Books of 2015 Part 5: 20-11

So I'm going to finish this post with you teetering on the brink of excitement outside my top ten, and then increase the suspense as tomorrow I count UP my bottom 12 from 61-72. Top ten will be posted Christmas Day (hopefully; I'm still writing them up). But for now:

20) Time's Arrow – Martin Amis

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf

So wow, two books in a row that Bec went out and bought, and that I read when I ran out of books this year.

It’s not often (i.e. never) that a Martin Amis of any description would crack my top twenty. And ordinarily this would be no exception, apart from the fact that in this there is very little Amis in it. That’s an interesting point to note, because without being quite so Amis, he’s quite a talented little storyteller.

Of course, you can take the Amis out of the Amis, but you can’t take the Amis…*trails off indistinctly* well, basically his wild pretensions aren't here in any supercilious narrative or his character asssinations of poor people for the crime of being poor, but they are instead here in the hugely ambitious artifice of the narrative structure:  in this story, time runs backwards. It’s not simply a backwards-jumping narrative (like half of my number 5 book of last year, Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing, or the film Memento), it literally tells the story with time running backwards, like it’s undoing itself.

As difficult as this conceit is to wrap your head around, once you get into the flow of it, it’s a perfectly affecting book. What’s more, it uses the construct similarly to Evie Wyld, in that we’re shown a man at the end of his life moving backwards in time, and there’s something not quite right about the life that he’s living, even though he seems a perfectly normal human being. So as time runs backwards, we’re slowly given the clues to unlocking what it was that seemed slightly off at first.

I urge you, if you’re ever likely to read this book, to avoid reading the unfathomably retarded blurb that gives away the entire, complete point of the story in about the first four words but just go along for the ride. It’s an extremely challenging ride but a deeply rewarding one, too. And probably the best (/only) argument you’ll find for Martin Amis’ continued publication.

19) The Godfather – Mario Puzo

#NewAuthors #BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint

Oh yes, it’s another one of those books: a beloved film adaptation that I so enjoyed and thought “hmm, might as well pick up the source material”.

You’ll notice this doesn't have quite the status that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (#3) or Gone With the Wind (#1) had two years ago, and the reason for that is not that this is an inferior book to them, but rather that where I got so much more out of them than I did from the films (for different reasons), there’s actually very little in this that the film(s) didn't capture.

So for those who don’t know, this served as the source material for the first Godfather film as well as the Vito parts of the sequel, although the plot structure here is effectively just the plot of the first film, with the Vito flashback sequence inserted as a sort of “let’s look back now at where this character started out” to explain his psychology and his relationships a bit – especially with his wife.

But despite not having anything particularly to add to the film after the fact, it’s still very worthwhile reading this book, just because it’s excellent storytelling, and while the film is an unquestionable masterpiece of pacing, mise en scène, acting, art direction and entirely everything, it’s also a masterpiece because there’s such a compelling story behind it. And here it is, fit to give you a renewed appreciation.

18) For whom the bell tolls – Ernest Hemingway

#WhyDoIThinkINeedAHashtagForEveryBook

I guess I could set myself another yearly custom like Dickens, of one Hemingway a year. The only thing is that there’s only really one more Hemingway I care about reading, and it’s really short, and also it’s just happenstance that I've only read one a year, because I don’t find him a difficult read at all. Nevertheless, after The Sun Also Rises (overrated rubbish) got suitably panned two years ago and A Farewell to Arms (not overrated-rubbish) cracked the medium time last year, Papa’s got a brand new top twenty entry.

There’s little-to-no connection between the themes of the three books, although I think this is probably his most involved and intricate plot. Set in the Spanish civil war, it revolves around a young American (all-l-l-l-l night!) volunteer helping the rebels defeat the fascists by making use of his explosives expertise.

Around the politics of trying to penetrate the existing hierarchy of the rebel camp, Hemingway weaves a tale of high suspense and dips again into the well of mortality for much of the pathos.

I'm sure there are academics out there who have combed through the themes and the language - since that’s one thing academics seem to love doing with Hemingway - so I won’t go into them in too much detail. I found it interesting to read about such a small part of a giant war machine in such detail though, and the tension of the book just made it compelling reading. I feel almost as though this is the sort of narrative that Clouzot’s film Wages of Fear wanted to be (and what everyone else seems to think it is).

17) Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut

#SeriouslySamWhy

This was a later read this year, and kind of unfortunately predictable how high it’s come out, because it is the sort of offbeat, cynical black comedy that I invariably respond well to.

And this is really very dark, and also very offbeat. Some weird otherworldly narrator tells us this story as if we’re also not of this world, and some prolepsis tells us that, before we’re done with the tale, one of our main characters is going to go berserk and attack a bunch of people unprovoked.

Vonnegut’s style is one that’s really hard to pin down, and I think his idiosyncracies are what make him so beloved of the internet, because everything he writes is done so nonchalantly and so candidly that even when he’s writing some quite horrifying things, there’s a curious childlike detachment to it, that allows you to make light of it – much the way people on the internet like to do.

Ultimately everything that’s good about this book lies purely in Vonnegut’s writing, because the story is a bit threadbare and as a result there’s no great vision to it, but even while the author is just traipsing through coincidences and side-roads, he still manages to squeeze out some hilarious and satirical truisms as he’s doing so.

I can’t imagine everybody reacting so positively to it, and there’s certainly more of an interesting vision in Slaughterhouse-Five for instance, but there’s still a great deal to like here.

16) The Trial – Franz Kafka

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf

Frankly it took me until later in the year, and when I’d whittled down a stack of library books and was perusing my shelf, that I remembered I had a copy of this book in a different room and that after all this time I’d still never read it. Which I really should, considering how often I refer to things as Kafka-esque, and how frequently somebody mentions The Trial and I know the essence but no details.

The truth is, if you know the essence of the story, you won’t experience a huge avalanche of new material here, because as with all of Kafka’s work, it does just start with a central premise and explores it centrifugally from there. It’s still an exhilarating and uneasily amusing ride, though.

Like The Castle, what’s really on trial here is the system by which humans order their lives – namely, society. And poor hapless Josef K finds himself beset on all sides by people who either are part of that system or who want him to believe they've got the only solution for how to beat the system.

Although at times it gets a bit bogged down in detail, as any lampoon of bureaucracy will, it’s still quite droll, and yet despairing in its existential crisis. What really hits home is not so much the injustice or even the frustration of it all, but the inevitable question that maybe we should be able to take better control of our lives, even in a system that’s working against us.

15) Watership Down – Richard Adams

#NewAuthors #BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint

Oh, what a terrible thing to have to admit, that you’re *insert my age here* and you've never read Watership Down. The fact is, my brother loved this book at a younger age, and of course being younger I couldn't possibly be seen to enjoy anything that he enjoyed. Then later in life, I just started to wonder, it’s really just a book about rabbits, right? Rabbits that talk? Is there more of a point to it than that? I finally bit the bullet this year to find out.

And the truth is that there isn't actually more to it than that, which I guess in many ways is why this book is so beloved, because it really is the consummate story about rabbits and/or rabbits that talk. There simply doesn't need to be another book covering the same subject.

I guess my confusion lay in the fact that I wasn't really sure if it was sort of fantasy as well? And it isn't particularly, just a story of high adventure, as we follow a separatist cell of rabbits escape from their warren under the eerie prognostications of one Fiver, whose brother Hazel begins the breakout aided by a disparate group of rabbits with disparate skill sets.

What’s really curious about it is that Adams never really tries to anthropomorphise the rabbits, besides the fact that they talk and have thoughts beyond “Eat. Mate. Shit. Mate. Sleep. Mate”. Although their thoughts extend beyond those basic rabbit functions, their behaviour doesn't, and yet he manages to extract from this a story of great fun and suspense.

This is certainly something I will try and force on my hypothetical kids until I, like my parents before me, give up and hit the bottle because the kid is such an incorrigible little shit.

14) Decline and Fall – Evelyn Waugh

#MarryMeHarry

So an interesting sidenote for this book: before I tackled it I read an article – I think in the Guardian – about who are the best ‘Tory’ writers, and Waugh was included in that list. I found this kind of laughable, since Waugh spent nearly his entire career mercilessly sending up the old establishment and bourgeoisie. But then I think the article writer was basing this opinion entirely on Brideshead Revisited which is obviously a nostalgic lovenote to the glory days of the empire. It’s possible also that I don’t quite get what’s meant by ‘Tory’ or also that Tories love witty send-ups of themselves (like Hollywood clearly does).

Anyway, to this book, and alongside A Handful of Dust I’d say this is Waugh’s absolute best satire of the English aristocracy. It’s a saga of inheritance and old-boy networks, as members of the inner group behave invariably in atrocious and supercilious ways, but only ever within a preordained framework of acceptable eccentricity: the only grave offence here is that of non-conformity.

But where A Handful of Dust also took me into weird territory I didn't expect, this plants itself firmly in Waugh’s typical milieu – and yes, that is a very Tory universe – and basically just dissects the culture and its values from there.

It’s very funny, very dry and tongue-in-cheek throughout: the institutions and pre-established relationships are so familiar and timely even today, and while it doesn't necessarily do anything but lampoon, it’s rollicking great fun, what. Also interesting to note that I think this book contains the source of the enigmatic title of Stephen Fry’s first memoir Moab is my Washpot.

13) The Savage Detectives – Roberto Bolaño

#NewAuthors

I first discovered Bolaño on a New Yorker podcast, where famous writers would read other famous writers’ short fiction previously published in the magazine. To be honest, I can’t remember if I have any fond recollection of the Bolaño story that was read (by Daniel Alarcon), but ever since I've looked at this monstrous tome The Savage Detectives on my library shelf and wondered about it.

It was an immense reward to finally pick it up, even while it’s a long and convoluted journey.

This tells the story of a clique of Latin American writers and thinkers – founders of a movement called ‘visceral realism’ - who get caught up in some unfortunate gang activity in Mexico, and spend the most part of the rest of their lives fleeing across the globe.

We follow two main characters: the Chilean Belano (who I always thought was probably a stand-in for Bolaño himself) and the Mexican Lima, and their intermingled lives as outlaws and intellectuals searching for a famous poet who influenced their thinking across the vast expanses of North and South America and beyond.

It’s really quite a gripping read. As with other writers who can put together a short story well, I think Bolaño has a great talent for narrative voice, and he very seamlessly slips between different protagonists and stories and settings. The book has such an immense scope to it as well that even while you can just sit down and enjoy the individual sections, the whole thing comes together as a modern bildungsroman and examination of the intellectual experience from a Latin perspective.

I couldn't help but compare the reading experience to that of Infinite Jest: although they are in many ways worlds apart, working my way through the pages felt eerily familiar, and the vision of both is certainly comparable.

12) The Outsider – Albert Camus

#BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint

When I read this earlier this year, I went into it knowing that some people regard it as the greatest thing ever written and say of it that it "changed my life" and "I had multiple orgasms throughout" and I couldn't help but bring in a load of scepticism. After I read it, though, I had it earmarked as a potential number one book of the year. The fact that it sits just outside the top ten is testament to how strongly I reacted to a lot of books this year.

This is also a very short, digestible read that nobody should shirk from. It tells the story of Meursault, a French Algerian who commits a revenge killing on behalf of his friend after attending his mother’s funeral (that's unrelated). The ensuing trial becomes less a trial about the facts of the killing (which we as readers are privy to) as it is about establishing and destroying the character of the accused.

Because Meursault is guilty, of that we know. But the question remains as to whether it was a justifiable killing in self-defence or whether he plotted the whole thing coldly, procedurally (thereby warranting the death sentence). Little quirks of his character and behaviour are paraded and postulated before the court to establish the fact that the accused is unemotional, unsympathetic, and therefore psychopathic.

This mystery is never fully resolved by the book’s end, but we’re nevertheless somehow left with a palpable sense of injustice, that a person’s idiosyncracies can so readily be dredged up as evidence of psychotic intent, particularly as that person fails to live up to what society prescribes as ‘normal’.

I certainly wouldn’t go so far as to say this book changed my life, but in a short time it managed to establish in my mind why some people have this response.

11) Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie

#BaileysPrizeWinners

So the tragic thing is that this is the highest ranked of this particular hashtag, and I'm being rather conformist in ranking it top of the Baileys Prize winners, as this year, Half of a Yellow Sun was awarded the 'best of’ the Baileys Prize winners from the past decade', so I'm obviously in agreement there.

This is quite a harrowing and emotionally draining book, set in Nigeria around the time of the Nigerian civil war in the 1960s, when a splinter community attempted to break off and form a new country of ‘Biafra’ – the title takes its name from the proposed flag of the fledgling nation that wasn't to be.

Within that setting, we follow two Nigerian sisters and their respective man-friends as they struggle through the war zone, attempting to maintain their lifestyle and identity while being broken apart and forced to flee from danger.

I think I reacted to this book in no small part due to my more recent fascination with Nigeria, its politics and history, inspired by the brilliant Twitter ramblings of the satirist Elnathan John, and while I don’t believe there is any connection between the two, my piqued interest found an immense fulfilment in this book.

At the end of the day, despite my own interest, it’s a really superb piece of writing: exposing questions of identity and nationhood that still run rife throughout the African continent and constructing an evocative and deeply affecting story of love and family being tested to its limits.

I think it's also fair to say that I think of all the Baileys Prize winners, not only was this the best but it was also the one that most overtly and successfully tackled the issue of female identity.