Best books I never wrote
We’re in a golden age of literary fiction – too many great books to keep up with, not that I’m complaining. The novel of our times that’s stayed with me longest and strongest is Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Set at the time of Tony Blair’s commitment to the Iraq War, it’s the story of a London neurosurgeon whose family life is disrupted one Saturday when thugs break into his home.
I’m not going to argue it’s his best (that would be Atonement or On Chesil Beach, I think), but I love Saturday for its synthesis of big politics and private themes, and for the space it allows for scientific rumination. This is one of the early and most successful examples of the “expert” genre of novels: a book that clips a complex technical world onto a story and tells you all about it. For all that, though, it wouldn’t be worth reading if it didn’t have characters drawn with vividness and depth, a story told with tension and urgency and a literary style that is, as ever with McEwan, beautifully controlled. Big ideas, great craft, gripping storytelling.
My favourite book of non-fiction is Atul Gawande’s Better. Gawande is a doctor, and a Harvard professor, and a regular writer for The New Yorker, which is kind of preposterous that anyone can be all that, but still. Better takes as its theme the idea that many of the important advances in medicine happen not because of technological advances or new scientific discoveries, but by practitioners learning how to do their work better. Hygiene has saved more lives than gadgets, that sort of thing. Gawande writes in quiet, clean elegant prose and his accounts of medical adventure in the developed and developing worlds are infused with a great optimistic humanism. As for his message, it’s pretty revolutionary, really.
The book of poetry I return to most often is Clive James’ 2015 collection Sentenced to Life, which contains the poems he wrote about dying, following the news that he did not have long to go. Beautiful, sublime, funny of course, crafted exquisitely, these poems come from a greatly intellectual and profoundly creative atheist mind. So very rare. Mind you, he’s still with us and brought out another collection of poems on dying earlier this year. Nobody was more surprised than him, and I’ve been a little scared to take a look.
I write a lot on urban design, politics and the tribulations and triumphs of city life, and the book that underpins so much of that for me is Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jacobs was a Canadian-American journalist who committed herself to the values of community in the process of building cities. Inspirational? Oh yes. She was the great champion of pedestrian streetlife and the great critic of both tenement blocks and suburban isolation, and I’m going to regard her as the patron saint of the new age of people-focused city building we’re entering right here – I hope – with our new government.