Word to the wise

BOOKER JUDGES CAN NEVER please everybody, but in selecting John Banville's The Sea (Picador, £16.99) this year, they picked a novel which has nothing trendy about it, a beautifully written book which would attract few headlines, none of them lurid, and arouse no controversy. Just a good novel, in fact. Good for them.

Banville has long been a candidate for any literary prize on offer, but much though I admired The Sea, it wasn't the most compelling Irish novel I read this year. That was A Game with Sharpened Knives (Phoenix, 6.99) by Neil Belton. Set mostly in an uneasily neutral Dublin during the Second World War, in what I called "a grey, dank Ireland of shortages and uncertainties, of suspicion and resentment and censorship, of old hatreds and new fears", this was an unusual and compelling first novel, with faint echoes of Graham Greene.

Perhaps the most remarkable novel of the year was James Meek's epic romance The People's Act of Love (Canongate, 12.99), set in Siberia in 1918-19, in the bloody months of civil war that followed the 1917 Revolution. Having praised the Booker judges for selecting Banville, I have to add that the omission of Meek's novel from the shortlist was extraordinary.

Equally ambitious, but less successful, was Sebastian Faulks's long Human Traces (Hutchinson, 17.99). This novel about the evolution of psychiatry was intelligent and enjoyable - everything Faulks writes is enjoyable. But the characters were buried under the research, while the narrative almost disappeared.

Two novels from small publishing houses deserve more attention. The first was Unity (Maia, 8.99) by Michael Arditti, an intelligent and disturbing novel about the roots and attraction of evil, and urban terrorism; it was structured convincingly as a work of non-fiction. The second was Matthew Yorke's Chancing It (Waywiser, 6.99), an imaginative novel set in a Yorkshire town that has lost its old function. It rings true, and is written with an unusual understanding of, and sympathy for, so-called ordinary people.

"Ordinary" is a disparaging and usually silly description, but good novelists put the apparently ordinary to use. At first the characters in Never Let Me Go (Faber, 16.99) by Kazuo Ishiguro seem ordinary and conventional. But Ishiguro has placed them in an extraordinary situation, and this is what gives the novel much of its power. Hitherto, I've had reservations about Ishiguro's novels. Not this one; it is very good indeed - chilling and disturbing, yet still speaking out for love and friendship.

Four fine novels by writers who must be classed as veterans, but who are all writing as interestingly as ever: Look at the Dark (Secker & Warburg, 16.99) by Nicholas Mosley; All for Love (Hamish Hamilton, 16.99) by Dan Jacobson; Sterner Stuff (Hutchinson, 17.99) by Stanley Middleton; and The Lighthouse (Faber, 17.99) by PD James. When writers peter out, it's usually because their energy has flagged or their curiosity has withered. These four have retained both. So has Penelope Lively. Her story collection, Making It Up (Viking, 16.99), is sparked off by the question: "What if my life had taken a different turn at various moments?"

There were disappointments this year. JM Coetzee's Slow Man (Secker & Warburg, 16.99) never quite took off. Paul Theroux's Blinding Light (Hamish Hamilton, 17.99) had fine passages, but was self-indulgent and verbose. Nadine Gordimer's Get a Life (Bloomsbury, 16.99), though acute in social observation, was clumsy and, considering the title, strangely lifeless. The same can be said for Ian McEwan's Saturday (Cape, 17.99).

I have read a lot of foreign fiction this year. Outstanding was Andrei Makine's The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme (Sceptre, 16.99); there is no-one writing today I admire and enjoy more than Makine. Memories of Melancholy Whores (Cape, 10) may be little more than a footnote to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's work, but this meditation on old age was nonetheless elegant and moving.

There were also three fine foreign novels by writers whom I hadn't previously read: Fatelessness (The Harvill Press, 14.99) by Imre Kertesz, a matter-of-fact account of a Hungarian Jewish boy who just manages to escape the Holocaust; Lewi's Journey (Duckworth, 17.99) by Per Olov Enquist, far more compelling than its subject - Swedish Pentecostalism - suggests; and the brilliant Adios, Hemingway (Canongate, 7.99) by the Cuban Leonardo Padura Fuentes, an investigation by a disillusioned former policeman into a body found in the garden of Hemingway's Finca Vigia, a victim of a 40-year-old crime.

Finally, a word in praise of that most underrated of novelists, Margaret Forster, underrated perhaps because, like Matthew Yorke, she writes about people who at first sight are not particularly interesting, and about the sort of issues more often discussed in the feature pages of newspapers than in serious fiction. Ostensibly, Is There Anything You Want? (Chatto & Windus, 16.99) is about cancer and how its victims and their families cope. Really it's about the big emotions: love, fear, resentment, courage; about our need for others and the burden which this need so often represents. Forster is a novelist to be prized: never fashionable, always honest, perceptive and understanding, a writer for grown-ups.