For better or for worse, this year I mostly read novels, and very little non-fiction, apart from a couple of biographies and memoirs. A sizeable number of these were contemporary Irish works, of mixed quality, that by and large confirmed my belief that 21st-century Irish writers still live in the shadow of Joyce. There was also a little sci-fi, a couple Russian novels, and some American fiction. The list below presents the books that stayed with me the most, for whatever reason. Your mileage may vary.
10. Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan
The emergence of Sally Rooney as Ireland’s newest celebrity author also helped to establish an Irish sub-genre: coming-of-age stories about young women attending or just out of college, usually engaged in some fractured romance. Some of these, such as Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan, are engaging but lacking sufficient texture or variety to give the sense of a complete story. This work by Megan Nolan, however, charting the twisted romance between the unnamed narrator and Ciaran, contains such in-depth examination of the narrator’s motivations that it merits the use of that overused adjective, honest. Nolan presents all the ways in which Ciaran mistreats and maligns the narrator throughout their torrid relationship; yet also shows all the ways in which the narrator is complicit and accepting of this state of affairs. Unlike, say, Normal People, where the characters stumble through disasters without displaying much self-awareness of their psychological catastrophes, Nolan’s narrator applies considerable self-analysis in unfolding her tale. The solipsistic style of the narrative can become at times irritating, and the prose offers relatively few memorable lines, yet amongst the contenders in this new sub-genre, this is a stand-out.
9. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
I jump back a century to Ford’s 1915 classic, originally called The Saddest Story, a title amazingly discouraged by the publisher. It is narrated by John Dowell, the husband to Florence, who was mistress to Edward Ashburnham, who was husband to Leonora, friend and confidante of Dowell. Ashburnham is the titular soldier, a powerful Englishman with fine looks, reliable income, and significant appetites, and though the central figure of the novel, he remains nebulous, accessible only through Dowell’s fragmented memories and echoed anecdotes. Our narrator tells us a winding and contradictory tale of infidelity: Ashburnham’s liaisons with mistresses range from a high-class escort to a loyal Englishwoman, and culminate in the great love affair of his life with Florence which, if he is to be believed, went on for years without Dowell ever having the slightest idea of the truth. The story loops around on itself, revisiting the same incidents multiple times, revealing a little more on each encounter, and the discursive style of the novel suggests that Dowell is trying to find a way to understand — or reinvent — what happened. The tone of honest disclosure is contradicted by the lack of information Dowell gives away about himself, and the overall impression is that of fractured minds snatching half-glimpses of each other, without any certainty beyond the fatal consequences of unbridled lust. It is not a long book, yet it is one that both contains and conceals entire lives.
8. Chasing the Light by Oliver Stone
At the start of the year I read several books about or by Hollywood directors. All were engaging, but none offered such a balanced examination of both the filmmaking career and the inner emotional life as Oliver Stone’s memoir. Beginning with his childhood and concluding with his Best Director Oscar for Platoon, Stone takes us through his artistic and personal formation, from beginnings as the son of a New York stockbroker who met and fell in love with a Frenchwoman while in Europe during the latter stages of World War II, through his own encounter with war as a soldier in Vietnam, and his subsequent development as a writer. Those who know Stone only for his films of the late 1980s and 1990s may be surprised to learn that he won his first Oscar for the screenplay of Midnight Express in 1978, and that he also wrote Scarface. The process by which he became a successful director was long, fraught with failure and discouragement, and at all times imperilled by financial uncertainties. Though at times the prose style can be a little hyperbolic, for instance in the concluding passage that mixes metaphors with all the bravado of a Vegas bartender, the strength of Stone’s book is that he shows the close interactions between his artistic work and his personal concerns and beliefs. Though his films often deal with grand political topics, this memoir makes clear that every moment he has committed to celluloid has emerged from an intense internal dialogue: the signature of a genuine artist.
7. The Devil I Know by Claire Kilroy
Anyone with even a passing awareness of 21st-century Irish history will know that this country experienced a property bubble of absurd magnitude during the 2000s, and that we are still living in the fallout of the subsequent economic catastrophe. For proof of this, one need only observe the ranks of homeless people trying to find shelter in the capital every night. This has given birth, of course, to another sub-genre of Irish writing. Books such as Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart rank among the most well-known of these works, and while I still need to explore this area further, Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know is one of the strongest contributions that I’ve read. It follows Tristram Amory St Lawrence, 13th Earl of Howth, a recovering alcoholic, as he gives testimony at a tribunal investigating the property disaster of the “Celtic Tiger” years. This is not a novel that examines the impact on ordinary people: instead, it gets inside the minds of the perpetrators, as Tristram describes how he was swept up into a series of absurd property speculations, working with old schoolfellow Desmond Hickey to bribe officials, erect shopping centres in godforsaken locations, and carve every graspable inch out of the Irish landscape in search of greater profit. Kilroy’s book stands out for two reasons. She shows how slapdash, haphazard, and indiscriminate the schemes of these developers really were: how, as Tristram remarks, the “recent history of this country has been moulded by those without the vision to perceive the flaws in their plans.” The socio-economic fabric of this small nation was ripped apart by a group of gallivanting lads who went to school together, went on holidays together, and took drugs together. Amidst a picaresque background, Tristram’s delicate character forms a counterpoint, and also connects to the other distinguishing feature of the novel: its Gothic qualities. Tristram spends some time haunting his family’s empty castle, and he takes orders from a faceless man lurking in Europe by the name of M. Deauville. With precision and flair, Kilroy blends together a realistic story of greed with a dark fairytale of avarice, producing a portrait of the bubble years that would sit well alongside Dorian Gray’s own image.
6. Billy Summers by Stephen King
The casual reader of Stephen King knows him to be a skilful creator of monsters; the committed reader knows him to be an ingenious creator of characters who happen to have monstrous traits. His latest novel, Billy Summers, is yet another example of this. It follows the eponymous character, as he is hired to do a job, methodically goes about the work in impeccable fashion, and later finds himself in a pickle as his employers attempt to double-cross him. The crucial detail, of course, is that Billy is an assassin, and he has been hired to kill a key witness in a criminal trial. One might imagine that it would be difficult to sympathise with a protagonist of this kind, but Billy wins the reader over at once, with his self-awareness, his honourable conduct, and his carefully-protected principles, chief among them: he only kills bad men. Is he a bad man? Probably. But as Rust Cohle reminds us in True Detective, the world needs people like this: they keep the other bad men from the door. Though there is no supernatural activity to be found in these pages, King’s book offers many of his classic topics in a fresh form: the quest of a loner to get beyond a past of violence, a heartwarming depiction of small-town American life, a road-trip with the inevitable aim of defeating the villain, an innocent soul who gets caught up in the struggle and finds their way to a new strength, and of course some satisfying action scenes. There’s even a brief appearance of a ghost from one of King’s most famous works. In some ways, there’s nothing very new about Billy Summers, yet with its attention to detail and commitment to the emotional reality of the story, it is a fine work by an old master.
5. The Peregrine by J. A. Baker
If, like me, you have listened to a number of Werner Herzog interviews on YouTube, you will have heard of this book. Why on earth does the famous Bavarian filmmaker, who once had a ship dragged over a mountain in Peru, who once cooked and ate his own shoe, who once, after being shot, said that “it was not a significant bullet” (it was rubber), recommend this collection of bird-watching observations by an elusive Englishman who lived and died in Chelmsford, Sussex? It becomes more comprehensible when you read the book and understand that it is not just a diary of a man monitoring the activities of the peregrine, an elusive and powerful falcon, but rather the diary of a man becoming at one with the peregrine, until he virtually sees through the eyes of the swooping bird. It is often a difficult book to get through, structured as it is in the form of repetitive diary entries, some uneventful, others packed with the details of the peregrine’s majestic killing of some hapless prey. Early on, however, it becomes clear why Herzog considers this essential reading for would-be filmmakers, as Baker declares that “[t]he hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.” His quest was to see what was really there, not as a detached observer, but as an emotionally engaged participant. This culminates in striking passages, such as when he notices “[i]n a lair of shadow the peregrine was crouching, watching me, gripping the neck of a dead branch. We live, in these days in the open, the same ecstatic fearful life. We shun men. We hate their suddenly uplifted arms, the insanity of their flailing gestures, their erratic scissoring gait, their aimless stumbling ways, the tombstone whiteness of their faces.” Baker’s absorption into the life of the peregrine is gradual, almost imperceptible for the first half of the book, but as the pages go by, the truth of his experience becomes clear. It is a remarkable piece of writing, if only for demonstrating the extent of one man’s commitment to his subject.
4. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Certain books cannot be described, summarised, or even really talked about. There is nothing to do except reread them. Bulgakov’s famous novel is one of these. It depicts the visit of the Devil himself to 1930s Moscow, and the subsequent breakdown of sanity and reality among those who come into contact with this diabolical newcomer. It also depicts Pontius Pilate at the trial of Jesus, as he decides whether or not to sentence this upstart to death by crucifixion. If one were to liken the book to other famous works, the list would be long. Its chaotic, nightmarish atmosphere echoes the sufferings of Kafka’s protagonist in The Trial, but also the similar misery of Golyadkin in Dostoevsky’s The Double. Of course it feels at times like a biblical episode, at other times like a folk tale; and at other times still it brings to mind South American magical realism: one wonders if Márquez was influenced. Baz Luhrmann has apparently acquired the rights and is working on an adaptation: it is absolutely inconceivable to me that an American could successfully put this book onscreen. If there is a reason to learn Russian, perhaps it is to read this book in its original language: I imagine only then could a reader actually claim to understand it.
3. Stoner by John Williams
Certain books amaze through their inventive style, others through their astounding events. Some works, however, offer the simplest style and the simplest events, and by these means produce a crushing emotional experience. Williams’s novel Stoner is, in one sense, simply about an academic who marries the wrong woman, and finds his life turned to misery as a consequence. In a greater sense, however, it is a book that records the pieces of life that an ordinary man, William Stoner, gives away and struggles to reclaim, day after day, across mundane years that leave little mark on the world. It is not only that Stoner marries the wrong woman: he fails to realise his error sooner, he makes many false moves in trying to rebalance his mistake, he buries himself in his work without exercising enough self-awareness, he does not properly protect his relationship with his daughter, too often he defends his independence and integrity too late, and above all, he does not take the risks that he must take, in order to maintain his vitality. Yet, on the other hand, he becomes a good and respected teacher, he retains his goodness to the extent that he finds true love, albeit fleeting, he never loses the affection of his daughter, he largely avoids doing anything that he considers wrong, and he holds onto his sense of pride and self-respect, despite assaults on it from all sides. Stoner is the kind of book that can be read as a brutal tragedy, as William is crushed by his own lack of courage and decisiveness; or it can be read as a tale of endurance, as Stoner keeps on going despite the cold indifference of life. Either way, it is an essential work of literature.
2. Solar Bones by Mike McCormack
If possible, read this book without looking at any reviews (even this one), without even reading the back cover text or the Amazon synopsis. McCormack’s only error in creating this work, I would argue, was to allow its revelatory climax to be publicised. What can be said, however, is that this novel unfolds in a single sentence: of course there are paragraph breaks, but otherwise, every line slips directly into the next, without any division. In this, it draws greatly from Joyce and Beckett, but unlike other Irish writers whose efforts languish in the shadow of these past greats, McCormack’s style incorporates the influence of his forebears into his own entirely distinctive voice. The book does not offer any particular plot: rather, the narrator, Marcus Conway, a middle-aged engineer from an unnamed Irish town, sits at his kitchen table, ruminating on recent and distant memories of his life, passing back and forth from personal and public matters. In the Joycean fashion, Conway’s roving narration touches on countless topics: marital fidelity, the awkward relationship with migrated children, his wife’s woeful experience of cryptosporidiosis, his work as an engineer and his conflict with local officials over the unstable foundations of a new school, and much else besides. It is a book that attempts to take in all of a man’s thoughts and feelings, at a pivotal moment in his existence, as he contends with the unsettling realisation that “having lived a decent life might not in itself be enough — or a life which till now I had honestly thought had been decent — since there was now some definite charge or accusation in the air which made it appear that not having done anything wrong was not enough”. Like Stoner, this is a book that is concerned with the question: what gives ordinary life its value? It’s not clear if Conway, or McCormack, find an answer, but both writer and narrator are convinced that it’s essential to keep conscious, and to keep asking.
1. Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Fitzgerald is most famous for The Great Gatsby, which is a shame, because his last novel, Tender is the Night, is a superior masterpiece. Though it opens, in cinematic fashion, on Rosemary Hoyt, a young Hollywood actress, its central storyline is the life of Dick Diver, a talented psychiatrist, who becomes embroiled in a complex romance and, later, marriage with wealthy heiress Nicole Warren. Diver and his story epitomise the elite end of the Lost Generation, all those young men and women who found themselves disoriented and directionless after World War I, a cohort that formed one of Fitzgerald’s central topics, not least because he ranked among them. In Fitzgerald’s vision, these dissolute elites wandered through the cultural centres of Europe, gathering and discarding friends like so many beautiful handkerchiefs, always maintaining a demeanour of detachment and drollness. In this way, one of Diver’s companions is astonished to engage in a physical confrontation with another man, because “he was one of those for whom the sensual world does not exist, and faced with a concrete fact he brought to it a vast surprise.” Indeed, this is a novel of shimmering surfaces shifting over cold concrete realities, as each character tries to maintain their own fairy-tale in the face of the real world and its pressures. Bit by bit, Fitzgerald takes us from the superficial narrative of Diver — a man of tremendous humour, grace, and social skill, who captivates the young Rosemary and has a perfect marriage with the glamorous Nicole — through to his murky wanton depths, as a man who needs to realise his natural brilliance, yet repeatedly foils himself from achieving this, and so becomes condemned to a life of aesthetic beauty and spiritual translucency. Indeed, like Stoner and Solar Bones, this is a novel about how to live a good life, and the awful frustration that settles on those who never learn the secret. Still, in some ways, this version of the story has a happy ending: though you’ll have to read the book to make up your own mind.
