Booknotes 28-12-2006

2006 will be remembered as the year when major novelists produced minor novels. A new direction is something a writer should always look for, but many didn't seem to know where they were going. Some went nowhere at all. Irvine Welsh's The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, Roddy Doyle's Paula Spencer as well as Patrick McCabe's Winterwood were nothing new and smelt unmistakably of the re-cycling of tired old material.

There were exceptions to this gloomy verdict. Andrew O'Hagan's Be Near Me, the harrowing tale of a priest, was overlooked when released, but its potent message about social injustice was the most challenging examined by any novelist this year. The Australian writer MJ Hyland surprised everybody with the raw darkness of Carry Me Down. Hyland drew on her own experiences of growing up in Wexford and Ballymun to tell the disturbing story of a delinquent child. Carry Me Down was up for this year's Man Booker Prize, which became a sickening reminder of just how much celebrity mania has infected our culture. Because those on the shortlist had little public profile, the BBC decided not to bother transmitting the ceremony. Regardless of this pathetic media snub, the talented Anglo-Indian novelist Kiran Desai won the prize for her alert emigration novel The Inheritance of Loss. Meanwhile, everyone will be watching Edward St Aubuyn, whose acid-tongued novel about the wars within families, Mother's Milk, came an exceedingly close second place.

Two Irish writers produced exceptional novels this year. Tenderwire, Claire Kilroy's electrifying thriller about an Irish violin-player's adventures in New York, is proof of this young writer's already formidable talent. The difficulty of following a book as accomplished as Dancer was great but Zoli, Colum McCann's heart-rending tale of cultural displacement, won this meticulous writer even more admirers. Another writer whose incedible last novel raised expectations to ridiculous levels was David Mitchell. Shortsighted reviewers complained that Black Swan Green was small fare compared to Cloud Atlas, but those who gave this touching novel the time and consideration it deserved recognised in it a genius for storytelling that even Mitchell's previous books had not displayed. Two of fiction's elder statesmen, JM Coetzee and Philip Roth, wrote books that were preoccupied by the theme of mortality. Slow Man, by the Nobel-Prizewinner Coetzee, looked at the life of a man in the aftermath of a near-fatal accident. Roth, the one-time court jester of American literature, wore a grave face for Everyman, a brief, resonant fable about the approach of death. Other distinguished gentlemen who turned up in 2006 included JG Ballard, whose Kingdom Come was a razor-sharp satire about consumer society, and William Boyd finally and deservedly moved into the first rank of British fiction on the back of his acclaimed World War Two spy story Restless.

From an Irish perspective, 2006 could be said to have belonged to Flann O'Brien and Samuel Beckett. It has taken a long while for Flann O'Brien's incredibly innovative novels, like The Dalkey Archive and The Third Policeman, to find the respect they deserve. RTÉ's superb Arts Lives documentary, shown to mark the 40th anniversary of the writer's death, and the selection of At-Swim-Two-Birds as Dublin's novel of the year put this to rights. Samuel Beckett's timeless works have always been respected but until this year, his centenary, they were never loved. After a superb series of productions at the Gate theatre, a multitude of books, art exhibitions, documentary films and Barry McGovern's epic reading of the Trilogy, Beckett has, in the space of a year, gone from glum to fun. Whatever you read, a Happy New Year from BookNotes.