Stuart Kelly on the year in books: 'Irish literature leaves Scottish writing look derivative and threadbare'

Sally Rooney | Getty Images

With the end of the year approaching, it is time for me to do my equivalent of discriminating naughty from nice, as books get sorted into keepers and charities. It is always an exercise tinged with guilt, not just over the unread, but the ones that I will retain even if the chances of reading them again are vanishingly slim.

That said, it was a distinct pleasure this year to have one of my favourite novelists, Jonathan Lethem, musing in idiosyncratic fashion on his art collection in Cellophane Bricks, and a critical biography of Olivier Messiaen by Robert Sholl in the always reliable Reaktion series. There are oddities that I have a Gollum-like relationship to: Max Ernst’s collage novel The Hundred Headless Woman, James Branch Campbell’s excessively peculiar Jurgen, the selected “scholia” (academic insights on unwritten works) by Nicolás Gómez Dávila collected as The Authentic Reactionary.

Poetry at its best is re-readable, and Tablets: Secrets of the Clay by Dunya Mikhail, a series of illuminated splinters, translated from Arabic to English and then language to image, even more so (sample: Prose is light. / Poetry is lightning); and I will indubitably re-consult William Egginton’s The Rigor of Angels, an ingenious account of (deep breath) Kant, Borges and Heisenberg on the limits of knowledge and whether we can ever truly grasp reality.

Ecclesiastes is assuredly right, when the preacher admonishes that “of making many books there is no end”, though personally I have never found it to be true that “much study is a weariness of the flesh”. I asked some of my friends and acquaintances in the book world what they had thought especially notable in 2024, and the responses were pleasingly diverse. One festival director recommended Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap, to which I had already given a good review in these pages and which won the overall Saltire Prize this year. Most of the literary individual winners – Jen Stout, the late John Burnside, Ajay Close – I agreed with, which is a great deal more than I can say about the shortlists.

Laura Cumming | Suki Dhanda

Certainly some of my copies are now doing some good by supporting various charities. Caveat emptor and all that. The Booker and the Saltire are self-evidently very different entities, but I would have been pleased to see the majority of the Booker’s shortlist win. That Samantha Harvey did pleased me (again, I reviewed it), but it also pleased several novelists, critics and colleagues, as well as my church minister and Mum. That Percival Everett didn’t win was slightly made up for by him winning the National Book Award. Although I liked James a great deal, I like others by him – such as I Am Not Sidney Poitier and Dr No – slightly more.

One old friend whose opinion I trust, who is a director of one of the network of Literature Houses immediately pushed Close To Home by Michael Magee on me, which (alongside new work this year from Kevin Barry, Sinéad Gleeson, Sally Rooney and Catherine Prasifka) proves that contemporary Irish literature really is leaving Scottish writing looking pretty derivative and threadbare. One novelist here I do admire – Ali Millar – enthused over Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars, and when a writer says another has “reinvigorated my writing” they are a proposition to take seriously (I knew his short stories, so have pencilled in some holiday for this). Curious, nonetheless, that she is looking to America not Scotland for inspiration.

Ali Millar | D Adams

My local booksellers were keen on Chloe Dalton’s memoir, Raising Hare, and Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits – another Irish writer, take note, and another reimaging of the classical world. (Since I know them all it is perhaps unfair to highlight the works of Charlotte Higgins, Emily Wilson and Natalie Haynes, but they are genuinely remarkable).

A publisher friend also looked to the classics with Scottish poet Jane Goldman’s translation Catullus 64, describing it (rightly) as an arcane hybrid of the Elizabethan translator Lady Jane Lumley and the SCUM manifesto of Valerie Solanas – he described Goldman’s version of the epyllion as a work of “obscenity, radical feminism, wit and a translation bordering on the vengeful”.

But the most significant literary event of the year, to my mind, chimed with the rather silly “words of the year”. Collins chose the word “brat” and Oxford, “brain rot”. I am referring to the various petitions and boycotts against book festivals and their sponsors. Cambridge chose the word “manifest”, as in “to dream something into existence”, and the collective will of the literature workers must have worked since Gaza is at peace and all fossil fuel products, down to their smartphones, are but a distant memory. The literary world is small, and there are people whom I know and like and admire that signed the petitions.

There are some who seem to have treated it as an exercise in self-promotion. Richard Flanagan gave back his Baillie Gifford Prize money: I preferred John Berger giving his 1972 Booker Prize winnings to the Black Panthers. A great many of them reminded me of the famous work by the late Mike Kelley, whose retrospective is at Tate Modern. It includes the work Symbiotic Relationships, a banner bearing the text “F*CK YOU” in large coloured letters, with “Now give me a treat please” underneath.