Sunday, January 6, 2002		Books

THE year began, as it ended, with the premature death of a writer associated with the UK’s University of East Anglia, a remote but vigorous campus that, shaking off its identification with Malcolm Bradbury’s History Man, is fast becoming the Mecca of contemporary English writing.

The posthumous success of Lorna Sage’s Bad Blood (Fourth Estate), a compelling, Dickensian memoir of her extraordinary family, will probably not be matched by the pre-Christmas sales for W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (Hamish Hamilton), though Sebald’s fatal car crash last week was, indeed, a devastating blow to European literature.

Between these two sad milestones, the literary year opened with an enjoyable return to form by John le Carre, whose The Constant Gardener (published in the UK by Hodder) reasserted the author’s almost hypnotic hold over a generation of English readers. Le Carre is now 70, but his novel had the thrilling, polemical energy of a writer half his age. The Constant Gardener also — another trend - expressed a cautious flirtation with email culture that, so far, only Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook (published in the UK by Cape) has dared to explore creatively.

Elsewhere, Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (published in the UK by Faber) marked the welcome renewal of a career that had seemed, since he won the Booker Prize in 1988, to have been in danger of losing momentum.

In the same month, January, the Whitbread Prize, conducted without the lifting of skirts and slamming of doors for which it has become renowned, was won by Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (published in the UK by Viking), a result with which not even professional contrarians could take issue.

Shortly after this, former British cabinet minister Peter Mandelson fell from power for the second time, after questions raised in The Observer plunged his ministerial career into one crisis too many. For a few days, there was some speculation about the kind of money his memoirs might generate, with figures in excess of US dollars 1.5 million being thrown about by the more excitable class of literary agent.

This kind of heady talk could not obscure the fact that the political memoir of recent times, with the shining exception of former UK prime minister John Major: The Autobiography (published in the UK by HarperCollins), has had the sales appeal of home-grown anthrax. In this dismal genre, John Major’s former finance minister Norman Lamont’s execrable In Office (published in the UK by Little Brown) is still recognised as some kind of nadir.

The world of books is, happily, never wholly without frivolous moments of drama. Early in the spring, Brett De La Mare, an Australian paraglider, dropped in on Buckingham Palace to promote a wider interest in his novel, Canine Dawn. This work has yet to find a publisher, but the stunt was a sharp reminder of the desperate lengths to which some writers will go to draw attention to their work.

There were, otherwise, few excitements in the first months of the new century. Just as, 100 years ago, it was established writers like Kipling and Samuel Butler who made headlines with, respectively, Kim and Erewhon, so 2001 was the Year of the Seasoned Literary Veteran.

In the absence of exceptional work by new, young writers, it was Britain’s premier literary prizes, as always, that stimulated debate. The 2001 Orange Prize got off to a flying start by publicising the announcement not of the winner but of its short-list. By the time Rosie Boycott, chair of the judges, arrived at the microphone to reveal that Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection (published in the UK by Picador) had won the trophy, the Orange publicists had squeezed every last drop from the bitter lemon of contemporary women’s fiction. Who knows what the Orange Prize will come up with by way of an encore.

Perhaps they should sign up Andrew Marr. The BBC’s political editor ignited a lively debate in May when, as chairman of the Samuel Johnson Prize jury, he announced that ‘our non-fiction writing is currently eclipsing anything being done by the novel in this country’.

This variation on an ancient theme — The Novel Is Dead — was partly a restatement of a 1990s critical commonplace, viz, that fiction has become supplanted by non-fiction memoir, and that writers are now exploring their lives explicitly where previously novelists had done so through the refracting lenses of fiction, but Mr Marr managed to make his views stick. Several forests were cut down before the fiction-v-non-fiction debate had run its course. The Samuel Johnson Prize itself was a memorable evening, tinged with anxiety about its future sponsorship.

Was Marr right ? The statistics say that biographies in Britain account for barely 2 per cent of annual output. By contrast, all categories of fiction dominate the marketplace with a staggering 25 per cent share, generating US dollars 358 million in turnover. Much of this, of course, is utter tosh, but that’s nothing new.

Yet, once the Booker Prize long-list was announced, it seemed momentarily as if Marr was on to something. Apart from Ian McEwan’s remarkable novel Atonement (published in the UK by Cape) and Carey’s Ned Kelly, there were few novels with the kind of imaginative or literary stature that the ‘common reader’ would be entitled to expect from such a prize.

And then all the arguments about books were overshadowed by that terrifying assault on New York and Washington. For several weeks after 11 September, everything we did on these pages seemed trivial and pointless. Rarely had reality intruded on the world of books with such effect. Several good books were overlooked in the aftermath of the crisis. Andy McSmith’s Innocent in the House (published in the UK by Verso), a coruscating and witty satire on the absurdities of New Labour, was one of these.

Literary journalism did its best to respond. New York has inspired American novelists since Washington Irving’s Salmagundi Papers. In the last century, many of America’s finest - Fitzgerald, Malamud, Mailer, Ellison, Roth, even Bellow - all paid tribute to the ‘constant flicker of men and women and machines’ (the phrase is Fitzgerald’s) and in recent times the New York novel became a lively sub-genre from Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe) to Bright Lights, Big City (McInerney) to American Psycho (Easton Ellis) to Don DeLillo’s Underworld. In their different ways, each was a celebration of a city of unique and pulsating energy.

Sudenly, this potent, inexhaustible metropolis was wounded and vulnerable, its people numbed with grief. Now it was British and American writers, for whom Manhattan is an essential publishing centre, who fell over each other to publish their tributes. In a thin year for Anglo-American fiction, some of the most memorable prose came from novelists getting to grips with this irruption of almost unimaginable horror.

If there was one new novel that did benefit from these events, it was probably Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (published in the UK by Fourth Estate), a highly readable family saga of very superior literary intentions which was greeted with the kind of universal acclaim that might inspire ordinary readers to start counting, as it were, their literary critical spoons. Franzen’s lift-off also benefited from an updraught of publicity stimulated by his canny refusal to appear on Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club (and his even cannier ‘spin’ on the controversy).

Here in Britain, we found that we were suddenly at war, and peacetime literary endeavour seemed beside the point. The great beneficiary of the crisis was Roy Jenkins’s biography of Britain’s archetypal twentieth-century war leader, Churchill (published in the UK by Macmillan). As the smoke and dust cleared, this compelling 1,000-page volume dominated the end-of-year landscape like some Stone Age colossus. I doubt if any other US dollars 45 volume will have sold as well in the run-up to Christmas 2001, though it will have found good competition from Miranda Carter’s biography of Anthony Blunt (published in the UK by Macmillan) and Carole Seymour-Jones’s polemical biography of the first Mrs T.S. Eliot, Painted Shadow (published in the UK by Constable Robinson).

Perhaps the one literary story of the autumn that was a match for the events in Afghanistan was V.S. Naipaul’s Nobel Prize for Literature. This was long overdue, and it recognised the work of a writer who is, as The Observer has maintained consistently, the finest living writer of English prose.

Other legends also did well as the year drew to a close. The extraordinary sales of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books both illustrated the grip exerted on the popular imagination by old-fashioned storytelling, and also the enduring commercial benefits of a persuasive Hollywood adaptation.

Adult publishing, meanwhile, abhors a vacuum. The catastrophe of 11 September has been followed by a sub-genre of books (profits donated to charity) with titles like The Day That Shook the World (published in the UK by BBC Books), September 11: A Testimony (published in the UK by Reuters) and, by far the best, Fred Halliday’s Two Hours That Shook the World (published in the UK by Saqi Books).

These, unquestionably, will not be the last in this field but they illustrate an enduring point that, in the era of electronic communication and the 24-hour news cycle, it is to the printed word that people turn for wisdom and consolation in a crisis.