100 Best Books of 2009
Novels
by Guy Somerset
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CENSORING AN IRANIAN LOVE STORY, by Shahriar Mandanipour (Little, Brown, $34.99). This is a portable bazaar crammed with an insider’s insights – the blind film censor, black-marker slashes obscuring Snow White’s arms in fairytale illustrations – in a deft allegory that convincingly presents Iran as Absurdistan. Writing about a country where literary artistry has become a matter of creative cunning and personal survival, Mandanipour serves up a novel scarred with crossings-out and populated by browbeaten characters struggling to assert themselves.
THE CHILDREN’S BOOK, by AS Byatt (Chatto and Windus, $38.99). Byatt’s 600-page behemoth covers a wider canvas than anything she has attempted before. Frequently blurring the boundary between realism and fantasy, the book is absorbing, rewarding and, yes, at times exasperating as it tracks more than 20 characters over a 25-year period, culminating in the engulfing calamity of World War I. The number of characters can mean their individual stories get partially swamped, but this is the attendant vice of a narrative virtue: Byatt achieves a symphonic richness of texture here that could not occur in a more finely focused novel.
THE CITY AND THE CITY, by China Miéville (Macmillan, $38.99). A novel about borders and the lengths to which people go to make them real. On its surface, it is a murder mystery, beginning with a dead girl and a detective. But the detective’s investigation prompts him to look afresh upon his native Beszel, a dreary Eastern European city-state, and it soon becomes apparent it intersects with Ul Qoma, a city-state that is its wealthier Ottoman doppelganger. As with all good science fiction, Miéville makes the implausible seem eerily familiar, and with Beszel/Ul Qoma he has created a territorial absurdity from which readers can gain new perspectives on the absurdities of the real world.
COCKROACH, by Rawi Hage (Hamish Hamilton, $37). Complex, absurd and laugh-out-loud funny, this is an astonishing follow-up to Hage’s award-
winning debut, De Niro’s Game, with eclectic references to the works of existential and subcultural authors such as Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoesky, Jean Genet, William Burroughs and Samuel Beckett meshing seamlessly in a mad, darkly poetic voice that is entirely Hage’s own. In his scrabble to survive as a petty thief and “cockroach” in his new home of Montreal, the novel’s Lebanese narrator is driven by “slimy feelings of cunning and need”; his hallucinatory transformation and fantasies, however, are symptomatic of a more psychotic malaise.
DEAD PEOPLE’S MUSIC, by Sarah Laing (Vintage, $29.99). That rare and lovely thing: a first novel that doesn’t try too hard. Faint praise? Au contraire, this is a work of subtlety and charm. With understated skill, Laing explores the complicated art of taking what you’re given – in this case, musical talent and a double-edged family legacy – and (forgive the American Idol phraseology) making it your own. What makes this zeitgeisty novel so enjoyable is Laing’s splendid grasp of the specifics: Wellington, London and New York fairly pop off the page and she is concretely convincing on the minutiae of her characters’ lives.
A GATE AT THE STAIRS, by Lorrie Moore (Faber and Faber, $38.99). Death, in Moore’s shattering novel, her first in more than a decade, is “the loneliest and most dumbfounding thing”. It’s a punchline without a joke. Which, perversely, makes it the perfect subject matter for this inveterate punster and sad-clown genius. Ostensibly, the novel is the tale of a year in the life of a 20-year-old farm girl turned college student. Crucially, that year begins with the winter of 2001, and the shadow of 9/11 hangs over the novel as it unravels from campus bildungsroman into a startling meditation on death, grief and the limits of language. At first, we are safely in the realm of dark social comedy, but then the novel takes a hairpin turn, and then another, and another …
HANDLING THE UNDEAD, by John Ajvide Lindqvist (Text, $35). Lindqvist turns from the vampires of Let the Right One In to a subversion of the zombie genre, with a return of the recently dead, although oddly only to Sweden. As befits a nation where folklore and faith seem to dance close with the trappings of modernity, responses to this otherworldly phenomenon vary between the extremes of the scientific and the religious. And then there are the government spin doctors, ever ready to metabolise the worst possible scenarios: forget George A Romero’s “living dead”, these are “the reliving”.
INHERENT VICE, by Thomas Pynchon (Jonathan Cape, $38.99). Arguably Pynchon’s most accessible and funniest novel. Like something designed by a committee composed of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, the Marx Brothers and the unholy brother-writer-trio of James M Cain, Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy, it is at once a psychedelic romp, a carnivalesque carry-on and a magical mystery tour through a noir 1970 Los Angeles.
