It was an exceptional year for the novel, with impressive books from Adam Mars-Jones, Ali Smith, Edward Docx, Edward St Aubyn, A.S.Byatt, Cressida Connolly, Ross Raisin, Amitav Ghosh, Tim Binding and Jeffrey Eugenides, just to mention a few. Many congratulations to the enterprising Hesperus for bringing a small but enchanting German classic, Hans Keilson’s Komodie in Moll, to English readers for the first time.
The three new novels I’d particularly commend are, first, Robert Harris’s superb The Fear Index guaranteed to appeal to anyone who shudders when their laptop unaccountably fails to switch off. Secondly, my friend Alan Hollinghurst’s magnificent The Stranger’s Child, universally acclaimed as the best novel of the year. Its sumptuous setting perhaps prevented readers from seeing how innovative and original its design was, as a single narrative retreats into vagueness the more it is retold. Thirdly, a debut novel which I helped into the world, Ginny Baily’s Africa Junction, a finely written and incisive story of global connections. I wish it had had more attention on its publication.
Craig Brown’s One on One, about unlikely encounters of the great in a century-long daisy-chain, was a beautifully original and gripping approach to biography. Max Hastings’s All Hell Let Loose was a grandly comprehensive and expressively humane one-volume account of the second world war — something we surprisingly rather lack. I was gripped by Sandy Nairne’s matter-of-fact but hair-raising account of the efforts to reclaim two Turners stolen from the Tate, Art Theft and the Missing Turners. P. G.Wodehouse’s collected letters, edited by Sophie Ratcliffe were not just more entertaining but (whisper it) rather better written than Samuel Beckett’s, which have now reached Volume II, yawn.
The most overrated book of 2011 was Owen Jones’s polemic Chavs. The spread of contempt for the urban working classes is an important subject, but here it got lost under a welter of old-school moans about Mrs Thatcher, as if anyone still cared. A missed opportunity, mysteriously admired by the lumpenintelligentsia.
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