Read and Appreciated in 2002
A Year’s Best List
I am generally behind the times. Therefore I may only offer a few comments on what I have experienced in 2002, rather than what was actually produced or issued that year. Some of these items are quite old, but they seemed fresh to me and for that I am grateful. It has been an interesting year and I have been privileged to discover work as good as anything I have ever encountered.
Books
The recommendations of friends are frequently the best source of cultural discoveries and I would like to thank: (a) Gabriel Mesa for introducing me to Kelly Link and Jeffrey Ford, (b) Jeff VanderMeer for introducing me to Edward Whittemore, (c) Steve Redwood for introducing me to Juan José Arreola. Mr Redwood is also the author of one of the best unpublished comic fantasies I’ve read, Fisher of Devils, which is due to be released by Prime Books before the end of eternity. Reading good novels in manuscript form is an intriguing pastime. Another one I enjoyed is the occult thriller Scorpion, a collaboration between two new writers, Brian Willis and Chris Poote. Because things like this tend to form loops, Mr Willis tried to introduce me to the His Dark Materials trilogy of Philip Pullman, but it was a vain attempt. I am simply too busy. Limits must be set somewhere.
It’s the same story every year. As always I bought or borrowed more books than I managed to read, increasing my backlog of essential titles to the point where it will never be cleared. Books I purchased but have not even begun include novels by Vikram Seth, André Malraux, Lawrence Durrell, Italo Svevo, Arthur Schnitzler, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Michel Tournier, Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Bertolt Brecht, Carlos Fuentes, Isabel Allende, Amin Maalouf, Ray Bradbury and Jack Vance. I regret I obtained only two non-fiction volumes. A foreword to Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker by Brian Aldiss encouraged me to seek out Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man, and I also secured a copy of The Total Library by Jorge Luis Borges, a selection of essays composed between 1922 and 1986. Precise, profound, puzzling, these pieces cover a vast range of topics. I am still working my way through them but already I suspect that Borges was the greatest essayist of them all.
I once made a promise to read one book every year by Flann O’Brien, Robert Louis Stevenson and Lord Dunsany. My 2001 selection was magical, The Third Policeman, The Ebb-Tide and Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley, but in 2002 I chose badly. The Hard Life must be the weakest of O’Brien’s novels, breaking out into something special only near the very end. A disappointment, as was Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Unbelievably I hadn’t read this before, though I’ve wanted to since the age of 14. The story was too familiar from films and rumour and I felt slightly annoyed that most of the crucial action takes place off the page. The Dunsany volume was The Last Revolution, a technophobic fantasy about malevolent machines which can replicate themselves but ultimately succumb to rust, a singularly uninspiring message.
I fared much better with my re-reading. John Sladek is always a pleasure and The Complete Roderick is a single volume collection of his two masterful robot novels about the “education of a young machine.” This is science-fiction as it should be written, challenging, clever, witty, disturbing, wise. Sladek deserves a far bigger reputation than the one he has, a reputation as big as that of Kurt Vonnegut or J.G. Ballard, for he is at least their equal in terms of maturity and their superior when it comes to invention. Critics point out the lack of emotional engagement in Sladek, but this is never a problem with The Complete Roderick, which is genuinely moving. Of all those writers who first came to prominence in the 1960s, Sladek is my favourite. I also rate Roger Zelazny highly and I started a second tour of his Chronicles of Amber, a hefty, sometimes jarring plod from breathtaking originality to cloying sentiment to good/bad Hemingway pastiche and back again via deliberate or unconscious manipulation of familiar myth and subtle or clumsy creation of new myth. An astounding, awkward journey, and one I am less than a third through.
