(Some Of) The Books I Read In 2014

Follow a dozen critics, or writers with an independent-published novel behind them (a lovely thin volume to brag over), on Twitter, and believe me - you will have clicked on blue text, the hyperlink to personal blogs, where there will be a picture... This picture will show you a dozen books, stacked and lined with show-off marks of use.

It’s the end of the year, and I shall follow these forty year-olds; here are the books I’ve read in 2014, best at the top, worst at the...

I have read more books than those that you see above, but they were not at hand. The best books I have read are there, and that’s all that matters really. I’ve also chosen to not include the many I’ve failed to penetrate fully, but I will list a few of them here, I’ll get to you lot eventually: Gravity’s Rainbow, Infinite Jest, Neuromancer (was naff really), Crime and Punishment, Parade’s End...

To start off, Zoe Pilger’s first novel, Eat My Heart Out. I didn’t like it. After months of reflection and thought, I actually think it’s awful. The book has received a lot of acclaim among the broadsheets and the likes of Jonathan Gibbs (didn’t quite get to you Jonny, but I will, I will...), and I can understand why. The prose occasionally bubbles, but never threatens to really spit consistently enough to burn me, scold a reaction. It’s a feminist book, I read. But is it? The veneer of ironic detachment (as seen in the cheap, ‘punny’ title) and sarcasm gives the novel a sheen of nihilism that does not convince either - it doesn’t say anything to me, it settles nowhere. We are given a series of set pieces with a hit-rate not strong enough to tip it into positivity for me. Shit covered rooms, public self-harm, the book tries too hard and does nothing. If the Pilger name were not there, I’m not sure Zoe would have got a deal for this book, perhaps the next one...

I spent the first half of this year wondering whether I hated Ned Beauman for being a public-school, son-of-a-publisher, hipster twonk, or that I actually liked his fizzy prose. I think I fall into the latter. I read The Teleportation Accident after Glow (which we’ll talk about later), and my further research assured me the former would prove to be stronger than the latter. I disagree. The first 100 pages of The Teleportation Accident, where we follow our feckless protagonist as he flounces around 1930s Berlin and Paris, looking to get laid, entirely ignorant of the monstrous political overtones of the era, are fantastic. But Beauman loves plot; whereas I’m not sure he can do plot, at least satisfyingly so. He writes a lovely sentence and is bloody funny, and the first half of this book are the strongest pages he has published to date. The rest was just too messy, too disjointed.

I didn’t want to read The Rehearsal. Eleanor Catton, in my eyes, was gifted 2013’s Booker ahead of the ‘more worthy’, Jim Crace. So I’ve since viewed her work with needlessly derisory glances, eugh... But The Rehearsal is fantastic. I read it for a module in my last year of university, and the vagaries of the narrative excited me, as did Catton’s admirable androgyny of voice. I was ultimately disappointed with where the novel went - I wanted the book to be more fantastical, more obtuse than I believe it actually ended up being.  It is very good though, in spite of that, especially so when we consider that Catton was just 23 on the novel’s publication.

And we’re back to Ned Beauman, with his latest (and the final book on this list to have been published in 2014) - Glow. Again, it was when reading Beauman’s first fully contemporary set novel, a conspiracy-thriller-cum-hipster-rave-narrative, that I encountered these largely class related difficulties. When angry and dismissive, I read the book as a textual artefact of middle-class gentrification of London’s inner-city. Raf (Beauman’s protagonist) only holds, and tenuously at that, loose jobs; he floats in and out of gangster showdowns, he somehow affords designer drugs and beds beautiful, exotic women, all the time, appropriating working-class colloquialisms and cultural reference points. I was forced to throw away my prejudices however, due to the sheer enjoyment I got from Beauman’s style. He is a limited writer, but for every misjudged, cringe inducing line, there are three delightful similes or shining images. Maybe it’s sentimentality, but Beauman’s London is one I know - I have lived the fox-ridden, red-eyed sunrises that litter the novel; I’ve stayed up too late and done stupid things in dodgy areas. Beauman’s a writer with potential. I look forward to what he does in the future.

I had never read Zadie Smith. I’ve been reluctant to engage with a writer who, unlike most, has invaded the public consciousness due to her earlier works that James Woods labelled as ‘hysterical realism’. N/W sounded different, it sounded modernist. And as you might have guessed by now, form and style interest me personally far more than the twists-and-turns of plot. The opening pages of the book are indeed very Joycean, all abstractions and tone, a burning North London presented to the reader with a strength of vision fantastic to witness in a mainstream English novel. Interestingly, Smith is at her best in the book when she is stylistically engaging with formal experimentation, but equally at her worst when she attempts to take the narrative into similarly left field situations. As good as the scenes when one of the characters is walking home through a city so vivid and there are, sections where we have a painstakingly signified ‘normal guy’, talking emotively with a bizarre ex-lover and broken-heiress type figure atop a roof in Soho, or the class-guilty lawyer’s, almost random, threesome - these jar and disrupt the unity of the novel. Though it’s encouraging that this book is out there, with such a high profile, it fails to touch the beauty of my number one, a book that came out in the same year (2012) to Smith’s novel...

Samuel Beckett is my favourite novelist; his novel Murphy has been integral to my early reading and writing. This year I read his first published book of long-form fiction - More Pricks Than Kicks. The short-story collection is Beckett at his most unrecognizable. The hallmarks of Joyce are obvious, and Beckett is not concerned with creating realistic characters or even place - the Dublin featured in the short-stories is secondary. What there is to love in this book is the joyous time Beckett is clearly having with his diction and voice. As early as it is, Beckett is finding a niche, finding an idiom for his characteristic gallows humour and singular prose. Nowhere is this to be found clearer than in the first story of the collection - ‘Dante and the Lobster’, which is surely one of the greatest short-stories of all time.

Once could doubt Ford Madox Ford’s legitimacy as a modernist novelist should one consider Joyce and Woolf’s experimentation to be the defining feature of that movement. But to do so would be foolish. Like Lawrence, the wonder of Ford’s fiction is in the subtlety, in the progression from Henry James’ and Knut Hamsun’s ‘psychological fiction’ from the generation previous. Ford’s The Good Soldier is a masterpiece of character study and perspective. Nothing we are told by the narrator can be taken for granted. Morality is subjective and lived experience becomes as loose as a petal caught in the breeze. The unreliable narrator has practically become cliché - but please don’t let that put you off Ford’s slim novel. It’s a wonder of literature.

To be a young writer in the twenty-first century, is to be an individual intimidated and in awe of Thomas Pynchon. As Elvis Presley is the godfather of all pop music; Pynchon is the founding father of contemporary literature. He has helped shape the arena, he has shaved the walls, tiled the roof of prose since the 1960s. And yet, he is such a ball to read and work with - The Crying of Lot 49 is the perfect introduction to the man’s work. It is a delight to read, with characters that we think we all know from cinema, from literature, from pop music, distorted and skewered on a satirical poker. Jacobean theatre, The Beatles, underground counter-culture, television, all is subject to Pynchon’s magical pastiche. The mode of style alters as required - we have those deliciously fat American sentences, clause after clause of sparkle, and we have the hard-boiled, we have Proust, we have Chandler. All this within the covers of a book that is, in total, 127 pages long. Read it, read it, read...

The book I read in 2014 that has lingered most with me, has been Will Self’s 2012 tour de force - Umbrella. By the late 2000s, who even saw Self as a viable, serious novelist and writer anymore? Sure his journalism was always a delight, his television appearances humorous and a welcome change from the ever revolving cast of slobbering talking heads. But who ever thought he could have written something as consistently daring and impressive as Umbrella?
Superficially, thematically, this is a fairly regular Self affair - Ballardian psycho-sexual metaphors, psychoanalysis and techno-culture. Once one turns a page, one realises that formally, Self is far away from his regular Guardian-reading, satirical mode. The entire book is written in the stream-of-consciousness, a narrative style so liquid and difficult to define. Self does not always control the difficulties of the form, but he maintains the narrative adeptly and intelligently.

Really, the book stayed with me so due to almost one metaphorical conceit alone. The reader is aware that one of the main characters and voices in the novel has been presumed dead for decades, one of the many lost on the fields that hosted conflict during the First World War. Yet there is a prolonged sequence where this character - instead of remaining a collapsed corpse amongst the mud - is brought, bloodied and broken, to an underworld, mere feet from the cratered dirt of Flanders and Ypres. Here he is revived by a community of fallen soldiers, all miraculously returned to life also. These soldiers are no longer arms-bearing fighters, but genderless, partially clothed nurses, who sleep warmly with eachother, holding and embracing as death reigns above. They traipse beneath the war, ever expanding this underground not-quite-heaven and rising up to reclaim those fallen men, taking them back to a life of boyhood and simple humanity, away from the brutalised war machine that destroys and bends the human body.
I found this extended conceit so beautiful; for that, Umbrella won me.