Books of 2017 Part 6: My Top Ten

So we come to the end of another long and windy road of nostalgia, looking back at the year that was. I should state that I was pretty pleased overall with my book choices in 2017, so this set of 10 really is the best of an already good bunch.

10) The Color Purple – Alice Walker

#ClassicsIShouldRead

Felt I should read this, as I feel like I've read all the other paragons of black literature at least according to the predominantly-white establishment (so now I’ve done this I guess I can start exploring what else PoCs see as the best examples). I'd avoided this mainly because I've seen the film, but given the film was (really bizarrely, it seems, now, but probably an indictment on the times and of course those times still exist) directed by a white straight Jewish man, it's unsurprising that it's just less effective than the book. Walker has an excellent authorial voice throughout this; southern and uneducated in tone and language, but obviously worldly and knowing, and very personal and heartfelt. Her protagonist Celie is, for all intents and purpose, a black lesbian so it's as many minorities rolled into one as you are likely to get, and she's such an endearing, soulful narrator: both a character of pure goodness, and a spirited fighter who yearns for more. The story is ultimately just about love and spirit, how we can be raised up out of adversity by love and how the spirit can withstand any kind of adversity thrown at it. Curiously the character who becomes the most poignant exemplar is Albert, Celie's forced husband who mistreats her, withholding years of letters from her estranged sister in order to keep her mind and spirit captive, but who ultimately undergoes a broad spiritual recovery and enlightenment. The parts of the story dealing with Nettie, Celie's sister doing mission work in Africa, I found less effective just because they felt familiar, and didn't really have a new or interesting take on the whites' rape of Africa that aren’t covered in similar narratives – like Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible for instance. I'm obviously a bit removed from this book just because of the levels of privilege between me and its characters, but it's undeniably uplifting in its humour, pathos and bittersweet philosophy.

9) Sabbath’s Theater – Philip Roth

#NationalBookAwardWinners

Between this and Gravity's Rainbow, I can't help but feel that National Book Award panels are a bunch of kinky old pervs. This one took a while to get into, as I often find with Roth, since he writes in such a non-directional, dawdling kind of way. At times this has a very modernist, stream of consciousness style, as our protagonist Mickey Sabbath moves from the present into a series of reminiscences that goes back and forward in his mind. His mind, too, is where we spend most of the narrative, and a very unpleasantly oppressive place it is. In essence here Roth has drawn a portrait of human depravity; Sabbath is as much a sexual obsessive and as much an apotheosis of Jewish sufferance as Portnoy (of his eponymous complaint), but where Portnoy was repentant and self-aware, Sabbath is morbid, amoral and behaves with absolute reckless abandon. The journey, following the death of his mistress, is a Ulysses-style odyssey through past and present as he barrels headlong towards a spectacularly self-serving suicide, and in the process of having nothing to lose, burns all his interpersonal bridges linking him with the rest of humanity. But somehow out of this unsavoury portrait, Roth has also weaved a fascinating tapestry of the dark underside of human consciousness. It's full of dark and sardonic humour, and where another writer like William Somerset Maugham I might describe his wit as sharp, cutting right to the heart, Roth is more of a blunt object, and he'll bludgeon you with this dark wit until you emerge feeling battered. It's not a friendly or welcoming read, but it's unsettlingly captivating nonetheless; it's the novel equivalent of a horrific twisted car crash and I just couldn't look away.

8) Robinson – Muriel Spark

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Another quality bit of obtuse, delightfully unpredictable social commentary from Spark. Starts out in a familiar setting; a few survivors from a plane crash become stranded on an isolated island, but unlike the conventional narrative, this island is inhabited by a hermit of sorts, who takes care of the survivors as well as laying down the ground rules. Similarly, instead of them waiting and watching in vain for a faint hope of a rescue, they simply wait for the annual supply ship that is due on the island in a couple of months, so they know when to expect their reprieve. But when one of the party goes missing, it becomes an intriguing country house murder mystery and far more. The thing I possibly forgot in heading into this is how rarely anything is all that it seems in Spark's storytelling. There's a lot of really strange twists, and as with all of her work, her characters are unpredictable and intractable (in a good way), operating with this wafer-thin veneer of civility but subject to all sorts of dark whims, superstitions and strange impulses. There's certainly a bit of a Lord of the Flies element to this, except there isn't that uncertainty of reprieve, yet due to the nature of confining a group of individual wills together, it still becomes a crucible of human ugliness and conflict. It perhaps leaves a few too many questions unanswered, but it definitely gives plenty of value and reward in pondering them.

7) The Razor’s Edge – William Somerset Maugham

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I love the way Maugham writes. He's similar to George Eliot, in the sense that he tends to be fairly verbose and sometimes meandering, but still has a knack for cutting right to the heart of the matter with a couple of efficient phrases. He's also a great observer of humanity; I saw this in Of Human Bondage (My #4 book of 2015) and it's just as astute here. This is kind of a mishmash story, told in first person by a writer who just writes and observes about the people around him (I got accustomed to thinking of it as a fictional first person narrator, but one time in the entire book, about three quarters through, a character addresses him as "Mr Maugham" and I actually found it a bit jarring): the elitist society snob Elliott, the spoiled but discerning beauty Isabel, and above all the lost soul Larry, wandering the world in search of enlightenment. Maugham is a very subtle gonzo character here, gently prodding and influencing the action around him but ultimately serving only as an observer, with his friends the only players in the story he's relating, as they all sit on that "razor's edge" between atheism and strident faith, between love and hate, between hope and despair and ultimately life and death. When Maugham explores spirituality, and philosophy, his verbosity starts to get the better of him, and I do find him far more engaging in his observations of human nature, and explorations of the human condition from an external rather than introspective angle. It's an extremely engaging read, but definitely one that wavers and goes off the tracks occasionally.

6) The Sellout – Paul Beatty

#BookerPrizeWinners

I have overarching issues with the fact that this, as an American novel, won the Booker prize, and I do feel like it dilutes the identity of one of my favourite awards to open it in such a tacky, cynically commercial way. But having read this I'm actually ok with it now: with this winning, not with the Booker generally being open to American fiction. Firstly, if the Booker is essentially an award for post-colonial literature then this book about racism in a post-racial America is essentially the US equivalent of a post-colonial novel. The second reason I'm fine with this winning is that it's very, very good. It's hilarious, but it's hilarious in a provocative, confronting way. It reminds me a bit of Get Out, that other great improvisation on racism I experienced this year, in that it made me laugh a lot but I was often uncomfortable at the same time as being amused. Beatty really throws racism in the reader's face; he takes the whole "reclaiming" racism and racist slurs and dials it up to a really absurd extreme. The story centres around a small semi-rural suburb on the outskirts of Los Angeles which is officially dissolved into the areas around it, and the two residents who try to put the suburb back on the map (literally) by reintroducing segregation and thus forging their own ‘black’ identity rather than the diluted miscegenation being imposed on them. The slightly absurd concept and all of its absurd characters aside, what makes the book such a delight is the sheer joke density. Every sentence Beatty writes is punchy, witty, soaked in irony and/or sarcasm and is just full of sharply skewed observations about race relations and the position of black people in "post-racial" California. There are some issues with the identity and character of the narrator, who is a little thinly drawn, and the book also reminds me a little of some of the more challenging aspects of Infinite Jest, in that it is a little directionless and largely a patchwork of loosely connected anecdotes. The Infinite Jest comparison (which I don’t make lightly) also seems apt, not just because they're both extremely entertaining, but there is an oblique David Foster Wallace reference in the book as well, plus the crux of both of their plots includes the mad pursuit of a videotape - in this case a collection of "especially racist" episodes of The Little Rascals that one of our protagonists starred in. This is in many ways just a madcap sequence of confronting but amusing jokes, but it's also a sharp and intelligent satire that is very cleverly written.

5) The Dark Forest – Liu Cixin

#ContinuingSeriesIStartedInPreviousYearsIsThatAThing?

I really enjoyed this. Following on from enjoying The Three Body Problem (My #28 book of 2015) – which we read for our book group a few years ago, this was just as rich and fascinating a read but evidently also far more rewarding for me. Picking up from the end of the first book but taking a predominantly new set of characters and a new direction, this tells the story of Earth's struggle to deal with the impending conquest of the Trisolaran race (introduced as the conundrum in the first book), which is complicated by the Trisolarans' ability to block human scientific progress as well as see everything that happened on earth – except, crucially, in our minds; Trisolarans’ thoughts are all transparent. Earth devises a strategy of appointing four individuals, ‘wallfacers’ to work on their own defence strategy, in complete obfuscation and secret – with the proviso that they can do whatever the hell they want and ideally try to lead Trisolaris down the wrong path at every turn. One of these is naturally Chinese , given the author is, too, and it becomes a bit of a global crisis with a key focus on a handful of Chinese characters in that fold. What Liu creates here is a very dark and at times distressingly bleak vision of humanity. Bec read this before me and came away with a more positive view, but to my mind this book is unapologetically critical of humanity and is all the more interesting for it. The idea that our thoughts are secret and that is our key strength, that we have an ingrained belief in ourselves as the strongest force in the universe, but also that we have an inbuilt mistrust of others, are all explored in great depth. It felt like sort of an anti-Watchmen (my #13 book of 2014) story in that, even faced with the impending invasion from outside the planet, old political rivalries and mistrust can't be overcome, and all the UN can do is squabble and waste time. I did find some elements of Liu's writing a bit weak, especially his exposition. Like when our main protagonist Luo Gi is, apropos of nothing, flown overnight to UN headquarters and brought into a session where they just happen to be announcing the four Wallfacers who will be the savior of humanity, and three of them are appointed from the US, UK and South America, and he's wondering who the fourth and last will be and then - oh sweet heavens what a shock- it's him. Like, my one-year-old would have seen that coming. I'm not saying Liu needed to make it somehow more of a twist, but the frequent inner-monologue of guessing and wondering just felt like the narratorial device equivalent of Tantalus having fruit yanked away from him, yet always remaining within his reach, so it's kind of annoying having to reach further out but you still always grasp where it's going. And this is a disappointing prosaic weakness because otherwise Liu’s narrative is wonderfully unpredictable, his cultural commentary from an Eastern perspective, the atheistic explorations, they're all really interesting and engaging, and some minor quibbles maybe held me back from being totally awestruck by the book.

4) Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

#ADickensAYear #FinishingOffMyBookshelf #ClassicsIShouldRead

It seemed like a bad move to go from Emma to my annual Dickens - and a Wordsworth Classics edition I bought before I knew better, no less - but this was a greatly enriching read. It took a while to get into, possibly due to the stodginess of the edition, but once it gained momentum especially in the second half I heartily enjoyed it. It's very typically what you'd call ‘Dickensian’, with all its plot twists and all the characters being strangely interconnected, as well as all the characters being decidedly either 'entirely good' or 'entirely bad,' although in this case (unlike Nicholas Nickleby, where every character followed his/her straight line trajectory throughout) there's some ambiguity in some of the players, particularly the eccentric Miss Havisham and the shadowy figure of the convict, who in early behaviour seems a benevolent figure despite the malignance of his recurring presence. It's also an intriguing morality tale, about class politics and loyalty and principles, and it's easy to see its influence. For instance having just read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban it's clear that the lunchtime scene with Harry's aunt is almost a complete transplant of an early scene here with Pip, where his sister's obnoxious friends talk loudly of his ingratitude in his presence. This was ultimately a very moving, at times comedic and strangely uplifting fable, and certainly the best I've read from Dickens.

3) The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea – Yukio Mishima

#BooksIPickedUpForNoApparentReason

I’m generally a sucker for ‘classic’ edition book covers, so whenever I see a Vintage classics or Penguin classics cover in the library, I’m wont to have my eye drawn there, and in this case despite knowing nothing whatsoever about it, I grabbed it and borrowed it. And obviously the gamble paid off. This is a fascinating, surreal book about a thirteen-year old boy, his mother and the sailor who has a love affair with her. There's something very beautiful about Mishima's prose, even in translation, with some odd word choices that come across as quite poetic. This then belies how brutal this story is, with Noboru (the thirteen-year-old boy) being part of a gang who eschew maturity and adulthood as weak, soft and hypocritical, and aspire to a perfect state of what you might call stoic extremism. This creates a schism between the characters but also parts of the story, as it feels at times like a whirlwind romance story but the harsh, sociopathic credo of the gang of boys clashes with and in turn undercuts it, making it multifaceted in tone and unsettlingly ambivalent. The directions these two elements are tugging the story in makes the direction it takes never very clear, which makes the denouement all the more compelling. I can't quite decide if it's savagely beautiful or just savage, but it's an extremely affecting bit of writing.

2) The Mill on the Floss – George Eliot

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This one also took a long time to get into, but once it and I were in sync I realised the import of what is a very long introduction to these characters. Basically the tribulations of the Tullivers and their fall from high standing into poverty is the sort of story that a lesser, or less ambitious writer would consign to 200 words of exposition. Eliot by contrast makes it just the first part of a long bildungsroman of two siblings who are bonded by love and kinship yet infinitely separated by their irreconcilable but mutually well-meaning natures. In this way, while I was questioning the deliberation of the narration through the early parts, it all paid off when the drama intensifies and I’m now so invested in these people. As such I was captivated from halfway through by these incredibly well-wrought characters Eliot has taken the time to bring to life in full living colour - most importantly the sensitive, astute but inexperienced Maggie whose cross to bear is both a heart so over-swelled with feeling and a nature that is so bewitching to others. Eliot stands in a class of her own; she is so skilful with language that she can vacillate quite readily between efficient and elegant description and elusive, enigmatic ambiguity. It often feels like this story is heading in a familiar direction, and at each turn there's yet another twist, with Eliot offering no convenient or symmetrical solutions and leaving us on a very ambivalent foundation on which to build our own meaning. But it's such a strong and powerful narrative that piles on the meaning and the philosophy and the struggles, so it felt like I’d been washed away by the flood that marks the climax of the book. It's profoundly affecting and brilliant, and I can confidently say I enjoyed it far more than the perhaps more esteemed Middlemarch, which was only my #9 book of last year. Slightly funny story too, I didn't choose this to read for myself, but at some point Bec was on her way to the library (I think to get out of the house while I looked after Dylan) and I told her to bring me back a 'surprise book' I hadn't read, and this was the result. She chooses well, except when it comes to husbands. Anyway, lots and lots of rambling afterthought to increase suspense...

1) The Unconsoled – Kazuo Ishiguro

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What a year for Kazuo Ishiguro. First the Nobel prize for literature – arguably the finest accolade a writer can achieve – and then he gets my #1 book of the year – actually the finest accolade a writer can achieve. This was only the second book I read in 2017, but from the moment it clicked with me it was always at the front of the pack. Fact is though, this is a really odd read and it’s a bit difficult to convey exactly what it was that so beguiled me. Essentially a surreal, absurdist dreamscape, it has that patented Ishiguro style of just subtly tweaking the edges of reality and believability so you sometimes don't cotton on at first. In fact I think it’s fair to say that Kazuo and I (I call him Kazuo because he’s like an old chum by now) have a very good relationship as writer-reader; I am always ready to suspend my disbelief and let his surreal, other-worldly hand guide me down whatever garden path he chooses to.  This is certainly what happened for me with Never Let Me Go (my #2 book of 2012) - and I’ve read a number of people really not connecting with that book for what seems to me the reason that they’re unwilling to be led, or trying too hard to second-guess his intentions – and it happened here with The Unconsoled. It begins like a straightforward - if slightly odd - story as a musician checks into a hotel a few days before his big performance in town. The first hint that things are not as they seem is dropped fairly soon as the narrator is left in a car while his driver goes into a house to talk to the occupant and without explanation the narrator watches and conveys the whole scene inside the house that he isn't present for. This unexplained omniscience is just the first drop of a meandering journey through an unending dream where corridors and car journeys go on for ever but then opening a door takes you straight back to the place you started from, and while in a crowd of random strangers you take a second look and realise one has suddenly become an old childhood acquaintance. And I have to admit it took me 300+ pages before I finally cottoned on to the fact that it was following dream logic; I was just along for the ride. There's loads of absurdist Beckett-esque dialogue, surreal and nightmarish imagery and the constant flitting from one chance encounter to the next and our narrator's chain from one misadventure or distraction to the next is as frustrating as it is witty and captivating. The story, particularly once I was invested in it as a dream is genuinely high stakes stuff, it feels like after all we've been through with this narrator, you need the concert to come off and be a triumph, and everyone – benevolent, malicious, vengeful – to get their just desserts. But as in a dream, nothing is ever really neatly wrapped up, and the whole thing takes on the feeling of being a thorough, sometimes brutally uncomfortable but enlightening self-examination of some kind of collective unconscious of humanity. It’s also true that there are some threads of this story that frustratingly never got resolved, but it’s all part of the nature of the unconscious, and part of my relationship with my old chum Kazuo that what could be glaring plot holes are just part of the singular journey he’s taken me on. It ends up quite melancholic, bittersweet, darkly comedic but with a beautiful sense of inverted reality that left me feeling strangely serene and sanguine.