This year I read 64 books, the first time since records began (2014) that the number has exceeded my age in years (I am 62). The total might be inflated, though, as some of the books have been duologues or trilogies and I’m never quite sure what to do with these. In addition, I use the term ‘read’ advisedly, as thirty of these were audiobooks. The rest were dead-tree versions — none was an e-book. So here, in no particular order, are my ten best reads of the year, with the overall winner at the end.
Cixin Liu: The Three-Body Problem This (with its sequelae The Dark Forest and Death’s End) evokes nostalgia for SF stories of an earlier age, from authors such as Arthur C. Clarke. It starts in 1967 when a young girl, Ye Wiejie, witnesses her father, a physics professor, beaten to death by high-school students during the Cultural Revolution. This traumatic event shades her future, and — eventually — that of humankind. We see her brutal exile to a remote logging camp; her involvement as a technician in a secret radio-astronomy program of initially unknown purpose; her political rehabilitation, and, finally, retirement as a physics professor at Tsinghua University, where her father had once taught. But there is another strand to this — or, rather, several, as the story is somewhat nonlinear. In the present day, Wang Miao, a materials researcher working on a super-strong nanofilament, is coopted by a bluff, hard-drinking, hard-smoking cop Shi Qiang to investigate the mysterious deaths of several scientists. This leads us, through various diversions, to a secret scientific society charting the very limits of science; eco-terrorism; an eerily realistic computer game set on a planet orbiting chaotically in a triple-star system (hence the title); and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. The scope is vast, and some of the set-pieces are truly staggering. Witness, for example, an analog computer consisting of thirty million soldiers arrayed on a vast plain using black and white signal flags as ones and zeroes. And the efforts of alien scientists to create sentience by etching microcircuits inside protons. It shouldn’t really work, but it does. This is a work of SFnal genius in anyone’s cosmos.
Amor Towles: A Gentleman In Moscow Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, late of ‘Idle Hour’, an estate near Nizhny Novgorod, returns to Russia from Paris after the Revolution to set his grandmother’s affairs in order. He is rounded up by the Bolsheviks, who, rather than shoot him for being a ‘social parasite’, have what seems to be a worse fate in store. He is made a ‘former person’ and confined for life to the luxurious Hotel Metropol, just opposite the Bolshoi Ballet and within sight of the Kremlin, there to live at the state’s expense, in a tiny attic room, as he is forced to watch the collapse of his privileged world. But the Bolsheviks hadn’t reckoned on the resourcefulness of their prisoner. Rostov adapts to his new life and finds in it contentment as he encounters poets, actors, waifs, strays, journalists, diplomats, party apparatchiks, petty bureaucrats, movers and shakers among the hotel’s guests. His old-world decorum finds him taking a job as Head Waiter at the hotel’s prestigious Boyarski restaurant, as well as advising the New Russians on how best to conduct themselves in foreign company. This perfectly constructed novel is every bit as elegant and well-comported as its protagonist, with wry, funny asides and delicate prose lightly concealing the ups, downs — and horrors — of the Soviet Union from its birth until the early 1950s. A sign of a good book is if you miss it once you’ve finished, and I found myself missing the company of Count Rostov, known to his friends as Sacha, a man with a steely resolve buried beneath his well-groomed exterior.
Adrian Tchaikovsky: Children of Time (with its sequelae Children of Ruin and Children of Memory) Generation starship Gilgamesh is the last hope of humanity to flee a dying Earth in search of a new home. Eventually the crew discovers a gorgeous green planet that had been terraformed by an outpost of the long-gone human empire, watched over by a half-mad quasi-human guardian determined not to let any human land there and spoil her experiment in generating new sentient life. The life that arises, however, is not quite what the guardian — and the desperate crew of the Gilgamesh — had expected. Who will win the ultimate battle? Terrific, thrilling, madly inventive hard SF adventure.
Lavie Tidhar: Maror People of a certain age will remember James Michener, who wrote vast blockbusters in which historical panoramas were seen through the eyes of a multi-generational cast of characters. One such was The Source (1965), telling of the Holy Land from pre-Biblical times to foundation of Israel. Maror, by Lavie Tidhar, can be seen as its antithesis. Yes, it’s a vast epic about Israel, but it is relentlessly anti-heroic. It stems from the idea that any fully rounded nation must have more than just politicians, heroes, generals, visionaries and pioneers. It must have whores, pimps, gamblers, gangsters, crooks and villains, too, and the boundaries between good and evil are not always clear. It starts with Avi Sagi, a cop so hard-boiled that he makes Dirty Harry look freshly laundered. Avi’s story, in the early 2000s, turns out to be just the first in a series of vignettes set in Israel (or among Israelis abroad) from just after the 1973 Yom Kippur war, through the Lebanon campaigns of the 1980s, up to 2008. The stories illustrate the history of Israel but through the eyes of cops so bent they could be drawn as pretzels; drug lords who are also devoted family men; soldiers, who, once out of the army, find jobs as ‘security consultants’ (please don’t call them ‘mercenaries’) to foreign terrorist organisations; professional drug couriers; politicians and generals who are also serial rapists and embezzlers, and who take advantage of the chaos of the Middle East to indulge in what are euphemistically called ‘import-export’ businesses. At the heart of it all is the mysterious, Bible-quoting Cohen, a policeman who is also a gangster, who plays both sides because, he says, if crime can’t be stopped, it has to be ‘managed’, and this means bending the rules. It turns out that Cohen was born on the day Israel achieved independence, and he can be seen as a kind of genius loci for Israel: sleeves-rolled-up, practical, cunning, doing everything to ensure Israel’s survival by any means necessary. The book is not without hope, though, even if cruelly dashed. In the mid-1990s, the young and idealistic Avi, trying to put a life of petty crime behind him, and fuelled, like all his generation, by the hope of the nascent Oslo peace accords and a peace treaty with Jordan, goes to a rock festival in Arad, in the Negev desert, and makes out with a girl. It all looks lovely… until disaster strikes. This is a portrait of a real event. The collapse of security barriers led to serious injury and death for young festival-goers. And on 4 November 1995, Yitzhak Rabin, an architect of peace, was assassinated by a Jewish ultra-nationalist hothead. Avi turns back to crime and after that the course of the book is relentlessly downhill. The story ends, as it began, with Avi, and from the foregoing you’ll not be surprised to learn that it’s not a happy conclusion. To anyone like me who admires Israel, even if they don’t always love it, this novel is deeply unsettling. But I am consoled that there is a message here, too, for progressives, who rightly deplore the fact that women and minorities have to work twice as hard to achieve as much as their white, male colleagues, but, in their hypocrisy (born of deep-seated antisemitism) question the very existence of Israel, because Israelis don’t live up to ethical standards they would not match themselves, or expect in anyone else.
W. G. Sebald: The Rings of Saturn Sebald was an expatriate German academic who taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The Rings of Saturn is ostensibly a travel journal, made on a walking holiday along the Suffolk coast southwards from Lowestoft, via Dunwich and Southwold. In reality it is a long series of digressions connected together in an almost stream-of-consciousness way, giving it the flavour of that peculiar state of thought one experiences while just on the edge of sleep. There you are, reading (to take one example among many) about a man who spends most of his life making a scale model of the lost Temple in Jerusalem, but before you know it you’re deep into a history of the cultivation of silk moths, with no recollection of how you got from one to the other. There are more literary allusions here than you can shake a stick at, and certainly more than I grasped. The debt to Borges is obvious and acknowledged. There is also a flavour of Joyce, though one should beware (as Borges himself would have warned) of trying to spot influences. In the end, comparisons fade. This book is sui generis: melancholic, marvellous, morose, magnificent.
Robert Harris: The Cicero Trilogy (Imperium/ Lustrum/ Dictator) The Imperium trilogy is a fictionalised biography of the lawyer, orator, statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE) during one of the most exciting periods of Roman history, when the old Republic gave way to the Empire. That we know Cicero existed is attested by a wealth of material. Perhaps less well-known is that much of it was recorded by his slave and personal secretary, Tiro, who devised a shorthand method of recording speech verbatim. It is also known from other sources that Tiro, who long outlived his master, wrote a biography of Cicero, though the biography itself is now lost. It is this that Harris recreates, with his usual attention to detail, sensitive characterisation and matchless readability. Imperium records Cicero’s early life and training, rising through the political ranks from the relatively junior quaestor, through aedile, praetor and finally consul, during which Cicero made his name by the high-profile prosecution of Gaius Verres, a corrupt governor of Sicily. Lustrum covers Cicero’s tumultuous year as consul and the years immediately following, in which he helped foil a conspiracy to destabilise the Republic, during which he condemned several men to death without trial, a circumstance that was to dog him ever afterwards. Dictator charts the rise and fall of Julius Caesar, the various civil wars, and Cicero’s eventual downfall. Characters from ancient history shine out as real people. Not just Cicero, who is supremely clever, cunning and cultured — as well as crotchety, driven and vain — but the majestic if rather dopey Pompey; the fanatically stoic Cato; the vulpine Julius Caesar; Cicero’s ferocious and clever wife Terentia, and, in Dictator, the precocious Octavianus, who becomes the Emperor Augustus. It might not sound like it, but it’s a nail-biting thrill-ride as Cicero navigates the treacherous shoals and sometimes lethal hazards of Roman political life — especially as you just know it’ll all come to a sticky end. The dramatisation of Julius Caesar’s assassination is brilliant because, even though you know what’s about to happen, it’s so shocking.
Jasper Fforde: The Eyre Affair This knockabout whimsy is set in England in an alternate 1985, in which literary investigator Thursday Next has a lot on her plate. A veteran of the ongoing Crimean War, she has to work out who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays; find some way to make it up with her equally-war-scarred Crimean veteran boyfriend; and venture into the closed communist republic of Wales to track down arch-villain Acheron Hades, who has stolen the original manuscript of Jane Eyre. Hades has also stolen a device powered by bookworms that will allow him to get inside the novel and kidnap the heroine, altering the novel beyond repair. That he has already abducted a minor character in Martin Chuzzlewit shows that he means business. It is gloriously silly, and there are episodes that are pure Python (sensu Monty). Fans of Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin, Spike Milligan and Tom Holt will love it. And so will everyone else.
Isabella Tree: Wilding Despite her name, Tree is not a tree-hugging eco-warrior. She was forced to rewild when increasing debt forced her and her farmer husband Charlie Burrell into a corner. The Burrell family had been farming several thousand acres on the River Adur in West Sussex for generations. Before that, the area had been a hunting forest, back to the time of King John. By the end of the twentieth century, the thick, clayey soil was exhausted, and no amount of fertilisers, weedkillers and machinery was going to produce the yield of cereals required to meet their growing debts. The Burrells were up against it. Letting the farm go wild was their only option. What was so amazing was the disbelief and occasional hostility of their farming neighbours, who thought that allowing farmland go back to nature was, somehow, against nature. People — and not just the public, but conservationists — think that the countryside they grew up in has always been like that, and therefore should be preserved in that state, as if in aspic. In reality, the environment has always been changing. What conservationists think of as the natural habitat of endangered Species X is, more than likely, a degraded remnant that’s far from that species’ preferred surroundings. Tree tells the story of how the land occupied by the farm was (and is) gradually returning to its natural state. Doing this isn’t cheap, and requires funding from various bodies who, initially (and puzzlingly) were, if not as aghast as the Burrell’s neighbours, still required a lot of convincing. But slowly, slowly, the Burrells are winning. Tree also dispels some modern myths. One is that Europe was once covered in dense, primeval forest, when the habitat was more likely to have been a mixture of woods and open country, what she calls ‘pasture’, an environment kept ever changing by the activities of animals within it, such as wild boar, deer, beaver and bison. Second is the seeming need of all farmers to make every square inch of the land productive, irrespective of its suitability. She traces this attitude back to the Second World War, when Britain, importing most of its food and completely isolated, had to become largely self sufficient. The ‘Dig for Victory’ attitude has persisted, even though the world now produces more than enough food, and farmers are (or have been until recently) subsidised by the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, which at one point swallowed more than half the entire EU budget, such that farmers were paid to grow as many crops as possible, with all that implies for use of pesticides and herbicides — when a lot of the food simply went to waste. Rewilding your land still seems to many like a romantic dream. But discussions around land use are needed more than ever to inject a dose of reality into the minds of farmers, conservationists, politicians and the public.
Daniel Finkelstein: Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad I am sure you both know that Daniel Finkelstein is a journalist and Conservative peer, and you probably are also aware that he is, like me, a Red-Sea Pedestrian, whose world view is inevitably coloured by the Holocaust and its consequences. His perhaps more than most, as the families of both his parents were all but wiped out, one by Hitler, the other by Stalin. His mother’s journey began in Berlin and came to Hendon via Amsterdam and Belsen (her family knew Anne Frank’s family well). His father’s started in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) and progressed via the steppes of Kazakhstan, though his grandfather was transported to the Arctic Gulag. I should say that the little humour this book contains is dark, and very far from books with similar titles such as, oh, I don’t know, Adolf Hitler: My Part In His Downfall by Spike Milligan. It is, though, calm and measured, and the author has trenchant things to say concerning the contemporary airbrushing out of Stalin’s crimes compared with those of Hitler, which tends to allow the modern Far Left an easier time of it than it deserves. That the book is a rip-roaring read, despite its complexities, is a product of the author’s own skill, though I note that the acknowledgements include thanks to Robert Harris, who as you know is one of my favourite novelists, and crafts thrillers from well-researched events, whether in Ancient Rome, Nazi Germany or Stalin’s Russia.
… and the overall winner is…
Philip Ball: How Life Works This magisterial account of the workings of genes, cells and bodies is, first of all, an antidote to the gene-centric view of evolution, in which genes are ‘libraries’ or ‘blueprints’ or ‘programs’ for creating a body out of nothing, and all else is commentary. It turns out that genes are rather less, or more, or. well, something or other, it’s actually really hard to explain, and that’s because it’s almost impossible to describe what goes on at the scale of atoms and molecules without recourse to metaphor. It’s often been a cause of some wonder to me how molecules in cells can do what they do when they are packed in so tightly, and all surrounded by water that cannot possibly behave as a bulk fluid. How can molecules meet and interact in the way they seem to do in all those neat diagrams seen in textbooks when the viscosity regime must be rather like treacle? Such misgivings have similarly long preoccupied Ball, who is trained in physics and chemistry rather than biology, and can appreciate problems that biologists might miss. He puts it very well when he says that the insides of cells are less like factory floors than dance floors, crowded with excited dancers packed in together and jiggling about and unable to communicate with one another because of all the noise. In such conditions, how can JAK kinase possibly get to JIL kinase across such a crowded room, in order to — well, let’s just think of something, oh, I don’t know, Release Calcium from Intracellular Stores? The intracellular environment is noisy, and very far from favouring the kind of neat networks and diagrams in which abbreviations cleanly interact with other abbreviations. Rather, says Ball, cells make a virtue of the noise and disorder. Molecular interactions are much less precise, much more fleeting, than one might imagine, and tolerate a degree of slop that no engineer would possibly countenance. Because of that disorder, the interactions between the various levels in the rough hierarchy of scales from genes to proteins to cells to tissues to organs to organisms are not always clear. But order emerges from the melee, nonetheless. If that’s all there was to How Life Works, it would be a good book. What makes it a great book is that Ball unflinchingly tackles the really big questions — what is the nature of life? What makes a living thing alive? What is the nature of that vis essentialis, pneuma, je ne sais quoi? It’s here that Ball gets into challenging and exciting territory. Ball suggests that organisms are living because they make active choices. A dead one cannot. At the most basic level, a cell membrane can admit the passage of some ions, but not others, even against a concentration gradient — Maxwell’s Demon, made (in some sense) real. In the deepest philosophical sense, life is that which gives an assembly of atoms meaning. Given the difficulties of describing the biochemical and cellular processes of life without recourse to metaphor, some will find this hard to take. There is also the issue (which Ball deftly navigates) in which biologists are afraid to use terms such as ‘agency’ and ‘purpose’ for fear of invoking teleological or panglossian explanations, or, worse, welcoming a role for divine intervention. No such things are necessary — yet living things are definitely alive, and conventional prescriptions for the properties of life that we are taught in school (that it reproduces, grows, excretes, blah blah blah) fail to satisfy, and, being that this is biology, are plagued with viruses exceptions. As I was reading How Life Works, I was reminded of Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 book What Is Life? subtitled The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell, in which the famous physicist attempted to tackle the essential problem of biology. What Is Life? was part of a movement in which physicists became enamoured of biology and, having done so, boosted it into the molecular age (Francis Crick was one such). Ball obligingly discusses What Is Life?, its deficiencies, successes and influence. How Life Works is What Is Life? for the 21st century, and, because we know so much more than people did in Schrödinger’s time, is more successful How Life Works is a milestone in its field and should be required reading for anyone seeking to take an undergraduate degree in biology.
