Scotsman Books of the Year: Fiction

Allan Massie talks us through his choices for fiction books of the year

Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize with his novella The Sense of an Ending (Cape, £12.99), which was no surprise. Alan Hollinghurst’s elegant novel, The Stranger’s Child (Picador, £20) failed to make the shortlist, which was. The Booker stirred up controversy as usual, doubtless to the delight of the sponsors, since argument keeps it in the news. This time it was about whether the judges, by saying they had gone for readability, were dumbing the prize down. It was all rather silly, if only because what one person finds readable, another doesn’t, and vice versa.

Meanwhile there were, as usual, a lot of good novels, some of which got less attention that they deserved. Here, in no particular order, are a number which I enjoyed and admired :

Graham Swift, Wish You were Here (Picador, £18.99). Swift is a very accomplished novelist who writes sympathetically about characters who would be unlikely to read his sort of books. Jack Luxton, a farmer’s son, certainly couldn’t. Repressed and inarticulate, writing a letter is something he finds difficult. But Swift gets into his mind in a moving novel about the weight of the past, family secrets and guilt.

Barry Unsworth, The Quality of Mercy (Hutchinson, £18.99). Unsworth is one of our finest novelists, and this sequel to Sacred Hunger (itself a Booker winner) is an outstanding work of the historical imagination. Set in 18th-century England, its theme is the nature of justice. Unsworth, like all good historical novelists, never allows us to forget that his characters were ignorant of the future which is for his readers the past.

William Kennedy, Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (Simon & Schuster, £16.99). There is more life in Kennedy’s discordant novels than in all the correct products of creative writing academies. This one, moving between Batista’s Cuba, where Hemingway holds forth, and the civic corruptions of Albany, capital of New York State, demands the reader’s close attention, even surrender. It’s well worth it.

Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles (Bloomsbury, £18.99). The gods walk convincingly in this version faithful to Homer of the life of Achilles, recounted by his boyhood friend and lover, Patroclus. Tender, witty and moving; a fine imagination at work here.

Philippe Claudel, Monsieur Linh and His Child (Maclehose, £12). A novella of exquisite simplicity by one of the best of contemporary French novelists, beautifully translated by Euan Cameron; the themes: exile, love and friendship.

Aravind Adiga, Last Man in Tower (Atlantic, £17.99). Adiga won the Booker Prize with The White Tiger three years ago. This is, I think, an even better novel. Set in Mumbai, with a host of thoroughly realised characters, it confirms one’s belief that the heirs to the great European novel of the 19th century are to be found in the Indian sub-continent and the Arab world.

Andrew Nicoll, The Love and Death of Caterina (Quercus, £12.99): The best Scottish novel I read this year, it is set in Latin America with only one character who makes a claim, possibly dubious, to Scottish ancestry. Distinguished by the author’s assurance of tone, depth of understanding and range of sympathies, it has echoes of Graham Greene and is not diminished by the comparison this invites.

David Lodge, A Man of Parts (Harvill Secker, £18.99). A thinly fictionalised account of the life of HG Wells., who once had claims to be the most influential writer of the early 20th century. Lodge does Wells justice, not hiding his faults and weaknesses, but letting us understand why Orwell said there was no thinking person of his generation who had not been to some extent shaped by Wells. He pursued rationality in his private life and created chaos. Women found him very attractive, though he was short and ugly. One of his mistresses gave the reason: “he smelled of honey”.

Helena McEwen, Invisible River (Bloomsbury, £16.99) A short, vividly written novel with themes of permanent interest: love, loss, friendship, responsibility and the importance and meaning of art. The novel contrives to be simultaneously a study of possibilities, as life opens out before the young characters, and of impossibilities, putting the past either to rights or to sleep.

Tim Pears, Disputed Land (Heinemann, £12.99). A family novel, set over a few days of a Christmas holiday and spiralling back into a troubled past. The best novel so far by a very good writer.

Justin Cartwright, Other People’s Money (Bloomsbury, £12.99). Cartwright, the most professional of novelists, is always bang up to date. Other people’s money is what bankers deal in and with, and sometimes, like the central character here, treat it as if it was their own, with unhappy results.

Chan Koonchung, The Fat Years (Doubleday, £12.99): A big fat novel about China today. Written in a flat journalistic style, its interest lies in the fascinating, depressing and alarming picture it offers of “China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy” built on lies which compel people to be happy. Quite the most disturbing book of the year.

Jane Harris, Gillespie and I (Faber & Faber, £14.99). Crime in respectable middle-class Glasgow in the city’s golden age, the year of the great International Exhibition of 1888. An unreliable narrator, a trial scene: what could be more agreeable for a winter evening?

Carlos Alba, The Songs of Manuel Escobar (Polygon, £10.99). The child of Spanish parents, father a refugee from Franco, grows up in Glasgow, determined to be Scottish, not Spanish, but cannot escape being drawn back into his family’s chequered past. A novel then about accommodation with cultural differences, the uncertainties of identity and painful and disturbing history. Very well done.

Robert Low, The Lion Wakes (Harper Collins, £7.99) The first in a projected sequence about the Scottish Wars of Independence, written with tremendous verve and bravura. Robert Low has not set out to demolish the nationalist myth, but, by questioning conventional interpretations of it, to deepen and enrich it by revealing its complexity and the mixed and shifting motives of the principal characters. The battle scenes beat Braveheart hands down.

Susan Hill, The Betrayal of Trust (Chatto & Windus, £14.99). Susan Hill, one of this year’s Man Booker judges, has the rare and enviable ability to write crime novels which are more than the conventional police procedural. They are as much concerned with ethical questions and personal relations as with the solving of a crime.

PD James, Death Comes to Pemberley (Faber & Faber, £18.99) . PD James meets Jane Austen in a sequel to Pride and Prejudice. What could be more agreeable? Perfect for Boxing Day.

Finally, a curiosity: a recently discovered unfinished novel by Stevenson, published for the first time in a French translation, edited and completed by Michel Le Bris as La Malle en Cuir (Gallimard). It is in the vein of “The New Arabian Nights” and cries out for a Scottish publisher.