FEW contemporary writers write as well as Jonathan Raban, and his Bad Land - an American Romance (Picado,) which chronicles the heart breaking story of the attempted settlement of Eastern Montana in the early years bf this century, is both powerful social history and moving elegy. Perceptive and humane a beautiful book.
Humanity also sings through the individual testimony offered by an engaging cast of characters co narrating Graham Swift's outstanding Booker winner, Last Orders (Picador), one of the best novels I've read in recent years and certainly a celebration of vernacular speech. For sheer beauty of prose Seamus Deane's darkly lyric, episodic Reading in the Dark (Cape) is difficult to surpass. Memoir or novel, it has already inspired many debates; even so, an unforgettable work. Another novel which walks the tightrope between fiction and memoir is Paul Theroux's blackly self absorbed My Other Life (Hamish Hamilton).
Mary Morrissy has already demonstrated her many gifts in several accomplished short stories; her first novel, Mother Of Pearl, (Cape) is a compelling story about a woman's determination to have a child and is all the more moving for its narrative control and apparent detachment. David Malouf is another stylist, and although The Conversations at Curlow Creek (Cliatlo) is a small work compared with Remembering Babylon, this is a good novel, particularly in its portrayal of Adair, a man finally coming to terms with himself as he oversees an execution of a prisoner.
Margaret Atwood's assured intelligence and mordant wit dominates Alias Grace (Bloomsbury), a veritable masterclass in the art of storytelling. Based on a real life double murder that preoccupied 19th century Canada, this spiky, clever novel is also concerned with issues such as the elusiveness of truth and the grim lot endured by working women, treated as an alien species by their more fortunate sisters who earned status and respect by marrying wealth.
Three reasons for not worrying about the fate of the short story are provided by William Trevor, Alice Munro and Tobias Wolff. Trevor's After Rain (Viking) contains several masterpieces such as "Lost Ground". Reading this collection served to remind me yet again that the short story genre belongs to Trevor, a veteran whom age clearly can not wither.
Another writer who has dominated the form is Canada's Alice Munro, and Alice Munro - Selected Stories (Chatto) brings together 23 of her best stories spanning over 30 years. While Munro is fascinated with the family histories which have led her characters to their present position, Tobias' Wolff is more interested in their lives as seen in a continuous present. Wolff's The Night In Question (Bloomsbury) shows his deliberate, precise imagination at work. It is also an impressive return to fiction following two outstanding volumes of memoir.
When Beryl Bainbridge gets it right, she tends to get it very right indeed. Her Booker contender, Every Man for Himself(Duckworth) is a terse morality play and coming of age narrative set against the human tragedy of the sinking of the Titanic: Big and flawed - even so, Robinton Mistry's feat of 19th century storytelling, A Fine Balance, (Faber) had many moments of painful human comedy.
Few writers can make a reader laugh quite like a Russian on form does, and satirist Evgeny Popov's burlesque collection Merry Making in Old Russia (Harvill) is often hilarious and never dull. Seamus Heaney's The Spirit Level (Faber) is warm and familiar while also possessing a new anger and exasperation; I loved it.
Another Nobel Laureate, the late Joseph Brodsky, yet again displays his mastery of prose in the essays contained in On Grief and Reason, (Hamish Hamilton), a worthy companion volume to his earlier classic, Less Than One (1986) - this is, quite simply, a great book.
James Corner and Alex S. MacLean's Taking Measures Across The Americana Landscape (Yale) is a breathtaking, informative and perceptive combination of literature, geography, science and photography exploring the natural and man made topography shaping the monumental and varied landscape of the United States. It also endorses aerial photography as an art.
SOMEHOW the Michael Collins myth never really captured my imagination: Wolfe Tone any day. Still, villains invariably prove more fun than goodguys. Frank Callanan's singular T.M. Healy (Cork University Press) is a magisterial study; elegant, witty and astute. Hermione Lee's magnificent, dignified and textually based Virginia Woolf (Chatto) rehabilitates literary biography. Thomas Pakenham's glorious and informative Meetings With Remarkable Trees (Weidenfeld) is the book I will buy for my best friends.
Meanwhile, Dear Santa - the book I most desire is Geoffrey C. Ward's The West: An Illustrated History (Weidenfeld).
