Essence remains after the storm

By MARGIE THOMSON

What makes a book good or, more to the point, "best" is, beyond a few objective factors, dazzlingly subjective, almost embarrassingly personal. Looking back over the considerable list of books I've read this year, trying to pick the favourites seems hideously random: if you pick some, others miss out.

And yet ... the very sight of some titles brings a wave of emotion, a visceral charge as a concentration of that book's packaged experience resonates around your soul like heady perfume: essence-of-book.

Two titles in particular have lived quietly within me since I closed their covers a few months ago. Both are by Canadian writers, and I think I must have an affinity with that vast country dotted with human civilisation, a "lesser" place just as we are a lesser place with a dominant neighbour.

Margaret Atwood, Carol Shields and Michael Ondaatje have captivated the world for years, but it was only this year that two other stunning Canadian writers, Alistair McLeod and David Adams Richards, burst upon us with the force of a Cape Breton storm. McLeod's No Great Mischief (Vintage, $26.95) recreates the past's currency in the present through the lives of members of a memory-laden, Gaelic-speaking clan living in the late-20th century in Nova Scotia. The gentle, terrible unfolding of events haunts me still.

Richards' Mercy Among the Children (Jonathan Cape, $34.95) contains a similar haunting tone, a paradox of brutality and compassion. It's the story of an educated but extremely poor man living on the fringes of a society that fears and vilifies him. His striving to live a life of almost suicidal goodness, though, leads us to question the nature of good and evil, and to realise that the answer is not always what you might expect.

Both these novels propose a morality that seems out of step with the jingoistic times we live in, but all the more urgently needed for that.

There have, of course, been some excellent New Zealand titles released this year. Two of these have been around the subject of Katherine Mansfield, with the first, Recollecting Mansfield by Margaret Scott (Godwit, $29.95), being a captivating personal memoir of her life as a scholar of Mansfield; and the other, Joanna Woods' Katerina: The Russian World of Katherine Mansfield (Penguin, $39.95), a scholarly appraisal of the Russian proclivities and influences of the great writer. Quite different takes on their subject, they both nevertheless race easily along with all the ease, colour and accessibility of good novels.

We are always, and increasingly, entranced by our own history - this was the year, after all, that Lloyd Jones' historical novel about the 1905 All Blacks, The Book of Fame, won the Montana Deutz Medal for fiction.

Historian James Belich is one of the key wizards when it comes to conjuring up our past as a nation. His Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the year 2000 (Viking, $59.95) is probably the most significant book published this year, and is the sequel to Making Peoples. It's a broad, learned, anecdotal sweep that leaves traditional, drier histories gasping in its wake.

Peter Walker's The Fox Boy (Bloomsbury, $29.95), the story of the Maori boy captured and brought up in the household of New Zealand premier William Fox, is memorable for its discursive, endlessly fascinating readability.

Its fashionable mix of modern detective story coupled with historical narrative underscores the links between past and present and, while some of his conclusions are controversial, his is a fresh take on our colonial past that really brings to life the goodies and baddies on both sides.

I thought that Carole van Grondelle's biography of Nola Luxford, Angel of the Anzacs (Victoria University Press, $39.95), was beautifully crafted and hugely sensitive - a perfect match of biographer with subject. While much of the action happens in the United States, it nevertheless shows us, albeit through the back door, a snapshot of the passions that drove New Zealanders in the first half of the 20th century.

And, yet another "looking back" title, Peter Wells' Long Loop Home (Vintage, $27.95), his memoir of growing up in Auckland's Pt Chevalier in the 1950s and 60s, is rich in its evocation of that time, of childhood in general, and of the tightly bound society we were.

Philip Simpson's lush and learned hymn to the not-so-humble cabbage tree, Dancing Leaves: The Story of New Zealand's Cabbage Tree Ti Kouka (Canterbury University Press, $59.95) is far more than a botanical study, although it is that. But it also documents the interface between those distinctive trees and ourselves - another example of our hunger to discover ourselves as a people.

Taking a leap offshore, New Yorker Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon: An Anatomy of Depression (Chatto and Windus, $75) overwhelmed me with its research but also with its humanity. Anyone who has suffered from this encroaching disease will be enriched in these pages; but so will anyone who is simply interested in what it is to be human.

2001 – The year in review