Books review 2005

2005 was the year in which the book world’s battle lines weren’t so much drawn on paper as daubed in blood. On the face of it, the opposing factions adopted contrary positions of Art versus Middlebrow, but the unspoken subtext was Story versus Anti-Story.
The row pretty much kicked off with a lit-crit bitch-slap from John Banville directed at Ian McEwan’s Saturday, describing it in the New York Review Of Books as “a dismayingly bad book.” Banville went on to win The Booker Prize with The Sea of course, and many decreed it an exquisite work. Me, I started it on three occasions and got put off each time by the grandiloquent language and lofty disregard for the joys of a good yarn. The verdict was hotly contested by at least two Booker judges rooting for Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, while booksellers threw their hands up in despair at Banville’s triumph because the book’s prospective readership could be squeezed into The Point, or on a cold night, Whelan’s. Banville himself didn’t exactly put a poultice on the wound with his Booker acceptance speech either, modestly professing himself relieved that the award had gone to “a work of art” this year, presumably a dig at young(ish) pups like DBC Pierre.
These factions were just as evident in the domestic literary scene, where poets of the rural mundane such as John McGahern and Dermot Bolger duked it out for column inches with uncouth tykes like Mike McCormack (Notes From A Coma), Sean O’ Reilly (Watermark) and Declan Lynch (The Rooms). The former delivered technically faultless but often dull tomes, while the latter weighed in with work that was frequently undisciplined but nevertheless crackling with energy.
So, like we said, a year of stand-offs. The kind of year in which reviews of Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park varied so wildly the average punter could scarcely believe they were reading about the same book. A year in which Irish Times book critic Eileen Battersby eviscerated Lionel Shriver’s Orange-winning novel We Need To Talk About Kevin, an imperfect but nevertheless riveting tale that deserved better.
In the end it took Cormac McCarthy to sort them all out, a man who apparently has no problem reconciling the notion of language as high art with the equally exalted skills of plot, suspense and characterisation. Now that’s a writer.

• Music books of the year
• Fiction books of the year
• Non-fiction books of the year