The novel's not dead yet

Rewind '98

Routine claims about the death of the novel took a blow as 1998, the centenary year of Brecht, Lorca, Erich Maria Remarque and C.S. Lewis, began strongly with Don Delillo's Underworld (Picador). Massive in scale and imagination, the beauty of this strange, dazzling book which juxtaposes the Cold War with the outcome of a big ball game, is contained in the images. It is a random, unsentimental, deliberately anti-heroic history of post war America and if not quite the best of DeLillo whose masterpiece remains The Names (1982), it reaffirmed his standing as a writer who, conscious of the threat to the written word posed by the visual image, is capable of bringing the novel form into the next century.

Smaller in scale, and as witty as it is profound and moving is John Updike's Toward The End of Time (Hamish Hamilton) which was published early last February and proved that at his best, few writers can match him. The 1991 Nobel Prize winner, Nadine Gordimer, never a great stylist, has written many important books and her place as a chronicler of the hell of South African society is assured. The House Gun (Bloomsbury) is, on the surface, an intense courtroom thriller, in which a respectable, white middle class South African couple are devastated when their son is accused of murder. It is a taut narrative, barbed and astutely observed, and above all, it shows Gordimer, aware of the changing power shifts in the political and social structures, continuing to examine life as lived.

March saw the publication of one of the best books of the year: Sri Lankan Romesh Gunesekera's graceful and moving The Sandglass (Granta) is a wonderful novel in which a sympathetic narrator virtually pieces together the various lives and times of three generations of two rival families.

It is no great classic, but William Boyd's likeable Armadillo (Hamish Hamilton) which follows Lorimer, a hapless loss adjuster, who can't sleep and is determined to free himself of his Eastern European background by ineptly reinventing himself, is very funny. Boyd's unnamed London is a messy endurance test, where life is reduced to surviving the traffic and the tube system. Beryl Bainbridge followed her Whitbread Prize-winning Every Man For Himself with Master Georgie (Duckworth). Set during the Crimean War, this slight novel, which would later be short-listed for the Booker Prize, defies its size largely through the engaging narrative voice of Myrtle, who, for reasons best known to herself, loves the self-centred Georgie.

One of the most awaited books of the Spring was 1993 Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's Paradise (Chatto) which brings to a close the informal trilogy which began with Beloved (1987) and continued with Jazz (1992). Gender and race have always preoccupied her, but in Beloved she actively began chronicling the Black experience. An urgent, dramatic, powerfully theatrical writer, her prose often belies the brutality of her fiction. Yet despite displaying the full-blooded, vernacular grace of her prose, Paradise, her most overtly political book to date, is disappointing and somehow lacks the conviction and emotional force one expects from Morrison.

Never having been a particular fan of the overblown fiction of John Irving, I was pleasantly surprised by his latest Dickensian saga, A Widow for One Year (Bloomsbury), his best book since The Cider House Rules. For all its coincidences, showmanship and large cast of unattractive characters, this aggressive, far-fetched romp has its moments as well as some of the best dialogue Irving has ever written, and certainly testifies to the power of a good story.

Curiously, a very fine US writer, Russell Banks, took on the complex and contradictory legacy of John Brown, martyr or madman or possibly both, in the hugely ambitious epic Cloudsplitter (Secker) and did not quite succeed. One of the most seriously under-rated writers currently at work, Banks achieves wonders of atmosphere and tension in this novel while also failing in characterisation and dialogue. By the end he seems as weary as the reader.

William Trevor again demonstrated his perception and understanding of the subtle cruelty of life in Death in Summer (Viking), a shrewdly observed study of class in which he cleverly uses flashbacks, nuance and vivid set pieces. As valuable as social history as it is as a novel, Carlo Gebler's understated How to Murder A Man (Little Brown) is a haunting performance.

The Berlin-based German-Romanian writer Herta Muller won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award with The Land of Green Plums (Granta) a surrealist tale of betrayal in which a female narrator and a third person voice report of the respective sufferings of a small group of friends. The most outstanding European novel of the year must be, however, the German W.G. Sebald's elegaic novel of ideas, The Rings of Saturn (Harvill). Part philosophical travelogue, personal history and random study of life, this strange, obsessive book, as elegant as it is eccentric, is unforgettable. Perhaps it was to be expected, considering his own unique voice and the fact that Cormac McCarthy's Border trilogy has already earned itself a special place, but the concluding volume, Cities of the Plain (Picador) is an exhausted, unconvincing book. Admittedly the second book, The Crossing, is a masterpiece, so it was never going to be easy to match, never mind surpass, and McCarthy's failure, while understandable, is no less disappointing for his admirers.

Antony Beevor's Stalingrad (Viking), a fine book in its own right, also confirmed the ongoing fascination with the second World War and particularly the history of Russia, a country which could claim the century's most complex story. In a quiet year for biography, Leslie Stainton's Lorca impressed with its thoroughness, sensitivity and determined - and successful - effort to catch the voice of the poet himself and so achieved a convincing portrait of a man whose ambitions and dreams were always tempered by his fears. Earlier, novelist and skilled translator of several major Russian poets D.M. Thomas irritated with his stagey and cliched Solzhenitsyn: A Century in his Life (Little Brown), considering not only Solzhenitsyn's story, but also that of his country. Tom Paulin's brilliant and original The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style (Faber) not only celebrates the master essayist, it proves exactly how sharp Paulin's own critical intelligence is.

Ted Hughes began the year of his death by following his wonderful Tales of Ovid with Birthday Letters (Faber), a highly personal, human and conversational series of poems largely addressed to his former wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, in which he confronts the agonies of the marriage that has haunted him and his career as well as the demons that pursued her.

It came as no surprise to see the Portuguese writer, Jose Saramago, author of The The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, The Stone Raft and Blindness, being awarded the Nobel Prize. He is one of Europe's most original and prolific writers - all praise is due to the British publishers Harvill who have been consistently publishing English translations of his work during the past few years.

The Booker-weary might be ready to pass on this, but still, from a dull shortlist came two good novels: Bainbridge's, as mentioned above, and Ian McEwan's daringly ordinary examination of friendship, betrayal, mutual dependence and the fear of death, Amsterdam (Cape), was a popular and acceptable winner.

Nothing made me laugh as much as much Martin Amis's hilarious The State of England story from his Heavy Water Collection (Cape).

Philip Roth's urgent, angry and human lament, I Married A Communist (Cape), is a fine sequel of sorts to American Pastoral. In late mid-career, Roth is performing miracles.

Still the miracle of the year is Annie Proulx's miraculous love story Brokeback Mountain (4th Estate).

Fast Forward '99

Hardly surprisingly, Proulx's Close Range - Wyoming Stories is likely to be a treat in store for 1999. As is William Maxwell's The Folded Leaf (Harvill), and yet another book from John Updike, Bech at Bay. Also very interesting should be the first biography of Saint-Saens, by Brian Rees, which will be published by Chatto early in the year.