Although you’d never guess it from this year’s bizarre Man Booker choice — John Banville’s numbingly pretentious
The Sea has brought the prize’s reputation to a low ebb — 2005 brimmed with lively fiction. No novel published during it buzzed with more intellectual and imaginative energy than Ian McEwan’s
Saturday (Cape £17.99). Against the backdrop of London’s mass demonstration against the Iraq war, dramas in the day of a neurosurgeon open up a brilliant exploration of consciousness and the ways in which it can be impaired by physical mishap, warped by ideology or blossom into triumphs of artistic, scientific and humane achievement (of which this novel is itself an outstanding example).
Braininess is always prominent in Julian Barnes’s fiction. Arthur & George (Cape £17.99) adds to it a wealth of warmth and depth. Fictionalising a real-life episode — Arthur Conan Doyle’s undertaking of some Sherlock Holmes-like sleuthing himself to help a wrongly imprisoned young half-Indian man — it isn’t just a fascinating literary investigation but an engrossing portrait of two contrasting individuals in the England of 100 years ago. Handsomely got up by its publisher to resemble an Edwardian book, it’s the ideal novel to sink into in front of a blazing fire with a glass of port at your elbow.
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (Faber £16.99) is bleaker but just as rewarding. Merging a science-fiction scenario with what at first seems a sunny reminiscence of idyllic schooldays, his book — the year’s most remarkable novel — evolves into a haunting fable that resonates with disquieting suggestiveness about humanity and inhumaneness. Utterly original, it’s a work of extraordinary emotional impact.
Another unusual tour de force is The Penelopiad (Canongate £12), Margaret Atwood’s shrewd, sardonic take on The Odyssey. From the Elysian Fields, Odysseus’s legendarily faithful wife casts a wry eye back over events that Homer epically imprinted on the western imagination. Penelope’s unillusioned version throws a very different (funny, sceptical and thought-provoking) light on the heroics and the nature and manufacture of myth. Interludes from her serving maids (jauntily chanted poems, revue routines, burlesque of Greek tragic choruses) boost the subversiveness with mocking razzmatazz.
Atwood’s fellow Canadian author, Alice Munro, shone again with her 10th story collection, Runaway (Chatto £15.99). As usual, she focuses on female lives in the lake towns and tucked-away little communities of southern Ontario. And as usual, despite the initially familiar look of her material, she comes up with stories, each as rich as a compacted novel, that are masterpieces of fresh immediacy and unexpectedness in their portrayal of people’s inner and outer worlds.
Linked stories are compellingly deployed in Tim Winton’s The Turning (Picador £16.99). Zigzagging across decades, switching between men and women, young and old, tales told in very diverse voices interlock into a multifaceted display of intricately interconnected existences in a backwater town in his native western Australia. Written with exhilarating vigour, the stories ripple with subtlety and nuance. In a more metropolitan milieu, Melissa Bank’s highly enjoyable story-sequence, The Wonder Spot (Viking £12.99), sends clear-sightedness and an often rueful humour (spiked with one-liners Woody Allen would relish) flickering over the personal and professional ups and downs, especially the latter, of a young woman in today’s New York.
Jazz Age New York provides the setting for Caryl Phillips’s neatly titled Dancing in the Dark (Secker £12.99). A veteran fictional chronicler of black enslavement, Phillips here looks at an insidious form of it. Based on the true-life career of Bert Williams, a lightskinned vaudeville performer from the Bahamas whose Broadway success demanded his capering in “blackface” before segregated audiences, the novel exposes the corrosive loss of face caused by wearing this demeaning mask of burnt cork. The shame, guilt and depressive insecurity that eat into Williams as he grimacingly shuffles through his caricature “coon” act are laid bare in pages written with stylish attack and finesse.
Dan Jacobson’s All for Love (H Hamilton £16.99) also blows the dust off a historical episode and burnishes it into glittering fiction. His subject is a scandal in Hapsburg Vienna where a royal, Princess Louise, lustily flings herself into an adulterous affair with a raffish, upstart hussar. Packed with piquant details, Jacobson’s ironic, polished account of this sometimes comic, sometimes shabby sideshow to Austro-Hungarian pomp and circumstance mixes documentary and imaginative surmise to effervescent effect.
Poverty of spirit behind an assured, affluent facade is also probed with needle-sharpness in Stephen Amidon’s Human Capital (Viking £12.99). Tremors on the money market combine with an unlucky accident to send acutely traced moral and psychological repercussions shuddering down a storyline taut with suspense and surprises.
Our two most accomplished practitioners of classic crime fiction gave masterclasses in what can still be done with the conventions of the genre. PD James’s The Lighthouse (Faber £17.99) turned that whodunnit favourite — the offshore island populated with suspects bristling with motives, shady pasts and opportunities for murder — into the location for a broodingly atmospheric study of pain, guilt and the inroads of time. Ruth Rendell’s latest Barbara Vine novel, The Minotaur (Viking £17.99), converted that gothic-mystery property — the secluded mansion whose inhabitants are seen through the increasingly appalled eyes of a decent incomer — into the setting for an intensely claustrophobic drama of family dysfunction.
Two engaging debuts should be mentioned. Marina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian (Viking £12.99) hilariously and affectingly records the fall-out when an elderly Ukrainian widower long resident in Britain falls for a flamboyantly busty Russian gold-digger in search of a passport to prosperity. Nick Laird’s Utterly Monkey (Fourth Estate £9.99) takes two frequently handled fictional subjects — sectarian Ulster and the high-gloss heartlessness of big business — and out of their interaction creates a novel with a pell-mell thriller plot, sparky satiric edge and a flair for vivid images that reminds you he is also an acclaimed poet.
Available at Sunday Times Books First prices on 0870 165 8585
Top five
SATURDAY by Ian McEwan
Cape £17.99
The story of one day in the life of a neurosurgeon is also a brilliant exploration of consciousness
ARTHUR & GEORGE by Julian Barnes
Cape £17.99
Holmes-like sleuthing in this fascinating literary investigation based on a real-life incident
NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro
Faber £16.99
A haunting, disquieting fable about humanity and inhumaness; this year’s most remarkable novel
THE PENELOPIAD by Margaret Atwood
Canongate £12
A subversive and shrewd take on The Odyssey in which Penelope gives her own, wry version of events
RUNAWAY by Alice Munro
Chatto £15.99
Little masterpieces about women’s lives in remote communities; rich, surprising and immediate
Bestsellers
1 The Triumph of the Sun by Wilbur Smith (Macmillan) 122,574
2 Thud! by Terry Pratchett (Doubleday) 118,305
3 The Take by Martina Cole (Headline) 98,905
4 The Broker by John Grisham (Century) 98,746
5 Saturday by Ian McEwan (Cape) 74,621
