My top ten books of the last decade

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Adam Roberts, Christopher Priest, Colson Whitehead, David Mitchell, Hilary Mantel, Kate Atkinson, M. John Harrison, nina allan

I have chosen one book from each year, with the added proviso that I have chosen no more than one title per author. That is, I admit, an artificial rule, and it did give me problems on a couple of years, but it avoids the problem that the list would otherwise be dominated by the same two or three names.

Some of these were obvious from the moment I thought of doing this list (the first and last on the list, for instance), others less so, mostly when there were years in which no title really sang out to me. I was sorely tempted to list two books from one year and none from another. But if you set yourself rules, I suppose the least you can do is stick to them. So here are ten books from the last ten years. I’d be very interested tosee what your lists are.

2011
The Islanders – Christopher Priest
When I started this exercise, this was the first book I thought of. It is among the two or three very best novels Priest has written. I have read it several times now, and each time it seems fresh, each time the complexity, the daring, the humour all combine to make the book exciting and invigorating. There is always something new to discover within its maze of distortions, uncertainties, twists in time and games with identity. I reviewed the novel for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

2012
Bring Up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel
I remember the excitement of reading Wolf Hall when it first came out. I know most commentators focussed on the way the novel connected with history, the rehabilitation of Thomas Cromwell (up to that point familiarly presented as one of the villains of the age), the sense of being fully absorbed in the politics of the age. But for me what I found most engaging was the language. I wrote at Big Other about Mantel’s use of the word “he”, and what it signifies about identity and narrative voice. So now, two years later, there comes a sequel, and any fears I might have had are quickly dispelled: the same language, the same inhabitation of the age. The two books together are simply magnificent.

2013
Life After Life – Kate Atkinson
I continue to regard this book as one of the finest works of science fiction of the last decade, although, as I said when I wrote about it here, it is a book that demands not to be read as science fiction. It is a variant on an alternate history novel, but here it is a single life, a single consciousness, that is fragmented. Ursula constantly dies and is reborn, barely if at all conscious of her previous existences, but always trying to relive her life in a way that brings her closer to achieving her goal, which is the survival of her brother who, most commonly, is killed in a bomber raid over Germany during World War II. The sequel, A God in Ruins, details the emptiness of the life that is thus saved, making for an extraordinarily powerful dyptych of novels.

2014
The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell
Not, perhaps, his finest novel (that, surely, is Cloud Atlas), but still a vivid, beautifully realised, and always compelling novel that manages to turn the half-sensed interlinking background that has underlain all of his
previous books into the foreground of the story. And it does so without in any way undermining the faithfulness of Mitchell’s portrayal of ordinary life from the recent past to the near future. As I wrote here, it spells out the patternmaking that is Mitchell’sapproach to writing.

2015
The Thing Itself – Adam Roberts
I had a struggle with myself over Roberts’s place on this list: should his place go to The Thing Itself or to The Black Prince? If I were to subvert my own rules I would do both, without hesitation. But in the end I decided to go with The Thing Itself, partly because, while I love the way The Black Prince retells a medieval story in the manner of John Dos Passos, The Thing Itself includes a whole series of chapters recapturing literary styles that vary from 18th century prose to the work of James Joyce. It’s a joy to read, and the way the title offers a mash-up of John W. Campbell and Immanuel Kant demonstrates what a wild intellectual journey this book is.

2016
The Underground Railroad – Colson Whitehead
Over the years, I have been in disagreement with the Arthur C. Clarke Award more often than not. I have found shortlists to be wilful and bizarre on too many occasions, but even then the right book might emerge as the winner, and this is one such. It is powerful, haunting, unforgettable, all of which I tried to compress into this piece about the book when I was on the Shadow Clarke jury.

2017
The Rift – Nina Allan
Back at the end of 2017, when I wrote my list of the year’s reading, when it came to this novel I simply put: “My book of the year.” I didn’t elaborate, I didn’t try to justify the choice, somehow it felt like I didn’t need to. This was one of those books that was just so unquestionably right that I didn’t think it needed further discussion. It still feels that way to an extent. Of course, it is a novel that ticks all my boxes, a novel of indecision, of uncertainty, a novel that could go in any direction depending upon how we choose to read it. Isn’t that what a great book is supposed to do? Well, so far as I am concerned it is.

2018
Europe at Dawn – Dave Hutchinson
Okay, I’m playing slightly fast and loose with my own rules here, in that I am using the final novel in Hutchinson’s Fractured Europe sequence to stand in for the whole series. Europe in Autumn not winning the Clarke Award was one of the occasions on which I seriously parted company with them. What I wrote about the third book, Europe in Winter, for the Shadow Clarke jury, sums up much of my feeling about the sequence, which I see as one of the most politically relevant works of science fiction we have seen for many years. And the way I see Europe at Dawn as a fine conclusion to the series is spelled out in my review for Locus.

2019
Ivory Apples – Lisa Goldstein
I admit, I have doubts about including this novel in the list. I enjoyed it immensely, and as I said in my review
for Strange Horizons, I thought it was a major work of contemporary fantasy. Yet it somehow feels, in retrospect, slighter than some of the other titles on this list. But I wonder whether that is primarily an artefact of the way 2019 felt to me, a year in which nothing seemed to blaze particularly brightly. I’ve often found that in a year of good books it is easy to spot the great ones; but in a year of mediocre books, even the good ones seem diminished. That was 2019 for me; this is a good novel, it probably deserves its place, but it wasn’t a particularly good year.

2020
The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again – M. John Harrison
Yeah, this is no surprise, is it? Only yesterday I was writing my massive survey of the year’s reading, and I said then that this was without doubt the novel of the year. Well, it is. It is the summation of everything we love about Harrison’s writing: the supple prose, the intense realism, the inescapable sense of the weird beginning to break in around the edges.

Among Ghosts and Giants

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David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro, Leo Tolstoy, M.R. James, Rosemary Sutcliff

Yesterday evening I went in to London to see a conversation between Kazuo Ishiguro and David Mitchell at the Southbank Centre. And very good it was, too.

Patterns

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David Mitchell

David Mitchell does not write stories, he writes patterns. Oh there are stories in his books, but if you read them for the story you are not going to understand what is going on. You need to read them for the shape they are making in order to get out of them all that is going on.

Reprint: Cloud Atlas

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David Mitchell, Russell Hoban

Every so often you read a novel that is absolutely thrilling because of the way it breaks convention, causes you to see things afresh, makes you think harder. Such a novel was Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, and this review was first published in Vector 238, November-December 2004.

BSFA Short Fiction Award

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al robertson, China Mieville, David Mitchell, kameron hurley, nina allan, paul cornell, Robert Holdstock

Still trying to decide how I will vote in the BSFA Awards when I go to Eastercon tomorrow. I’ve made my mind up about the novels, but the short fiction category foxes me. I didn’t read a huge amount of new short fiction in 2011, but was it really such a poor year? My choice, I think, is going to come down to a matter of the least worst, which is not how I like to make award decisions.

Black Swan Green

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David Mitchell

It’s a little early to be thinking about books of the year, but I have a very strong suspicion that Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (Sceptre, 2006) is going to feature on my list. In his previous novels he has proved to be a master of pyrotechnics, but this new book demonstrates that he can also do the sustained narrative voice and the small scale. In other words, he has added more weapons to his arsenal as a novelist without losing those instinctive storytelling skills which keep you moving through his books at a headlong pace.

Astonishing Stories

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Ayelet Waldman, Charles D'Ambrosio, China Mieville, Daniel Handler, David Mitchell, Heidi Julavits, Jason Roberts, Jonathan Lethem, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Peter Straub, Poppy Z. Brite, Roddy Doyle, Stephen King, Steve Erickson

Let us assume, just for a moment, that ‘genre’ delineates a mode of story rather than a mode of telling, in other words that it refers to science fiction and romance and crime and the like rather than to prose and poetry and drama. With me so far? Let us, then, also imagine that there are two approaches to genre. For the sake of argument I shall call them the ‘resident’ and the ‘visitor’ approaches. Those of us who are ‘resident’ in a genre, its habituees, its authors and critics and devoted readers, want the genre to grow and live and change. Thus, although we delight in familiar landmarks, we also like exploring new neighbourhoods, new ways of doing the genre, because that is what keeps it fresh. Those who are visitors to the genre, however, here to see the sights, want it to stay the same because they are here only to see the familiar landmarks, indeed they define the genre in terms of those landmarks, they orient themselves on those landmarks (TM Maureen). Anything that does not conform to the pattern set by those landmarks is not noticed by the visitor because, by definition, it is not what drew them to the genre in the first place. The residents are happy to see change, the visitors are in search of the static.

number9dream

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David Mitchell

I’ve just read David Mitchell’s second novel (Sceptre, 2001). And having now caught up with his entire oeuvre it looks, on current form, like I’ve got to wait a couple of years at least, dammit, before the next book comes along. I’m going to be impatient simply because there is such a wild talent here that I am anxious to see what he does next.

Of his three books to date, this is the closest to a conventional narrative, at least to the extent that it has one continuing narrator, Eiji Miyake, who remains central and on the same quest throughout the entire book. There are a couple other tales that entwine with his – a charming and very odd little fable about a goat who is an author and the hen and Neanderthal who are his companions; and the diary of a kamikaze Japanese mini-submarine pilot during the last days of the Second World War – but essentially this is Miyake’s story from beginning to end. But that does not mean it is a conventional narrative. Miyake is a naive country boy haunted by the death, years before, of his twin sister, who turns up in Tokyo just before his twentieth birthday to discover the identity of his father. His mother, an alcoholic who has played no part in his upbringing, gave birth as the result of a brief fling with someone who appears to have been quite powerful on the edges of Japanese society, and though Miyake simply wants to discover his identity many of those he encounters on this quest believe there are other motives, which sets off much of the extraordinary drama of the story.

We begin with Miyake sitting in a cafe lusting after a waitress and trying to steel himself to cross the road and confront the powerful lawyer who might be able to give him the information he needs. This scene is punctuated with a series of fantasies – in one his confrontation with the lawyer turns into a Matrix-like battle of computer wizardry and incredible futuristic weapons, in another Tokyo is flooded and he rescues the waitress, both of which presage what is apparently going to happen in the real narrative – but in the end he is simply turned away by the lawyer’s receptionist. The dreams in this opening sequence seem to suggest that what follows is real, but at the same time they cue us to read events as dreams, and this curiously delicate ambiguity between fantasy and reality is the line that Mitchell treads with remarkable confidence through the rest of the novel. Miyake’s quest brings him into contact with the Yakuza, and he finds himself in the middle of turf wars between rival gangsters, a war carried out with surreal violence that could be dreamlike or could be terrifyingly real. Shattering incidents happen, then have no apparent consequences, or rather their consequences are not mentioned so we have no idea if they were real or not. A stray cat that wanders into Miyake’s tiny apartment is apparently run over early in the book, but remains his companion for the rest of the novel. Characters drift into the story and out again, but never seem to leave. The waitress becomes his girlfriend; a bored rich boy who picks him up one evening and sweeps him away for a curious night in a private high-class brothel reappears as the victim of Yakuza violence; a voice on the telephone who calls him in the middle of the night to order a peculiar pizza turns out later to be his father. Mitchell does drama (and melodrama) with great assurance, so you always keep reading because you need to know what is going to happen next, how can he top the last extraordinary incident, but all the time you’re not sure how much you’re supposed to believe. Is any of this real; is any of it not real? Then Mitchell ends the novel with the most heart-touching, nerve-shattering cliffhanger I have read for many years, and you realise you want it all to have been real because otherwise this climax would not have the poignancy it does, and at the same time you want to take Mitchell by the throat and shake him until he tells you what happened next.

If I’m sitting back and being clinical about this, I’d say that number9dream is perhaps not quite as good as Ghostwritten and certainly not the stunning achievement of Cloud Atlas (a term that is casually dropped into number9dream), but this is a matter of nuance, of hair-splitting. If I’d read nothing else by Mitchell this novel would have sent me out in desperate search of his other books, because it is a novel you just know is going to haunt you.

First published at Livejournal, 9 October 2004.

Ghostwritten

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David Mitchell

Sometimes the circumstances in which we read a book matters almost more than the book itself. Lawrence Durrell’s The Revolt of Aphrodite will, for me, always be associated with a stone bridge over a dusty river bed in the middle of a Greek island, with a bag of huge purple grapes and the lazy hum of insects. Ghostwritten (Sceptre, 1999) is going to have similar associations. I read the first five pages on the flight to Montpellier, then it stayed in the bag for the rest of the week until I did my knee in on the Friday. This meant I wasn’t able to do the walk on Saturday, so I was transported, along with the luggage, to the isolated gite high on the slopes of Peyrepetuse where we were to spend Saturday night. Here I sat under a trellis loaded with heavy, fat grapes accompanied by the buzz of wasps. Occasionally the owner of the gite would appear to gather tomatoes for the evening meal, or to pick blackberries for tomorrow morning’s jam. Once he placed a glass of wine and a carafe of water in front of me, once more he brought tea while he and his wife settled down to an acrimonious game of chess. But mostly there was no interruption to the long, hot, slow day, just me and the book and the absolute quiet. I didn’t quite finish the book during the day, but by then I was so enraptured by it that I had to hurry through the few remaining pages on the bus to the airport and the flight home next day.

Read when it first appeared, as a first novel without any context, this must have been a dazzling, breathtaking firecracker of a book. Read now, after the even more dazzling Cloud Atlas, it comes over as a dry run for the bigger novel. Luisa Rey even puts in an appearance, not as the heroine of a series of thrillers but as the author of them; and there is a passing reference to the comet-shaped birthmark that tags the successive protagonists of Cloud Atlas. And the structure … oh yes, the structure. We start with the person who perpetrated the sarin gas attack in the Tokyo underground as he flees to ever more remote Japanese islands, at the same time becoming ever more isolated from the cult that sent him on the mission. Then the scene abruptly shifts to a young man managing a small record shop in Tokyo and falling in love with a visitor from Hong Kong. But buried within this second story is the ghost of a reference to the first tale. Then we shift to Hong Kong and the story of the last day of a divorced Englishman caught up in some shady deal. The young lovers from the last story appear in the background of this tale, so already we see the pattern: each story is individual, but each connects to the whole, sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly. That the Hong Kong tale is also a ghost story illustrates the flexibility of Mitchell’s narrative format and the sustained brilliance with which he can take on different voices and styles. Another story, just a little later in the sequence, tells of the journey of a soul as it seeks its host, yet this fits seemlessly into tales of gangsters and art fraud in post-communist Russia, of a gambling scam in contemporary London, and of icy cold war politics being turned upon a brilliant Irish scientist. One story, the penultimate one, is pure science fiction, the story of the end of the world as orchestrated by a super-intelligent computer; yet this story is written as a transcript of a New York late-night radio phone-in show. The gall of the man constantly amazes, but he carries it all off with panache.

As in Cloud Atlas, the stories work in their own right, but because they each carry a fragment of the other stories around them (though you have to keep your wits about you as you are reading precisely because of that) the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The stories in Cloud Atlas are longer, more varied in tone, and therefore contribute more richly to the whole. And because they move in and out of each other the structure works rather better than Ghostwritten where the succession of stories carries you along until the final piece which attempts, not altogether successfully, to reintegrate the whole. Still, that is not to say this is not a dazzling novel that you really should make a point of reading.

First published at Livejournal, 12 September 2004.

Six books

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David Mitchell, Karen Joy Fowler, Kenneth Harvey, Kevin Brockmeier, Matt Ruff, Thomas Mallon

I seem to have read a lot of books over the last few months [this was written in August 2004]. Some I’ve had to read, many have not been as good as I might like, but several have stuck in my mind as being among the best I’ve read in an awful long time. There are six in particular that I would recommend to anyone. In the order in which I have encountered them: