Publishers have their faults but they do not forget anniversaries. This year in books, accordingly, was always going to have an elegiac tone, so dominated by the centenary of the First World War that it often felt like we were commemorating its early stages in real time — as indeed we were. Readers could draw comfort from the fact that similar landmarks have often produced enduring works — think Simon Schama’s “Citizens”, published for the bicentenary of the French Revolution — and in Christopher Clark’s “The Sleepwalkers” and Margaret MacMillan’s “The War that Ended Peace”, we had two likely classics before 2014 even arrived. Many more titles followed: histories, as you would expect, with Adam Tooze’s “The Deluge” a heavyweight offering; but also novels, biographies of war poets and statesmen, some fine anthologies and powerful first-hand accounts such as “The Burning of the World”, a memoir of Austro-Hungarian army life by the painter Béla Zombory-Moldován.
Other milestones competed for our attention. The upheavals of 1989 — above all, Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall — were the subject of numerous well-received books. Likewise the Napoleonic wars, with the looming bicentenary of Waterloo prompting publishers with an eye to the paperback to get their accounts of the battle out early. Maybe the same thinking lay behind the appearance this year of “In These Times”, Jenny Uglow’s assured social history of the British experience between 1793 and 1815, as well as two significant lives of the bicorned bogeyman himself by Andrew Roberts and Michael Broers.
Occasionally, I did wonder whether some of the anniversaries might, in another time, have been allowed to pass unmarked. Should we really have got so excited about the 450th of Shakespeare’s birth, for example, especially considering that we only have to wait until 2016 for the 400th of his death? Was the passing of 45 years since the publication of Eric Carle’s children’s classic “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” a good enough reason to invest extra significance in the 2014 celebrations of “Very Hungry Caterpillar Day”? I regularly receive notifications of 30th, 15th, fifth, even seventh and third anniversaries — at which point, for me, the idea just seems to lose all meaning.
Journalists, of course, should be wary of memorialising. But if anniversaries have become a kind of secular religion, scattering the calendar like saints’ days with their invitations to reflect on victories, heroes and cautionary tales, then perhaps that isn’t such a bad thing. Going back to Dylan Thomas last month around the time of the centenary of his birth, I was grateful for the reintroduction; however arbitrary the reason, I am richer for it. And in a world of distractions, why not welcome any inducement to read? As for Very Hungry Caterpillar Day, you can sign me up for that when the half-century comes around.
A preoccupation with the past is understandable right now: six years on from the financial crisis, western economies continue to struggle, populist forces are on the rise nearly everywhere and there is a pervasive sense of a social compact under pressure. Such concerns were at the heart of “Political Order and Political Decay” by Francis Fukuyama, who worried about the capture of the American state by special interests; they weighed on David Marquand in “Mammon’s Kingdom”, his modern take on the “Condition of England” question. They were there, too, in Greg Grandin’s “The Empire of Necessity” — a book that managed to be at once a compelling narrative of an 1804 slave revolt, a panoramic study of the Americas in an age of revolution and a meditation on the contradictions inherent in the idea of liberty itself, then and now.
But no writer spoke more directly to the zeitgeist than the winner of the 2014 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, Thomas Piketty, whose “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” arrived with a resounding thud in a fine English translation this spring to challenge a century of theory-driven economics with a degree of confidence seldom found outside the grandes écoles. The product of 15 years’ research, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” pulls together disparate data from a number of different countries to argue that we are returning to levels of inequality last seen a century ago; and to propose, furthermore, that the tendency for the rate of return on capital to exceed the rate of growth (“r > g”) requires sharp taxation of wealth at the higher end if we are to preserve the levels of social harmony necessary for democracy to function.
Critics of Piketty’s ideas as too extreme have ranged from Mervyn King to Myleene Klass (if the singer’s views on Labour party proposals for a “mansion tax” count); he has come under fire from the left, too, for a certain lèse-majesté with regard to the work of Marx; and some of his statistics have been questioned, notably in the “Financial Times”. No one is going to turn to the literary editor for a decisive ruling on all of this but it seems fair to conclude that, while Piketty may not have settled the inequality debate, he has taken it into new territory: his opponents will be obliged to follow.
As Piketty disarmingly accepts, economics is only one guide to the pressing issues of the day; fiction can offer different insights and, on this particular subject, “We Live in Water”, Jess Walter’s tender, funny collection of stories about life on the wrong side of the tracks in the US northwest, was a fine example. The winners of the US National Book Award for fiction and Britain’s Man Booker Prize both looked squarely at war — the Iraq “surge” in the case of Phil Klay’s “Redeployment”, the Thai-Burma “death railway” in Richard Flanagan’s “The Narrow Road to the Deep North”, a historical novel that carried a powerful contemporary charge. Concerns about technology also seemed to play on the minds of novelists: social media in the case of Joshua Ferris’s Man Booker-shortlisted “To Rise Again at a Decent Hour”, the excesses of the security state in Peter Carey’s “Amnesia”.
Meanwhile, literary nonfiction was taking a personal turn. Helen Macdonald’s “H is for Hawk”, an exhilarating journey around falconry and T.H. White, became the first memoir, and the first work of nature writing, to win Britain’s Samuel Johnson Prize. And autobiography was suddenly everywhere, evident in history, science, biography — even the novel, with the English translation of the third instalment in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” series often, like the first two, seeming to render the distinction beside the point.
If this was a year for honouring the past and worrying about the present, it was also a time for speculating about what might be. Ursula Le Guin, in a passionate speech at the National Book Awards this month, welcomed her lifetime achievement award as a sign that writers of science fiction and fantasy — “realists of a larger reality” — were no longer the poor relations of the literary world. And as the prize shortlists and review pages showed, serious novelists have clearly shed any inhibitions they might have once had about venturing into the speculative: David Mitchell, Howard Jacobson, Chang Rae-Lee and Michel Faber all did so to great effect in 2014.
Elsewhere, the forces of progress captured the imagination. At the policy makers’ and business leaders’ forum of Davos in January, “The Second Machine Age” by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee generated a flurry of interest in the idea that robots could soon play a far bigger part of our daily lives — and render many of us unemployed in the process. Immortality was in the air, too, with the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari speculating in “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity” on what might happen if advances in bioengineering and artificial intelligence came together to vastly increase human lifespans and capabilities. Little surprise, in a world getting to grips with the logic of “r > g”, that we should not expect the benefits to be equally shared.
But it was the strength of writing about mortality that really struck me in 2014. To pick just a few examples, there was “Do No Harm” by Henry Marsh, a gripping portrait of a brain surgeon’s life and work; “Being Mortal” by Atul Gawande, the American doctor-writer whose first Reith lecture was aired by the BBC this week; and Marion Coutts’ remarkable “The Iceberg”, an account of the period between her husband’s diagnosis with a brain tumour and his death a little over two years later.
Here is a subject where writers are clearly reflecting a shift in public attitudes — one evident in the phenomenal response to the British actress Lynda Bellingham’s memoir of her last years, which has topped the bestseller lists since its publication, selling more than 200,000 copies in less than two months. The 17th-century essayist Francois de La Rochefoucauld wrote that death was like the sun, neither to be looked at steadily. It is to our credit, surely, if that maxim no longer holds.
–Financial Times
