Books of 2009

I’ve seen a number of people listing things like their top ten books of the decade or their favourite films of the decade. I’m not going to do that for the simple reason that there is still a full year to go before the end of the decade. However, this is my list of the books I read this year, and, pleasingly, in the last few hours of the old year I managed to finish number 70. As ever, the ones I recommend are in bold:

Welcome to Avilion

Just back from the funeral service for Rob Holdstock. No, ‘funeral service’ is the wrong term; it was a memorial ceremony, a celebration. It was moving and hard to take and joyous all at the same time. It took place in a Unitarian Chapel, but it was the most unreligious ceremony you could imagine: the only ‘hymn’ we sang, right at the end, was Woody Guthrie’s ‘So Long, It’s Been Good To Know You’.

An Answer

I interviewed Rob Holdstock several times over the years, enough so that we had a running joke going. He would accuse me of always asking the same question, so I replied if he’d just answer it one time I wouldn’t need to ask it again. But, of course, he didn’t answer it. I’m not altogether sure he could.

The question was: why did you give up science fiction for fantasy?

Amid among betwixt between

I’m currently reading the latest interstitial anthology, Interfictions 2 edited by Delia Sherman and Christopher Barzak. It’s not a bad anthology. If no stories stand out as brilliant, there are no obvious clunkers either. Though for all the claims of innovation, most of the stories are fairly straightforward fantasy or (less commonly) science fiction. It’s quite remarkable how many of the contributions use the standard postmodern trick of foregrounding the fact that it is a story, making the characters aware they are within a fiction or directly addressing the reader. I keep seeing things I’ve seen rather too often elsewhere; in fact, reading it has made me realise why I feel so ambivalent about the whole interstitial enterprise.

The High Cs

We like our alphabet in sf: ABC (Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke), the three B’s (Bear, Benford, Brin), etc. All of these, of course, are still in print, still read. But what about that cluster of British writers of the 70s, Compton, Coney, Cooper, Cowper? Mostly out of print and forgotten now, it would seem. Which is a shame.

Simenon and evil

Off to the London Review Bookshop yet again, (by way of a Starbucks where the bacon and egg panini seemed to consist mostly of mushrooms) to see John Banville in action once more. This could get to feel like stalking. This time he and John Gray are talking about Georges Simenon, whose books I’ve found unreadable though I’ve enjoyed the Maigret dramatisations on the radio.

SF Addict

Intriguing, though when you think about it not totally surprising, to discover that William Golding was what he describes as a ‘science fiction addict’. At Christmas 1954, the year that The Lord of the Flies was published, Charles Mentieth sent him some sf novels (John Carey, in his biography of Golding, does not mention which). In an enthusiastic response, Golding wrote how keen he was on sf, listing as favourites Ray Bradbury, C.S. Lewis, and ‘A Case of Conscience’ by James Blish. As Carey notes, he must have read this as a novella in If since the novel wasn’t published until 1958.

Flaws in the Matrix

Anyone who has driven along the dispiriting stretch of holiday homes overshadowed by the grim sea wall at Dymchurch will understand well enough why the fairies chose to flit from there. But as Rudyard Kipling wrote it, the fairies left because Britain changed from being Catholic believers to Protestant sceptics.

Three Paragraphs

I’ve been following the Short Story Club over at Torque Control, if not always taking part, and I’ve realised that one of the things that has bothered me is that three of the four stories so far have not been what I would call a well-made story. Let me try and explain by picking up just three paragraphs from the latest story, ‘The Rising Waters’ by Benjamin Crowell, published in two parts, here and here. This is not meant as an analysis of the story as a whole, just a reading of what he says in these paragraphs.

I’m only omniscient some of the time

A photograph never quite tells the whole story. I recognised John Banville the moment he walked into the London Review Bookshop, he was exactly like his photographs. Yet there was still something different: he was shorter and heavier than I had anticipated. His face seemed the result of high gravity, the flesh had descended loosely around cheek and jaw but was tight across the brow. He had that mournful, Clement Freud look, offset by an attractively self-deprecating sense of humour.