Material Witness

Best Reads of 2020

It´s been dreadful, hasn´t it, this absolute disaster of a year? Few of us will look back on it with any great fondness and the overwhelming memory of it will be confinement, masks and hand gel.

It´s fitting then that one of the highlights of 2020 for me was discovering a great novel set in another plague time and in which incarceration plays such a major role. And Little Dorrit was just one literature highlight among many for me, a year in which I found a load of new authors and so many great books I couldn´t keep this list down to 10 as originally intended.

My haphazard records indicate I´ve read or listened to 56 books in 2020 to date, and that 35 of those were written by women. I noticed this imbalance during the late summer when I got on to a roll of reading one great book after another by female authors. And that shows through in the list below.

If you´re looking for late stocking fillers, here are some recommendations, delivered in chronological order by reading.

Three Hours by Rosamund Lupton

Three Hours, which tells the story of a siege in a school, a breathtaking novel, with as well crafted a plot as I can recall reading. It is also emotional and gripping, the sort of story that is with you even when you’re not reading and that demands you get back to it quickly. But for me it was defined by its humanity, its exploration of what it means to be brave, what it means to be a part of a community, what it means to be good. REVIEW

 

 

 

 

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

Such was the emotional gravity of The Mirror and the Light that about halfway through reading the conclusion to Mantel´s magnificent Cromwell trilogy, I stopped reading it at night to hold off dreams of Cromwell meeting his fate. While I didn´t feel this novel lived up to the stratospheric standards of its predecessors, and in particular Bring Up The Bodies, it was still a hugely compelling read and a worthy finale.

 

 

 

Hamnet by Maggie O´Farrell

If ever there was a novel for 2020 surely it was Hamnet, the story of how the plague claimed the life of William Shakepeare´s 11-year-old son. This is not a novel of Shakespeare, but a portrait of family, of the power of motherhood and the knife edge between life and death. It was gripping from start to finish, and two passages in particular will remain long in the memory. The passage of the deadly pathogen from Egypt to Stratford; and then the death bed scene as Hamnet succumbs to the disease. Powerful, heart-breaking and unforgettable.

 

 

 

Remain Silent by Susie Steiner

The Manon Bradshaw series became one of my favourites from the moment I picked up the first book Missing, Presumed, in 2017. The third, Remain Silent, is the best yet with everything you want from a novel: strong, engaging narrative; rigorously researched detail; characters you want to see again - and in particular Manon, a woman for our times. Like all the books I love the most, it felt intensely personal and I carried it around in my head during the days I was reading it. Let us hope there are more. 

 

 

 

The Golden Rule by Amanda Craig

Twitter can be a dark, cruel and infuriating place but it can also be educational, uplifting and warm. Boot Twitter is the best Twitter and that´s where I found Amanda Craig, whose novel The Golden Rule was everywhere you looked on the channel in early summer. It didn´t disappoint, this engaging, gripping story of strangers on a train who agree to murder each other´s husbands.   But it´s so much more than that with a slow-burning love story and a polemic on contemporary poverty among its riches. Within a few weeks I´d read everything novel Craig has published. If there´s a modern Dickens in our midst, it is Amanda Craig.

 

 

Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers

Amanda Craig was the first link in a Twitter chain that led me first to Clare Chambers, who subsequently put me on the trail of the Cazalets. (see below). So far I´ve bought this charming, clever and engrossing novel for three people and recommended it to many more. Every one of them has loved it. It tells the story of Jean Swinney, a reporter in 1950s suburban Kent who swaps household and gardening features to follow the tale of a local woman claiming to have delivered a child from an immaculate conception. Small Pleasures is an understated but quite wonderful novel, full of rare insight.   

 

 

 

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Haig is another Twitter regular who chronicles with honesty his own struggles with mental health while railing against the injustices and absurdities of the world. The Midnight Library has a beguiling premise: the library sits between life and death and contains an infinite store of books that tells every possible variant of an individual´s life story. Nora Seed finds herself there after a series of events convinces her that her own life is no longer worth living. In the library an old school teacher encourages a reluctant Nora to explore the infinite possibilities of her own existence.  The result is a moving and thoughtful novel, read brilliantly in the version I had by Carey Mulligan.

 

 

Casting Off by Elizabeth Jane Howard

This is the fourth of the late author´s marvelous Cazalet chronicles, which follows the fortune of several generations of the Sussex/London family. Another Twitter recommendation, I devoured all five books in a matter of weeks in the autumn. Any one of them could have found its way onto this list. I chose this one as I really enjoyed the emergence of Clary and Polly into adulthood and as the emotional heartbeats of the books. Casting Off takes the Cazalets into the post War era and a time when the bombs were no longer falling on London, but the privations of war were still evident.

 

 

 

Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith

If you haven´t yet read this, the fifth novel of JK Rowling´s Cormoran Strike / Robin Ellacott series of detective novels, you may have held off because of the trans controversy around Rowling or because you have heard that it is too long. I don´t find the trans argument convincing (the suspected killer occasionally cross dresses to lure his victims, but I doubt I´ll change anyone´s mind on that. So let me say that at 944 pages, it is long, but it never drags as there´s so much going on, from the investigation to the ongoing drama of the will they / won´t they relationship between Robin and Strike. There´s also a lot more insight into Strike´s early life in Cornwall. The focal point of the story is an investigation into a cold case, the 1970s disappearance of a London GP. It´s a hugely satisfying novel, and for me the best book in the series so far.

 

Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

I´m a latecomer to Dickens – see yesterday´s blogpost – and while I enjoyed my first encounter with him in Nicholas Nickleby it was Little Dorrit that really got me hooked. It´s often described as Dickens´ most personal novel, given his own familiarity with the Marshalsea debtor´s prison in which Amy Dorrit´s father starts the novel. It´s a quite magnificent and broad work rammed with memorable characters and extraordinary story-telling.  I had Audible´s Dickens collection version, performed by Juliet Stevenson. If you can´t quite face the novel, you could do a lot worse than look up the BBC´s 2008 adaptation starring Claire Foy and Matthew Macfadyen.

The Cold Millions by Jess Walter

Jess Walter hasn´t written too many novels – not enough for my liking – but he has shown huge range, from the ocean-hopping love story Brilliant Ruins to the hilarious small-time-Jersey-gangster-in-witness-protection romp that was Citizen Vince. Here Walter takes us to familiar territory – Spokane, Washington is a regular setting for his books – but to an unknown chapter of American history (to me at least), the labour battles in the north west industrial communities of the early twentieth century. Walter tells the story of two Irish brothers trying to make their way in a world that seems to have loaded every last die against them and the rest of the impoverished “cold millions” just trying to earn enough to eat. As I´ve come to expect from Walter, he paints a colorful canvass and tells a terrific story.

 

 

The Dirty South by John Connolly

Another signed first edition Charlie Parker for my collection and another tremendous installment in the Maine PI´s story. The Dirty South is something of a prequel, transporting Parker back decades to a period in which he is in pursuit of the killer of his wife and daughter. The trail takes him to Arkansas where a pair of brutal killings show just enough similarities with his family´s murder to attract his attention. Parker quickly decides there´s nothing to help him in Burdon County but while he´s there a third murder takes place and the local officers – without an investigator – co-opt him onto the team. What he finds is a small town caught between wanting to catch the killer and wanting the problem to go away while it tries to nail down investment from a large corporation that would transform the town´s fortunes. Connolly on great form and he delivers another top read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finding Dickens: It´s never too late for the books you should read

Over the summer, a friend told me that her 13-year-old daughter planned to start reading the novels of Charles Dickens.

I was impressed and appalled. The former by the young lady´s enterprise, the latter by the fact that despite being a voracious reader and having an A level in English Literature, my guilty literary secret was that I´d never read Dickens.

My not reading Dickens started with him not being on either my O or A level syllabus, and frankly he was never going to find himself high on my extra-curricular reading list, which at that time was comprised largely of DC comics and Stephen King.

In the post-studying age, Dickens was the very epitome of "books you should read", rather than the ones you wanted to read. Despite this, I found my way to other novelists in this category: Jane Austen, the Brontes, Thackeray, Trollope, even giving a second chance to Thomas Hardy, whose books I had hated at school with a rare passion. 

In my late 20s I picked up my obsession with crime novels, started this blog and read little else for 20 years. The closest I made it to Dickens was in 2003, when a change in job suddenly presented me with a lot of driving and "reading the classics", or listening to them, seemed a good way to spend all that time on the M1. I went to the library and rented the 28-tape (!) box set of A Tale of Two Cities. I didn´t make it out of the first tape, finding it impossible to cope with both driving and concentrating on Dickens.

My life has not been Dickens free, of course. There were school productions of Oliver Twist; trips to see A Christmas Carol; the BBC has a long track record of brilliant adaptations – Bleak House, Great Expectations and Martin Chuzzlewit stick in the memory. But no books.

Until the summer when Fiona inspired me to try again with audio – having long become accustomed to running, driving, cooking or just idling with an audio book.

I decided to start with a book I knew nothing about – Nicholas Nickleby performed by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith. There is now no looking back: I am on Our Mutual Friend, my fourth audio book since August (each running to more than 30 hours), and also reading Hard Times.

And I´m feeling exactly as I did about five years ago, when I reluctantly ate oysters for the first time: that I had been wasting my life not reading Dickens (and not eating oysters).

So what did I find? What had I missed?

The first thing that struck me was the sheer exuberance of the writer. Dickens seemed he was having fun with every line, every paragraph, every word! It´s evident in the names as much as anywhere else: Flintwinch, Stiltingstalk, Barnacles, Nicodemus Boffin, Wackford Squeers, Tupman the lover, Slumkey, McChoakumchild!

And there is rhythm, flourish and poetry on every page – language stretched to very limits of its descriptive prowess. It is by turns joyful, soulful, angry, colourful, empathetic and atmospheric. Halfway through Nicholas Nickleby I watched Armando Iannucci´s The Personal History of David Copperfield a gloriously vivacious and energetic film and ket thinking: Dickens would have loved this. Iannucci has given life not only to his story, but to the very spirit of his story-telling.

And often that story-telling is funny, sometimes darkly so and sometimes with beautiful light-heartedness and generosity. Here it is a play on words, there a wry aside, somewhere else a witty observation – and very often it is laugh-out-loud-funny and never more so than in The Pickwick Papers, less a novel perhaps than a serious of raucous character sketches. Consider the physical humour conjured by the picture of Mr Pickwick and his friends caught between two charging armies during a military display.

“There are very few moments in a man's existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat.”

You don´t need Armando Iannucci to bring that to life (although Lord knows I´d him love him to), it´s right there imprinted in your mind the moment you read the words.

Elsewhere the stories deliver the gut punch of powerful social commentary as Dickens takes aim at the iniquity and cruelty of society and the indifference of the establishment.

And that brings me to Little Dorrit, the child of the Marshalsea, the debtor´s jail in Borough where Dicken´s own father was imprisoned during his childhood.

Little Dorrit is such a richly textured, multi-layered novel it´s difficult to know where to begin. What struck me most about it was just how modern it felt – and not just because the narrative takes place during a plague. The book takes on both grand themes – the oppression of poverty, the matching claustrophobia and absurdity of wealth and class, the spectacle of society in thrall to capital – and the individual struggle. At times it feels startlingly, painfully intimate – there are many many tears reading Dorrit – while at others it is hugely grand and philosophical with multiple lessons for those of struggling to cope with Britain in 2020. (The passage in which Dickens describes and takes apart the prevailing attitudes to foreigners felt particularly pertinent).

And I cannot recall another novel with such a wealth of extraordinary and vibrant characters. Of course Little Dorrit, her father, Arthur Clennam and the other main characters. But such care is lavished on peripheral actors – Flora, John Chivery, Doyce – that each momentarily fills the space they occupy in the narrative as if the book were about them, or should be.

My immersion in this world occasionally felt completely overwhelming. It is utterly magnificent from start to finish and I thank my stars (and Fiona) that at 49 I finally found my way to Dickens for this book alone, although now I´ve started I don´t think it will be possible to stop until I´ve read them all.