What struck me most about the fiction I read this year was the dominance of the straight-forward, non-experimental, traditional, first-person narrative voice. Among the year's very finest is Siberian Andrei Makine's haunting Le Testament Francais (Sceptre), in which a young boy's identity becomes obliterated by his French grandmother's complex cultural legacy. Written in French and beautifully translated by Geoffrey Strachen, Makine's gracious, elegiac narrative is poised between two cultures, and merges the techniques of contemporary French fiction with those of the 19th-century Russian novel. The narrative voice is wistful and intense, even obsessed, and the narrator's dilemma of seeming to live through his grandmother's memories is both romantic and sinister.
Ordinary life can be dull material for fiction, and few writers can match the empathy of Ivan Klima, author of Judge on Trial - one of Europe's finest postwar novels. Klima's The Ultimate Intimacy (Granta) explores one man's life, personal problems and the complexities which bedevil him in the new Czechoslovakia. Daniel Vedra is a pastor who progresses from life-long emotional neutrality to a state of controlled complexity in a dense, episodic plot. The achievement of this novel - and of this most philosophical of novelists - lies in a humane understanding of moral and emotional confusion.
Austrian Robert Musil's epic novel The Man Without Qualities was first published in German between 193043, and Sophie Watkins's dazzling new translation, published last month in a Picador paperback edition, reinvigorates a Modernist masterpiece. Re-reading its in this exciting new edition ranks as one of my literary year's highlights.
Closer to home, John Banville's Whitbread contender The Untouchable (Picador) is a poised, elegant, often funny account of a spy's life as narrated by witty, fastidious art historian Victor Maskell. This is a big novel in which one man's multiple betrayals of self and others is acted out against the backdrop of 20th century history. Above all, it is a moving love story.
For me, Anne Haverty's One Day as a Tiger (Chatto) was the most engaging, exciting and original Irish fiction debut. She bravely gambled on an unpleasant, obviously emotionally re pressed narrator, and achieved real poignancy.
The only British writer to impress me this year was Jim Crace with his engaging and imaginative New Testament yarn Quarantine (Viking). Shortlisted for the Booker, it is very loosely based on the forty-day fast Jesus underwent in the desert and Crace assembles a mixed bag of pilgrims. It is very funny and atmospheric. Former Booker winner Peter Carey entertained with Jack Maggs (Faber), his pacey Dickensian pastiche which was overlooked by an unimaginative Booker panel. Inspired by Great Expectations, it follows the homeward journey of a flawed anti-hero-with-apast. The novel's main message could be that the Victorian poor suffered horribly. Despite the weakness of Maggs's characterisation, it is a lively book.
Many were surprised to see Tim Parks's Europa (Secker) Bookershortlisted. I wasn't. Although I didn't feel he should win, Parks displayed some daring in creating a disgruntled male narrator who is travelling to the European parliament on a protest mission more out of resentment of his ex-mistress than of solidarity with the cause. The narrator's complaining, sexist voice is irritating but convincing.
It was a poor year for the Booker, this most maligned of prizes. Heavilyhyped from the outset, Arundhati Roy's winner The God of Small Things (Flamingo) is unique only for reflecting the worst aspects of magic realism. Some reviewers did note the sloppy, laboured prose, multiple pretentions, coyness, caricatures and creaking plot. But hype carried the day - and the prize. Even more disappointing, considering the quality of contemporary Indian fiction - never mind serious Booker claims of Crace, Carey and Banville - was the omission of a far superior Indian novel, Ardashir Vakil's excellent debut Beach Boy (Hamish Hamilton), a touching and unsentimental story about a young boy growing up in Bombay. Another engaging coming of age novel was the gifted Israeli novelist David Grossman's The Zigzag Kid (Bloomsbury). Nonny, the hyper-observant son of a depressed policeman father, acquires wisdom through some crazy experiences, along the way discovering the truth about his long-dead mother. Yet again, Israel's Amos Oz confirmed the new-found beauty of his mature work with Panther in the Basement (Vintage), which explores the meaning of truth in a narrative set in Jerusalem in 1947.
Central to the book is young Proffy's difficult relationship with a father who seeks his sense of self through books. Literature not life provides the language through which he communicates with his son. US fiction again challenged all-comers with a diverse gathering of very fine work. Short, sharp and humane, The Actual (Viking) is a by now almost routinely magisterial performance from Saul Bellow, a 20th-century master. - coming 50 years on in a remarkable career - The narrative observes sane, sensible, hopeful Harry Trellman reviewing, and confronting, the truth: "We are, for the time being, the living, maimed and defective." Richard Ford's superb collection Women With Men (Harvill) focuses on characters living life at a remove. Thoughtful, brilliantly observed and honest, this trio - particularly the middle story, "Jealousy" - is outstanding.
Never before a fan, I was astounded by Phillip Roth's American Pastoral (Cape), a moving lament for America, in which Roth's alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman tells of a decent former high school sports hero's tragic experience of seeing his American dream destroyed by reality. The confessional has always been central to Edmund White's work, and The Farewell Symphony (Chatto), chronicling the horrors of the AIDS plague, is a candid beautiful, terrifying book, which testifies to White's genius as a polemical artist.
Among the leading non-fiction books was Robert Hughes's epic American Visions (Harvill), which tells the story of America through its diverse visual culture: passionately observed, erudite and playful. South African J.M. Coetzee's Boyhood (Secker) is beautifully written and harrowing, and probably more novel than memoir. The boy at its heart is not lovable, but this cold, elegant book contains some of the most beautifully crafted prose among this year's books. Style has never preoccupied Dervla Murphy, but South from the Limpopo (John Murray) is a compellingly wellobserved journal of travel through South Africa's contradictory society.
Poet and Michigan undertaker Thomas Lynch possesses an oddly compelling voice, and The Undertaking - Life Studies from the Dismal Trade (Cape) is a thoughtful, assured volume of essays. Among the best of the biographies published this year is David Noakes's lively life of that most elusive of individuals, Jane Austen (4th Estate), Most biographers end up walking respectfully around Austen, but this a full-blooded social and family history bristling with pace and humour.
A number of excellent books from Irish publishers showed that quality academic writing can open specialist areas to general readers. Author of A Paper Landscape, geographer John Andrews compressed his extraordinary learning into Shapes of Ireland - Maps and their Makers 1564-1839 (Geography Publications). The book is written with style and verve, and the mapmakers emerge as heroes and pioneers.
County Down, edited by Lindsay Proudfoot (Geography Publications), is the tenth volume - and first Ulster county - in Dr William Nolan's monumental History and Society series which is chronicling each of the thirty-two counties. Frank Mitchell's classic Reading the Irish Landscape (Town House), reissued in an extended, revised edition co-written by Mitchell with archaeologist Michael Ryan, overshadowed Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape, edited by Fred Aalen, Kevin Whelan and Matthew Stout (Cork University Press), but the latter is an exciting, provocative work. Cartographer Stout again impressed with The Irish Ringfort (Four Courts), in which this geographer turns his eye on the most numerous of Irish field monuments.