Eleven books make my year’s best list for 2012, and what most impresses me is how genuinely good all of them are. Usually my list contains four or five books that I regard as first-rate along with perhaps a half-dozen that earn honorable mentions but aren’t at the same level. This year, though, it was easy to pick the finalists, and to keep the list to manageable length, a handful of worthy books had to be eliminated.
As always, we start with fiction. It gives me no particular pleasure to report that all three of the books I’ve chosen are (a) by men and (b) by men who live in Britain. There’s no point in nattering on for the umpteenth time about the current state of American literary fiction, so let’s just leave it that such pleasures as new fiction gave me in 2012 were imports from the other side of the Atlantic. Richard Mason, the author of “History of a Pleasure Seeker,” was born in South Africa but has lived in Britain since he was 10 and is a product of the maddeningly productive Eton/Oxford assembly line. This, his fourth novel, is as I said in my review “an unabashed romance, a classic story of a young man who rises from unprepossessing circumstances to win the favor of the rich and prominent, and in so doing starts his progress toward what no doubt will be his own eminence.” It’s delicious, “Tom Jones” transplanted to the 21st century and great fun all the way.
Mason has enjoyed a bit of success in the American market, but to the best of my knowledge that has largely escaped D.J. Taylor, although he has written several good novels and well-received biographies of William Makepeace Thackeray and George Orwell. “Derby Day,” his eighth novel, is set in Victorian London and revolves around the Epsom Derby, the great horse race that has been run forever. The race draws the panoply of London society, from the very highest to the very lowest. Taylor has populated his novel with a cast of characters wholly true to both London and the Derby, and to Victorian England as well. It all revolves around a splendid horse named Tiberius, a considerably grander character than the Roman emperor after whom he is named, and a thoroughly raffish man named George Happerton. It’s about time American readers discovered D.J. Taylor.
Then of course there is Ian McEwan. No one now writing fiction in the English language does it better than he does, and it may well be that no one does it as well. The many readers who fell under the spell of “Atonement” will find themselves similarly entranced by “Sweet Tooth,”not least because it comes up with much the same sort of surprise in its closing pages. It is about a young woman, Serena Frome, who idles her way through Cambridge and then finds herself in the employ of MI5, the British domestic intelligence agency. This is not exactly a spy novel, though it contains some of the classic ingredients thereof; mainly it is an acute psychological study and a wise contemplation of the stories we tell and read and the question of who actually “owns” them. McEwan at his best.
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