The Best Novel of the Year was Alex Shakar's LUMINARIUM, which is a hell of a story and smartly technological, neurological, and metaphysical at the same time, the big ideas in witty, sharply written prose.
Good tandem reads were this year's The Spiritual Doorway In The Brain: A Neurologist's Search For The God Experience by Kevin Nelson, M.D., and last year's My Stroke Of Insight by Harvard scientist Jill Bolte Taylor.
Luminarium was also my year's Best Book About Brothers, with Patrick Dewitt's darkly humorous western, The Sisters Brothers, runner-up in this category.
Best Literary Westerns of the Year: Susan Froderberg's OLD BORDER ROAD, Craig Johnson's HELL IS EMPTY, Patrick Dewitt's THE SISTERS BROTHERS, and Denis Johnson's TRAIN DREAMS.
Best Literary Mystery/Thrillers of the Year: Craig Johnson's cross-genre HELL IS EMPTY (which is also a runner-up for the Track of the Cat Award), and Declan Burke's dark and funny ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. A longer descriptive list of the year's ten best crime novels will appear here later this week.
The Best Time Travel Novels of the year 2011, from a banner crop, were: Stephen King's 11/22/63, Felix J. Palma's THE MAP OF TIME, and Thomas Mullen's splendid thriller, THE REVISIONISTS.
Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, John O'Hara's Appointment in Samarra, and several other good ones dealing with time and fate.
The one anachronism I noted in Stephen King's novel was when the gatekeeper calls the protagonist the "mf" epithet, this in 1958. That ugly term did not enter common vernacular until a few years later when Richard Pryor and some other comedians started using it. I could be wrong about this, but I don't think so.
Perhaps it was merely a clue that the drunken gatekeeper of the rabbit hole (who reminds me of Shakespeare's gate porter in MacBeth) is an out-of-time character. Later, the protagonist talks with another gatekeeper whose name is something like a play on Auld Lang Syne.
You might seek out Rohan Wilson's The Roving Party, which was touted as Blood Meridian-like. I loved it, though it is not nearly as deep (nor as dark) as McCarthy's masterpiece. It is similar in surface plot, attitude, punctuation, dialogue, cadence, and vocabulary, though not in philosophy nor symbolism and it is based upon an entirely different history. I'll review it at length one of these days, when the mood strikes me to read it again.
Most novels being compared to Cormac McCarthy are no such thing, of course.
Daniel Woodrell, author of Winter's Bone and other good ones, when asked (in this interview) about the reviews which compare him to Cormac McCarthy, replied:
"Well, I've certainly read and admired Cormac. However, the books that influenced him also influenced some of the rest of us who are always getting hit with that 'sounds like Cormac' thing. I've read Shakespeare and the Bible and Hemingway and Faulkner as well, and so if that means I have echoes that sound like Cormac it doesn't necessarily mean it comes from Cormac. It comes from the original source. I don't think I'm that much like him, to be honest, but it does come up a lot."
There are two other novels I've recently read that are especially worth mentioning. Both of them would have made my best lists if I'd been lucky enough to read them when they first came out. The first is Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist, which brims with spacey humor and lovely poetic turns of phrase. The second is Teddy Wayne's Kapitoil, which I passed on last year, probably because it was a trade paperback and I wanted to read it in hardcover.
These two are not to be missed in any format, both of them charming, insightful novels. Detailed reviews of them are not hard to find, but with these, the less you know ahead of time, the better.
This year's winner in the general Best Book Art category was Felix J. Palma's novel, THE MAP OF TIME, dustjacket, frontispiece, title page, and choice of fonts.
The Best Dustjacket or Cover Art of the Year winner was Patrick Dewitt's comic western, THE SISTERS BROTHERS, which has to be seen in person to be fully appreciated. Runner-up here is Adiga's Last Man In Tower.
Christmas Eve: My selections of the year's best non-fiction are at this link..
DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS: IRISH CRIME WRITING IN THE 21st CENTURY is an anthology edited by Declan Burke, filled with brilliant ideas and surprising points of view, an examination of Irish crime literature by those who now write it, packed with verve and humor that sparkles, a treasure chest of emerald noir.
The book consists of thirty selections (counting Professor Ian Campbell Ross's introductory essay on the history of Irish crime fiction), and it is divided into three parts, Out of the Past, Thieves Like Us, and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Some of the essays are really literary short stories, but they each make a point that fits nicely into this volume. Ireland's treasured past is literary, but crime novels bring it into the present, often in a literary way.
There are brief opening notes by editor/novelist Declan Burke himself and by the well known American mystery novelist, Michael Connolly, and at the end of the book there is a long list of Irish crime books, a survey of suggested Irish crime reading. You will want to keep a notebook handy for jotting down the names of newly discovered authors.
Some of them I had already discovered. I reviewed Alan Glynn's Winterland at this link, and I can't wait to get a look at his newest one, to be published in September.
I also reviewed Eoin McNamee's Resurrection Man at this link. In here, McNamee eloquently explains how he melds his fiction to the actual history he has researched. If you've already read his stunning novel, Orchid Blue, this essay will open your eyes to the uncanny brilliance behind McNamee's art. The case involves a Judge, and McNamee adroitly uses the particular to express the universal:
"What we understand to be noir has the mark of John Calvin on it. The universe is a cold and pre-determined place. Your fate is decided before you set yourself to defraud your employer or catch a faithless eye across a downtown cocktail bar.'
"It is the essence of the noir hero to go among the damned, to relate to them, to be one of the damned himself. He sets himself...against the judge, knowing that the verdict has already been reached."
I first became aware of Irish noir when visiting one of my favorite websites, the Rap Sheet, whose proprietor led me to the novels of Ken Bruen and John Connolly, both of whom have pieces in here. Later I found the websites of Irish authors Declan Burke, at this link, and of Adrian McKinty, here, both of them self-effacing men and promising authors with an intriguing backlist of novels I'd yet to read.
Try them, you'll like them too. Today, on Declan Burke's site, you can read Declan Hughes essay on the forming of his own identity, on how the reading of American books and the viewing of so much American film and television has marked him as American as well. The question of national identity is taken up by several authors in this volume, and their different answers may surprise you.
Listen to Ingrid Black:
"Being Irish . . .was a collection of less-than-groundbreaking reflections by a hundred people, famous and otherwise, on what it meant to them to be one of God's chosen people. They didn't put it quite like that, of course, but there was no mistaking the assumption underlying a depressingly large proportion of the contributions, namely that being Irish was an awe-inspiring achievement altogether, and that those born under a green star were sensitive, poetic souls with a superhuman capacity for empathetic engagement with the world, intimately connected to history and their native land, thirsting for justice and peace like no race before. . .It made How The Irish Saved Civilization look modest by comparison."
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"Art outlives us.
Storytelling, dancing, song, sculpture and painting are all essential parts of human existence, as I learned late. For too much of my life I thought of them as merely frosting on life's cake.
Here, I confine my comments to the only art in which I can claim any expertise, the telling of stories. Even that I once disdained and until quite late in life, after a few successes such as The Education of Phylistine and Breaking Smith's Quarter Horse, stories that remained in print and copyright longer than almost any other Canadian works in the last half of the twentieth century, I was still unsure as to whether they were worth anything and nagged by the suspicion that writing was no way for a grown man to earn a living.
Now I know otherwise. Those two stories and perhaps a few others will outlive me by a generation or more. Information about whether my mortgage was paid off, the size of my credit card bills and such stuff is less than a soup made from the shadow of the wing of a passing dove. The arts live longer than anything else. Of them all, the telling of stories is one of the greatest. and those who do not do this for their grandchildren neglect both a joy and a duty. Every generation needs stories told by those who went before.
I offer an example, a classic great story. I wish I had told it but the author was an unknown Lakota who died a century or so ago. Out of a commonplace observation that men and dogs have a special relationship, he created a story that lives on as a masterpiece. This is the translation:
In the beginning, men and the other animals were the same and could speak with one another. But the Great Spirit became angry with man and decided to separate them. He called them all together on the floor of the desert, the man on one side, all of the other animals on the other side, and with his thumbnail he made a mark in the sand between them.
The mark he made grew deeper. It went right down to the centre of the earth. It grew wider and wider, man standing on one side, all other other animals on the other side.
Just when it seemed that man was going to be alone forever the dog made a tremendous jump and took his place beside the man.
This is no old man prattling, this is an inspired professional teller of stories. All he has to offer is commonplace, that men and dogs are close. There is nothing more, and everybody already knows it. He could have told it all in one or two sentences: "The Great Spirit decided to separate man from the other animals but the dog stayed with man." But that's a narrative, not a story.
The difference is fundamental. Narratives are valuable, we use them all the time: they are an account, true or fictional, of a series of events. It is the twist of the narrative that creates a story that excites our imagination, touches our heart and is remembered and retold during the dark nights of winter.
Observe this Lakota professional plying his trade. First, he obtains what every storyteller needs, the willing suspension of disbelief. Did you stop reading because some being cut the planet in half with his thumbnail? The original author could have made the whole matter too easy and uneventful. The dog could have simply stepped across the line with no risk when it was only a centimetre wide. Instead he made the dog wait until the gap was almost unbridgeable.
But there is a factor more important than all the preceding. It is the essence of the art of storytelling. He made the audience take part in creating the story. Any great storyteller arouses questions he does not attempt to answer. All who hear this story are left to write most of it themselves."
----from Paul St. Pierre's excellent book of essays, Old Enough To Know Better (2002)
In this essay, Paul St. Pierre continues to elaborate on just what it is that the listener must provide to complete this story. This was aptly defined as "recalcitrance" by Austin Wright, who coined the literary sense of the word and used a novel to illustrate the concept in his brilliant study: Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the Professors.
Eoin McManee, interviewed by Declan Burke at this link, says that a novel should be "an attempt to apprehend the transcendent." I heartily agree.
"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it." --Hannah Arendt
One of my favorite blogs is that of Emerald Noir author Declan Burke, and this last week he discussed an Edward Docx newspaper article, which essentially replied to author Lee Childs' trashing of literary novels. The link to that article is here and the link to Burke's discussion of it is here. Burke is the author of Crime Always Pays
, The Big O, 
Eight-Ball Boogie
, and other crime novels yet to be published.
The comment section of that blog drew several novelists including Dr. John Connolly, author of, among many others, Every Dead Thing
and Nocturnes, two of my favorite reads of the past year.
I sent for his other works too, and they are on my to-be-read shelves now for the upcoming year.
We know that crime novels often rise above genre, offering social criticism and insights into the human condition, while maintaining that tension that comes with the thriller/detective novel format that makes them genre. Whenever the best novels of the last century are listed, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and other elite genre novelists with staying power have always gotten their due while lower quality and fadish best-sellers, whether literary novels or genre, have fallen by the wayside.
Which brings me to the book in front of me, a seasonal read, Martha Grimes' Jerusalem Inn (Richard Jury Mystery). This is certainly a genre novel, one of her long-running series published more than a quarter of a century ago back in 1984. I love the way this book opens, the cinematic feel of it, the images which invite interpretation:
"A meeting in a graveyard. That was how it would always come back to him, and without any sense of irony at all - that a meeting in a graveyard did not foreshadow the permanence he was after. Snow mounding the sundial. Sparrows quarreling in the hedges. The black cat sitting enthroned in the dry birdbath. Slivers of memories. A broken mirror. Bad luck, Jury.
"It was on a windy December day, with only five of them left until Christmas, that Jury saw the sparrows quarreling in a nearby hedge as he stood looking through the gates of Washington Old Hall. The sparrows--one attempting to escape, the other in hot pursuit--flew from hedge to tree to hedge. The pecking of one had bloodied the breast of the other. He was used to scenes of carnage; still he was shocked. But didn't it go on everywhere? He tracked their flight from tree to hedge and finally to the ground at his feet. He moved to break up the fight, but they were off again, off and away.
"The place was closed, so he trudges about the old village of Washington in the snow now turning to rain. After three o'clock, so the pubs were closed, worse luck. Up one village lane, he found himself outside the Catholic church. Feeling sorry for yourself, Jury? No kith, no kin, no wife, no . . . Well, but it is Christmas, his kinder self answered.
"This depressing debate with himself continued, like the fighting sparrows, as he heaved upon the heavy door of the church, walked quietly into the vestibule, only to find he'd interrupted a christening in the nave. The priest still intoned but the faces of the baby's parents turned toward the intruder and the baby cried.
"His nasty sparrow self cackled. You nit. Jury pretended to be in a brown study before the church bulletin board, as if it were important to convey to the people down there that the information posted here was absolutely necessary for his salvation. Nodding curtly (as if they care, you clod!) at nothing, he turned and left. Unborn again.
"That sparrow self was with him in the church cemetery, sitting on his shoulder, pecking his ear to a bloody pulp, telling him that no one had forced him to accept his cousin's whining invitation to come to them at Christmas ("But we never see you, Richard. . ."). Newcastle-upon-Tyne. What a bloody awful place in the winter. A nice walk among the gravestones, that's what you need, Jury. And in the snow, too. Peck, peck, peck, peck.
That was when he saw her."
______
His meeting with the woman in the graveyard is then beautifully described. They talk casually for a long while, and she invites him for a drink at her place, which is nearby. Grimes gives this an entirely natural feel as her characters become genuinely interested in each other, each with the growing prospect of a surprisingly wonderful holiday ahead of them. The reader is rooting for them to get together, and indeed it looks as if they will. But then the last sentence of the first chapter is,
"The next time he saw her she was dead."
Well, what did you expect? This is genre fiction. It follows a formula. The perpetual loner, Richard Jury, now has personal reasons for investigating the case, even though he is away on vacation. We know the theme, but each genre novelist gives us a different variation upon it, and hopefully a creative one.
