 9/11. The writing is inventive and surprising at every turn, the story is offbeat and exciting, yet also surprisingly moving.

At its surface though, Villa Incognito worked for me because I found it very, very funny. While I think there’s an extremely laddish quality to his writing, I find his flights of fancy and esoteric style hit their mark in this book every time. Of all the books on this list that I would consider re-reading, this is the one I believe I would enjoy revisiting the most.

2) The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton

#BookGroupReading #BookerPrizeWinners

So I’m stretching to use the #BookerPrizeWinners hashtag here because, although this is a Booker winner, I read it purely because it was selected as our first book group option this year, and if anything my enjoyment of this book probably inspired my opting for Booker winners as a potential reading challenge for the year.

There’s naturally been a lot written and talked about this book throughout this year, and many people I know have actually struggled with it, in particular the seemingly endless first chapter that takes up nearly (equal to? More than?) half the entire book and skips confusingly through a monstrous cast of characters.

The only thing I can say is: use the list of characters at the front of the book unabashedly, and keep going with it, because my god does it pay off. Catton is a master of Chekhov’s gun, with every single character and every single line of dialogue being deliberately employed to the attainment of a final goal, and by the time you’re able to wrap your head around the incredibly complex plot, everything starts to make sense.

The second chapter of the book, that consists of a courtroom trial sequence, is the most immersive and transporting bit of writing that I’ve experienced since the final chapter of Infinite Jest (high praise from me indeed). I found myself almost missing my train stop for the days when I was reading it because from the moment I sat down I was completely lost in the action.

I have to admit this book did have a weakness for me (and this provided the only disagreement in the circlejerk of admiration that our book group meeting turned into), which is that the chapters getting progressively shorter towards the end (in a rhythm supposed to mimic a waning moon) brought me a little out of the immersive story, and I couldn’t help but feel the author’s unnecessary interference in the world I was enjoying. It’s a clever device well used, but it just lifted the veil uncomfortably from my eyes, and let this otherwise unparalleled masterpiece fall shy of the completely engrossing…

1) The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch

#BookerPrizeWinners

I don’t think anybody would have been able to predict what my number one book was this year. And, to be honest, despite my feeling during and after my reading of this book that it was a firm contender for the top spot, the race this year was a lot tighter than in previous years where Infinite Jest and Gone with the Wind were miles ahead of their competitors.

So why does Iris Murdoch’s 1978 Booker Winner find itself above so much other mastery?

As I hinted to just then, I just found the story utterly compelling from start to finish. It also strikes me, looking at it and the list as a whole, that this features a pastiche of elements that I enjoyed in other works. The central character of retired theatre director Charles Arrowby occupies a seaside hermitage similar to Kerewin in The Bone People, and as I said in my discussion of the 2005 winner The Sea, has a similar feeling of longing nostalgia to Banville’s. But there are a couple of elements that raise this well above the standard fare.

Firstly, this is delightfully cynical, but also cynical in a really unsettling way. The story it tells of nostalgic love and uncompromising obsession has this strange evocation of so many other lovesick stories, but it’s actually very dark in the way it plays out. There is tragic death, an attempted murder, an effective kidnapping, and yet it’s all just a simple story about a man re-encountering his first unrequited love.

Secondly - and this really seems to be an absurd thing for me to admire – this book captures purely and unequivocally the male sphere of existence. That paradoxical lone-wolf longing for both solitude and gratifying companionship, and that single-minded focus on control, both of self and of the situation around you. It’s not like males need any external help to have our voice heard in literature, but it was still remarkable and fascinating to see how Murdoch as a woman so neatly and yet curiously captured it.

Thirdly, there's a very haunting and ethereal quality all over this. Again there's that futility of trying to control the elements which I respond to, and there's a lot of exploration of the notion of nostalgia, of what an empty, pointless pursuit it is to grasp onto the past like it can control the present.

But to really capture the essence of my enjoyment, we have to look back at my previous two years of reading challenges, and note that TIME and TIME again, I felt that the TIME list made questionable – if not utterly wrong – choices in some of their books. If they need a Don DeLillo, Underworld should have been the clear choice over White Noise. Margaret Atwood should be a shoe-in for the list, but The Handmaid’s Tale is infinitely superior to The Blind Assassin. So when I read the Murdoch inclusion in the list, Under the Net, I couldn’t help but wonder why such a lightweight offering was chosen –was it simply that as her debut, it heralded the arrival of a unique voice? Quite possibly.

But when I read this, and found it retaining the irreverently humourous tone and peculiar characterisation of Under the Net, and yet discovering it to be possessed of significantly more gravity and profundity, asking questions about life and love that Under the Net wouldn’t bother with, it gave me a wonderful sense of vindication. Again, what I’d thought unseen would be the obvious choice, would indeed have been the better one.

And that feeling of self-righteousness really can’t be undervalued.

So there you have it. I hope you have enjoyed my self-indulgence while I take a little bit of a break before starting it all over again with movies.