Halfway through the decade already, and we're all a little older, wiser and in my case more gainfully employed though curiously lighter-of-pocket (damn you, student loans) than we were back in the heady first days of the new millennium. We're also, as a planet, more familiar with the terms "al-Qaida", "war on terror" and "9/11" – and 2005 saw the first attempt from a heavyweight novelist to deal directly with them in the shape of Ian McEwan's Saturday, described by Mark Lawson in the Guardian as "one of the most oblique but also most serious contributions to the post-9/11, post-Iraq war literature". While the reviews were largely complimentary, however, public reception was mixed and Saturday, which sees the day of London's huge anti-war marches in February 2003 through the civilised, satisfied eyes of neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, failed to make the 2005 Booker shortlist. Personally, I found McEwan's liquid sentences could only carry me so far: the redemption-via-poetry towards the end of the novel stretched the bounds of plausibility to snapping point (and I speak as a poetry nut).
Happily, though, there were plenty more titles to choose from. This was, as Booker chairman John Sutherland pointed out, an "exceptional year" for fiction, with new novels from Salman Rushdie, JM Coetzee and Julian Barnes. John Banville swooped in from leftfield to take the Booker with his melancholy examination of bereavement, The Sea, pipping Kazuo Ishiguro to the post (two of the judges apparently fought hard for his clever, frightening Never Let Me Go). Zadie Smith's On Beauty polarised reviewers (the Observer called it "exceptionally accomplished"; Peter Kemp, in the Sunday Times described it as "inconsequential" and "self-indulgent"), but went on to win the Orange prize in 2006. My own favourites from the year included James Meek's The People's Act of Love; Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (his best novel, I reckon, though I realise I'm in a minority there); Paradise, AL Kennedy's intimate, sensual exploration of alcoholism ("the good hurt", she called it) which I loved (in fact, it set me off on an ALK kick – I came to her short stories after reading it); EL Doctorow's civil war drama, The March, which lacked some of the heft and sparkle of his New York novels, but remained streets ahead of pretty much anything else by pretty much anyone else; and Hilary Mantel's superlative Beyond Black, which opens with one of the finest passages of descriptive prose I've read anywhere in the last decade.
In fact, Beyond Black ties with The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's meditation on the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, as my book of the year. Didion's is an agonizing, beautiful gift of a book: an unsparing exploration of the elliptical mental journeys on which grief takes you; the swoops and switchbacks your mind performs in order to spare you, to permit you to cope. On the non-fiction front, I was also gripped – and educated – by Reza Aslan's history of Islam, No god but God, and Bella Bathurst's exploration of nefarious goings-on on Britain's coastline, The Wreckers, which I picked up on account of a teenage obsession with Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn, and found completely fascinating. Other noteworthy titles include the final volume in Hilary Spurling's biography of Matisse, Matisse the Master, which snagged her the Whitbread prize and caused an outbreak of "magisterials" across the review pages, and Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J Dubner. In poetry, highlights included Anne Stevenson's Poems 1955-2005 (I saw her reading at the Poetry Bookshop in Hay: wonderful) and Alice Oswald's Woods Etc (a line from it – "It was death, it was death like an in-breath, fully inhaled" – has echoed round my head ever since. I await the near-inevitable news that I'm misquoting her here: my copy of the book's in a box in a friend's cellar, so not available for consultation.)
Finally, of course, it would be remiss of me to neglect to mention publishing leviathan JK Rowling, who, with the help of her boy-wizard sidekick, continued her inexorable onward march with the publication of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which broke all sales records, and so on and on and on.
Anyway: those are some of my books of 2005 – looking back, it was quite the year. Look here and here for more titles to jog your memory and tell me: what were yours?
