Best Books of the Year 2009

Patrick Allington Of 2009’s emerging Australian novelists (such a silly term: emerging from what?) Craig Silvey’s second novel, Jasper Jones (Allen & Unwin), stands out. A dark and funny morality tale set in a 1960s Western Australian mining town, it ruminates on death, secrets, racism, dodgy parenting and adolescence. For anybody who once dreamed of sporting greatness, the cricket match is pure joy. In a year when there were too many books written about Charles Darwin (who turned two hundred), Iain McCalman’s Darwin’s Armada: How Four Voyages to Australasia Won the Battle for Evolution and Changed the World (Viking, reviewed 3/09) offers entertaining and erudite accounts of landmark expeditions by Darwin and three men who became his great allies: Joseph Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley and Alfred Wallace. Glenn Fowler, Christopher Smyth, and Gareth Malone’s Dear Editor: The Collected Letters of Oscar Brittle (UNSW Press) is hilarious. Although Brittle is a fiction, he writes – and often publishes – letters to various publications. His ludicrous wisdom represents literary hoaxing at its most delightful. Dennis Altman The book that most upset and inspired me was Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun (Hamish Hamilton), the true story of a Syrian immigrant caught up in the madness of Hurricane Katrina and homeland security. I implore every politician who believes implicitly in the unique goodness of the United States to read it. It was a tie for second between China Miéville’s The City & the City (Macmillan), in which his capacity to invent palimpsests of the real world is again stunning, and David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife (Doubleday), the extraordinary story of Mormon polygamy and its continuing legacies. The best Australian books I read were by friends, and the Editor has cautioned us against naming our mates. So I’ll cheat and mention Andrew Bovell’s play When the Rain Stops Falling (not yet published), which I suspect is the best Australian play to date this century. Judith Armstrong ‘Summer reading’: lazy enjoyment and justified escapism, or the leisure to attack more demanding or serious tomes put aside for this rare opportunity? Both, of course. My list of high-quality books for 2009 contains one in each category. Alex Miller’s Lovesong (Allen & Unwin, 11/09) is a warm and compulsive read, thanks largely to his faultless evocation of place. Whether it transpires in the familiar streets of Carlton or a café in Paris, the life of the vividly exotic, hard-working protagonist, Sabiha, draws you in. Anne Michaels, author of The Winter Vault (Bloomsbury), remains a poet even when writing prose. This sweeping yet superfine exploration of displacement, which moves from Egypt’s Aswan Dam to a Polish community in Toronto, needs to be read with slow concentration, but offers the distilled rewards of poetry. It is one of the most impressive novels I have ever read. Nicholas Birns Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch (Giramondo, 10/09), meditative, incantatory and wry, combining the intimacy of childhood with the ultimacy of true adulthood, may well bring this challenging and humane novelist to the notice of all who should read him. David Sornig’s taut and gripping Spiel (University of Western Australia Publishing, 11/09) builds on the work of Tsiolkas and McCann in re-theorising Australia’s relationship to Europe – perhaps not dead, but at least on life support – and also establishes a genealogy of the relation of the queasy present to the totalitarian past different from the orthodox ones. Poems from the Women’s Movement (Library of America), edited by Honor Moore, explores an era too often consigned to the memory-hole of the near past; and Steve Pincus’s 1688: The First Modern Revolution (Yale University Press) reasserts the political origins of the entire English-speaking world. James Bradley If there is a downside to Hilary Mantel’s winning the Booker Prize, it is that I am no longer able to force her books on people while insisting she is one of the smartest and most unflinching writers working today. All of which should detract a bit from the success of her wonderfully airy and slyly revisionist depiction of the court of Henry VIII, Wolf Hall (Fourth Estate), but its acclaim is so wholly deserved it doesn’t. In a good year for the Booker judges, I was also impressed by A.S. Byatt’s strangely seductive and entirely idiosyncratic riff on the life of E. Nesbit and the uncanny and cruel power of story, The Children’s Book (Chatto & Windus); and by Summertime: Scenes from Provincial Life III (Knopf, 9/09), J.M. Coetzee’s alternately tragic and mordantly hilarious deconstruction of the faultlines that run through any depiction of a life, in particular the depiction of a life lived through words. Finally, I must mention the book that began my year: Marilynne Robinson’s Home (Virago), a book lit not just by its belief in the redemptive possibility of forgiveness but by its author’s almost magical regard for the capacity of language to show us the world anew. Peter Craven Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a luridly lit bit of historical reanimation in which the author is blatantly gunning for the shade of Thomas More, but nevertheless pulls off the all-but-impossible trick of writing a Tudor historical novel that is a credible, dramatic page-turner, full of torture and burning corpses in the midst of the panoply, and that is also intelligent and moving. J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime looks for quite a while like a cool clinical performance in which a group of women take apart the memory of a marginal famous man, now dead, called J.M. Coetzee, but then engulfs the reader with the portrait of the writer’s father. Peter Temple, that other South African expatriate, shows with Truth (Text, 11/09) what a thing of grandeur the crime novel can be when it kicks over the traces of its genre and lets the emotion rise to the level of the narrative momentum. Gerald Murnane, in Barley Patch, recapitulates the themes of a lifetime with a new sense of wonder that confounds the old story and shows what a master we have in our midst. Morag Fraser Needing to know about the global financial crisis, I began reading ‘Stupid Money’, in Griffith Review 25 (Text, 10/09). My Calvinist DNA compels such explorations, but that doesn’t mean I volunteer for infection by acronym. With Gideon Haigh I thought there was a fair chance I would learn about credit de-fault swaps without suffering an acute attack of the Don Watsons. And so it proved. There’s more than enough information and also enough indignation in Haigh’s deft prose to satisfy an ironist, even a moralist. Which is appropriate, because if you think the Wall Street story reads like a mad, morally disconnected electronic game – it was. Worse, it still is. In Civilising Globalisation, Human Rights and the Global Economy (Cambridge University Press), David Kinley does similar service for some other acronym-burdened worlds: the United Nations, human rights organisations, and international money markets and regulators. In lucid language, he argues that the global economy and human rights are interdependent, and should be. Kinley also has a neat way of addressing human rights with professional seriousness but not an ounce of unctuousness. Peter Porter’s latest volume of poetry, Better Than God (Picador, 5/09), has all kinds of gifts, for all kinds of readers. ‘Ranunculus Which My Father Called a Poppy’ has Porter’s father stalled in age and living in Australia – ‘his waterless Eden’. It is almost unbearable to read, and unforgettable. Here is the final stanza of his closing poem, ‘River Quatrains’: ‘I’m on a river bank. I think I see / The farther side: a choice of nothingness / Or Paradise. My poems wait for me, / They look away, they threaten and they bless.’ So they do. I have included Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity (Museum of Modern Art), the current exhibition catalogue, because it demonstrates so graphically the protean nature of the Bauhaus School. The functional buildings by Walter Gropius might be familiar, but it’s easy to forget that the sublime Paul Klee, master of whimsy and of colour, was an essential influence in the Bauhaus workshops. The Bauhaus was modernity’s think-tank, and its illustrated history is an exhilarating microcosm of twentieth-century design, art and politics. Andrea Goldsmith This year I discovered the American novelist Elizabeth Strout. I began with Abide with Me (Random House), a narrative focused on a Christian minister living through the mysteries and unfairness of grief. Then I read her linked short stories, Olive Kitteridge (Random House), and her first novel, Amy and Isabelle (Random House), with its brilliant, unflinching portrayal of a mother–daughter relationship. Steven Carroll’s The Lost Life (Fourth Estate, 4/09) is a gem. The tone and texture are quite Woolfian, and the portrayal of T.S. Eliot is so deft. In his latest novel, Ransom (Knopf, 5/09), David Malouf takes a minor event from the Iliad and spins it into a tale of the limitations of honour and pride and the strength of a father’s love for his son. Ransom shows the fictional imagination at full strength. Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 5/08) presents an idiosyncratic history of twentieth-century Europe and America through new classical music. The book comes with suggested playlists. I loved this book, and the music. Anna Goldsworthy My favourite books this year both kept me guessing. I have always loved Alice Munro’s level tone. Her style rarely draws attention to itself – sometimes she even flirts with monotony – and then she eviscerates you. Too Much Happiness (Chatto & Windus) is more sinister than her previous books, but I believed her every word. The book that afforded me the greatest number of belly laughs this year was J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime. Here, he achieves the ultimate leap of imagination: seeing himself as others see him – or as they claim to. Coetzee enumerates his flaws and even critiques his lovemaking, but is too honest a writer to hide behind self-deprecation, allowing his earlier self a strange dignity. Lisa Gorton This year, I have kept turning back to Martin Harrison’s Wild Bees: New and Selected Poems (University of Western Australia Publishing, 4/09). Its prose poems work sometimes like short essays and sometimes like memoir, and all his poems marry ideas and incidents with the same intimacy. This collection works as a study of what it is like to know a place so well that it starts to work as a fact of consciousness. Nicolas Rothwell’s The Red Highway (Black Inc., 5/09) combines essay, memoir and travel diary. Bringing the style of Sebald to North Australia, it holds places and encounters in an atmosphere of melancholy and revelation. Evelyn Juers’s The House of Exile: The Life and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann (Giramondo, 10/09) links their story with those of Thomas Mann and the Bloomsbury set. Subtle in its structure, disciplined in its detail, this is an involving study of family, chance, ambition and complicated friendship. Mary Beard’s Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town (Profile Books) is a remarkably lively study of Pompeii – a good companion to this year’s Pompeii exhibition at the Melbourne Museum. Bridget Griffen-Foley Jill Roe’s long-awaited Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography (Fourth Estate, 2/09) appeared in late 2008, but was too much of a leviathan for me to tackle until Christmas. It is a work of great maturity, displaying insight, subtlety, a wry touch and a degree of tender simpatico between the country girl subject and her biographer. That HarperCollins should publish a work of such meticulous scholarship is a hopeful sign for the Australian publishing industry. This year brought a biography of William Hackett, an apparently obscure figure. In The Riddle of Father Hackett: A Life in Ireland and Australia (National Library of Australia, 10/09), Brenda Niall introduces us to a Jesuit priest who was immersed in Ireland’s troubles before being sent off to Australia in 1922 and be-coming Daniel Mannix’s ‘only friend’ and a bridge between him and B.A. Santamaria. It is an intriguing story of religion and politics, sectarianism and intellectualism, education and business, told by a distinguished biographer who grew up in Melbourne’s ‘Vatican Hill’, in sight of Mannix and Raheen, and who met Hackett. Paul Hetherington In a good year for Australian writing, I am singling out four books that have resonated with me. Alex Miller’s novel Lovesong is a limpid and elegant study of the psychology of love and intimacy. The characterisation is captivating and the framing metafictional narrative skilfully constructed. Joan London’s The Good Parents (Vintage, 5/08) is an attentive, nuanced story of family and other close relationships that subtly explores ideas of separation and togetherness, displacement and belonging. David Marr’s The Henson Case (Text, 11/08) is an important analysis of the brouhaha surrounding Bill Henson and some of his photographs. Marr’s lucid assertion of the need for complexity in the public discussion of such issues is timely. Emily Ballou’s The Darwin Poems (University of Western Australia Publishing, 7/09) would make satisfying holiday reading even for those who usually prefer prose to poetry. Its occasionally idiosyncratic vision of Charles Darwin is presented in accessible poetry that, at its best, both beguiles and persuades. Jacqueline Kent This year’s Australian reading has been mostly limited to politics, including the Diaries by Mark Latham (Melbourne University Press, 11/05). I think they have been severely underrated. Yes, they are sometimes mean-spirited, but also insightful and funny. They are unswervingly candid, not always to the writer’s advantage. I enjoyed Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (Bloomsbury), stories dealing with unexpected and often unwelcome tensions between cultures and notable for their quiet, unobtrusive poignancy. For sheer entertainment Molly Haskell’s Frankly My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited (Yale University Press) is hard to beat: a Southerner’s sardonic look at the novel, movie and author of Gone With the Wind. A welcome rediscovery was The Unbearable Bassington by Saki, (1907: my copy is an ancient Penguin). He is a master of tone, able to describe his brittle characters so that they are both amusing and tragic. Evelyn Waugh learned a great deal from him. John Kinsella For tough, taut, uncompromising poetry of motherhood, nothing surpasses Rebecca Wolff’s The King (Norton), a supersmart book with a minimalist approach to ‘the poem’ and acute dissection of the lyric. Adam Aitken’s Eighth Habitation: New Poems (Giramondo) is a collection of poems that investigates cross-cultural dialogue and politics of re-mapping in the Asia–Pacific region. Aitken’s poems are characterised by rhythmic control, and skilful examination of belonging and exclusion. Peter Porter’s Better Than God is one of his finest books of poetry and a sign that, like Thomas Hardy’s, his poems evolve with age. Two books I can’t separate in terms of personal worth: first, Jennifer Harrison and Kate Waterhouse’s superb anthology Motherlode: Australian Women’s Poetry 1986–2008 (Puncher & Wattmann, 10/09), with its solid thematics and breadth of vision; and Xavier Pons’s challenging and risk-taking critical book Messengers of Eros: Representations of Sex in Australian Writing (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 10/09). James Ley My first two choices are going to be unsurprising, since I had the pleasure of reviewing both for ABR. J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime and David Foster’s Sons of the Rumour (Picador, 11/09) are wonderful examples of the respective strengths of these two seasoned but very dissimilar writers. The third instalment in Coetzee’s autobiographical trilogy is written with an understated formal mastery that is self-reflexive and subversively ironic, yet manages to convey an underlying sense of pathos and regret; while Foster’s first book of fiction in eight years is a sweeping, boisterous, multifaceted comedy that turns Arabian Nights inside out and, in the process, delivers his finest work since his Miles Franklin winner, The Glade Within the Grove. Sonya Hartnett’s Butterfly (Hamish Hamilton, 2/09) is a reminder of what an extraordinarily good writer she is. Hartnett specialises in writing about children and adolescents, but her vision is ruthlessly unsentimental: no one captures the emotional intensity and rawness of youth with quite the same devastating clarity. It was also a good year for first books. In particular, I was impressed by several new writers whose work revitalised some familiar fictional modes. Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (Sleepers, 4/09) takes its cues from apocalyptic fiction, basing itself around a rolling series of disasters, but develops an atmospheric story sequence whose intimacy expresses a restrained sense of optimism. Tom Cho’s hilarious collection of short fiction Look Who’s Morphing (Giramondo, 6/09) demonstrates what might have happened if Robert Walser had grown up watching The Muppet Show. Vivienne Kelly’s Cooee (Scribe, 4/09) is an offbeat crime novel of sorts that, thanks to her intriguingly unstable narrator, has a weirdly compelling psychological dimension. Patrick Allington’s Figurehead (Black Inc., 10/09) is an historical-political novel with an absurdist edge that is based on the lives of the radical journalist Wilfred Burchett and Khieu Samphan, one of the leaders of the Khmer Rouge. The premise is unusual and potentially dicey, but Allington’s remarkably polished début somehow makes it work. Patrick McCaughey Vincent Buckley’s Collected Poems (John Leonard Press, 7/09) – edited by Chris Wallace-Crabbe, foreword by Peter Steele – represents a major event in Australian poetry, adding a significant number of new poems, particularly a beautiful sequence of love poems from the 1960s. Handsomely produced, it must surely restore Buckley to the highest levels of Australian literature. Anne Gray and Ron Radford’s McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17 (National Gallery of Australia) provides a superb, overdue survey of McCubbin’s great final phase, the only Heidelberg School painter to sustain his art to the end. Andrea Goldsmith’s Reunion (Fourth Estate, 5/09) is a remarkable novel, outstanding even in the crowded field of new Australian fiction. Her quartet of Melbourne friends is strung together with intricacy and elegance like a single-volume Dance to the Music of Time. Finally, Mic Looby’s Paradise Updated (Affirm Press, 11/09) is my best rookie novel of the year – like early Waugh: comic with a sense of threat. Brian McFarlane Resisting the temptation to write about Robert Hichens’s seventy-six-year-old The Paradine Case, which I had to read in the line of duty, and which reminded me how seductive middle-brow fiction can be, I find that this has been a very good year for novels. That is, if one may call J.M. Coetzee’s quietly ingenious Summertime a novel. Is a book in which a young biographer is researching a period in the life of an author called John Coetzee, interviewing lovers and others who have crossed his path, a novel? Well, of course it is, and done with sly wit and beautiful tact, in that famously lapidary prose. Steven Carroll’s The Lost Life also plays with real and fictional lives, intersecting in the rose garden at Burnt Norton, in 1934. Here, the emotion has to make itself felt through a similarly chaste style – and does. Last, Philip Roth, eschewing age and death in Indignation (Jonathan Cape, 3/09), compassionately traces a conservative young man’s education (in the broadest sense) in the America of the early 1950s. Peter Mares The book that I most enjoyed this year was Cate Kennedy’s The World Beneath (Scribe, 9/09) about two forty-somethings yearning for the lost idealism from their youth when they joined the blockade to save the Franklin. Kennedy is bitterly funny, skewering hypocrisy and self-delusion, and her storytelling is compelling. Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch eschews plot (and character). He uses a scant supply of images (a jockey’s colours, white rails against the green turf of a race track, a two-storey house) to celebrate the life of the mind. Murnane deliberately intervenes in the text to prevent narrative from asserting itself. I struggled mightily with Barley Patch at first, but Murnane’s images have stayed with me, and he got me thinking deeply about the act of reading. I also recommend Kalinda Ashton’s well-crafted début novel, The Danger Game (Sleepers, 12/09), and the vigorous prose of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. David Marr Another year when publishing so outstripped reading that bookshops became places of alarm and dread. Why do we even dream of keeping up? This year I finally read one of the best of 2008: Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island (Hamish Hamilton, 9/08), a study of death on Palm Island that doesn’t flinch from contradiction. I read David Malouf’s Ransom the moment it appeared, and add my voice to the general chorus of praise. Finished months ago, Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (Picador) is with me vividly still. So is Nicolas Rothwell’s The Red Highway. In his hands, over the top is a great place to be. I hadn’t known M.J. Hyland until I came across her illuminating and supremely disciplined This Is How (Text, 7/09). Old admiration for Steven Carroll was renewed by the pleasures and unsuspected destination of The Lost Life. Finally, praise for a scholarly and elegant companion in a great city: Anne Warr’s Shanghai Architecture (Watermark Press). Brenda Niall In a good year, it’s easy to make a long list; very hard to shrink it. Here are three favorites by Australian authors. First, and appropriately from the globe-trotting Giramondo Press: Evelyn Juers’s brilliant group biography of displaced people, House of Exile. The exiles of Hitler’s war include Virginia Woolf, and others who took their own lives, unable to make a ‘home’ or maintain their creativity. Shirley Walker’s The Ghost at the Wedding (Viking, 6/09) is a movingly written family story about another war-damaged generation, that of 1914–18. For contrast, a comedy of manners by expatriate Madeleine St John, rediscovered by Text. The Women in Black of the title are not the Furies; they wield power as saleswomen in Model Gowns in a Sydney department store. A fairytale ending doesn’t disguise the fact that 1960s Australia was no place for a clever young woman like St John. Peter Pierce Alex Miller’s Lovesong returns to the themes and locations of his Miles Franklin-winning Conditions of Faith. This is also a story of salvation through betrayal, of individuals’ essential solitariness, and of their unquenchable hope. A wry portrait of the artist as well, Lovesong is perhaps Miller’s finest novel. Published together as An Oresteia (Faber and Faber), Anne Carson has translated and enmeshed the works of the three great Greek tragedians: Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Sophocles’s Electra and Euripides’s Orestes. Coruscating and colloquial, this is a remarkable literary and imaginative feat, surpassing its many forerunners. Posthumously published, Dorothy Porter’s book of verse The Bee Hut (Black Inc., 10/09) is a fitting culmination of her career. Intense, self-dramatising, direct in its address to her cancer, vivid in image, limpid in diction, this collection ends valiantly: ‘Something in me / despite everything / can’t believe my luck.’ Neither can we. Geordie Williamson There is, thanks to J.M. Coetzee and David Malouf, no need to go offshore this year – the great world comes to us. Summertime is Coetzee’s best work since Disgrace. The author’s late turn toward the nineteenth-century Russians is like watching a cold-climate plant swivel to meet the sun. Meanwhile, in Ransom Malouf’s fractal treatment of Homer’s Iliad is a quiet triumph. For me, it brought to mind those beautiful lines by Camus: ‘It is by acknowledging our ignorance, refusing to be fanatics, recognising the world’s limits, and man’s, through the faces of those we love, in short, by means of beauty – this is how we may rejoin the Greeks.’

Hidden Author

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