Gwyneth Jones -- Best Literature Picks of 2007

Best American Fantasy, eds. Jeff and Ann Vandermeer (Prime Books) is definitely worth a look. Challenging, uneven, but very interesting stuff. Second volume out soon.

Sci-Fi In The Mind’s Eye, ed. Margaret Grebowicz (Open Court) is a lot more entertaining and insider-savvy than most academic overviews of science fiction, and includes pieces from not-the-usual-suspects, well-chosen radical sf writers, e.g. Timmi Duchamp, Nicola Griffith, Terry Bisson.

Eclipse One, edir=ted by Jonathan Strahan (Nightshade Books) I shouldn’t really comment on this original anthology, but I recommend you give it a whirl.

Other than that, for me this was the year of Alan Furst, Kate Thompson, and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Alan Furst (Orion in the UK; Random House in the US). I picked up The Polish Officer first, and still think it’s the best. I moved on to The Blood Of Victory, and Dark Voyage, at which point I realised I was hooked, and would have no rest until I’d read all eight titles in this loose series. To those who don’t know, these are WWII “crime and pleasure” novels, with wartime Europe, from the Spanish Civil War to 1945, providing the all-important romantic setting; espionage or Resistance work the thriller element. The formula, once it settles down, is roughly as follows. Our hero, probably a professional in his thirties, and in the signature case a Parisian movie producer (The World At Night; Red Gold), has his pleasant life torn from him by the war; tries to resist the forces impelling him into deadly danger, meets some beautiful and willing women along the way; and displays strong European “national characteristics” (if he’s a Dutch sea captain, you can be sure he’s missing the chips and mayo; probably also fond of tulips. If he’s Hungarian, he’s an impossibly suave aristo (Kingdom Of Shadows). The first two episodes (Night Soldiers and Dark Star) are different, and clearly the heart of the original project: a wide-ranging fictional study of the stormy “love affair”, as Furst puts it, between Hitler and Joe Stalin, told through the lives of young men and women painfully caught in the crossfire.

Essentially, what you get is Gravity’s Rainbow territory, rewritten as the screenplay for Casablanca, if that makes sense. Just gritty enough, just cosy enough, not too serious, lots of information: to my mind, Furst has the elements of perfect genre reading. And he hasn’t finished yet (tho’ I’ve probably had enough). New titles are on their way.

Kate Thompson. I was reading for the ‘Ultimate Book Guide (8-12s volume)’, a compendium of recommendations for younger readers. A lot of the books I read and reviewed were great fun, but Thompson stands out. A winner of many awards, and deservedly so, her subject material is too varied to pin down, except you could say there’s often a strong Irish Celtic element. For all ages. I particularly recommend The Fourth Horseman (Red Fox), a hard-hitting and spooky eco-thriller, and The New Policeman (Red Fox), a much lighter story, involving Wandering Aengus, lost socks, trans-dimensional travel problems, and a whole lot of music.

Fyodor Dostoevsky. Why have I never read Dostoevsky before? Because I’m lazy, because I thought he would be turgid and dreary; because I’d missed him out in my Famous Big Books phase, and thought War and Peace would do for the Russian section. . . Anyway, my Gap Year son, committed to huge train journeys in South East Asia, and entrenched in the aforesaid Famous Big Books, started raving about Crime And Punishment. So I read it, couldn’t put it down, immediately had to get hold of The Brothers Karamazov, and I’m just about to embark on Notes From The Underground. Dostoevsky is wonderful. Incredibly easy to read and hard to put down. The immediacy of his writing, the harsh, unlikely candour of his human portraits just blew me away. Sentimental, certainly, violent, you bet. Mood swings, mad contradictions, wild conincidences, it’s so modern. He’s an Impressionist, paints what’s in front of him.

Where did he get that reputation for unreadable gloom? Well, possibly there are a couple too many treatises on the dark and threatening nuances of Russian Orthodox Monastic Practice, or diatribes on Nihilist Politics. Occasionally these non-fictional excursions will go on for twenty or thirty pages. You can always skip them.