Christmas books II: Books of the year

Spectator, The, Nov 22, 1997

Books of the Year

A further selection of the best and worst books of the year, chosen by some of our regular contributors

John Fowles

I thought one novel this year thoroughly exceptional. It will make 1997 a year to remember. This was Thomas Pynchon's Mason and Dixon (Cape, 16.99). Quite remarkably rich and allusive, I really could not fault it except perhaps in that it justifies those adjectives so completely (it is very long, as delicate as an ornithology, and needs complex magpie learning in both history and language, so it is not easy to read). As a fellow-novelist I could only envy it and the culture that permits the creation and success of such intricate masterpieces. This almost feels like the last great fiction of our dying era. Though I'm sure it won't be, I must admire its sense of the bright farewell, the clear passing overseas of the torch that Peacock, Dickens, Lawrence and Conrad bore. You'll not find a better, this next time round.

William Boyd

An odd year for me of intermittent reading (a novel was being written) still managed to produce some rare treats. Jamie MacKendrick won the Forward Poetry Prize for his third collection, The Marble Fly (OUP, 6.99) - clever, wry, rich, lyrical - a wonderful poet already and a major one in the making. I powered through Geoff Dyer's book about his inability to write a book about D. H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage (Little, Brown, 16.99). Funny and self-laceratingly candid but with a nice Nabokovian spin on the fatal and irresistible allure of procrastination - a disease we all suffer from, alas, perhaps writers more than others. But no such problems, apparently, for the industrious John Wyse Jackson and Peter Costello in their continually illuminating, fascinating, highly readable and therefore ideally scholarly biography of John Stanislaus Joyce (Fourth Estate, 20), the monstrous father of the more famous James.

Peter Levi

The best book all round and the most rereadable, the fireside friend, is James Lees-Milne's Ancient as the Hills, Diaries 1973-74, but William Dalrymple's travel book is the most remarkable bundle of surprises and a real literary excitement as well (From the Holy Mountain, HarperCollins, 18). In this house our special favourite book this year is Jeremy Lewis's Cyril Connolly (Cape, 25); it is the funniest and has the most spring in its step of any literary life I have read in ages. Galileo's Salad (Carcanet, L7.95) is the latest collection from John Heath-Stubbs. His poems approach English literature like an iceberg approaching the Titanic. They are wonderful and his position looms as one of Oxford's greatest poets of the midcentury.

Andrew Barrow

I have had the curious privilege this year of having two excellent books dedicated to me, and though it would be churlish not to mention Hugh Massingberd's Daily Telegraph Third Book of Obituaries:

Entertainers (Macmillan, 16.99) and Mary Killen's Your Social Dilemmas Resolved (Constable, L9.99), I can hardly choose them as my favourite books of the year. This honour must go to two great novels of the Thirties, Elizabeth Bowen's The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart (both Penguin, L6.99). I read these classics for the first time this year and found them utterly absorbing.

For lighter perusal, I recommend A. A. Gill's The Ivy: A Restaurant and its Recipes. The Ivy just happens to be the place where Hugh Massingberd launched his Entertainers book this autumn at a lunch that went on till 6.15 pm.

Enough of this nonsense. The book I would like to be recommending this year is Piers Paul Read's formidable new novel about social, moral and family dilemmas under New Labour. Alas, I understand that Mr Read, who is uniquely equipped to write such a book, which would be a sort of sequel to his masterly A Married Man (Phoenix House, 6.99), has no plans to do so. Who, I wonder, will step into the breach?

Andro Linklater

Jim Crace's Quarantine (Viking, l16.99) was by a country mile the best fiction I read this year. Not since the death of Angela Carter has an English novelist succeeded in harnessing the wild, disorderly element of the English imagination to story-telling with such authority. A great novel. None of the pieces in Ahead of its Time, edited by Duncan McLean (Cape, L9.99), touches this high mark, but this repellently designed collection of early works by Scots writers like Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner, first published in the 1990s, gives a genuine flavour of the sprawling demotic vigour of the latest wave of writing north of the border. Finally, with couplets like this, `He stared. Lust bristled up his thighs/ And poured into the roots of his teeth,' Ted Hughes' Tales from Ovid (Faber, L7.99), a retelling of the poet's Metamorphoses, has caught perfectly the original's knowing passion.

D. J. Taylor

My series of annual puffs for succeeding volumes of Pierre Coustillas, Paul F. Matheisen and Arthur C. Young's magisterial edition of The Collected Letters of George Gissing ends with the appearance of the ninth and final volume (University of Ohio Press, L75). Covering the years 19023, and containing some wretched letters from Gissing's last illness - he died of emphysema at 46 - this brings Professor Coustillas's decades of endeavour to a triumphant conclusion. All that remains is for the doyen of Gissing studies to complete a biography that was first advertised in the publishers' catalogues as long ago as 1981.