The big novels of 2012
From Hilary Mantel to Martin Amis, Ian McEwan to Zadie Smith, plus
the first adult novel from JK Rowling - the biggest stars are out in
2012. Here's a guide to an extraordinary year in fiction.
Capital by John Lanchester (Faber, February)
John Lanchester's novel of money and the metropolis was published to
high hopes - not least because its author had made a name for himself as
a journalist on the side, explaining the crash in terms that even arts
graduates could understand. Capital is an ambitious state-of-the-nation
fiction with a positively Victorian breadth, dramatising many
present-day obsessions, from bank meltdowns to Islamist terrorism, house
prices to parking tickets.
Street in south London Capital is an ambitious
state-of-the-nation fiction … a street in south London.
Picture by Toby Melville/Reuters |
It follows a varied cast of characters grouped around a Clapham
street recently colonised by the City rich: a Polish builder, a
Zimbabwean traffic warden, a Senegalese footballer, a lonely old lady -
and at the centre of it all, a banker and his spa-obsessed harpy of a
wife.
Capital was generally well received by the critics. Claire Tomalin,
fresh from her Dickens biography, praised Lanchester's reports from the
front line of London life - for telling the reader what it's like to be
detained without charge under the terrorism laws, or to receive a life-destroyingly
small banker's bonus (not much more than the average yearly income).
However, some reviewers complained that its episodic, soapy story lacked
a central thrust; and that its language didn't have the energy of the
big urban novels that it resembles, such as Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of
the Vanities. Either way, it's clever, thoroughly researched and an
engrossing read.
The Chemistry of Tears by Peter Carey (Faber, February)
The consolations of clockwork lie at the heart of Peter Carey's 12th
novel, which employs a large mechanical bird to link the stories of two
unhappy people - the 19th-century father of a sickly boy, who is
constantly searching for distractions to keep his son alive, and a
modern museum curator mourning the sudden death of her lover. The
dismembered automaton is delivered to Catherine Gehrig in eight tea
chests by a colleague who believes that reassembling it will distract
her from her grief. Packed in with it are the diaries of Henry
Brandling, which recount his journey to the Black Forest, the centre of
German clock-making, to meet a master craftsman capable of building a
mechanical duck that can eat and excrete.
A mere duck will not do for the clockmaker, any more than clockwork,
for all its engrossing ingenuity, will do for Carey. As well as being
the birthplace of the cuckoo-clock, the Black Forest is the spiritual
home to the German fairytale. The clockmaker's final, fantastic creation
- reassembled and reanimated by Catherine in a classic Carey setpiece -
is as much a creation of human yearning for the resolution of a story as
it is an assembly of cogs and wheels. While welcoming the novel for its
research, its ingenuity and its picaresque energy, several reviewers
complained that they found it hard to sympathise with the grieving
Catherine, and that Carey's underlying exploration - of what it is that
makes human beings more than "intricate chemical machines" - is
unsatisfying. It's an ingenious construction, but not quite perfect in
all its parts.
Skagboys by Irvine Welsh (Jonathan Cape, April)
Twenty years ago, Irvine Welsh published Trainspotting, now an
undisputed landmark in British fiction. Ten years ago, he published
Porno, a slick if relatively unloved sequel. This year, he published a
prequel, Skagboys, about Renton, Sick Boy and Spud's descent into heroin
use in early 1980s Edinburgh. The new book starts off like a blunt anti-Thatcherite
epic, with Renton beaten up on a picket line during the miners' strike
and Spud laid off from his job as a removal man, while
pharmaceutical-grade heroin leaks onto the streets of the Scottish
capital.
Later it becomes more rambling and more personal, following the path
of Renton's self-destruction, from university in Aberdeen back home to
Leith, via a filthy squat in Hackney. Inevitably, Skagboys lost out in
comparisons to the original.
The writing is sometimes slack - it is based on unpublished drafts
written before Trainspotting, and some readers felt that they were being
fobbed off with reheated cabbage; it's about three times the length, yet
it covers much of the same ground.
Others loved it, with many fans placing it alongside Marabou Stork
Nightmares in the "nearly as good as Trainspotting" file; one reviewer
even compared it to Moby-Dick, calling it "close to magnificent". At the
very least, it provides a full-on immersion in Welsh's Leith, with its
unforgettable cast of radges, bams and junkies.
The Beginner's Goodbye by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus, April)
The fact that The Beginner's Goodbye, Anne Tyler's 19th novel,
received a couple of distinctly tepid reviews will not deter her devoted
readership. Even when not at the height of her powers, Tyler offers a
dose of fictional solace and sustenance that few contemporary writers
can provide. Part of what makes her fiction so comforting is its
familiarity, and all the trademark Tylerisms are to be found in The
Beginner's Goodbye: the shabby gentility of the Baltimore setting; the
emotionally repressed and (literally) limp hero; the amusingly
mismatched marriage; the fairytale ending.
Aaron Woolcott's world collapses when a tree crushes part of his
house and kills Dorothy, his wife. It is turned upside down once more
when she seems to return as a no-nonsense ghost. Although Tyler has
tackled grief before, most particularly in 1991's Saint Maybe, in a rare
interview she revealed that The Beginner's Goodbye was the first time
she felt able to approach her feelings of loss and bewilderment
following her husband's death 15 years ago.
Much of the satisfaction of a Tyler novel stems from the skill with
which she teeters on the brink of sentimentality, and some readers may
feel she has slipped too far into feyness on this occasion. But, despite
the whimsy, her sure comic touch, unfailing empathy and gentle wisdom
win through.
Home by Toni Morrison (Chatto & Windus, May)
Frank, a traumatised black veteran of the Korean war, is angrily
adrift in an America that remains as brutally racist as ever. News that
his younger sister Cee is in peril from the depredations of a eugenicist
doctor draws him back to the small Georgia town where they'd shared a
loveless, hardscrabble childhood.
Lotus had seemed "the worst place in the world ... nothing to survive
or worth surviving for", but the damaged Frank and Cee must find the
inner strength to make an accommodation with a place they could call
home. Nobel laureate Morrison's 10th novel is an intense, striking read,
though some critics found the book moved too briskly to develop and
deepen her abiding themes of violence and fortitude, horror and love.
Hever Castle Hever Castle, Kent ... Anne Boleyn's childood home.
Photograph: Prudence Hone
Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel (Fourth Estate, May)
For the first time in her novelistic career, Hilary Mantel has
written a book that is like her previous one. Bring Up the Bodies is
just as good as Wolf Hall, the product of a still-consuming passion for
the transformation of historical detail into darkly vivid fiction. It
narrates the events leading up to Anne Boleyn's execution, a climax
arranged by Mantel's protagonist, Thomas Cromwell.
As before, the novel is narrated from Cromwell's point of view, and
the strange sympathy she creates for this servant of power faces new
tests. In a brilliantly unsettling chapter, he interrogates the four
doomed victims of the "plot" he has discovered: the men accused of being
the Queen's lovers. We are used to these processes of threat and
humiliation, but not to seeing them from the interrogator's point of
view.
It is a big book, but with a turn of phrase to be relished in almost
every sentence. The sharp-eyed Cromwell is the novelist's best
accomplice, noticing every telling circumstantial detail, each "shadow
of calculation" that crosses another's face. As in Wolf Hall, the story
is told in the historic present tense, and for a very good reason.
Mantel is unstitching history - reimagining events as provisional,
undecided. Cromwell moves from one danger to another; there is no
vantage point beyond events. Always there is risk. "Death is your
prince, you are not his patron."
Lionel Asbo: State of England by Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape, June)
When Martin Amis bade temporary farewell to his Brooklyn brownstone
to give his new novel its London launch, he had to spend a lot of time
explaining to interviewers that Lionel Asbo was not intended as a
two-fingered salute to the country he's written so provocatively about
for so long. In fact, he says, he'd written most of this tale of a
delightedly thuggish criminal who wins a fortune on the lottery before
he left Britain, for family reasons, a year or so ago.
There's actually something rather affectionate in Amis's portrayal of
Lionel, particularly in his tortured diction and the immense effort that
he puts into keeping on the wrong side of the law in the grotty, vicious
(and fictional) London borough of Diston Town.
Why else would the author reward him with not only a bumper payday
but the attentions of pneumatic glamour model (and poet) "Threnody"?
Whatever Amis's real feelings about Lionel, the critics were predictably
divided; they were, however, more inclined to give him a chance than
they had been The Pregnant Widow's toffs cavorting around an Italian
castle. Amis wouldn't be Amis if he didn't roam up and down the class
scale like a demented pianist, but one suspect he finds it a little
easier to have fun with the Lionels of this world.
Canada by Richard Ford (Bloomsbury, June)
Now we've been let into the secret of Richard Ford's success: in a
recent interview, the Pulitzer prize-winner described how he began work
on Canada, his seventh novel, 20 years ago - and then decided to store
his notes in the freezer.
He also revealed that when he was working on the book again, he told
his doctor to tread lightly during an annual check-up; if Ford knew
anything was wrong with him, he reckoned, he'd never finish it. Both
details speak of a writer with exceptional dedication to his craft - and
it shows. Canada is a wildly impressive novel that demonstrates what
John Banville, reviewing it for this newspaper, called Ford's
"unrelenting control" over his prose. It also boasts a gripping story.
Set in Great Falls, Montana, it is narrated by 16-year-old Dell
Parsons, who is forced to run for the Canadian border when his parents,
"the least likely two people in the world to rob a bank", do exactly
that.
The novel's opening line promises us that later - just in case a bank
robbery wasn't thrilling enough - there will be murders. But there are
also some fine character studies, a beautifully observed portrait of
small-town life and a thought-provoking exploration of the complicated
relationship - both actual and imagined - between two very different
countries.
Ancient Light by John Banville (Viking, July)
John Banville's latest loops back to pick up the threads of a pair of
novels from his pre-Booker-winning days. In Ancient Light, we're dropped
once more into the mind of ageing actor Alexander Cleave, first
inhabited in 2000's Eclipse, then glimpsed slantingly in 2002's Shroud,
which culminated in the fatal fall of his afflicted daughter, Cass, from
a church tower on the Italian coast. Cass is one of the ghosts who haunt
the pages of this dense, often wrenching novel; the other is Mrs Gray,
mother of Alexander's schoolfriend Billy, with whom, at the age of 15,
he embarked on an importunate affair.
With its fixation on past events and assiduous exposure of the fatal
unreliability of memory (details and chronology slip and slide in
Alexander's recollection; seasons shift in an instant from spring to
autumn, the sun jumps back and forth across the sky), Ancient Light
works well as a meditation on memory and the lies we permit it to tell
us. But the novel comes to life when it shakes off philosophy and sinks
into the sensory. The self-contained vignettes in which Alexander
recalls his panting encounters with Mrs Gray are brilliant; Banville
excels in his brightly lit descriptions of self-absorbed teenage lust.
Toby's Room by Pat Barker (Hamish Hamilton, August)
Pat Barker has a penchant - or perhaps compulsion - for revisiting
her characters, most obviously in the Regeneration trilogy, which
culminated with 1995's Booker prize-winning The Ghost Road. Here, she's
back with the students of the Slade School of Art, whom we first met
five years ago in her novel Life Class. Not that Toby's Room is a
straightforward continuation: its narrative is split between 1912 and
1917, bookending Life Class's 1914 setting.
Barker's focus is art student Elinor Brooke, torn between a desperate
desire for independence and a feeling (partly ascribed to Virginia Woolf,
whom she briefly meets) that the war has nothing to do with women. But
when her troubled brother, Toby, is reported "Missing, Believed Killed",
she knows that she must find out what happened to him, and enlists the
help of her one-time lover, Paul Tarrant.
The novel's tension derives from the ambiguity of Elinor's search;
the extent to which she simply wants to put to rest her doubts about
Toby's mental state. More than 20 years after she first began writing
about the first world war, Barker's determined unsentimentality is still
impressive. Only she, maybe, could have a horribly injured soldier
remark: "'You know the rules as well as I do. What happens out there
stays out there.' He stood up. 'Along with my fucking nose.'"
Umbrella by Will Self (Bloomsbury, August)
Stream of consciousness is a notoriously challenging form, but it
seems typical that Will Self would not restrict himself to one single
mind. Umbrella waltzes between three minds and two people: his recurring
character, the psychiatrist Zack Busner, in the 1970s and the present
day; and a patient, Audrey Dearth, or De'Ath, or Death, who suffers from
encephalitis lethargica, the so-called "sleepy sickness" which broke out
in 1918 and left its victims locked in for decades, conscious but
unresponsive. Busner brought the patients out of their open-eyed comas
in the 70s, and by the present day is haunted by whether or not he did
the right thing.
In prose uninterrupted by chapters or line breaks, a twisted version
of the 20th century is woven and unpicked again. It is a postmodern
vivisection of Modernism, analysing the dream and the machine, war as
the old lie and a new liberation, and rituals sacred, profane and banal.
Of course, it features Self's trademark satirical cadenzas, but this is
perhaps his most humane book to date: his wit is tempered, becoming
steelier and more ferocious.
The world of medicine provides an emblem for Self's own concerns with
language; how polysyllabic pile-ups and esoteric coinings can conceal
ideas rather than make them precise, how language is the disease and the
diagnosis. Self has never been shortlisted for the Booker, but Umbrella
is such a linguistically adept, emotionally subtle and ethically complex
novel that this could and should be his year.
Zoo Time by Howard Jacobson (Bloomsbury, August)
One hopes, for Howard Jacobson's sake, that the spiky exchange that
opens his first novel since the Man Booker-winning The Finkler Question
wasn't drawn from real life. In it, a reading group member demands that
the narrator, novelist Guy Ableman, explain why he hates women so much;
when he asks her to give him an example, she produces an extensively
marked-up copy of his book. Not, perhaps, a moment that any writer would
look forward to (particularly not one whose publisher has recently
killed himself directly after they had lunch together).
Even more irritatingly, Guy came to the meeting only because of its
proximity to his mother-in-law, "with whom I had for a long time been
thinking of having an affair". Aha! We're in Jacobson territory all
right; a land where desire simply won't do what it's told and pops up in
the trickiest of places.
You don't read Jacobson for a restrained and respectful delineation
of what goes on between men and women; you read him for a
no-holds-barred, bawdy and highly naughty glimpse into what we're all
really thinking about doing to one another. And for the jokes, of which
Zoo Time has plenty. Not sure that reader with the red pen would find
them very funny, though.
Ian Hamilton Ian Hamilton ... leans on the bar of a Soho pub in Ian
McEwan's Sweet Tooth. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images
Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan (Jonathan Cape, August)
It will be enough for many that it's a new McEwan novel. That it's
about spying and seduction will surely quicken appetites. But that Sweet
Tooth also has a frisson of autobiography will add an unexpected gossipy
buzz. For there in the novel is McEwan's friend Martin Amis as a young
man - it is set in the early 1970s - reading The Rachel Papers to an
enraptured audience. There is legendary publisher Tom Maschler, who
helped to discover McEwan. And there is the New Review editor Ian
Hamilton leaning on the bar of Soho's Pillars of Hercules doling out to
new writers in his circle (as McEwan himself was) his distinctive form
of very high praise ("not bad"). What's more, a central character is a
writer, Tom Haley, with connections to the University of Sussex (from
where McEwan graduated in 1970), who wins a literary prize with his
rather odd first work - McEwan won the Somerset Maugham award in 1976
for First Love, Last Rites ...
But let's not get carried away. The story is told by Serena Frome, a
Cambridge graduate who develops an intellectual crush on Solzhenitsyn
and gets recruited to MI5, where her first real assignment is a skirmish
in the cultural cold war. She surreptitiously funds the anti-communist
Haley, with whom she is soon smitten - but what will happen when her
cover is blown? In restaurants they talk about the war in Northern
Ireland and the three-day week: early 70s Britain is grey and rather
desperate; the service's offices are smoke-stained and unswanky. Think
Le Carré, who is thanked in the acknowledgements for "irresistible
reminiscences", with a touch of the tough-guy politics of Amis's Koba
the Dread. (The book is dedicated to Christopher Hitchens, another
mucker from those days.)
Yet this is (in more than one sense) no straightforward spy thriller.
From the start the story seems oddly told, and there's a suspicion that
more is going on than meets the reader's eye. It will come as no
surprise to McEwan's legions of expectant admirers that Sweet Tooth is
also a novel about books and writing - one in which the author has a
great deal of fun, not only with his 70s past, and sex and secret
agents, but with the idea of deception itself.
Boneland by Alan Garner (Fourth Estate, August)
The conclusion to Alan Garner's classic fantasy sequence, which began
with his debut The Weirdstone of Brisingamen in 1960, has been 50 years
in the making. "Trilogies are strange creatures," he admitted earlier
this year, having previously said he could never write the novel
"lurking within" book two, The Moon of Gomrath. "Why did it take so long
for Boneland to gestate? All I can say is that it took as long as it
took."
Like all Garner's work, the early books draw on myths and legends
both universal and local; they describe the magical adventures of
brother and sister Colin and Susan around Alderley Edge in Cheshire as
they clash with and are changed by ancient forces beyond their control.
In Boneland, time has moved on and Colin has grown up to become an
astronomer, searching for his missing sister among the stars and out on
the Edge; he cannot remember anything of his childhood. In another
dimension, a Watcher looks for a Woman. Both must find what they're
searching for, and fast, or "the skies will fall, and there will be only
winter, wanderers and moon".
Philip Pullman describes Garner's work as a place "where human
emotion and mythic resonance, sexuality and geology, modernity and
memory and craftsmanship meet and cross-fertilise". From Harry Potter to
The Hunger Games, adults have been enthusiastically reading children's
books over recent years. Garner predates the crossover phenomenon by
decades, but he's never been just a children's writer: he's far richer,
odder and deeper than that.
The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling (Little, Brown, September)
As with her world-conquering Harry Potter books, the contents of JK
Rowling's first novel for adults will be a closely guarded secret until
publication day. All we know so far is that, in true Potter style, it's
a whopper at 512 pages; a "big book about a small town" in which
horcruxes and golden snitches are replaced by council meetings and
squabbles on the village green. Pagford appears to be an English idyll,
but feuds and passions seethe below the surface, erupting into all-out
war when the sudden death of Barry Fairbrother leaves an empty seat on
the parish council. It's classic society-in-microcosm territory: Little,
Brown promise a "thought-provoking" black comedy.
Merivel: A Man of His Time by Rose Tremain (Chatto & Windus,
September)
Having won the Orange prize in 2008 for her contemporary novel The
Road Home, Rose Tremain returns to historical fiction, and to the
narrator of 1989's Restoration, in Merivel: A Man of His Time.
It is 15 years since Sir Robert Merivel returned to Bidnold Manor in
Norfolk; at the urging of his beloved daughter Margaret, he decides to
tackle his middle-aged melancholy and, armed with a letter from his
patron Charles II, sets off for Louis XIV's glittering palace of
Versailles. Andrew Motion said of Tremain's historical fiction that "she
manages to make good stories, ripping yarns ... but when we read them we
realise that she's up to something more ingenious than that, more
modern, self-reflexive and complicated ... We're having a good time in
an old-fashioned sense but also being made to think about things."
Tremain's 12th adult novel reflects her scope, luminous style and
emotional resonance.
NW by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton, September)
It's seven years since Zadie Smith's last novel, the Orange
prize-winning On Beauty, during which time the literary world's
fascination with her has remained undimmed. Fortunately, her new one is
a triumph: the intertwined stories of a group of Londoners, linked by
the council estate they grew up on, trying to negotiate adult life in an
era of arrested development. Driven Natalie, who reinvented herself as
the world's idea of a success, is coming off the rails; uncertain Leah
is balking at the prospect of motherhood; for Nathan, it's been downhill
since primary school.
The complex topography of modern London is explored in a dazzling
portrait of aspiration and apathy, change and continuity, the social and
personal barriers between people and how they can be breached. As Smith
threads together her characters' inner and outer worlds, every sentence
sings. - The Guardian |