Books of the year, 2006

It was a year where fiction writers veered from the seriously weird to the beautifully mundane.
Rogue males possessed by shapeshifting serial fiddlers (McCabe), holy father-and-son families traipsing post-apocalyptic wastelands (McCarthy), future religious cults venerating long dead cab drivers (Will Self’s The Book Of Dave) and menopausal males facing up to their various mortality crises – too many to mention, but special merit awards go to Alan Warner’s The Worms Can Carry Me To Heaven, Jay McInerney’s The Good Life and Richard Ford’s The Lay Of The Land, all of whom produced strong but not definitive works – (although if Ford had cut the interminable rambles about real estate, he might’ve hit a career high).
The best of these was This Book Will Save Your Life, AM Homes’ succulently somnambulant yarn about a middle-aged male who wakes from a dream of life to undergo a slow thaw and eventual full-on spiritual reawakening. Like all books worth their weight, it split readers right down the middle. Michiko Kakutani inflicted GBH on it in the New York Times, but Stephen King wrote the novel a love letter before it was even published. “I think this brave story of a lost man’s reconnection with the world could become a generational touchstone, like Catch-22, The Monkey Wrench Gang, or The Catcher in the Rye,” he testified.
There was also plenty of time for the contemplative and the melancholic: Willy Vlautin’s alco parable The Motel Life, MJ Hyland’s ickily claustrophobic Carry Me Down, Roddy Doyle’s boldly drawn Paula Spencer, and maybe best of all, Billy Roche’s finely observed Tales From Rainwater Pond. The playwright’s first book of short stories proved him to be as deft a prose writer as John McGahern (whose own new-and-selected short story collection Creatures Of The Earth exhibits the late master at the height of his powers).
It was also a year when several of the heavy hitters made comebacks, mostly those of a bizarre bent. The aforementioned King garnered his best reviews in years for Lisey’s Story, ditto Martin Amis’ House Of Meetings and Thomas Pynchon’s Against The Day, while JG Ballard’s Kingdom Come was Darwinian monkey business as usual in the dystopian suburbian zoo. At the time of going to press, Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Rising prequel has yet to appear in our in-tray, but we await with baited breath and tightly clutched rosary beads.
Fanfare be damned: here, in no particular order, are the books that made 2006 a sight for sore eyes.

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The Brief And Frightening Reign Of Phil/In Persuasion Nation – George Saunders (Bloomsbury)

George Saunders, the Chicago-born master satirist and short story writer, delivered a formdable one-two combo this summer. In Persusasion Nation applied the surrealist and satirical sensibilities of Heller or Vonnegut to 21st century concerns such as mass media, consumerist propaganda and corporate drug pushing, while the novella The Brief And Frightening Reign Of Phil was less a bedtime story than an Animal Farm allegorical nightmare that described the rise and fall of a despot – the titular Phil – who stages a coup and takes power of the fictional territory of Outer Horner and sets about ‘dismantling’ and displacing the denizens of the neighbouring Inner Horner. Phil, like many despots, starts out as a rather pathetic human being with a chip on his shoulder who then stumbles to prominence through a window in history and politics, his focused rage and ambition starting to seem postively magnetic compared to the dithering and ineffectual idiots in power. Sound familiar? Frightening yes, but also very, very funny.

He Died With His Eyes Open – Derek Raymond (Serpent’s Tail)

The wonderful Serpent’s Tail imprint kept their end up this winter by reprinting a whole shoal of classic cult and crime novels (including Jean-Patrick Manchette’s The Prone Gunman and Louise Welsh’s Tamburlaine Must Die), but the most notable was He Died With His Eyes Open, the first of the six Factory novels written by low-life chronicler Derek Raymond (real name Robert Cook). A classic West London noir and police procedural narrated by an unnamed protagonist and set in the Metropolitan Police’s Dept. Of Unexplained Deaths (the dead letter office of homicide divisions), the book was originally published in 1984, and it’s spare and unadorned style anticipated the bitten-off bullet prose of latter day David Peace and James Ellroy.

Winterwood – Pat McCabe (Bloomsbury)

As outlined in last issue’s feature, Winterwood opens up new territory for McCabe. His first book to explore the realm of the supernatural, it tells the story of Redmond Hatch, a journalist and historian who becomes enthralled, obsessed and eventually possessed by the character of Ned ‘Pappie’ Strange, a yarn-spinning, shape-shifting hillbilly fiddler from the west. The storyline tracks Hatch’s decline from devoted (if deluded) family man to a ghostly semi-alcoholic loner whose mental stability deteriorates even as his fortunes are reversed, and in the process takes the reader into some very murky psychological terrain. Among other things, Winterwood highlights the culture clash between the secular urban and the rural uncanny, examines the social exclusion of rogue male parents exiled to hostels, pubs and cab ranks, and trawls the tortured dreamscapes of child molesters and murderers. Not one for Auntie Lil then.

Donald Cammell: A Life On The Wild Side – Rebecca and Sam Umland (FAB Press)

If ever an individual was long overdue the biographical treatment, it was the darkly charismatic Donald Cammell, scion of Scottish regality, doyen of ‘60s London, gifted society portrait artist, Stones consort, screenwriter, filmmaker, polymath, voluptuary, sorcerer, and a man inordinately fond of the odd menage a trois. Cammell is most famous as writer and co-director (with Nic Roeg) of Performance, which starred Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg and James Fox. The original and best Brit gangster/rock ‘n’ roll flick, Performance’s anti-chronological structure and bizarre tableaux at once acknowledged Borges and Bacon and anticipated Pulp Fiction. Cammell was too much the perfectionist to cut it as a career director, but even though he only made a handful of films over four decades, each one is, in its way, a minor classic: the mythic sci-fi horror of Demon Seed, the prescient serial killer flick White of the Eye, the auto-erotic ultraviolence of Wild Side. Throw in a long and ultimately frustrating Brando association (with whom he co-wrote the swashbuckling pirate novel Fan-Tan) and a little-acknowledged role as director of U2’s ‘Pride’ video, and you have a hell of a life story. Cammell committed suicide in 1996, following a long period of professional dissatisfaction and intermittent depression. A Life… is an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) book, a little heavy on the film school theory sometimes, but the diligent research and gorgeous visuals more than compensate.

The Road – Cormac McCarthy (Picador)

Equal parts Threads-style nativity play and Hiroshima-in-the-heartlands odyssey, The Road was less a book than a gloomy but grandiloquent prophesy of what awaits humanity if it persists in its folly. Beckettian and Biblical, like some desolate Neil Young song, the narrative was anchored by the central image of two ragged figures, father and son, pushing a grocery cart west across a dead continent, fleeing an encroaching nuclear winter.
There have been as many post-apocalyptic tales as there have end times predictions, including Matheson’s I Am Legend, Amis’s Einstein’s Monsters, and the one to beat, Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. But McCarthy’s horrific vision encompassed not just the requisite return to medievalism (cannibalistic ‘bloodcults’ stalk the highways trailing chained catamite joy divisions) but also harked back to the tribal barbarism of his magnificent Blood Meridian.
Here is a world that echoes Primo Levi’s deathcamp etchings of a species reduced to a bestial state for want of food. Humans are kept alive like livestock in cellars, meat cut from their bodies piecemeal and wounds cauterized that they may survive as mere incubators of their own flesh. Ash covers everything (McCarthy has as many synonyms for the stuff as the Eskimos do for snow). And through all this burnt hell, the father shepherds his son seaward towards a dream of deliverance he knows is a lie, and yet the glimmering keeps him going.
Unbearably bleak and beautiful: read it and weep.

Book Of Longing – Leonard Cohen (Viking)
El Cohen is fond of pointing out that as one gets older, the brain cells associated with anxiety begin to die. Contrasting this collection with early works like Spice Box Of The Earth or Let Us Compare Mythologies, the reader will sense a definite relaxation. The depressions have lifted somewhat, the fog cleared, and Cohen now functions as the stand-up comedian of spiritualists. Not that the poet doesn’t feel the wounds on rainy mornings, but he’s learned to disassociate somewhat, all the better to examine his predicament (“My heart will be hers/Impersonally”).
It’s tempting to use the term Zen-like, and of course many of these poems stem from Cohen’s stint at Mount Baldy studying under his friend and mentor Roshi (although often as not, Cohen seems to visibly chafe against the rigidity of religious instruction). His lines are certainly less tightly coiled, less concerned with effect and firework, more in tune with purity of feeling and expression (“You go your way/I’ll go your way too” – ‘The Sweetest Little Song’). The tone throughout is droll, affectionate and accepting. Cohen is as gifted a conversationalist as he is a writer, and it’s impossible to read these poems without hearing the old fox’s sly and self-deprecating speaking voice. And for all the early-morning austerity, his lines are soused with an appreciative eye for earthly pleasures: tobacco, a $300 bottle of scotch, the smell of a woman’s body.

The Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi (Jonathan Cape)

Like Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning Maus, an acknowledged influence on Satrapi’s powerful memoir, The Persepolis is a stunning graphic novel that takes an unflinching look at heavyweight socio-political history – in this case, the history of Iran, locus of the monolithic Persian Empire, balance-of-power fulcrum throughout the Second World War and Middle Eastern conflicts, oil repository, and most importantly, the author’s homeland. “I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists,” she wrote in the book’s introduction, and the stark illustrations and emotional wallop of the text go some way towards redressing the prevailing worldview of Iran as a place besieged by fundamentalism, fanaticism and terrorism.