Have you read Amis?

            Did you see George Dubya’s press conference?

            Didn’t you love what Arundhati wrote?

            Blair standing shoulder to shoulder with America? Shoulder to knee is             more like it.

            Jay McIrneney? He’d be better named McIninney.

            Will Pakistan allow ground troops on its soil?

Sometime around the middle or end of September in London it was possible to hear conversations which, within a short space of time, encompassed all the statements above.  Fiction writers become commentators on the state of the world, and it was understood within literary-minded circles that, for instance, ‘McEwen’s latest’ didn’t refer to his most recent book Amsterdam but rather to the most recent article he’d written about September 11 and its aftermath.  Some writers went public with saying they were unable to write fiction anymore because the world was changing so fast and anything they had to say seemed irrelevant.  James Wood attacked the shallowness of the contemporary novel which is more interested in giving us information than revealing the complex mysteries of the human heart; September 11, he said, showed us the uselessness of such novels.

            In bookstores, there was a rush for non-fiction work about Afghanistan, war, bereavement, architecture etc.  (Ahmed Rashid’s Taliban was a much-deserved big winner there.)  Not all non-fiction books saw sales increase – word got out that one American publishing house destroyed all its copies of a Middle Eastern cookbook that had been about to go on sale, because the climate wasn’t felt to be right for hummus recipes.

             Rumour had it, once again, that the novel was dead.  Outdated.  Useless.

            But then along came The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen’s much hyped novel.  Any fears that the post-September 11 mood would have dimmed the public’s appetite for fiction were quickly proved wrong as the novel rocketed to the top of the bestseller charts in America.  Sales probably weren’t hurt by Franzen’s heavily publicised clash with Oprah Winfrey (Oprah chose The Corrections for her bookclub; Franzen, in an interview, was less than enthusiastic about either Oprah or her bookclub, and Oprah responded by dropping the book.  When Franzen won the National Book Award he paid tribute to the role of Oprah’s Bookclub in making reading popular, so it looks as though that scrap has ended on a graceful note).  But to say the book owes its success to the Oprah incident seems grossly unfair.  Critics have been almost unanimous in lavishing praise on the novel.  Alex Clark in The Guardian says it has already been cited for “echoes of Dickens, Tolstoy and Thomas Mann.  The comparisons might be overblown, but Franzen’s ambitious attempt to unite the comedy of daily indignity and the tragedy of irretrievable loss, in a literature that confuses categories of ‘high’ and ‘low’ certainly demands our attention and our respect.”  In the U.K. the book wasn’t due to be published until 2002 but the success it achieved on the other side of the Atlantic convinced its UK publishers to push up its release date to November 2001.

            The Corrections may have been the most hyped novel of the year, but it certainly wasn’t the only novel to receive attention.  In the run up to the Booker Prize the three names on everyone’s lips were Ian McEwen (for Atonement), Peter Carey (for True History of the Kelly Gang) and Beryl Bainbridge (for According to Queeney).  Notably absent from the list of Booker probables was Salman Rushdie’s Fury, a novel about a man with a mid-life crisis who moves to New York and finds love with a younger woman.  Fury  was widely panned by critics, though Boyd Tomkin did make a remark to the effect that Rushdie at his worst is still better than most of his contemporaries at their best.  The Booker bookies were placing the best odds on Beryl Bainbridge, who has the singular distinction of being nominated more times without winning than any other author.  But although According to Queeney, a novel about the life of Samuel Johnson, received both critical and public acclaim it didn’t make it to the shortlist, thereby leaving Peter Carey and Ian McEwen in a virtual two-man race.  Ian McEwen won ‘the People’s Booker’ (that is, he got the most votes in a poll open to the public) but Peter Carey walked off with the prize.  In his acceptance speech he said he owed Ian McEwen a very expensive meal having just lost a bet with him about who would win.

           But although McEwen and Carey received the most Booker attention, the real interest (for me, at least) lay in the other names on the list.  Andrew Miller, for Oxygen, was regarded by some as the dark horse who might pull off an upset – Miller’s writing has consistently won him praise, and prior to Oxygen he’d been touted as a possible future Booker nominee.  But the other three names on the list belonged, refreshingly, to young writers about whom it seems safe to say that their best work lies ahead of them – a cheering thought, given the calibre at which they’re already working.  Rachel Seiffert’s debut novel, The Dark Room, deals intelligently and lucidly with World War II from the point of view of German civilians (there are three sections to the book – the first two set during the war, the last set in contemporary Germany); Ali Smith’s Hotel World tells the stories of different visitors to a hotel, including one visitor who is a ghost, in the inventive, beautiful prose that is her hallmark.  (Ali’s earlier work, Other Stories and Other Stories is one of my favourite collections of contemporary short stories); David Mitchell, who wrote my favourite novel of 2000, Ghostwritten, was the last of the nominees for Number 9 Dream, a fantastic, almost hallucogenic novel about a boy in search of his father in Tokyo.

            2001 was also the first year the Booker judges published the Booker Longlist.  One of the most publicised nominations was Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass, the conclusion of his Northern Lights trilogy. Described as a children’s book, The Amber Spyglass takes its references from Milton, William Blake and Emily Dickenson, with a nod or two towards Malory.  With its epic scope, theological questioning and dazzling writing, it can sit quite unashamedly on the bookshelf of any ‘serious’ adult reader.  Religious groups have not exactly warmed to it, though, in its re-writing of the battle between God (known as ‘The Authority’) and Lucifer.

            In contrast to previous years, Indian novels were largely absent from Booker consideration.  The only Indian novel that made it onto the longlist was Manil Suri’s The Death of Vishnu, and no one seemed to really expect it to shoulder its way onto the shortlist.  It’s a novel that is wonderful in parts – in its scenes of squabbling neighbours, it has echoes of Rohinton Mistry – but I’ve yet to meet a South Asian, from either side of the Indo-Pak border, who managed to warm to its use of Hindu mythology, which takes up more and more of the novel as the book progresses.  The other Indian novel which came out in a blaze of publicity was Ruchir Joshi’s The Last Jet Engine Laugh, a novel which spans a century of India’s history from 1930 – 2030, showing how a single family moves from non-violent protest (in 1930s’ India) to war (in India of the 2030 when the third generation of the family joins the Indian airforce and fights against the Pak-Saudi alliance).  Joshi’s writing is undeniably original, and his novel is a work of considerable imagination, but the novel has a hard time sustaining the energy of the opening pages.  (On the subject of South Asian writers, I can’t resist mentioning the Kashmiri poet, Agha Shahid Ali’s latest, dazzling collection Rooms Are Never Finished which was shortlisted for the National Book Award for poetry.)

            There were two fine novels from Muslim writers – the Lebanese writer, Hanan al Shaykh’s Only in London looked at the Arab community in London with warmth and humour; and, with asylum-seeking much in the headlines in the UK, Abdulrazak Gurnah’s By the Sea (also on the Booker longlist) was a timely look at the life of an asylum seeker from Zanzibar, who looks back on his life while trying to adapt to life in Britain.

            At home, Uzma Aslam Khan’s The Story of Noble Rot, The Bapsi Sidhwa Omnibus, Talat Abbasi’s Bitter Gourd and Other Stories and Leaving Home (a collection of Pakistani writing about migration and identity, edited by Muneeza Shamsie) added to the rapidly growing oeuvre of quality Pakistani writing in English.  Here’s hoping for more in 2002.