Late in the Day by Tessa Hadley

I've reviewed Tessa Hadley's fine new novel, Late in the Day, for The Independent.

Previous reviews I've written of Hadley's novels: The Past for The Independent on Sunday

The London Train for The Financial Times

Married Love for The Spectator

Books of the Year 2015

It's been a busy year, what with writing The King's Revenge and The Double Axe, and plotting the latter's sequel; not to mention other projects and the demands of that thing called Life. Nevertheless I have been reviewing and reading steadily, and these are the books that have particularly caught me over the last year. 

Benjamin Wood: literary thriller

Fiction

It may seem odd to start with an omission, but I've been much looking forward to Paul Murray's The Mark and the Void, and alackaday have yet to be able to start it; it's first on my list for this year. On to what I did read: Benjamin Wood's second novel, The Ecliptic, was an intelligent and able literary thriller about art and the processes of creation. Tessa Hadley, always elegant and finely-tuned, discussed family politics in The Past, full of gorgeous moments humming with delicacy and power. However strange Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant may have been, it was still intriguing in its use of the Matter of Britain and its understanding of humanity and memory. For pure enjoyment there was Martin Millar's The Goddess of Buttercups and Daisies, a clever romp set in ancient Athens; and David Mitchell's bonkers horror story, Slade House, featuring transdimensional immortals that eat your soul. Also splendidly entertaining is my friend Catriona Ward's terrifying Rawblood, a post-modern Gothic mash up which will have you checking behind your shoulders on even the sunniest of days. Rock on!

Children's and Young Adult Fiction

It was a good year for children's fiction, led by Sally Gardner's The Door that Led to Where, a moving account of a damaged young man who finds solace in time travel. Frances Hardinge's The Lie Tree is her finest novel to date: a delicious mixture of thrilling revenge narrative, feminism, natural science and askew realities. Philip Reeve's Railhead is a slick space opera with hints of Blade Runner, seeing a young boy, set to steal from the imperial family, discovering something much more dangerous at play. Cressida Cowell's How to Fight a Dragon's Fury was a perfect end to a much-loved series, taking its place amongst the classics of children's literature. And The Story of King Lear by Melania G Mazzuco, in Pushkin Press's "Save the Story" series, was a dark, moving version of what is, in my view, Shakespeare's greatest tragedy. 

Recent Non Fiction

I haven't read much non-fiction this year, being engaged upon a wade through Robert Tombs' magnificent The English and their History, but I did finally manage to get to Sandie Byrne's The Unbearable Saki, a fine biography and critical study of the soigné short story writer, which suggests that the apparent effeteness of his heroes is in fact all a part of his conservatism. I must also recommend The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature, which I reviewed for The Times Literary Supplement - edited by Daniel Hahn, it makes a useful and entertaining guide to a field of literature expanding in many interesting ways.

Recent Fiction

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad is funny, tender and skewers modern life with glee. I became obsessed, briefly, with Robertson Davies, devouring The Cornish Trilogy and The Deptford Trilogy in a matter of weeks, and I thoroughly recommend them to anyone looking for a hearty, brainy feast. Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake is rather an extraordinary piece of work: told in a shadow version of Anglo Saxon, it follows a displaced Saxon as the Normans begin their reign of terror.

Recent Children's Fiction

I missed all the fuss about Kevin Brooks' The Bunker Diary when it won the Carnegie: it's a marvellous book, threatening, menacing, involving; its ending may be bleak but that is an inherent part of its structure and composition; it is by no means gratuitous. Melvin Burgess' Junk is a brilliant account of two teenagers who become heroin addicts: convincing, funny, scary and poignant, it both conforms to and breaks the boundaries of children's fiction. I've also been feeding my Catherine Fisher addiction, hoovering up Corbenic - surely a minor masterpiece of Arthurian fiction - and Incarceron, which features a mysterious prison and a world controlled by computers to resemble a medieval castle. Splendid, and Fisher should be much more widely known and read. 

Classics

By far the best classic I've been reading this year is George Eliot's Middlemarch; but, on January 2nd, I have still got 100 pages to go, so I can't really count it. Turgenev's Spring Torrents and Fathers and Sons are both beautiful novels; the one infused with youthful spirit; the other with an elegiac tenderness. I would also count Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker as a modern classic - its weird post-apocalyptic visions stayed with me for days, nay weeks, afterwards.

Classic Children's Fiction

Elizabeth Taylor's Mossy Trotter was a funny, exquisitely observed story about a little boy's daily travails (including being forced to have a birthday party). And I cannot believe that I have got through life so far without having read Alan Garner's Elidor - superb, sharp, strange, a take on Childe Roland that throbs with mysterious and electric power. Similarly, Robert Westall's The Machine Gunners is a violent, unflinching account of how children act when they are not observed. I always return to Ursula Le Guin, and have been using A Wizard of Earthsea to teach: I re-read it this year, and it is still one of the most thoroughly imagined, firmly-constructed, wise and vivid pieces of fiction for the young that there are. Out of 12 students, only one liked it, which rather shocked me - this book came before Harry Potter, and is so much more interesting, thematically, than its shadows. Finally, I re-read Ted Hughes' The Iron Man with a young boy not particularly interested in reading - the effect on him was as if a spell had been cast - we read it together, without stopping, for an hour, totally absorbed in its galactic, poetic struggle. 

Spectator review of Tessa Hadley's Married Love

Hadley: Elegant

Pip pip. I've reviewed Tessa Hadley's short stories for The Spectator. Her novel, The London Train, was one of the best of last year.

Books of the Year, Day Five: Fiction

 Hello there, and welcome to the thrilling final installment of my books of the year - it's time for fiction! Hurrah! A good year, all in all, Booker mishaps aside, I'd say. It was also a good year for novels by my contemporaries - there was Ivo Stourton's slick The Book Lover's Tale; Anna Stothard's warm and vivid The Pink Hotel, and Jonathan Lee's inventive and accomplished Who is Mr Satoshi?, not to mention Leo Benedictus' post-modern The Afterparty.

1. At Last by Edward St Aubyn

Beware the teeny martini

The latest (and possibly final) book in St Aubyn's acidic Patrick Melrose series, this elegantly skewers the super-rich, and shows a deeply troubled man moving towards peace. There's a fabulous cast of grotesques: Nancy, who, though richer than Croesus, lies and steals and constantly bemoans her fate; Nicholas, a flamboyant and viperish socialite; and the mad drunk Fleur. Patrick seems almost sane by comparison. There are some brilliantly witty vignettes, too, including one about a Grand Duke who drank 20 martinis every day before lunch, which, I have decided, will be my New Year's Resolution. Cheers!

2. The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips

King Arthur: Real?

There are layers upon layers at work in this dazzling novel; it centres around a 'lost' Shakespeare play about King Arthur (itself based on Holinshead), which the author's father may or may not have forged whilst in prison. The book takes the form of an introduction to this play (which you must read first, and you will appreciate the beauty of Phillips' - I mean Shakespeare's - efforts), in which Phillips attempts to tell the story of his life and the events surrounding the play. The reader never finds out whether, within the context of the book, the play is real or not - it's totally fascinating.

3 The London Train by Tessa Hadley

What a novel should be - well-observed, beautifully written, surprising, funny and moving, this diptych shows two marriages in disrepair. Hadley's prose is filled with light; her eyes are keen, and her heart is clearly warm and open. 

4. My Former Heart by Cressida Connolly

A Parrot. Possibly psychotic.

Connolly's debut novel, about the loves and lives of three generations of women. Lilting, luminous prose and a deep understanding of human nature combine to make a polished gem. And there's a delightfully insane parrot called Birdle, as well as some lesbians, if you like that sort of thing.

5. Gods without Men by Hari Kunzru

A very involving tale whose themes and plots bounce around like echoes in a cave, involving the consequences of an autistic boy going missing in the desert. His parents are hounded; their lives interconnect with many other tales of strange disappearances, aliens and angels. Kunzru is a superbly strong writer, and this book won't disappoint.

6. The Champion by Tim Binding

This funny and highly acute satire of middle English life was somewhat overlooked this year; I highly recommend its tale of a Kent boy done good who wreaks havoc on his home town, to the detriment of its professional classes, it's full of insight and wit.

7. Ragnarok by A S Byatt

A numinous and powerful retelling of the myths of Asgard and the ends of the gods, it also works as part memoir and part ecological warning. More of a between novels stopgap, it's still worth reading to watch a master of prose at work.

8. By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

A married middle aged man falls in love with a beautiful young man; Cunningham perceptively and feelingly dissects the fallout of despair.

9. A Kind Man by Susan Hill

Taut and tense, this tale of the miraculous seeping into the everyday brings with it wisdom and strength. 

10. Ransom by David Malouf and The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason

These both came out last year but they are marvellous: Malouf retells the last book of the Iliad, delving into the concept of ransom - Priam himself was ransomed as a boy, and he gained his name from that - it's a beautiful, eerie, poetical work. Mason's is dreamlike - he relates, in kaleidoscope fashion, different versions of the Odyssey; in which the latter's identity is subsumed; where Ariadne becomes Calypso; where Achilles is a robot. It's great fun.

11. The Hunter by Julia Leigh

Leigh's Disquiet  was a brittle, sharp, poised thing, like an arrow; this is her first novel, based around a man's search for the last Tasmanian tiger. It's just as fluid and elegant as her second, and I can't wait for her next.

So a Happy New Book Year to you all, and I look forward to seeing you in 2012. Now, another martini? 

The Booker Longlist: A Travesty - A D Miller instead of Edward St Aubyn? Madness

Hadley: elegant

I know a lot has been said about this already, but this year's Booker Prize Longlist is mostly entirely mad. It is making my blood boil to the extent that you could probably power an entire city off me. The point about a prize for literary fiction, one would have thought, is that it had literary fiction on its longlist - and by that I mean serious, well-written and thoughtful fiction that doesn't think about whether it will sell in Japan. Crime and thrillers have their own prizes - surely the raison d'être of the Booker is to give space to serious fiction that might not otherwise gain any press at all? I can't talk about the books I haven't read, but I know that I have read at least two novels this year that beat A D Miller's appalling Snowdrops into a cocked hat. Snowdrops, with its clunky prose and guessable plot, embarrassing stereotypes and cringeworthy similes, doesn't deserve to be on this list at all. What about Tessa Hadley's elegant and beautiful The London Train? Or Tim Binding's overlooked The Champion? Or, more potently, Edward St Aubyn's sterling At Last?

A list that has something as inherently bad as Snowdrops on it is not a list that I can take seriously. Perhaps it's time for the Man Booker to rethink its position. Why have thriller writers like Stella Rimington as judges (whose own last novel was reviewed rather, well, feebly). For publicity points? Why have Chris Mullin, whose only literary effort to date has been some rather amiable diaries? No Pepys he. This isn't a proper list - it's like the weird woman in the supermarket taking tins off a shelf at random.

We'll have to wait and see what the shortlist looks like: if Miller's on it, I'm leaving the country if that's what passes for decent fiction these days.

• Read my review of Tessa Hadley
• And my review of Tim Binding
• And of St Aubyn
• And A D Miller.

THE LONG LIST Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape - Random House)
Sebastian Barry On Canaan's Side (Faber)
Carol Birch Jamrach's Menagerie (Canongate Books)
Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta)
Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent's Tail)
Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)
Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger's Child (Picador - Pan Macmillan)
Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)
Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)
A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic)
Alison Pick Far to Go (Headline Review)
Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
D.J. Taylor Derby Day (Chatto & Windus - Random House)

The London Train by Tessa Hadley: review

And the most splendiferous of New New Years to you all! For the Romans, 'novus' meant 'strange', as everything new was by definition strange; interesting that we've lost that sense of it. Anyway, here is a link to my review of Tessa Hadley's exquisite novel, The London Train, on the Financial Times website: click HERE