The Modern Library: the 200 best novels in English since 1950. By Carmen Callil and Colm Toibin Picador. 259pp, £12.99p in UK
Here we are, ladies and gentlemen: the great millennium game! Making A List. Any list. The Worst, the Best, the Most - well, you name it, but do so in numbers. A fitting end to the modernist age of analysis, a fitting tribute to the casuistry of a century which prefers theorists to critics, critics to writers, abstracts to books. What else could account for The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English since 1950?
But I had not reckoned on the editors: Carmen Callil, the founder of Virago Press; Colum Toibin, true artist and unlikely entrepreneur. This is going to be no ordinary list. Both are passionate readers. Both are known to be opinionated. Both work from the margins. There will be no protection racket for the dead white male. When there were furious rows - with two such strong-headed editors, how could there not have been? - clearly they were fought and resolved in favour of good English prose, from however unlikely a source.
Good English, naturally, no longer comes from England. So the publications of the past half-century from India, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand (yes, New Zealand), Canada, America, and, of course, Ireland, all had to be considered. They read everything. They may have fudged it here and there, but from their choices I am convinced they read, as best they could, everything that presented itself as a plausible candidate. When they had taxed their own memories and the patience of friend and acquaintance, they turned to booksellers. In her sublime common-sense, Callil trusts booksellers more than academics. They widened their brief - as if it were not wide enough - to include collections of short stories. They cut a wide swath (even looking at other lists, also listed in this book) of all the relevant prize-winners of all the relevant prizes in all the relevant countries. In short, they turned themselves into the combine harvesters of prose fiction written over the past five decades. There have been rich pickings
The list is wonderful - sometimes quirky, sometimes (after the quirkiness) completely predictable. It is true, there were moments of indignation at one or two favourites being bumped: to leave out Lord of the Rings seems a rank injustice. At other moments, I wondered why one rather than another of an author's works was chosen: why not Waugh's De- cline and Fall rather than The Sword of Honour trilogy? Why not Bowen's The Death of the Heart rather than The Little Girls? The answer is encoded in the arbitrariness of the publication date, it seems, not the quality of the prose.
The eminently sane decision to disregard the line between "literary" and "popular" fiction led to the inclusion of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire. Then there are the surprises. A shock to the system. How could we have not known about the Canadian, Alisdair MacLeod? Toibin regards his collection, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, as the high point of the search. There are others, virtually unknown, that sound as if they must be read; among them, Plumb by Maurice Gee, an unlikely story of a sharp, tetchy New Zealand clergyman.
In short: it is Saturday morning, you are late picking up your child from ballet or meeting your friend for lunch - so pay attention. There is only one thing to be said. Dear reader - if you ARE a reader (and there are few of us left) race out to buy The Modern Library. As you leaf through it, you can congratulate yourself on how flawless your taste has been in having already found the one novel from the one writer chosen here. Or, better, you can discover, humbly, and in the privacy of your own bed (for we always bring books to bed), how lucky you are to have so many wonderful books still to read. Each of the titles will come complete with a brief, tantalising introduction that tells you something (but not too much) all in one paragraph - along with the age of the novelist at its publication, a piece of information as pointless as it is consoling for those of us in our middling age.
And when you find yourself raging that your very favourite novel has been left out - the novel that kept you awake for nights and turned your life around - there is an opportunity for you to nominate it, together with five others, for inclusion in the paperback edition (see the form at the end of the book).
This is a book for those of us who hunger for the next good read. Yes, the bookstores are stuffed with books. But, regrettably, although the word processor has increased the capacity to write, and to write quickly, it has not increased the capacity to write well. It is said the average shelf life of a book is two-and-a-half weeks. This book, and the books it names, will be around much longer. Each day I look at it, The Modern Library grows in value: as a record of territory rediscovered, a map of journeys to come. All I wish to discover now is how many of the texts I have not yet read are still in print.
BOOK SERVICE: To order this book, or any book on these pages, and have it sent directly to your home or office, call the Irish Times Book Service at 1850-3060-60
Jerusha McCormack lectures in the English Department at UCD. Her most recent book is Wilde the Irishman published by Yale University Press last year.