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Best reads 2020

It is somewhat late for this but here are my best (and some worst) books for 2020.

Best Literary novel

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

I find it hard to pinpoint just what I loved about this short novel by the Polish Nobel laureate. Please don’t be put off by the title, it’s not about the holocaust, or massacres, unless you think we humans’ treatment of animals is something like that. It is not a grand book, it has a small canvas – an out of the way hamlet in rural Poland. The novel does have one of my pet loves, that is, a tough older woman taking on the (small) world. It is ostensibly a murder mystery as Janina’s neighbours start turning up dead. Janina takes it into her own head to find out what’s going on, amidst the snow and harsh conditions. Yeah, I can’t explain why I loved it but I just did.

Honourable mentions to The Inheritance of Loss by Kiren Desai, Madeline Miller’s wonderful Circe, Wolfe Island, as below, and My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell which is an interesting and brave take on complicity and abuse in a sexual relationship between a male teacher and female student.

Best Fantasy or speculative

A good year for this. I particularly enjoyed The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon as well as Skyward by Brandon Sanderson. I’ve never felt like reading his adult books but this children’s/YA one of a young aspiring female pilot, carrying the burden of her father’s cowardice in battle, and her talking ‘ship’, was well-written and absorbing.

I am an avid fan of Garth Nix and am currently rereading his ‘Abhorsen’ books (sigh, cry etc. etc.). His latest The Left-Handed Booksellers of London is a gem – set in the 80s, there is some great nostalgia for us who lived through it as young adults, plus the usual fantastic characters and dark plot.

 Best book with a tough woman protagonist

This is my find for 2020 – tough, older women not taking it anymore. As well as Olga Tokarscuk, there’s Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth who turns her gimlet eye on siblings and inheritance in Will and Testament and guilt, solitude, selfishness and art in A House in Norway. US writer Ottessa Moshfegh adopts a similar delicious tone in Death in Her Hands. It’s not everyone’s cup of tea but I just love it.

Best audiobook

A good book can be ruined by the wrong narrator/performer but the right one can bring so much out in a book I otherwise might not have read. Abbe Holmes’ southern drawl in Wolfe Island gave resonance to the protagonist, the wonderful dry, tough, Kitty Hawke, I loved it. The crisp British tones of Sophie Aldred makes her one of my favourite narrators and she didn’t disappoint in Skyward. I don’t know if I would have picked up the paper version of Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, but having it narrated to be by Anna-Maria Nabirye made it a pleasure. Jenny Agata couldn’t have been more perfect for Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels.

Book that doesn’t deserve the hype

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste

I guess you can’t get more hyped than being short-listed for the Booker prize (besides winning it). The Shadow King certainly garnered a lot of accolades with reveiwers often viewing it as affirmation of women as the author references in an afterword, her great-grandmother who fought against the invasion of Ethiopia by the Italian fascists. However, if the novel is supposed to be ‘an exploration of female power, it’s a depressing portrayal. Rather than being about the rewards of rebellion, the competency of women fighting alongside men, it is more about the ‘fog of war’, its ugliness, the viciousness of fascism, and who suffers the most – the poor, the third world, the women. We see women (and the protagonist, Hirut, in particular) used, abused, raped, taken for granted and dismissed.

I found the novel to be so overwritten, so consciously oblique, that for much of its length I had a hard time working out what was actually happening. For its popularity, I can only conclude that many people have read into this book what they want it to say. Its elusiveness and opacity allow for this.

Most objectionable book

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

I didn’t like the treatment of women in this. It’s a long dry, cerebral work. No one seems to care what happens to Yasuko, the main female character who is in fear of her ex-husband, or about her fourteen-year-old daughter. We are supposed to care about the fate of Yasuko’s next-door neighbour (male) who helps her out. As long as the detective (male) and his mathematics professor sidekick (male) resolve the fiendishly clever ‘problem’, that’s all that matters. For crime to be satisfying, it’s not just about puzzle-solving, it’s about justice, and I don’t mean merely in the legal sense.

Guilty comfort reads

I loved  Sujata Massey’s recent crime novels set in 1920s India – The Widows of Malabar Hill and The Satapur Moonstone so I sought out her backlist of crime novels of 1980s Japan. Rei Shamura is half-Japanese half-American and trying to start up a business as an antiques consultant in Tokyo. Although they are  light crime investigations with an edge of romance, Massey is more serious about exploring aspects of Japanese life and culture from an outsider’s perspective (Rei is never allowed to forget she’s not a proper Japanese). They are a lot of fun and cover aspects such as Buddhism, the history of kimono, flowering arranging etc.

Best Australian books 

Wolfe Island and Heather Rose’s Bruny. It might be far-fetched in places, but she goes right in there with her take on corruption and politics in the Apple Isle, and a prodigal daughter with secrets of her own – a lot of fun.

Best crime 

Not a great year for this but I enjoyed, admired and respected Dorothy L Sayers’ Nine Tailors. On a lesser plane, but nevertheless enjoyable was Lucy Atkins’ Oxford-set Magpie Lane. Anthony Horowitz’s Moonflowers Murders was devilishly clever with a full crime novel contained within the crime novel. I take my hat off to him.

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Where the Crawdads Sing – Delia Owens

I would have found this an interesting, absorbing, affecting novel if Crawdads had continued on as it started – a tale of a lonely, abandoned ‘marsh girl’ who channels her love and interest into nature rather than humans (who have so betrayed her). Owens’ history as a naturalist shines through in the wonderful descriptions of the watery marshlands of North Carolina (which we now call wetlands, recognising their diversity and importance). While it is perhaps hard to believe in young Kya as a total autodidact (she attends school for only one day), her salvation is the study of the environment around her.

I was taken by the idea of seven-year-old Kya learning to live on her own in a shack on the water, scraping together just enough food to keep herself going, befriending seabirds, dodging truant officers, and having to be tamed into a tentative friendship by Tate, a boy a couple of years older  who can see past the small town’s prejudice against the ‘white trash’ who live marginal lives in and around the waterways.

However, woven in with this initial story, is the suspicious death some fifteen years later of well-off, tear-away town-boy Chase who has fallen from a watchtower. Just how Kya is linked to this death is the trajectory the novel takes, and this is where, to my mind, it strays into genre fiction territory. I can only think that Owens thought there was just not enough in the story of Kya overcoming odds to become accepted in society and to live her life as a successful naturalist. The phenomenal success of the book probably proves her right, but there is something terribly wrong with the denouement of the novel.

The final twist is a betrayal of the reader. (Spoiler below) For a novel to be successful it has to have an internal consistency. Owens goes to some lengths to develop Kya as a character – she is hurt and betrayed but she overcomes this, she finds friends and allies. She matures and is essentially a good, independent person. For the final twist to work we must believe [that she planned an elaborate murder, she was able to lure Chase, who last we saw she’d punched and kicked after he raped her, to the watchtower at a particular time, that she was able to concoct disguises with no one twigging it, that in a tiny town they actually had buses running at night, that somehow she either had the red wool hat with her, or went home to get it, or that the fibres were left on Chase’s jacket from years before, that even though she only had twenty minutes to do the whole thing she removed footprints in the dark including Chase’s which if she was so clever she would have left. We also have to accept that she wrote a poem about the killing and kept the tell-tale shell necklace in a hiding place in the shack (although the sheriff thoroughly searched it) for poor Tate to find after her death. Why? She hated Chase, why would she keep the necklace?

And the final betrayal that is totally out of character is Kya accepting the support of her ‘friends’ (Jumpin, Mabel, Tate, Tate’s dad, her editor). The reader feels good about their loyalty to Kya in court, the way they stand by her as she professes her innocence, when all the while their support is betrayed. That is not the behaviour of the Kya we know – she committed the murder, she would either have admitted it, or she would have never been caught, disappearing into the marsh back to a lonely, isolated life.

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The Satapur Moonstone by Sujata Massey

The second in Massey’s Perveen Mistry murder mysteries set in 1920’s India (the first was The Widows of Malabar Hill). Perveen is a ‘lady’ lawyer, educated at Oxford after discrimination suffered when trying to undertake her law degree in India (this is explained in Massey’s novella ‘Outnumbered at Oxford’). Perveen is constrained by the mores of the time, including British colonialism, and also by her Parsi background (she can’t, for example, be divorced from her violent estranged husband). But never mind, she can look after herself and take on most people. Here she takes a job mediating between a maharani from a far-flung principality in the hills and the British authorities who have legal care for her son – the maharaja-in-waiting. Perveen gets embroiled in a possible murder investigation when she finds the maharani’s other son was supposedly mauled to death on a hunt in suspicious circumstances. The palace is remote, hard to get to, and hemmed in by mist, and there may be a poisoner at work. There is a suggestion of love interest in the form of Colin Sandrigham – a slightly bitter but companionable British agent living in the picturesque but lonely circuit house where Perveen is put up in bad weather before moving on to the palace (much to her chagrin, Colin is the only one there besides a loyal servant ). Some may find the pace too slow, but I love the detail of the setting and customs as well as Perveen’s self-control and no-nonsense approach. She may not, perhaps, be the action heroine that is now ubiquitous but she’s smart, determined and knows she must work within the constraints that are placed on her.