Books of the year: Fiction

Published on Friday 4 December 2009 18:35

ANY year that sees the publication of a novel that one can unhesitatingly judge to be great, belonging to the same demanding but rewarding company as Proust, Conrad and Thomas Mann, is a good one.

It's a bold claim to make but I have no doubt that the Your Face Tomorrow trilogy by Javier Marias comes in that category. I can say so with less hesitation than usual partly because English translations of the first two volumes were published years ago, and so the work has had time to mature in my imagination. It is, however, only when one has read the third book, Poison, Shadow and Farewell (Chatto & Windus, 18.99) that the full measure of Marias's achievement becomes possible. He is a novelist who reveals experience in a new light, wonderfully intelligent, often disturbing, witty and richly ironic.

In most years William Trevor's Love and Summer (Viking, 18.99) would have been top of my list, and how the Booker judges omitted it even from their shortlist is a mystery. Too good, I expect. Trevor's remarkable ability to make the ordinary seem extraordinary and significant is unmatched. This short novel comes as near to perfection as is possible. Despite their unforgivable decision to ignore Trevor, the Booker judges did come up with a worthy and – praise be – very readable winner: Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate, 18.99). Historians have rarely doubted the ability and intelligence of her hero, Henry VIII's minister, Thomas Cromwell, but they have usually concluded that he was a thoroughly nasty bit of work. Mantel offers the case for the defence and makes it convincing. She makes her Cromwell human and credible, and her evocation of Henry VIII's ghastly court is, suitably, horribly compelling.

Two other enjoyable novels skip nimbly over several decades. Stone's Fall (Jonathan Cape, 18.99) by Iain Pears is a romance and a mystery set in late Victorian and Edwardian times. There is a splendid – and apposite for our day – fictional reconstruction of a financial crisis which, beginning with a run on Barings Bank, threatened the solvency and credit rating of the City of London. There are also murders, and at the centre of the novel is an enigmatic femme fatale.

DJ Taylor's Ask Alice (Chatto & Windus, 16.99) takes us from the American Midwest in the late 19th century to Edwardian London and then the post-1918 society of the "Bright Young Things". Here too we have a murder and a mystery woman, and a plot of Victorian complexity handled with great skill.

Both these novels offer sheer intelligent entertainment – not a phrase to be applied to Brodeck's Report (Maclehose/Quercus, 18.99) by one of the best French novelists writing today, Philippe Claudel. This is a grim story, set in an unidentified frontier province. Beginning after what is recognisably the Second World War (though this too isn't specified) it deals with years of occupation by an enemy army, of the crimes committed by collaborators, and of the post-war consequences. It is a remarkable novel, all the more so because this account of man's inhumanity to man, of coarse and brutal stupidity, of fear and surrender to evil, is nevertheless not devoid of the hope that some sort of redemption remains possible.

Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin (Penguin Classics, 20) was first published in Germany in 1947 but has taken more than 60 years to appear in English, in an excellent translation by Michael Hofmann. Primo Levi called it "the greatest book ever written about resistance to the Nazis". Its resisters are not the brave aristocrats who tried to kill Hitler and save German honour in July 1944, but ordinary working-class Berliners, and part of the fascination of this gripping novel comes from the vivid and terrible picture it offers of the Nazi regime seen from below. It is indeed an extraordinary accomplishment.

Anita Brookner and Penelope Lively are novelists of such continuing excellence that one tends to take for granted the publication of "another Brookner", or "another Lively". One shouldn't, of course, but rather be ready to welcome novels so sure to give pleasure. Brookner's Strangers and Lively's Family Album (both Penguin/FigTree, 16.99) were both up to standard. No more need be said in a brief note like this.

Barry Unsworth is another old hand, who, despite winning the Booker with his slave-trade novel Sacred Hunger, has never perhaps been given his due, partly because he does not care to repeat himself but strikes out on a new line with each novel.

Land of Marvels (Hutchinson, 18.99), set in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in 1914, is not as good as his two masterpieces, The Rage of the Vulture and Morality Play, but it is a thoroughly absorbing, cunningly put-together novel about archaeology and espionage, in which the development of the plot advancing to an inexorable climax gains much from the book's leisurely opening.

There were two very good novels by comparative newcomers. Georgina Harding's The Spy Game (Bloomsbury, 12.99) is not quite what the title suggests, for the story really deals with the responses of two children, Anna and Peter, to the possibility that their mother may have been a Russian spy. One part of the novel is set in the harsh winter of 1962-3 when the snow lay for months, and Anna lives her life under a blanket of metaphorical snow, unsure what is real and what is not. Georgina Harding is a novelist to look out for.

Rebecca Gowers, likewise. The Twisted Heart (Canongate, 12.99) is a love story and a crime story, remarkable for the precision with which Govers delineates shades of feeling. It is acute, comic and true.

Finally, The Complete Cosmicomics (Penguin Classics, 20) by Italo Calvino. Calvino, who died in 1985, was the most inventive European novelist of his time.

This book is not a novel but a vast collection of short pieces, dealing with practically everything you can think of from the creation of the world to a reworking of' The Count of Monte Cristo, and meditations on some of Calvino's own books. For Calvino enthusiasts only, perhaps, but they will love it.