The novels I am glad I read this year
The pleasure, pain, progress, poverty, politics, and purpose of fiction down the ages..
Of the 30 or so novels I read this year these were the most wonderful. They are listed below more or less in order of reading but in reality I usually have four on the go at the same time so I can pick them up and put them down according to mood.
I am a firm believer in the idea that the outstanding novelist can offer the most acute condensed and multidimensional insight into the nature of human social interaction. The Henry James books, especially The Ambassadors, helped me conceive the idea of ‘contingent intentionality’. I kept thinking (of the central character) ‘for heaven’s sake, man, tell them what you are really thinking and intending to do!’ I now have a very high opinion of Henry James, and of John Banville (who references James as his muse).
Here they are:
John Banville, The Blue Guitar
John Banville, The Infinities
Henry James, The American
Henry James, Roderick Hudson
Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-Bye
Henry James, The Ambassadors
Maggie O'Farrell, This Must Be the Place
Henry James, The Wings of the Dove
Kate Atkinson, Life After Life
Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White
Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet
John Banville, The Singularities
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
Wilkie Collins, No Name
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Book 1
Wilkie Collins, Armadale
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
I also finished Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series and Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike series, reread one of the Ripley series by Patricia Highsmith, and reread An Old Captivity by Nevil Shute. Shute is one of my favourite authors.
Books I wish I had not bought in 2024 but still pick up and might return to include The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, and A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement by Anthony Powell. In each the central characters are thoroughly unlikable … but potentially redeemable.
I am about to start The Golden Bowl by Henry James, Treason's Harbour by Patrick O'Brian and Book 2 in the Harry Potter series. Maybe the new Haruki Murakami too. It is not well reviewed but having read all his novels I may not say ‘no’ to the latest.
Current affairs in the world of fiction..
French Novels by Vincent van Gogh, 1888 Arles
Is it really too much to ask students to read children’s books?
By Philip Womack, 26 October 2024
The Shakespeare scholar Sir Jonathan Bate recently claimed that students are struggling to read long books. Depressingly, he’s right. I could have told him the same thing five years ago, when I was teaching at a well-respected Russell Group university. The problem isn’t that students won’t read Moby-Dick in five days. It’s that even if you give them what they want, they’ll still find fault. This all points to a tussle at the heart of modern education: do you cave in to the blighters, or not?
To my surprise, when convening a BA course on children’s literature, I discovered that some of my students balked at reading children’s books. The course looked at the whole caboodle from the Romantics to the present day. It wasn’t a doss: the reading included knotty stuff like Rousseau, as well as all the primary texts. Most students seemed to enjoy it. Why wouldn’t they? Aslan and Bilbo Baggins! It was also intellectually stimulating, with literary, politico-ideological and biographical elements to absorb.
One day, after giving a lecture on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, I waited for questions. Several hands shot up. ‘Do we have to read all the books?’ came the first inquiry. ‘Yes,’ I laughed. ‘All seven?’ was the plaintive response. I answered, firmly, that it was Potter week, they’d had the reading list since June, and if they wanted to write their final essays on Potter, they’d have to refer to all seven: we’d been discussing the series as a Bildungsroman.
Later, an email pinged in. There had been complaints. Four, to be precise, from students who thought I had unfairly dismissed their concerns. I was yanked in for a meeting with a couple of departmental bigwigs.
I defended myself. I had devoted months to preparing this course. Surely it was not beyond the capabilities of the average student to read the Harry Potter books, especially when most would already be au fait with Hogwarts? I mentioned that when the seventh and final book was published (607 pages), critics read it overnight. Above all, not to read the set texts was a discourtesy. ‘Who could argue with any of that?’ I wondered afterwards. Well, I was wrong. The students were given a free pass, and yah boo sucks to my lectures. Bildungswhat? Even after that, many students’ final essays only referred to the films, as if I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. It was all quite deflating. …
Has ‘wokeness’ killed the English literature degree?
With universities starting to axe the course, the subject that helped shape Britain’s national identity is falling into crisis
By Claire Allfree, 1 December 2024
Flora Maxwell is in her second year at Cambridge University studying English literature. She is loving the course, particularly the way it tracks the subject chronologically from the early medieval period, “which means you get to see how English literature progresses, in terms of what it takes forward and what it leaves behind”.
Yet Maxwell is a member of a vanishing species: the English literature student. The study of Britain’s greatest cultural export is in the middle of a crisis. … A couple of weeks ago, Canterbury Christ Church University said it would no longer offer English literature degrees from 2025. …
… “Less prestigious universities are struggling to get the numbers to cover their overheads …” says Tim Fulford, Professor of English at Leicester’s De Montfort University. “But even some of the 1960s universities are making lecturers redundant or cutting budgets because they, too, can no longer recruit the way they should.”
Yet the crisis affecting English literature goes far deeper than a sustained political failure to properly fund higher education — the perceived value of the subject itself is in free fall. The era presided over by literary figures such as FR Leavis, who taught at Cambridge, has finally gone. English literature, which has done so much to shape Britain’s sense of itself, through the writings of Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Dickens, is no longer a respected intellectual discipline.
“English looks like a dead dog that’s about to be put down,” says one junior academic who has become so despairing he is leaving the profession. “Following the introduction of tuition fees in 1998, it has failed to articulate what it’s for in the modern world.” …
… Some argue that the institutions teaching English literature are themselves partly to blame. A solipsistic academic obsession with subjectivity, personal identity and decolonisation has taken root over the last decade, which has affected how the subject is both taught and regarded. One academic describes it as “English literature’s self-immolation”. It has become so bad, she says, that those who don’t subscribe have become too scared to teach Joseph Conrad and parts of The Canterbury Tales to students because of a fear of causing offence.
“The issue is not woke itself, but rather why English literature should have become vulnerable to American identitarian extremism in a way other subjects have not,” she says. “In the past, some of the brighter students might read English and then do a law conversion that also gave them serious professional, analytical and critical skills. English is now regarded as a gap year that allows students to explore themselves for three years. The subject has been intellectually evacuated.”
Some, however, argue that the impact of today’s so-called culture wars is overstated. “Literature has always been viewed through an ideological lens according to a set of shared, unspoken assumptions about what was right or important or true,” says Fulford. “Leavis, for instance, fought a battle to have Jane Austen and George Eliot considered worthy of serious study.”
Others argue that it is recent government rhetoric around the issue that has badly devalued English literature as a subject worthy of study at all. “There’s been a very successful push towards STEM subjects, but you rarely hear much support for literature and arts from the Conservatives,” says one teacher. “When Rishi Sunak announced he wanted everyone to study maths to the age of 18, even our maths department said that was ridiculous.”
Arguably the biggest contributory factor shaping how we regard and teach English literature has been the catastrophic decline in reading and the commensurate increase in illiteracy rates. A recent survey by the National Literacy Trust Survey found that reading for pleasure among the under 18s is at its lowest since the survey began in 2005, with only 20.5 per cent saying they read daily in their free time, down from 28 per cent in 2023. One academic I spoke to said they have abandoned asking students to read entire novels because they know they won’t bother. …
… It’s clear that we are heading towards an existential crisis. As one academic told me: “Unless English literature starts to make a case for itself, English literature degrees might not even exist in 10 years time.”
MGH: A relative of mine did not like her recent English Literature degree course at East Anglia. However, Kazuo Ishiguro studied there and W. G. Sebald taught there, and I have enjoyed the painful pleasure of reading all of their magnificent novels.
I made the mistake of reading a book that won the Booker Prize
By Rod Liddle, 26 November 2024
I’ve just broken one of my own golden rules – never buy a book that has won the Booker Prize, because it will be crap. So I have only myself to blame. …
The committee, whoever is on it, will always choose a book which accords with their asinine political beliefs, especially if it is a ‘warning’ kind of a book. It never used to be quite like that, but that’s how literature is these days. Write a book from a perspective unloved by the metro chattering class and you’ll be lucky to be published, never mind awarded a prize. And so, last year, it was Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, in which a horrible right-wing government takes over in Ireland and starts carting people away. If only. And this year, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which is set on the space station but is really about the state of our planet and global warming, natch.
… Anyway, I read Orbital and thought it very underwhelming. As a philosophical discourse it seemed shallow. As a story it didn’t really exist. Nothing happens, apart from the earth suffering a typhoon down beneath. There were so many indecipherable word salads that I was tempted to give up. It was repetitious …
Can you win the Booker Prize without being able to write?
By Rod Liddle, 28 November 2024
I mentioned a couple of days ago being underwhelmed by Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel. But I am a glutton for punishment, and continuing to ignore my long-held practice of never reading Booker winners, I bought last year’s victor – Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch. As I mentioned, this is about a nasty right-wing government taking over in Ireland and being horrid to union officials. It didn’t sound quite up my street, but I thought I’d give it a go. And then I read the second sentence in the book:
How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees.
I mean, hello? You’re trying too hard, mate. I know you’re meant to try, when you’re writing a serious novel. But the trick surely is not to let the trying show. And there you’ve got it in the second sentence. I almost threw the book away. I get worked up about this sort of thing. If I read that on the first page how can I continue, knowing there’s more of it to come?
It reminded me of a novel I read about 15 years ago. Or at least the first page of a novel I read 15 years ago – until I came to the line: ‘I breakfasted on coffee and apples.’ I don’t know why that line made me so cross, but I couldn’t read another word. …
MGH: My delightfully acerbic and fearsomely clever cousin Madeleine St John was shortlisted for the Booker. But, much as I loved her since childhood in San Francisco and during adulthood in London’s Notting Hill, I cannot honestly say that any of my cousin’s books would have made it onto my ‘best of the year’ as per the above list.
My thanks to the Spectator, the Telegraph, and conservative Condorito
Dr Michael G. Heller
