My Favourite Books for 2012

Of the 66 books I've read this year (not including the 10 or so I got nearly halfway through but, due to boredom or annoyance, put aside), these are the ones I found the most satisfying:

Best Novel (Literary):

Howard Jacobsen, Zoo Time. A biting satire of the world of writing and publishing, written with Jacobsen's usual verve and wit. Zingers on every page. Marvellous.

Chad Harbach, The Art of Fielding. I loved this first novel. Don't be put off by the college baseball setting. You'll be turned on by the characters and the plot. At once sad and uplifting. A major achievement.

Martin Amis, Lionel Asbo. Many reviewers thought this pretty ordinary. They're wrong. It's brilliant. They've just gone off Amis, one of our most important writers of the last forty years. 

Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth. Same for this. Universally misread by reviewers. All the men in this beautiful young woman's life are cowardly, duplicitous weasels, and THAT'S THE POINT, IDIOTS! Besides, it's the 70's, and I was fully alive then, and I recognise the truth in it.

Chloe Hooper, The Engagement. How damn good is this? Subtle, nuanced and tantalising right to the end. Amazingly good.

Colm Toibin, The Testament of Mary. Mary considers Jesus a boring little save-the-world dickhead. Wonderful!

Wayne Macauley, The Cook. Extraordinary in every way. So resonant with meaning on multiple levels, and the evil is as exquisite as the food! 

Best Novel (Popular):

Hannah Richel, Secrets of the Tides. Despite a seriously bad cover, this is a seriously good book. Families, eh...who'd belong to one?

Dennis Lehane, Live By Night. Raw, tense and just as brilliant as his earlier The Given Day. Ben Affleck has bought the film rights. Can't wait.

Herman Koch, The Dinner. Two brothers - the arrogant politician has the integrity; the progressive lefty  teacher is a vicious psychopath. Highly original. Read the final two pages very carefully or you'll miss the whammy, like most reviewers have. Turns everything on its head.

Toni Jordan, Nine Days. What a stunningly good writer Toni is. This is a lovely, heart-warming, rich tapestry of a novel.

Best Crime/Thriller:

Adrian McKinty, The Cold, Cold Ground. Belfast 1981 - a really scary place. A superb, pacy drama with great characters. Can't wait for Adrian's new one out early next year.

Ian Rankin, Standing in Another Man's Grave. Rankin's latest is one of his best, mainly because he resurrects a full-blooded Rebus and ditches the anal Malcolm Fox. 

Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl. Brilliantly written, exquisitely plotted. Sucks you in as it unfolds its inexorable, horrible logic. The best thriller I've read in ages.

Best Non-Fiction:

Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers. This extraordinary story about a Mumbai slum puts all your safe, comfortable, healthy, affluent life into sharp relief, you miserable complaining sod!

David Gillespie, Big Fat Lies. Oh I love this guy! The provocative, challenging, amazing Gillespie, who's causing such a stir in the health and nutrition establishment. Just as good as his earlier Sweet Poison.

Laurent Binet, HHhH. You've never read a non-fiction narrative like this. Uses contemporary novelistic conventions to explore an astonishing episode in Nazi history. Playful and charming as buggery, despite its subject matter.

Maxine McKew, Tales from the Political Trenches. Maxine really puts the boot in where it counts. A great political memoir and a thrilling read. 

Guy Pearse, Greenwash. As usual Pearse delivers. A well written, thoroughly researched expose of corporate hypocrisy. Stunning.

Paul Krugman, End This Depression Now. If you haven't read any of Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman's writing, then this will introduce you to easily the most important and influential economic thinker of our times. He's such a lucid, elegant writer too. A pleasure to read. 

J.K.Rowling's A Casual Vacancy

Combine a ludicrously inappropriate marketing campaign (Hachette) - a global embargo a la Harry Potter; no endorsements from respected writers on the cover (that would place it for a reader); a blurb so banal that it misses the whole point - and you get the awful misplaced expectations that have bedevilled the launch of this really excellent, very substantial novel. 

This is a gritty, believable story of modern personal and social relationships - husbands/wives; parents/children; middle/lower classes; conservatives/liberals. If the author was not Rowling, but for example, Paul Murray, who wrote the wonderful Skippy Dies (also a story of teenage/adult/social conflict), then there wouldn't be this quite extraordinary squall of snooty dismissiveness and disappointment that has accompanied this novel's release.

It's not hard to describe why quality popular fiction like this works. It successfully creates a world that is totally absorbing. It is rich in believable characters. It has a plot that is complex and satisfying. The interactions between the characters are frequently intense and conflicting. It is gritty, hard-edged and often violent. People get hurt. There is a lot of pain. There is cowardice and courage. There is a totally satisfying, emotionally resonant denouement and resolution.

This describes A Casual Vacancy. It is very good indeed. I enjoyed it immensely.


(This review by Michiko Katukani of the New York Times is worth reading for the vacuous nonsense it truly is. It's typical of a Harry Potter aficionado expecting Mugglemarch to be far more magical and exciting.)

The Booker longlist - some early thoughts

'The wizarding world is the society in which wizards and witches live and interact separate from Muggle (non-wizarding) society. The two communities are kept separate through the use of charms, spells, and secrecy. Wizards are forbidden to reveal anything about magic to Muggle society...' (Wikipedia)

I was reminded of J. K. Rowling's two worlds when reading Alan Hollinghurst's new Booker longlisted novel A Stranger's Child. Only, in Hollinghurst's universe the competing worlds are gay and non-gay.

The gays are the creatives - the poets, the writers, the teachers, the artists, the lovers, the musicians. The non-gays are the plainer, worldly, less interesting domestic, political, academic and business types, usually of inferior sensibility and taste. In the novel the only sex depicted is gay sex. Hetero sex takes place off stage, if any takes place at all. That's left to the reader's imagination.

No-one should have a problem with this necessarily, but as a literary device it's a cliche. And it renders much of the novel simply tedious. There is endless talking between the characters but to little avail. The nature of their close relationships is unexplored. Facts, truth, what actually happened - all remain undisclosed, to the characters themselves and to the reader. This is the 'love that dare not speak its name' after all.

There is much surface glitter, much that is hinted at, much left unsaid. It's a world of secrets and lies, and little enlightenment. But perhaps this is English society, and as an Australian with a plainer tongue, I was profoundly annoyed by it.


I was fully expecting a dramatic ending - a plot development, a detonation, that would bring all the pieces together, that would unify, enrich and give an extra dimension to all the narrative threads that over-populate this story. But none came. It simply fizzled out.

Here is a fairly typical Hollinghurst sentence: 'Dudley turned to her with that unstable mixture of indulgence and polite bewilderment and mocking distaste that she had come to know and dread and furiously resent'. 


Firstly, I find it quite hard to picture what sort of look Dudley could possibly have had on his face that could be so described! Secondly, there's apparently a huge amount of emotion going on between these two characters, a husband and wife, that is simply not evident in the rather domestic situation being described. It's just a familiar tizz. They are getting ready to go down to welcome their dinner guests, and she's a bit stressed.

This is the sort of over-writing that Hollinghurst indulges in, and that I find tiresome. There are four 'ands' in the short sentence above. The style is to build the drama, but that's where all the drama is - in the prose, not in the plot. The standard definition of sentimentality is that it's emotion disproportionate to the facts. Here we're seeing a  heightened dramatic prose style disproportionate to the routine events, situations and facts it purports to describe.

Hollinghurst describes one of his characters' literary style at one point: 'It was one of his better pre-war poems, though with that tendency to sonorous padding that spoiled almost everything he wrote if judged by the sternest standard.' Hollinghurst could be describing himself.

This is the bookies' favourite for this year's Booker prize. I can't see it winning at all. Most people will find it unreadable and quite unremarkable. And quite insubstantial. That is if they get past the first 100 pages, which they won't.


But, as Bob Ellis would say: 'You may disagree'.

Julian Barnes has had plenty of hits and misses, but The Sense of an Ending is simply wonderful.



It won't win the Booker - it's far too short at 150 pages, and has the feel of a novella - but it's a bright, refreshing tonic of a read, with that knowing, cynical, sharp, socially critical edge typical of Barnes at his best.


Speaking of plot: the book suffers profoundly from a major plot fault. The main character is criticised for not twigging to a critical fact, central to the plot. But, absent a visit from the Archangel Gabriel, he can't reasonably be expected to know it. As a result, we get something quite contrived, closer to melodrama than reality.


But you should buy and read this book if only to indulge in the delicious pleasure of reading the letter the main character writes to his ex-girlfriend and her new lover (who happens to have been a good friend). It's savagery at its best! Withering and marvellous.


And then there's the debate in the cafe about 'hand-cut' chips. They are apparently not hand cut at all. They are 'fat', and machine-made! (Oh, to have been there!)

This one could win it. Sebastian Barry's On Canaan's Side is a superb achievement. Unlike the Hollinghurst and Barnes novels it successfully brings all its elements together into an extremely satisfying whole. 


Ironically, these three novels span multi-generational timeframes of youth to old age. We are asked to engage with the main characters and stay with them emotionally during the different phases of their lives. Barry's Lilly Bere, from her earliest days in Dublin, to her final, heartbreaking days in a small village near Chicago, is impossible not to warmly embrace, in fact love. 


Of the thirteen novels on the Booker longlist I've only read three so far, but Barry will certainly make the shortlist and become a favourite to win. No doubt.


It's a joy to read.

Listen up, Mint:

Reading the morning paper and choking on my Danish is a frequent experience for me these days. There's just so much more bullshit going down than in previous decades!


This morning? Yes, it was the story about how the Australian Mint have suggested to the government that the 5 cent coin be abolished. It apparently costs more to make than its worth.


Two big things wrong here: 


1. Since when did every friggin coin in the history of the universe have to be its own profit centre?   


2. You want to save money Mint? ABOLISH THE ABSURD 50 CENT COIN!! Or at least downsize it.


Australian coins have to be the heaviest, most cumbersome bunch of pocket destroyers and purse fillers in the - once again - history of the universe! Especially our humongous 50 cent coin. Ugly, heavy and soooo huge. And it must, proportionately, be way more expensive to manufacture than the tiny and victimised 5 cent coin.


I remember way back when some long forgotten government minister introduced this monstrosity, no doubt on the advice of some dud Mint bureaucrat. The rationale for making it so huge, heavy and pointy (I know that's not the technical word) was that little old half blind pensioners would be more easily able to distinguish it from the other coins, especially the 20 cent one. 'Feel the edge, feel the edge - cool, eh'.


Christ! As if our seniors were such a dumb bunch that they'd prefer to be weighed down and rooted to the spot by this monstrous ballast rather than refining their squint when necessary.


And why, just as a matter of logic, is it BIGGER than the one and two dollar coins?


Listen up Mint: rationalise the whole lot of them. That would be a productive and cost efficient way to spend your time.

Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow

Rarely does a cover do absolute justice to the essence of a book. Whoever in Random House commissioned this photo deserves a medal! 


This new book from the (former) infant terrible of English literature, Martin Amis, is a stunning exploration of the sexual revolution and its aftermath, what it meant in the late sixties/early seventies, and what it seems to mean now. The 'pregnant widow' metaphor, first used by psychologist Alexander Herzen, refers to the rather long period between the death of one social order and the birth of the new - 'a long night of chaos and desolation'. 


This is a longish novel, at 465 pages, so requires a commitment of time, but it is absolutely worth it. Amis is such a stunning, gifted writer. His prose is magic. In virtually every paragraph a marvellous phrase, drenched in insight or sharp comedy, stands out and delights:


'And it came to Keith now - her essential peculiarity. She went at it, as if the sexual act, in all human history, had never even been suspected of leading to childbirth, as if everyone had immemorially known that it was by other means that you peopled the world. All the ancient colourations of significance and consequence had been bleached from it...' (p.380)


A group of young English friends in 1970 are spending the summer in a mansion in Italy. The setting is highly sensual and erotic, with much sexual activity going on, more off-stage than on. The principal antagonist, Keith, quite obviously in this semi-autobiographical novel the young Amis, is in a comfortable but unchallenging relationship with Lily, but he's sexually attracted to her friend the beautiful, mysterious (and romantically named) Scheherazade (the girl on the right on the cover - Lily is on the left). 


Keith is a student of English literature, just graduated, which allows Amis to contrast this modern setting with older social orders portrayed in classic English novels, particularly those of Jane Austen. Despite Keith's rather irreverent readings of Austen - 'one fuck per book' - Amis succeeds in making the point: the rich, layered social spheres, constraints and mannerisms of the old, against the seeming yet entrapping freedoms of the new.


The final part of the novel re-visits the friends decades later, in contemporary times. The logic of their complicated personal identities and relationships, barely visible then, has been played out, both predictably, surprisingly, and sometimes quite sadly.


I've read most of Amis' novels over the years, including his non-fiction, so I think I can say with confidence that The Pregnant Widow is his best. Amis' superb talents are fully evident, and his serious, critical preoccupations best displayed. 

Another miserable Henning Mankell: The Troubled Man

This is Mankell's latest in his Kurt Wallander series. I thought I'd give him another go, despite the fact that I loathed and detested his recent effort The Man From Beijing:  


http://tiny.cc/7okk8


Mankell's peculiar and thoroughly dated old-left, cold war politics, laughable in that book, surface again in the new one, The Troubled Man, only here we're subjected to an absurd form of anti-Americanism in place of an absurd anti-colonialism. 


The pity is that Mankell's hero, the Swedish detective Wallander, is a wonderfully entertaining creation, someone you can live with, book after book. He's a crusty old coot of 60, extremely human and fallible, but whose instincts are as sound as ever. In this new outing, Wallander's last - he succumbs to Alzheimer's at the end, Henning clearly killing him off - he thankfully transcends the author's ridiculous political obsessions and is the only reason anyone would bother to read this silly novel.

Do yourself a favour and read something else - anything!

An Excellent Easter Read: The Book of Rachael

With Easter coming up, and the Anzac Day holiday on the Tuesday making it a longer break than usual, you need to read an absorbing book that perfectly suits the season and its deeper meanings, even if you're not a person of particularly Christian views. Provided the book you chose is absolutely exceptional.

Let me wholeheartedly recommend The Book of Rachael by Leslie Cannold. Cannold is a well-known, highly regarded Australian ethicist, columnist and humanist who has written a few non-fiction books but never fiction. I've always liked her perspective on things - the sorry state of Australia's abortion laws, for example - but, frankly, I was a bit hesitant about picking up a mature public intellectual's first piece of fiction. It reeks of the publisher letting her have her way just to keep her on its list. And there have been so many examples of non-fiction authors just indulging a whim, having a go, and turning out quite second rate stuff.

But this is certainly not the case here. In fact Cannold has written a seriously good novel - in fact, one of the best I've read for a long time.

It's the story of Jesus' youngest sister, Rachael, who is smart, edgy, courageous and fascinating. The larger story of Jesus (Joshua in the novel), his family relationships, his friendship with the political radical Judas Iscariot (Judah) whom Rachael marries, his love of Mary Magdalene (Maryam), his three year mission and all the gathering forces that propel events towards their final, dramatic resolution - the whole tale we think we know has been re-imagined by Cannold in an utterly enthralling and powerful way. 

This is grounded, realistic stuff. The Jews of Jesus' time come thrillingly alive: their politics, their culture, their food, their medicines, their blindingly ignorant superstitions and prejudices, their cruelties to each other and to their women in particular. And Cannold succeeds in bringing the key events of specifically Christian belief, the crucifixion and the resurrection in particular, into sharp, dramatic focus without resorting to easy cynicism or cloying piety.

Frankly, I didn't expect to be able to say this, but this novel is a major achievement.  It is seriously good, and exceptionally well-written.

A must read.