No, not a vintage year for fiction, and 1998 was further undermined by a noticable lack of gifted new-comers. But lamentation aside there were several fine performances from established writers. . . Virtually all the year's fiction is dwarfed by Annie Proulx's profound, heartbreaking love story, the magnificent Brokeback Mountain (4th Estate). Two loveless, misfit youths find themselves tending illegally-grazed sheep on a Wyoming mountainside. Set in the 1960s, the two are as out of time as they are out of place; one is an orphan, the other the estranged son of a one-time rodeo rider. When the job ends, life takes them elsewhere, separately. Four years later, they meet again. Proulx is a brave, defiant writer: she takes risks with language. Her clipped, physical prose possesses a brutal lyricism. This is a brilliant exploration of desire, loss and love balanced between taut authorial observations and the edgy exchanges of characters as intense as they are aimless.
John Updike's Towards the End of Time (Hamish Hamilton) is a moving if randomly philosophical account of a man and a writer winding down. Likeable Ben Turnbull is retired and living in the near future in a place which is no longer the US as we know it. His world is a profusion of sensations; smells, desires, textures and, above all, fear. Preoccupied by his declining sexuality, his various ailments and his strained relationships, Ben is also alert to the passing of time and its impact on love, nature, women. His whimsical irony is juxtaposed with the harshness of the cowardly, new world. By now the victim of his own versatility and his interest in unheroic, urban survival, we take Updike is taken for granted. A chaotic but curiously beautiful, relaxed elegy in often glorious prose.
Ignore the stupid title, Philip Roth's I Married a Communist (Cape) is an urgent, bitter, human sequel of sorts to American Pastoral, which it also echoes structurally. Yet again Nathan Zuckerman is on hand to lead the reader through a narrative of voices which is partly autobiographical, partly social history: here, he is told the truth about his boyhood hero, Iron Rinn, by the man who knew his secrets - his brother Murray Rinn, Nathan's inspirational high school teacher. As before it is the story of America; the dreams and lost innocence competing with the ugly realities.
Don DeLillo's dazzling Underworld (Picador) is another lament, an ingenious, determinedly unsentimental attempt to express a desire to remember the past without celebrating it. By juxtaposing two events - the baseball world series clash of October 1951 between the Dodgers and the Giants, and the Cold War news of the Soviet nuclear bomb test, he tracks American society, its paranoia and the prevailing themes of consumerism, weaponry, waste disposal and ethnic unrest. Exact and random, this is a collage achieving at the end of the American literary century what John Dos Passos's USA trilogy attempted in its early decades.
An acknowledged master of the short story, Canadian Alice Munro's perceptive genius is evident throughout the eight stories in The Love of a Good Woman (Chatto) as is New Yorker Lorrie Moore's in Birds of America (Faber) - both reviewed this week.
It's not often the much-maligned Booker panel takes a chance. This time it did and although I'm no fan of Ian McEwan, Amsterdam (Cape) is an interesting Booker winner. A slight, well-written, adult novel about love, friendship, loyalty and the fear of death, it is unashamedly ordinary. It features two friends who have shared a lover, Molly, the novel's ruling presence although she is dead as it opens.
Booker runner-up Beryl Bainbridge's Master Georgie (Duckworth) is a crisp, convincing historical novel set during the Crimean War in which Myrtle, the candid narrator, ponders her obsessive love for the enigmatic Georgie.
The novel which should have won, but was not even shortlisted, Romesh Gunesekera's The Sandglass (Granta) takes on big issues with grace and dignity. A number of characters from three generations of two rival families pursue their respective notions of paradise. Pearl is a young Ceylonese girl who weds Jason with dreams of enduring romance. Reality proves otherwise: when the narrator for whom she has in old age become a mentor untangles her story, it is a sad one. The Sandglass exposes a culture at the mercy of colonialism as well at its own inner rot.
Not all the stories in Martin Amis's Heavy Water and Other Stories (Cape) are memorable but State of England is a hilarious demonstration of this gifted comic satirist chronicling angst as experienced by a classic Amis creation, Mal, a bouncer-cum-petty-crook.
One of the strangest, most unclassifiable and alluring books published this year is the German writer W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn (Harvill) which has as much or as little to do with fiction as Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines. The prose equivalent of Britten's music, this sublime, elegaic intellectual journey confronting a state of mind is a singular, imaginative, mesmeric meditation sustained by Sebald's love of history, ideas and random fact.
Seamus Heaney, possibly the most widely-read living poet, has divided more opinion than might be expected of a person universally well regarded. Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 (Faber), an updating of his Selected Poems 1966-87, is an important if uneasy volume. Charting the development of a poet, the 200 poems confirm his stylistic diversity, mood shifts from childhood remembered to anger and the rueful tones of The Spirit Level as well as his tonal range.
So much has been written about the Hughes-Plath marriage that Ted Hughes has been more widely heralded as a bad husband than as a major poet. Birthday Letters (Faber) follows his finest work Tales from Ovid (1997), and revisits the festering pain of a relationship which went tragically wrong. Gentle, often conversational, it reads as a final attempt to understand not only his regrets but the demons which haunted Plath and ultimately destroyed her.
Tom Paulin's lively, original and unconventional The Day Star of Liberty William Hazlitt's Radical Style (Faber) not only evokes the intelligence of the great English essayist, but showcases Paulin's imaginative and rigorous approach to criticism as here directed at his hero. Brian Fallon's An Age of Innocence (Gill and MacMillan) is a thoughtful, well argued cultural history free of ideology or agenda.
History writing this year was dominated by Antony Beevor's Stalingrad (Viking), a monumental account of Hitler's ill-fated invasion of Russia and the subsequent siege of a great city. Stylistically more sombre than Orlando Figgis's Russia - A People's Tragedy, this military-history based examination of the Barbarossa campaign also chronicles the horrific sufferings of the ordinary Russian citizens.
Medievalist James Lydon revealed an impressive understanding of Ireland's complex history in The Making of Ire- land (Routledge) which updates Edmund Curtis's classic A History of Ireland (1950).
Leslie Stainton's intelligently sympathetic Lorca - a Dream of Life (Bloomsbury) achieves a full portrait of the complex, self-appointed victim who moved between elation and despair: a dreamer and opportunist, his life was shadowed by his paranoia and dreams of death and loss.
Written by experts and illustrated by 15th-century Russian masters, The Art of Holy Russia - Icons from Moscow (Royal Academy of Arts) is awe-inspiring. Even for those who missed the exhibition earlier this year, it is a treasure.
Mark Rothko (Yale) by David Antham is a gorgeous compendium of the work of the Russian-born American Abstract Expressionist. Although the only way to experience his art is to view it in person but this wonderful book goes some way towards filling that gap.