Read and Appreciated in 2002
A Year’s Best List
Amazingly, 2002 was the year in which I read my first Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. At the Earth’s Core is very entertaining and extremely silly, much more surreal than the average conventional fantasy, filled with demented plot devices such as the scene where the narrator mistakes a telepathic dinosaur for his girlfriend when returning to the surface of the globe. Far more convincing and powerful and not a fraction less exciting, The Well of the Unicorn by Fletcher Pratt concentrates mostly on feelings rather than effects and is stronger for it. Pratt’s powers of invention are limited but his muscular prose more than compensates and the discomforts of his heroes feel real, a refreshing exception to the fantasy norm. This is only the second novel by Pratt I have read. The first was Alien Planet, a pulp adventure in the colourful tradition of Burroughs and Ray Cummings but with greater insights into questions of culture. A sadly neglected story.
However, of all the books I read in 2002, five in particular stand out. Here they are:
1. City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff VanderMeer
This remarkable volume glows with future classic status. Its design is not only beautiful but contributes to the reading experience as a whole in a fashion not dissimilar to some of Alasdair Gray’s best books. But VanderMeer goes further than Gray, for everything is part of the complex reading adventure, including the cover, author notes and bibliography. I have been reading and enjoying VanderMeer’s amazing fantasy tales for a number of years now, but I never suspected or even hoped they might fit together in a manner so seamless. The result is a profound story-cycle and a work of which I am savagely envious.
2. Maqroll El Gaviero, by Alvaro Mutis
A collection of three novellas which steam so tangibly and thickly that reading them is akin to taking a sauna with a fever. Maqroll is a rogue and adventurer adrift in a modern world which seems to be peppered with regions which are reverting to something more primitive or which never evolved in the first place. Hardly a healthy role model, he contrives to be charming and admirable. His sensual partner, Ilona, devises the best business proposition for a brothel I have encountered, one which should probably be set up for real. Gabriel Mesa quietly confided to me that he thought Mutis to be an even better champion of Colombian literature than Márquez. I equally quietly agree.
3. Perfume, by Patrick Süskind
This novel was given to me as a gift, which is perhaps the nicest way to discover a writer. Italo Calvino once wrote a short story entitled “The Name, The Nose” about the delights of unlikely erotic odours and Süskind has constructed an historical novel on a similar pattern. Redefining his life through smell, the narrator experiments with the aromas of anything he can fix his nostrils to, a habit which leads into increasingly weird and extreme realms. Adherents of this work tend to be enthusiastic about exploring this world for themselves. I was invited to sniff the back of the neck of a woman I barely knew almost immediately after we discovered we had both read it. I did. Honey, apricots, milk.
4. História de uma Bela Sereia, by Caroline Moreira
I have a special fondness for this rare book, which claims to have been washed up on a South Wales beach in manuscript form, the papers rolled tightly in an empty bottle of rum. Caroline is a mermaid but she spends most of her time on land studying Psychology at the Federal University of Paraná in Curitiba, Brazil. In many ways she is a normal student. She drinks coffee and wine, eats sushi and chocolate, goes dancing, flirts with admiring men and practises Tantric yoga, but at the weekends she travels down to the coast and takes to the waves and the secret world beneath them. There are coral palaces and nightclubs for dolphins. The surprising thing is that I believe all this. It’s really true.
