Cover Story
100 best books of 2008
With the Christmas holidays almost upon us, it's again time to sort out one of the essentials: which books to soak up this summer? To help you, Arts & Books editor Guy Somerset and our team of reviewers bring you their pick of the year's top reads, from novels, short stories and poetry to memoirs and picture books
NOVELS
THE BEHAVIOUR OF MOTHS, by Poppy Adams (Virago, $38.99).
An exquisitely written, kaleidoscopic tale of two sisters reunited, after nearly half a century, in the crumbling Gothic mansion in Dorset where they grew up. Adams’ debut is reminiscent of the terrifying, garish theatrics of Robert Aldrich’s macabre and hysterical movie Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? The title comes from lepidopterist sister Ginny, who is more comfortable with moths than with people. Adams’ background as a film-maker serves her well in a novel full of vivid scenes, striking images and spot-on pacing.
BEIJING COMA, by Ma Jian (Chatto and Windus, $36.99). London-based dissident Ma’s novel is a theatrical pageant, by turns comic, lyric and tragic. Its narrative arc is that of the People’s Republic of China through the 20th century and up to 2008. It’s a novel of the Old China – cast your mind back to the feudal yoke of Pearl S Buck’s The Good Earth – and Mao Zedong’s New China, but mostly of the new New China, where Marxist-Leninist ideology has become a get-rich-quick scheme for Communist Party members and the people of the republic groan under the weight of the new feudal yoke of -globalisation.
BREATH, by Tim Winton (Hamish Hamilton, $50). You won’t find better writing about surfing – either inside fiction or outside it; about either the “useless beauty” of the act itself or the bigger existential questions surrounding it. Winton’s theme is the inherent human yearning for excitement and its corollaries, risk and fear (“Being scared is half the fun”), and the anguish of accommodating yourself to the passing of that excitement. If only he would take a few more risks himself, and move on from the keening tone of men recalling the small-town mateships of their youth from the lonely ruins of middle age. We know he can do that, and to perfection.
CEMETERY LAKE, by Paul Cleave (Black Swan, $34.99). In Christchurch writer Cleave’s third novel, set like the others in his home city, someone is murdering young women – and then hiding their bodies in coffins dug up from the cemetery. The coffins’ original inhabitants are weighted down and chucked in the lake. Former cop Theo Tate, now a private eye, investigates. Tate has his own black side. Two years ago, a drunk driver killed his daughter and left his wife virtually brain-dead. Tate is suspected of applying capital punishment to the driver, who disappeared. Cleave tells the story with great flair. The plot is beautifully constructed, the characters come to worrying life, and it is all wrapped in an atmosphere of pervading evil that will make you wonder whether you should be reading it late at night.
THE COLLECTOR OF WORLDS, by Iliya Troyanov (Faber and Faber, $37.99). This is an epic fictionalised account of Victorian explorer Richard Francis Burton by globe-trotting Bulgarian-German writer Troyanov. With its shifting perspectives, multiple voices and colourful set scenes, it is an ambitious portrait of the life and times of the eccentric adventurer and those he encountered on his journey. Despite its colonial setting, its exploration of cultural cross-pollination and the search for knowledge and enlightenment far from home makes it truly a story for our times.
DEVIL MAY CARE: A JAMES BOND NOVEL, by Sebastian Faulks writing as Ian Fleming (Penguin/Michael Joseph, $37). Some secret agents, as a secret agent in Devil May Care asserts, just have class. And so do some novelists. This is vintage Fleming – even if it’s not written by him. Commissioned to mark the centenary of his birth, the novel is the work of Faulks. He may have seemed a strange choice at first glance – his previous books are conspicuously more serious-minded than genre fiction tends to be – but he proves a happy one, taking Bond to the brink of self-parody but (mostly) drawing back. The villain’s rant against all things British, stemming from a pathological hatred acquired at Oxford, where he was teased about his malformed hand, is hilarious.
THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE, by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape, $36.99). A fairy tale in the original tradition, like those of the Brothers Grimm before Disney airbrushed the horror and malice out of them. The stylised extravagance of the subject matter is well matched by the sumptuous language. Rushdie’s prose seethes with ideas and images, overflowing with colour, texture, scent and sound. Indeed, the complexity of the prose can be overwhelming, in the same way that the plot, with its genealogies, doublings and trickeries, can be hard to follow. But the experience is itself so delightful, so seductive, that such an excess is simply an invitation for rereading.
A FRACTION OF THE WHOLE, by Steve Toltz (Penguin, $28). Set primarily in New South Wales in the second half of the 20th century, Toltz’s Man Booker Prize-shortlisted debut follows brothers Martin and Terry Dean and their adventures in megalomania and crime respectively. We also get to know Martin’s son, Jasper. A nutty, whirlwind tour that is a guilty pleasure and a literary page-turner, A Fraction of the Whole brings the kinds of pleasures that remind us what made us readers in the first place.
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