CHRISTMAS BOOKS II

Books of the Year

A further selection of books of the year,

chosen by some of The Spectator's regular contributors

Caroline Moore

Justin Cartwright lost to Pat Barker's impressive trilogy in this year's Booker; but In Every Face I Meet (Sceptre, £15.99) is bleak, funny and human: his eye — and ear — for social detail is impeccable. Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower (Flamingo, £14.99) is based on the touchingly absurd passion of the German Romantic poet and philosopher Freidrich von Hardenburg (`Novalis') for an unremarkable 12-year-old girl: the novel is delightfully quirky, yet deeply engages our sympathies. But Fitzgerald has been `Bookered' too, so I'll add one more: Helen Simpson's second collection of short stories, Dear George (Heinemann, £12.99), is more uneven than her first; but her best is brilliant. Like Cartwright, she deploys details — physical and emotional — with a devastating comic accuracy.

Duncan Fallowell

Two non-fiction books which combine dis- ease and droll comedy. The first is A Short History of Decay (Quartet, £5.95) by E. M. Cioran, the most readable and horrible of modem philosophers. This is disease of the soul embodied in prose of magnificent, concentrated explosions. Published in 1990, but he died earlier this year which is why I'm including it. The second is disease of the body: Elisa Segrave's Diary of a Breast (Faber, £9.99) in which hospital visits for breast cancer are entwined with bravura social and family life in a kind of hip-hop

Kafkaesque nightmare.

I also hugely enjoyed Constantinople by Philip Mansel (John Murray, £25) and Auden by Richard Davenport-Hines (Heinemann, £20) .

A. N. Wilson

The incomparably dreary Booker list would have been improved by the addition of any of these three novels: Martin Amis's The Information (Flamingo, £15.99) which, in the flurry surrounding its purchase some- one forgot to edit, but which contains some of his funniest writing to date; The Liquida- tor by Ferdinand Mount (Heinemann, £14.99) is this oblique comic master's masterpiece; a plot which is almost baroque in its complexity; unforgettable characters; sad and funny in equal doses. Penelope Fitzgerald has also written her best novel to date, The Blue Flower (Flamingo, £14.99) — a brilliant recreation of Novalis's love of the 12-year-old Sophie von Kuhn. Mrs Fitzgerald is at her best lis- tening to families talk to one another. This is such a clever book, but it wears its clev- erness lightly, and the world it evokes will be unforgettable. Finally The Daily Telegraph Book of Obit- uaries (Macmillan, £14.99) is the funniest and most charming non-fiction title of the year. Every bedside table should have a copy. Who can resist a sentence which begins 'Mrs Victor Bruce, the dare-devil aviatrix, racing-driver and speed-boat pilot, who has died aged 94 . . '? Hugh Massing- berd redefined the English obituary. This book is like Aubrey's Brief Lives, only it is more accurate, less malicious, and funnier.

Patrick Skene Catling

H. G: The History of Mr Wells by Michael Foot (Doubleday, £20) was written with the moral decency and eloquence of three of Mr Foot's idols, Swift, Hazlitt and Thomas Paine. At the age of 82, Foot shows no sign that his admiration of Wells is dimin- ishing. In the present era of iconoclasm, a biography in praise of its subject was a wel- come relief. It was interesting also to be reminded that there was a time when avowed socialists actually believed in socialism.

I enjoyed Edward Lucie-Smith's compre- hensive study of American Realism (Thames & Hudson, £29.95). Though American 20th-century art of the dust- bowl, urban squalor and resentment should perhaps be called Depressionism, the high degree of technical skill of many of the paintings, beautifully reproduced, gave pleasure beyond the subject matter.

One of the most entertaining novels of 1995 is Black Night at Big Thunder Moun- tain, by Glenn Patterson (Chatto, £13.99). It is about a Walt Disney 'imagineer' who, demented by thwarted idealism, takes three hostages on Big Thunder Mountain in Euro Disney's Magic Kingdom. He demands respect for Mort, the father of Mickey Mouse. About time too.

Bevis Hillier

My choice is John Betjeman's Letters Volume II, 1951-1984, edited by Candida Lycett Green (Methuen, £20).

I chickened out of reviewing both vol- umes of Betjeman's letters. I calculated that if they were less than good, I would have to say so, and as Betjeman's autho- rised biographer I could not afford to make an enemy of his daughter, Candida.

I need not have worried. Having toiled and trawled through the same archives I know what fantastic energy she has put into tracking down his correspondence; and the selection is most judicious. What lifts the volumes well above a mere anthology of Betjisms is Candida's brilliant linking pas- sages about her father. In these, the second volume is even better than the first because it covers the years when she best remem- bers him. Her prose, like his poetry, traffics in humour and pathos with equal skill. She writes sensitively of Betjeman's love for his devoted friend, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish.

I have been asked whether Candida's publishing the letters steals some of my thunder. Inevitably, to some extent, yes; but as she has pointed out, our books are complementary, not rivals. They say that talent sometimes skips a generation. In her case, it has not.

Craig Brown

It's hard to imagine that any book pub- lished this year could be more dreadfully compelling or more profound than Gina Sereny's Albert Speer: His Struggle with Truth (Macmillan, £25). Sereny has been criticised — not least by her fellow guests on Start the Week (who added that they hadn't actually got round to reading the book ) — for being too sympathetic to her subject. Yet Sereny's own deep humanity never overwhelms her moral judgments. In many ways, her endless cross-examinations and her final verdict are more severe than anything Speer faced at Nuremberg. And how can we learn of our own worst impuls- es if we cannot immerse ourselves in the life and times of the most cultured, reserved and Spectatorish of Nazis, before asking the question, 'Could it have been me?'

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Best political biogaphy of the year was Roy Jenkins's Gladstone (Macmillan, £20). It doesn't answer the enigma of Gladstone's personality — can anyone? — or even leave me sure whether, on balance, I either like or admire him. But after reading Jenk- ins's excellent book, it is impossible not to be awed by the sheer, vast scale of Glad- stone's character, life and achievement. They don't make them like that any more? Well, no actually.

Although I haven't yet read Amos Oz's latest novel, Don't Call it Night (Chatto, £14.99), his admirers should make a point of reading his Under this Blazing Light (CUP, £13.95): a fascinating collection of essays for anyone at all interested in Zion- ism, Israel or Israel's greatest writer.

Each year, students of these Christmas books columns scan them attentively for prize-winners in two categories: shameless plugging of pals, and pretentious polyglot showing-off. Well, I asked my friend Robert Harris for a copy of his new thriller Enigma in its German edition (Wilhelm Heyne Verlag). The least I can say is how much I enjoyed it, thereby claiming a unique double prize.

Rupert Christiansen

Jane Smiley's Moo (Flamingo, £15.99) is a campus novel of extraordinary wit and sly subtlety — nothing like it since Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution. It didn't get the acclaim it deserved. I was also impressed and moved by Andrew Sul- livan's Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality (Picador, £14.99). It may be devoid of camp flamboyance, short' on humour and not a lot of fun, but its sim- plicity and integrity give it a quality I can only describe as noble. Charles Duff's The Lost Summer (Nick Hem Books, £12.99) is a fascinating reassessment of the Rattigan era of British theatre. Peter Ackroyd's Blake (Sinclair-Stevenson, £20) is thrillingly imaginative biography; and Quentin Bell's self-effacing memoirs, Elders and Betters (John Murray, £20) is the perfect bedside book — if only it didn't keep you so sharply amused and awake when you ought to be dopping off to sleep.

Andro Linklater

Reading John Updike creates in me that surge of confidence in the literary imagina- tion of my time that the Victorians felt with far less justice — when they read Dickens. The recent appearance in a single volume of his four novels about the irre- sistibly appalling Harry Angstrom offers the perfect opportunity to taste the late 20th-century flavour as distilled by a mas- ter. (Rabbit Angstrom, Everyman, £25).

Auberon Waugh's persistent boosting of his offsprings' work tempts me to admit publicly how vastly I enjoyed re-reading an ironic little epic of love and war called A Spell of Old Bones by my father, Eric Linidater, published by Cape in 1949, but now, alas, out of print. I would have nomi- nated as the most overrated book of the year Richard Ingrams' biography of Mal- colm Muggeridge (HarperCollins, £18) had its hollowness not been so perfectly matched by its subject.

Paul Johnson

Jack Miles's ingenious book, God: A Biog- raphy (Simon & Schuster, £20) treats the deity as a literary character, the hero of the Old Testament, and shows how he changes as the Bible proceeds — from volubility to taciturnity, for instance, and from openness to mystery and concealment. This approach is illuminating. It does not actually tell us anything about God but it tells us a great deal about how the ancient Hebrews modified their image of him over two millennia.

Also on a religious theme was Alice Thomas Ellis's Serpent on the Rock (Scep- tre, £6.99), a brave, funny and at times despairing effort by a forthright traditional Catholic lady to put to flight the evil legions of trendy clerics and secularisers who have got within the citadel of Rome and are laying waste the faith.

The political book of the year was undoubtedly Bernard Connolly's The Rotten Heart of Europe: The Dirty War for Europe's Money (Faber, £17.50). This devastating indictment of the single curren- cy system and the sinister Franco-German in-fighting which has gone on in its back- ground is written by a Brussels insider who knows where all the bodies are buried. The Europhiles have tried to rubbish the book, but Connolly's charges remain unanswered and are, it appears, unanswerable.

M. R. D. Foot

David Reynolds' Rich Relations (Harper- Collins, £25), is one of those history books that answers all the questions it raises, for good: nobody will need to work this subject over again. He explains the impact of United States soldiers and airmen on wartime Great Britain, and — quite as important — the impact of the British on the Americans. Not only the GI Brides, but the comparative liberation of the coloured population of the USA resulted from this meeting of cultures.

Geoffrey Parker's Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare (CUP, £24.95) expounds its subject, from Sargon in the eighth cen- tury BC to the Gulf War of the present decade, in elegant and compelling outline, with a fine range of pictures; no other fac- tor has done so much to shape the past and present of mankind.

Jeffrey Bernard

Streets Ahead by Keith Waterhouse is my book of 1995 (Hodder, £16.99). I am still dipping into it and I don't just mean dip- ping into the chapter that concerns the play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell. This is marvel- lously entertaining stuff for anyone who has been in or near the old Fleet Street. Waterhouse has a wonderful eye for the absurd posturing of the so-called grand old men of the Street of Shame, as he also has for the bizarre and lunatic people in Holly- wood. He can turn his beady eye as well onto his own beginnings on the Yorkshire Post to very amusing effect.

Alastair Forbes

My first choice (which for review purposes I read three times, and so triply enjoyed) is Evangeline Bruce's marvellous Napoleon and Josephine (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25) which I hope to live to read yet again when it appears in paperback. 'I win bat- tles', said Napoleon, 'but Josephine wins hearts.' As Evangeline Bruce discerned, `she herself had never been able to feel hate'.

One of the Almighty's greatest mercies was to bring back from the shadow of death that great and good, witty and kind chap Hugh Massingberd and allow him to sit more comfortably before his TV set than for so long in the hotter seat of Obitu- aries Editor of the Daily Telegraph. Some of his summer corpses have now been exhumed by Macmillan for £14.99, graves emptied, so to speak, to make a stocking- filler sure to evoke Christmas morning smiles as warm as Hugh's own.

I much look forward to reading Changing Enemies (HarperCollins, £18) by my old friend Noel Annan, whose Lumpenbiog so much disappointed me. I hope he also tells his readers how he came to meet and many the Grunewald German lady who is for my money the best reviewer writing in the English language on either side of the Atlantic.

I very much enjoyed A Scandalous Life, the biography of Jane Digby by Mary S. Lovell (Richard Cohen Books, £19.99), a study of one of the fascinating characters first revealed to modern readers by Lesley Blanch in The Wilder Shores of Love. Not surprisingly, the publishers requested a preface by the present U S Ambassador in Paris, born Pamela Digby from the same Dorset family and house. But 'Spam' thought it prudent to keep out of what might have been judged as both sexual and literary competition.

Simon Courtauld

For his first book Patrick French made a striking entrance with Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer (Harper- Collins, £20), having followed in his subject's footsteps over the mountains of Asia and finally struck gold in an attic in Dorset. It is a marvellous portrait of a great eccentric, memorable too for perhaps the first use of puns — 'That Sinkiang Feeling' — in the chapter-headings of a serious biography. Sebastian Faulks' novel of the first world war, Birdsong (Vintage, £5.99) was memorable for the spine-chilling descrip- tions of being trapped in underground tunnels between the lines.

However, my greatest discovery this year was Hounds are Home by Gordon Fergus- son (Springwood, £15), a history of the Royal Calpe Hunt from its founding at Gibraltar after the Peninsular War until it was disbanded in 1939, at the end of the Spanish Civil War. The book not only provides an insight into Anglo-Spanish relations at a time when the sovereignty of the Rock was not a issue, but is littered with anecdotal information. When Lady Harington, joint-master and the Gover- nor's wife, was riding with hounds through an Andalusian farm during the civil war, she was abused by nationalist supporters who assumed that because she wore a red coat she must be a communist.

Anne Applebaum

There was no need for me to follow the Rosemary West trial (thank God) because all of the relevant conclusions about human nature had already been drawn for me long before by William Trevor. Felicia 's Journey (Penguin, £5.99), his most recent novel, captures the world of the man in the dirty mackintosh, the pregnant Irish girl on the run, and the anonymous suburban estate superbly; what more needs to be written about the horrific loneliness of modern life? We can now dispense with the subject entirely, and leave it to Mr Trevor.

Moving swiftly East from the decadent West, Neal Ascherson's Black Sea (Cape, £17.99) was easily the best travelogue of the year, conveying the essence of the mixed, uncertain lands which lie to the southeast of Europe, home to Ukrainians, Abkhazians, Sarmatians and others, using an odd collection of stories, myths and reportage. Konin (Cape, £18.99), Theo Richmond's account of the Jews who inhabited one Polish town in the years before the second world war and afterwards, is the best description yet of the strange, drawn- out, unresolved aftermath of the Holocaust.

Finally, Robert Skidelsky's The World after Communism (Macmillan, £16.99) put quite a lot of things in perspective. I had always suspected that the economy of post- war Britain had quite a lot in common with the economies of post-war eastern Europe, and Lord Skidelsky has now confirmed my prejudices, always a satisfying feeling.

Jennifer Paterson

The Liquidator by Ferdinand Mount (Heinemann, £14.99). As usual, this author has written a book after my own heart. Very funny and sadly melancholic, but the great thing is his ability to write English as it should be writ, and with wit. A lovely read.

After Zenda by John Spurling (Deutsch, £14.99). A splendid continuation of Zenda and Rupert of Hentzau. Joyous madness and very exciting. I fell in love with the author's picture on the jacket: he is clearly the rightful king.

Serpent on the Rock by Alice Thomas Ellis (Hodder, £17.99). Her personal view of Christianity, which concurs with mine entirely: anti modern masses and guitars. Funny and furious but deeply convincing, as she has had the Job treatment in spades, and is most touching about her children who died.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt (Vintage, £5.99). My favourite book this year. Sleazy side of snobby Savannah. Extraordinary but believ- able crazy characters wheeler-dealing in wonderful ways. Murder, mayhem, voodoo and outrageous sub-plots. A non-stop good read.