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Best reads 2011

My book reading for 2011 was rather sparse for some reason – so many books in the world, so very few read. The top book from those I read this year is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. This was the novel that affected me the most and, I thought, was the most masterfully conceived and written. A quite good film was made of it and released during the year, and it is well worth checking out but, of course, it’s better to read the book. The book is written in the somewhat prosaic voice of Kathy who is an orphan (we think) living in a boarding school in the English countryside. From her limited perspective we find out more about the children in, what becomes more and more apparent, is a very strange institution. The reader is very subtly brought into this unsettling world, so that the horrifying is normalised. I thought the novel was beautiful, sad and very challenging on a number of levels.

In supporting short stories I commit to reading one short story a week. Not a lot, I know, but I find I’m always reading a novel and it’s easy to forget stories. There is an idea going around that short fiction will come into its own in the age of the smart phone and the tablet, peoples’ busy lives and a commuting culture. Let’s hope so. Okay, my favourite short story for the year is one I just chanced upon while browsing the net. The story is “One Last Winter Moment” by Kathleen Kennedy and this was publishing online in the Canadian Room Magazine. So you can enjoy it yourself here. It’s poignant, sad and beautifully written.

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Room by Emma Donoghue – review

I note that this novel is one of the Book Depository’s four top crime books for 2011. To put it in the crime genre is a bit of a stretch, although there is a crime at the centre of the narrative. I don’t think it is giving anything away to say that the novel uses as its central device the amazing fact that Josef Fritzl kept his daughter locked up in the basement of his house for 24 years. He fathered, through rape, seven children with her, three of whom stayed in the basement all their lives until they were discovered. Of course, anyone who heard this story was fascinated with what it would be like to have suffered what Fritzl’s daughter and grandchildren suffered.

Donoghue takes up this challenge but never in a sensational or prurient way. It is the great achievement of the book, narrated through the eyes on five-year-old Jack, that the (to us) the strange, even unbelievable, idea of being confined to one room and being dependent for your life on the support of your captor, is normalised. For Jack, born into the room, it is natural, it is all he has known.

So begins the novel as we are introduced to the room through the engaging eyes of Jack. Donoghue is excellent at portraying the world through the eyes of a child (even if he sometimes he has a vocabulary and thought processes way in advance of his age). Before I started the novel I wondered whether the author could sustain a book wholly centred in one room. As it turns out she doesn’t have to (but I won’t spoil it by saying how). Funnily enough, though, it was the section set in the room with Jack and his mother that I thought was the strongest – we find out what’s going on through Jack’s eyes, and this is beautifully done. When the outside world is introduced I think the narrative loses some of its inherent interest, and the device of using Jack’s point of view skirts the boundary of being too cute.