Richard Morgan -- Best Literature Picks of 2007

What was 2007 good for, literarily speaking? Well; Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day blasted the year definitively open at its front end – it’s a colossally absorbing whale of a book for those who can spare the three months to read it. I got mine in January and finished it just before Easter. Not Pynchon’s finest work (that would still, IMHO, have to be either Vineland or V), but still, a huge novel in every sense of the word, endlessly inventive, meticulously detailed, gratuitous in its detours and rambling structure, and by turns both hilarious and achingly melancholic. The territory it stakes out is nothing less than the creation of the modern world, and it makes a dent inside your head exactly the shape of life. It also deserves, incidentally, to be nominated for every science fiction and fantasy prize going, because science fiction and fantasy is very clearly what it is, and lovingly rendered as such along with at least another half dozen genres too.

Scaling rapidly down to more easily digested literary parameters, another brilliant piece of something completely different was Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth, a novel-length blank-verse poem about werewolves (well, were-dogs, if we’re being completely accurate) surviving in modern day Los Angeles. The book features some truly beautiful language, arresting imagery and tight word play, but it still manages to tell an equally tight, unashamedly cinematic story. I’ve read nothing even remotely like it all year.

And while we’re stretching the boundaries of the form – 2007 saw another rare entry into that category I define as “video games, no look, seriously, video games with the qualities of literature”. You get about one of these a year if you’re lucky; in all the time I’ve been playing console games I can still count the ones that make this elevated grade on the fingers of one hand. Anyway, this year’s entry is Bioshock – a grim, terrifying tale of a city under the sea founded by political idealists and now decayed into leaking, murderous chaos as everything falls apart under the pressures of human greed and rage, and gene technology run amok. As with the very small number of other games I’d class in this category, Bioshock features powerful symbolic imagery, complex plotting and detailed characterisation, and a ferociously intelligent underlying social and political commentary. It also has a nice historical dimension to it, which I’ve not seen deployed before in this kind of gaming. It really is a thing of dark and horrific beauty.

Speaking of dark, 2007 also saw the final wrap of the finest dark fantasy comicbook sequence of this decade – I’m talking of course about Mike Carey’s Lucifer, which closed this year with the graphic novel collection Evensong. Evensong is perhaps not the finest of the eleven volume run (that honour, I’d have to reserve for either Vol 2 Children and Monsters or Vol 4 The Divine Comedy) but it does bring everything, all the many, many narrative threads of the last eight years, to a magisterially orchestrated and satisfyingly complete close. Time now to go back to the beginning and read the whole lot again!

Also on my list of graphic novels this year was Marjane Satrapi’s Chicken with Plums, a bittersweet story of love and death, longing and family in modern day Iran. Technically, I’m sneaking this one in under the door, Chicken with Plums was published in October of 2006, but I was slow getting round to it. Anyone who’s already a fan of Satrapi’s Persepolis books will know what to expect; quirky, slightly surreal woodcut black and white images and a story of achingly simple humanity.

Back to prose and prosaic concerns, the most interesting non-fiction book I read in 2007 was Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting with Jesus, subtitled Dispatches from America’s Class War. This is a fascinating guided tour of small town American redneck life, as encountered by a native son who escaped to a life as a political journalist on the West coast and has now returned home. It’s angry, bitter and brutally insightful into the way all those Republican thugs and scumbags that run your country were put there by exactly the people who stand to take the most damage from their policies.

In science fiction, there’s one novel – apart from the aforementioned Against the Day – that stood out for me this year and that was Ian Macdonald’s Brasyl – lush, sweeping in scope, studded with technological gems and as brightly sparkling as the cityscapes two thirds of the book take place in, this is a worthy follow up to Macdonald’s award winning River of Gods; but where River of Gods moved with the stately flow of the Mother Ganges it’s named for, Brasyl comes on at you with the rapid percussive beat of carnaval, and like the itch of samba in your hips, will not be denied.

All of which just leaves me time for to mention my crime fiction discovery for 2007 – Charlie Huston. Some of you may already recognise the name for Charlie’s vampire PI stories featuring wisecracking undead gumshoe Joe Pitt; but alongside this, Huston has been quietly putting out a series of brutal modern noir thrillers which took my breath away. I started with the quite brilliant Six Bad Things, then went straight on to the next in the series, A Dangerous Man. Now I have to back up for the first in that series, Caught Stealing and also lay my hands on Charlie’s latest The Shotgun Rule. You should do likewise – the guy is pure dynamite.