Flashback 2004/Literary landmarks: Bloomsday dominated Ireland's literary year, but don't forget about Patrick Kavanagh. Elsewhere, Susanna Clarke delighted and Tom Wolfe dismayed Eileen Battersby
It was the year of James Joyce, or rather it was the year of Ulysses, better known as that Book of a Day, a particular day, and what a day: a journey spanning dawn's slow passage to midnight. Joyce's book took over from Joyce the man in a way that pleased readers weary of the endless biographical anecdotes too often offered as literary criticism.
Finally, it seemed, the text had supplanted the facts of the life. The public at large considered, even confronted, the novel and embraced Leopold Bloom. Ironically, Bloomsday celebrates the date on which the action takes place, itself the anniversary of the first time Joyce stepped out with Nora Barnacle. This meeting of high artistic aspirations, as personified by an edgy, ambitious young fella with a cosmopolitan head full of notions, and a practical Galway woman not overly given to reading anything at all played its part in shaping the sensibility that produced a great city epic.
Admittedly, the book has also spawned a literary industry, libraries full of critical texts, endless talk, disputes, legal battles, the odd duel and more than its share of tea towels and posters. For all its claims to be a pioneering literary masterpiece, this major modernist narrative, which, intriguingly, draws its structure from an ancient Greek oral epic, is very, very funny. Cynical, shrewd, too clever by half and often overblown, it is a bawdy, wordy extravaganza well worth singing, shouting and talking about, as well as breakfasting over, for another 100 years.
Yet while Ulysses dominated radio, television, the newspapers and the very streets Joyce immortalised from abroad, the gods ensured that in 2004 a great Irish poet, Patrick Kavanagh, was not relegated to the sidelines of the marathon Joycean, er, wake, for want of a better word. In Ireland the ultimate career moves have always been death, exile or both. Kavanagh, unhappy in life, was, for all his misery and disillusion, a natural, instinctive poet whose vision of Ireland was, possibly, more authentic than Joyce's and shaped by an anger born more of universal torment than of individual frustration, by a wisdom learnt through pain. For every sausage eaten this year in honour of Ulysses, let us salute those who took the time and thought to read a Kavanagh poem. Here is the poet, bitter realist, defeated romantic, who achieved a savage grandeur worthy of the great Jonathan Swift.
Neither Joyce nor Kavanagh won many literary prizes, but awards, derided and denounced, have become a measure of sorts - and do sell books. It has become too easy for reviewers to conclude a positive review with the now standard epitaph that "it should win the Booker prize". Perhaps it should, maybe it shouldn't. It's most likely, if it's that good, it won't.
Snipe at prizes if you will, but praise the judges of the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. This prize had come of age through fine former winners such as Herta Müller's The Land Of Green Plums (1998) and Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief (2001) It further matured this year by selecting a formidable victor: Tahar Ben Jelloun's magnificent and terrifying work, This Blinding Absence Of Light.
Based on an actual human-rights abuse that took place in the Moroccan desert, it is a narrative of immense horror and shocking beauty. The narrator is representative of the collective suffering of a number of soldiers who, unknown to the world, spent 20 years, between 1971 to 1991, imprisoned in relentless darkness in a foul concentration camp, following a failed palace coup. They were released only after international intervention. Less than half of the prisoners had survived.
It is a masterpiece, lyric, candid and philosophical. The genius of Ben Jelloun's French text is brilliantly served by Linda Coverdale's translation. Although the humiliation and physical agony of the men, confined in cells that are as closed as graves, are vividly evoked, the book triumphs through its belief in man's ability to survive. It is a testament of faith in life. Here is an outstanding example of how a prize can alert the reading public to a great book by a fine writer. His other books include the 1987 Prix Goncourt winner, The Sacred Night, and the Beckettian Silent Day In Tangier (1991), in which an old man waiting for death passes his last days remembering lost years and dead friends.
Also included on this year's IMPAC shortlist was an Afghan novella, Earth And Ashes, by Atiq Rahimi, translated by Erdag M. Göknar. This eloquent little fable, only 54 pages long, follows each heartbreaking step in an old man's journey to find his son in a war-torn landscape that shows no mercy. The Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf's stylishly witty Balthasar's Odyssey, set in 1666 (and translated from the French by Barbara Bray), also graced a shortlist that again underlined the international scope of the prize, which is serving the literature of the world, not merely books written in English - and readers are the winners.
This year's Man Booker Prize began its campaign in early March with the publication of the British writer David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, a big novel of interlinking stories. It looked a predictable contender, duly surviving the longlist to make it to the shortlist, where, on Booker night, it was beaten by Alan Hollinghurst's The Line Of Beauty, an archly clever, sexually explicit satirical social comedy of England under Margaret Thatcher. It was a win that underlined the limitations of contemporary British fiction, as well as the narrowness of the Booker itself. Four of the six shortlisted books were by English writers.
One need not be an Irish patriot to announce that the novel that should have won was Colm Tóibín's The Master, a subtle, graceful and intuitive exploration of the repressed consciousness of the consummate observer Henry James.
The problem with this year's Booker goes back to the longlist announced on August 26th. That selection included a number of rubbishy and indifferent books as well as seven exceptional novels, of which only one, The Master, made it to the final six. Ronan Bennett's profound allegory Havoc In Its Third Year, a taut, dramatic study of fear and betrayal, looked a potential winner but didn't make it.
But then Paradise, by the much-vaunted Scots writer A. L. Kennedy, did not even appear on the longlist. Expected to be one of the year's big books, this black, if at times funny, account of a woman's chaotic romance with alcohol and a fellow alcoholic was received quietly. As was Magic Seeds, by V.S. Naipaul, the 2001 Nobel literature laureate, the rather odd, quasi-philosophical sequel to the immensely superior autobiographical Half A Life (2001). It now appears the two books were intended to be published as one longer work, leaving Magic Seeds curiously flat.
Also disappointing was Conversations In Bolzano, by the Hungarian master Sándor Márai, author of Embers, an inspired tale of friendship betrayed. Conversations In Bolzano is an account of the sexual antics of Casanova. It is a stylish performance, at times funny and ulti-mately somewhat profound, as its thesis appears to be that of the plight of a man incapable of love. Such is the splendour of Embers that I expected much of this book - and was left sharing Casanova's dissatisfaction. It is my flop of the year.
Flop, however, fails to describe exactly how pathetic Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons is. This crass, self-indulgent and obnoxiously vulgar performance serves only as a warning for writers insistent on being listened to when they have nothing left to say.
Another veteran US writer, but one with more and more to say, is the increasingly magisterial Philip Roth. His new book, The Plot Against America, a brave and risky rewriting of US history in a what-if scenario featuring the aviation hero Charles Lindbergh as president, does not match the heights of American Pastoral, his profound elegiac lament to the US, yet it does testify to the enduring powers of the always gifted if formerly self-obsessed Roth, who has matured into a great American writer - something that the way-beyond-his-shelf-life Wolfe clearly is not.
The awarding of this year's Nobel Prize in Literature to Elfriede Jelinek, the Austrian novelist and feminist, appears to have frightened more people than it may have pleased. The author of The Piano Teacher (1983), a horrifically funny but shockingly graphic psychosexual book of genuine anger, has raised more questions than are usually asked about Nobel laureates. One clue towards understanding her work could lie in reading Robert Coover. Jelinek is committed to experimentalism and has translated Pynchon into German. Gender wars and sexual power shifts are her territory. Put plainly, she is an acquired taste.
By contrast, for sheer pleasure, fun and storytelling, Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell confirmed yet again that, Evelyn Waugh and J. G. Ballard aside, the best of English fiction resides in its 19th-century novel tradition.
The finest biography of 2004 must be Jeremy Treglown's V. S. Pritchett: A Working Life, but towering above everything for beauty, pathos, grace, wisdom, fierce passion, polemic and humanity is A Tale Of Love And Darkness, the visionary Israeli novelist Amos Oz's inspired and inspirational memoir, translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange. It is an atmospheric and candid narrative that illustrates how definitively a childhood shapes a life.
Take five...
. . . highs and lows
1 Reading Amos Oz's memoir A Tale Of Love And Darkness.
2 Celebrating Patrick Kavanagh's Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn.
3 Discovering sheer pleasure in the reading of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke, which was 10 years in the writing.
4 Witnessing IMPAC getting it so right with Tahar Ben Jelloun's This Blinding Absence Of Light.
5 Bemoaning Booker getting it so wrong, from the shaky longlist to the complacent sitcom-style winner, only to be bored senseless by Tom Wolfe's tissue-thin but bloated and unfunny I Am Charlotte Simmons.
