Books of 2015: Top Ten

So here we are, a Christmas morning wrap-up of the ten books I loved most this year. There's a little variety in here but as usual my tastes lean towards the depressing/cynical/dystopian. So without further Apu...

10) A Man in Love (My Struggle Book 2) – Karl Ove Knausgaard

#NewAuthors

So I presaged this one earlier when I called it far superior to Book One, A Death in the Family. Yes, I enjoyed book two of My Struggle enough for it to crack the top ten.

On the surface this operates in very much the same space as book one – it’s full of humdrum, routine details interwoven with piercing insights. But where A Death in the Family started to become hilariously mundane to me, and vacillated oddly between trivia and reflection, I feel that A Man in Love strikes the right balance as Knausgaard weaves his themes into the everyday experience.

The story, such as it is, in this case, takes us into his life with his wife and daughters, and jumps around a lot in time, detailing his first, failed marriage, and his arrival in Sweden (with lots of little digs at Swedish people which are quite amusing as an outsider) and plenty of literary anecdotes that can be enjoyed on their own merit as well as part of the greater narrative.

Enjoyable as both books are, this one struck a real chord with me as he wrestles with the question of what it means to be a man, and a family man, and struggles to become the best person that he can be. Even while he does this, he is very candid and honest in his warts-and-all self-portrait, and he establishes himself as a compelling anti-hero in his own life. I eagerly anticipate the next translation.

9) The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

#NewAuthors #BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint

What is this? A top ten entry for me that isn't dark, brooding, existential and with most or all people dying in the end? Did Sam accidentally get the special “editor’s cut” that ends with Colin going mad and slicing through the secret garden with a chainsaw before turning it on Mary and Dickon? No, not at all. This is, quite simply, a beguiling and charming story that I completely fell for.

I first found appeal in The Secret Garden by looking on it as a kind of anti-Gothic novel: there are lots of Gothic elements to the story: the secret forbidden area, unseen, untended for years; the giant mansion with long corridors and abandoned rooms; disembodied crying and the haunting, but constant presence of the dead Mrs Craven. Oh, and if I didn't mention it, the dude’s name is craven. How Goth.

But the anti-Gothicism manifests itself through the perspective of Mary: she sees it all with her innocent and curious child’s eyes, and as a sheltered, spoiled person is so self-unaware that she simply doesn't know enough to be intimidated in an atmosphere that adults would find so malevolent and haunting. Everything is actually dealt with matter-of-factly: the forbidden area of the ‘secret garden’ is not looked on as a place of awe and worship but rather a mystery that needs to be solved, so Mary sets about finding the entrance and letting herself in.

As a result of all of this, the book becomes a joyous manifesto in which the dead, invalid and umbral are brought back to vivacious, colourful existence, and page after page is full of enlivening wonder. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a little odd that I so readily turn up my nose at optimism in books set in an adult world – like Bel Canto and May We Be Forgiven – as soap opera-esque, but when depicted through the innocent filter of childhood as here, it’s simply joyous and happy.

I just feel that there’s a more perfect marriage here of mood, setting and content: Burnett strikes the right balance throughout to make such a complete redemption and rejuvenation seem both plausible and highly empowering. Basically, from reading this book I learned that there’s a secret garden in all of us. And that Lisa Simpson is guilty!

8) Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand

#BookGroupReading #NewAuthors

Wow, what a segue. From easy, childlike wonder we slip down the super-fun happy slide into the boney, waiting arms of Alan Greenspan and his cohort of the undead.

So this was Bec and my (mostly Bec’s) pick for our Book Group, and although it looked like I was somehow blaming Bec in the previous phrase, I actually think it was an inspired pick. Her rationale was that this is a book you should read to better “know your enemy,” and that this isn't the sort of book we’re likely to pick up and read under our own steam. And all of those reasons are valid.

The other valid reason, and it does hurt my bleeding liberal heart a little to say this, is that this is an utterly spellbinding, singular reading experience (with massive flaws, yes – don’t rush me, I’ll get to them). I likened this to reading an inverse dystopia: the speculative vision is bleak and cynical, but we’re viewing it from the other side, where the big heartless corporations are the good guys trying to save the world from slipping into oblivion.

The fact is, Ayn Rand couldn't half write. And naturally you should assume she could, since her legacy is as strong today as ever, and so many people who may be utterly ignorant jerkoffs but aren't stupid still lionise her. Her characters are well-motivated and intriguing, and the mood she creates of uncertainty, of a productive, harmonious world barrelling towards ruination is palpably tense and disorienting. The mysterious figure of John Galt, the parading extravagance of Francisco, and the hard-headed determination of Hank Reardon and our heroine Dagny Taggart – they’re a cast of fascinating, scintillating characters, but more importantly, characters who never get any kind of focus in the kind of books I otherwise read.

There are, however, problems: on the other side, Rand paints a very one-dimensional portrait of liberal-minded people who are either unable or unwilling to rationalise or reason or to see the bigger picture, reducing everything to a plea for pity and who resort invariably to deliberately stupid-sounding arguments like “Oh, but have a heart” or “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” There is a necessity to have this opposition, but it’s frustrating that Rand could provide such depth on her own hail-corporate side of the fence and only resort to silly clichés for the other. I didn't find this flaw to be problematic, however, as it’s also quite a lot of fun to have arguments with Ayn Rand in your head as you read.

The other major, and in fact, critical flaw, involves the absolutely farcical 120-page monologue that marks the book’s effective climax. Notwithstanding the level of disbelief-suspension required to allow that this monologue would continue unabated, it’s a really lazy way of cramming a philosophy down your throat, when that same philosophy has been otherwise so adroitly demonstrated throughout the remainder of the book.

That monologue is not only an immense slog to get through, but it takes you completely out of what was otherwise such a gripping prognostication of doom up to that point. I call this the critical flaw because, had Rand devised a more realistic and coherent way of bringing the book’s themes to a head, this frankly would have been my number one book of the year. I enjoyed reading it that much.

7) Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton

#NewAuthors

This was another genuine surprise for me – not that I had low expectations, but I just had no idea what I was in for. I also kind of turn my nose up at books with pretentious titles, and although this remains a pretentious title, it fits better than anything else could.

Cry, the Beloved Country is about South Africa – the beautiful country that Paton sees it as and the beautiful people who populate it – but moreover it’s a passionate, angry lament about the fact that in the ‘modern’ age as the plague of urbanisation spreads, the country and its people become infested by corruption.

It shares a lot of common ground, thematically and structurally with Richard Wright’s Native Son, but I also read it as kind of a dystopia: the small village inhabited by our protagonist, the reverend Stephen Kumalo, is a sort of utopia where everybody is self-sustained and community-minded, while the metropolis of Johannesburg is a decaying portrayal of urban progression: technologically and culturally advanced but inevitably succumbing to advanced entropy.

The Reverend Kumalo is therefore the outsider who travels to the dystopian chaos and suffers from it, only to return to his idyllic original setting, despite his ordeal infected with hope in how to rectify and rescue civilisation from the claws of decline.

It’s very poignant reading this book, knowing what Paton would go on and do with his life, effectively giving up a natural gift for writing and choosing instead to focus on politics and become an embodiment of the ideals and passions that he promulgates in this book. It’s reassuring in many ways to know that he believed so strongly in what he preaches through this book, and in some ways it actually saves this book from becoming overly preachy and self-righteous.

It’s a passionate cry for help, but also a hopeful one, steadfastly holding to the fact that people are generally good and can improve their situation through cooperation and holding true to character. It’s possible you can read this and feel lectured to, but I enjoyed a great deal of empathy with the characters and their creator.

6) The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

#NewAuthors #BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint

So from a passionate cry for help on behalf of a country to a very personal, introspective cry for help. I’d never read any Plath, as I’d mostly seen her as a poet (and I'm not a poetry guy), but was aware of this as a book I should probably read. So I did. And obviously, I loved it.

This was a fascinating and deeply affecting work for a number of reasons. Not least for its blunt, at times matter-of-fact, depiction of a mind suffering from creeping depression, but also from a feminist point of view.

Our protagonist Esther is a compelling figure, for the most part of the book simply going through the motions that society expects of her: putting on a façade as a functional, submissive female, full of hopes of a good marriage and a career, but ultimately yearning for her own independent agency As she starts suffering from her creeping, debilitating feelings of anxiety and depression she subsequently has any hope of agency rudely stripped away.

There’s a really interesting point on all of this made later in the story: Esther is institutionalised in an asylum, and her former flame and presumed-one-day-husband Buddy says to her: “I wonder who  you’ll marry now.” She responds by inverting it “who will marry me now”. I found it fascinating the way Buddy’s assumption is still that she will marry, while she makes the inversion and the corresponding point about agency, about her position now as an object rather than the author of her own future.

The bell jar itself is also possibly the most vivid and striking metaphor for depression I've come across, speaking as a fortunate non-sufferer, and although the rest of the book is intriguing in itself, that metaphor really helped this book linger in my mind as nothing short of a personal but profound and relatable masterpiece.

5) The Sacred and Profane Love Machine – Iris Murdoch

#CatchingUpOnMyBookshelf #ReadALLTheMurdoch

We knew this one was coming, right? I’ve been mentioning my undying love for Murdoch (IRIS Murdoch) a lot through these write-ups and it’s only really fitting in the end that she has again managed to crack my top 5 this year.

Truth is, although I absolutely adored this book, it was also a bit of a disappointment – for one reason which I’ll get to – and, like Atlas Shrugged, this was earmarked for a number one spot and a double-whammy for Murdoch until late in the piece.

This is very Murdochean. It’s surreal, it’s bizarrely random, and she writes so brilliantly about randomness. This book contains just as many unlikely and implausible coincidences and happenings as in my bottom book of this year, Bel Canto, but rather than trying to force them into incomprehensible symmetry, Murdoch uses them here to paint textures of the chaos that is humanity.

The book basically just tells the story of a love affair gone horribly awry, of a man who can’t make up his mind between his faithful, reliable wife and his exciting, dangerous mistress; it’s all fairly familiar territory. But the selfishness of the central character is compelling: as I've mentioned many times, nobody writes about the male ego quite like Murdoch, and she elicits an immense amount of pathos about illicit love, about loving people we shouldn't in ways that we shouldn't.

Besides the unsympathetic central character, there’s a full ensemble here of Murdoch genotypes – eccentric and each one solitary in their own way and of course, each one relying on the others in ways that just aren't healthy, whether they know it or not.

I was so drawn up in the surrealism, but the humanism of it all, that it was so tragic when a particular ex machina event towards the end of the story just pushed it a little too much into “far-fetched” and “sudden and unexplained” and jolted me out of the fantasy. The truth is there are very few ways to bring about the conclusion Murdoch clearly wanted that wouldn't seem contrived, but this particular one was very abrupt and just too unlikely, even in the circumstances.

The only real comparison I can draw is with my experience watching the Kubrick-begun Spielberg-finished film AI: Artificial Intelligence, if anyone’s familiar with my thoughts on the film. The fact is that the film, like this book, was so completely in my wheelhouse for so much of my time with it, that it just broke my heart to have to admit that, towards the end, the mechanics of the story are creaky and being forced to move ways that they shouldn't. Basically, AI without some of its last 30 minutes could have been one of my all-time favourite films, and likewise The Sacred and Profane Love Machine could have been my number 1 book of this year without some particular plot points.

4) Of Human Bondage – William Somerset Maugham

#NewAuthors #BooksIFeltIShouldReadAtSomePoint

Speaking of titles , can I just say to everyone who raised an eyebrow at the book's cover, or asked me when they saw me reading this in the lunchroom if it’s “work appropriate,” I just want to tell you – little known fact – that before ‘bondage’ was a sex act, it was a perfectly serviceable word? Used to convey meaning? Meaning beyond being a sex act? Holy shit people, get an education!

Anyway, this was an immensely beautiful, profound book exploring, as its title suggests, the inescapable human experience. Maugham writes with immense fluidity: although this bildungsroman covers a long passage of time in our protagonist’s life, the passage of time occurs so seamlessly throughout. Often in other reading, I’ll feel a sort of jolt and need to readjust as an author skips to the next forward progression, but Maugham simply picks up the flow at the next point forward in time and allows you to catch up as you continue forwards.

One of the quirks of the story that helps with that fluidity is the fact that our protagonist, Philip, often ‘forgets’ the names of acquaintances made earlier in the book and he has to remind himself of who they were, which helped to refresh my own memory even while it also adds to the sense of time passing for me in the same continuum as him.

This book overall has a very nineteenth-century feel, but its themes are compelling and timeless, and Maugham explores them with beauty that is at times angelic and at others savage and cruel. One passage in particular had a savage beauty that compelled me so much I took a photo of the page so I could share it with you, in full, at the end of the year:

“Life was insignificant and death without consequence. Philip exulted, as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief in God was lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last burden of responsibility was taken from him; and for the first time he was utterly free. His insignificance was turned to power, and he felt himself suddenly equal with the cruel fate which had seemed to persecute him; for, if life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty.”

Ouch. And it goes on like this.

There were a couple of minor flaws: at times the narration slipped needlessly into omniscience, whereas it’s mostly just all observant third person from Philip’s perspective. The other minor but inevitable criticism is that, while Philip is a sympathetic character, he is at times so utterly, incomprehensibly naïve and stupid that it kind of damaged the relationship I was developing with the author. It simply befuddled me as to what Philip is trying to accomplish by constantly chasing after the wanton and selfish figure of Mildred. Nevertheless, despite that lapse in sympathy the prose itself remains fluid and gripping, and while I questioned the motivation I was still caught up in the events.

Despite these, this is really an immense achievement: philosophical and poetic, at times upsetting and at others uplifting. It could almost be seen as somewhat ordinary – like the story of Larry in Larry’s Party – except that Maugham just produces so many beautiful and arresting reflections on existence.

3) A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

#NewAuthors #HeOnlyWroteOneBookThough #HowSad

So I’ve been biting my tongue throughout my write-ups, when I talked about the smirks elicited from me by Good Omens and the more voluminous guffaws emerging from Thank You, Jeeves, knowing that this book was still to come: a book that cracked me up more than any other has probably ever done.

The story around this book is quite as fascinating as anything contained within the book itself: completed before Toole took his own life, it only saw the light of day through the persistence of his mother in trying to bring the book to someone’s attention, and that someone turned out to be the great southern writer Walker Percy (see The Moviegoer in my write-ups from two years ago). The story around the book is so important because the book itself revolves around a slothful, misanthropic anti-hero and the chequered relationship with his own helicopter mother. So one can’t help but wonder what parallels there are between the fiction and its creator.

The central figure, Ignatius J Reilly, is one of the more compelling massive jerks you’ll encounter: completely egocentric, pointedly and deliberately lazy, and imbued with an intellectual snobbery that allows him to pour scorn over the entirety of humanity for intrinsically being inferior. He states explicitly his relationship with other people as “I really have had little to do with them, for I mingle with my peers or no one, and since I have no peers, I mingle with no one."

The whole book is effectively just an orgy of misanthropy and self-indulgence, as Ignatius careens from one catastrophe to another, each time motivated solely by self-aggrandisement and vanity. But as with so much great southern literature, the whole cast of characters here are effectively unsympathetic even while their unfortunate circumstances elicit our sympathy, and the whole thing plays out like a classical comedy: the humour of ‘low’ characters.

Although this book is as high as it is largely because it’s just the type of base and cynical humour I love, it’s also a really intelligent piece of storytelling full of dramatic irony and pathos that impishly explores one man’s unlimited capacity for self-indulgence. It’s wonderful.

2) The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe

#NewAuthors

Wow, there really are a lot of books with interesting/pretentious titles in this top ten, aren't there? This was certainly a title that had mystified me in the past, but even more so than with Cry, the Beloved Country, this is actually a wonderful, fitting title but one that only really becomes clear once you’re immersed in it.

So to aid my memory with some of these write-ups (and avoid some of the things that slipped through the cracks, like Greene’s The Tenth Man last year), I've tried to keep notes on books that I've read as the year’s progressed. My note for this book begins “Jesus Fuck, not half a book.” I think I remember reading a list a while ago that talked about the best or most important book of each decade of the twentieth century, and this was posited for the 1980s, and rightly so, because there really isn't a more 80s book out there.

This is a gripping political thriller, about the chaos that ensues when a bunch of 80s guys (dun dun DUN dun dun dun dun DUN DUN) face off in what is effectively judicial Guerrilla combat. Basically it becomes simply what the title suggests, as each personality’s particularly over-inflated ego explodes in an inferno against all the others and it becomes a compelling tussle to see who will come out on top, or even untainted.

It all begins when Sherman McCoy, 80s guy, is involved in a road accident in Harlem where a young black man is run down by his car. The fracas that ensues is fuelled by the inflammatory remarks of the Reverend Bacon, 80s guy, as well as the gunning ambitions of well-meaning but misguided hotshot ADA Larry Kramer, 80s guy, and the dry and alcohol-fuelled media ramblings of British expat journalist Peter Fallow, 80s guy.

In many ways I couldn't help but read this as somewhat of an ancestor of Gone Girl what with all its recent hype, given its commentary about media manipulation and trial by public sentiment. Everybody here is fundamentally unlikeable yet somehow, Wolfe is a talented enough writer to somehow draw my sympathy.

McCoy, the main 80s guy, becomes a sympathetic figure in the same way that Jerry Lundegaard is in Fargo: he does reprehensible things throughout, but because he’s so hapless at times there’s no choice but to feel a bit sorry for him. At the same time, I can picture someone else reading this book and just seething with rage at him, and not just people who think differently from me but someone of the very same mindset could have a polar opposite reaction.

That’s part of the joyful power of this book: it’s not simply a conflagration of egos (although that is where the most enjoyment can be had), but also an ambivalent, multi-faceted tangle of lives as well.

So if my maths are correct, that leaves us with only…

1) On the Beach – Nevil Shute

#NewAuthors

This one was a real surprise for me. For some reason although I’d vaguely heard it was somewhat dystopian and/or post-apocalyptic, I’d always filed it in “Australian literature therefore not my thing”. So picking it up and immersing myself in its exhaustive power was a complete revelation.

At the same time, it should have been really, really obvious that I’d like this book because it’s got all of my favourite things: death and doom and world annihilation. What really blew me away was the unwaveringly steady calm that Shute employs throughout, letting the stunning, slow-burn power of the story just wash over you like nuclear fallout.

Set in Australia about a few weeks after an immense nuclear explosion has wiped out a large portion of the northern hemisphere’s population - and the resultant slow-spreading poisonous radiation cloud has wiped out the rest - we join a group of Australian, British and American citizens and officials gathered in and around Melbourne for the last few weeks of life on earth, which includes the crew of the last-remaining functional nuclear submarine.

Grim as the starting premise is, Shute demonstrates admirably that there are far lower depths of grim that one can reach if one looks: throughout the book is a palpable, menacing doom that serves to highlight and emphasise the crushing futility of all the book’s threads of hope that it places in our path: there’s a remote signal coming from a radio station in north America. There’s a hypothetical medication that can slow or prevent the effects of the radiation. At the very least, there’s the possibility of one last love story before humanity faces oblivion.

The fact is that Shute writes this story in a cold, detached, very procedural manner, but all that does is allow the sapping emotions to burn more slowly and more intensely. It’s clinical, and curiously unsentimental despite the emotional heft and the fact that it’s laden with such a menacing doom. I couldn't help but wonder if I was so profoundly shaken by this simply because I’d been hoping – through the likes of May We Be Forgiven – for a truly mercilessly cynical book, and the unwavering misery here was exactly what I’d hoped for?

But more than simply being the uncompromising offering it is, On the Beach also made me think far more than any other book this year, because – though I think this book dropped out of fashion a bit after the end of the Cold War – what it relates seems so inevitable. Not the specifics so much, but that the world-slash-human race will end not actually through some huge natural disaster but through our own destructive agency.

I also liked, in the end, the fact that this book is Australian, but not just for the sake of setting it in Australia (Straya!). It’s very necessarily set in Australia, as during the time of its publication, Melbourne would have been pretty much the world’s most southerly major city, so an apocalypse travelling south on the winds would complete its destruction of the human race here in our own backyard. You could pretty much do the same thing but transplant it to Invercargill, now, or at least Wellington.

I have to admit that the car racing sequences seemed a little out of place – more of a Shute indulgence rather than a plot necessity – but it was merely the premise that didn't work for me, and the execution added to the overall atmosphere. I know I may have effectively spoiled the book for those who haven’t read it by implying there is no happy ending here, but despite how the book does end up, throughout the whole story there is an unending encroachment of fatalism that it’s difficult to imagine any more positive conclusion. Suffice to say, Shute wields its immense power to the bitter end.

And that's a wrap, Mother, and anyone who got lost looking for the great blog about department store shaving experiences, searsbeard.blogspot.com. I hope you enjoyed not reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it up. I will inevitably do some kind of movies of 2015 post (although I clearly spent far more of my free time this year reading than movie-watching), and a write-up of my top 5 beers of the year, but here is the lion's share of my 2015 experience. Bye!