In praise of simple pleasures

It was the year we fell back in love with old-fashioned storytelling. The world may be in crisis, but the future of fiction looks bright

Almost every year, someone declares the death of the novel. Not in 2020. Lockdown may have closed bookshops for weeks, but digital sales went through the roof. We fell back in love with fiction, and – as luck would have it – plenty of excellent new novels appeared to stoke our ardour.

While none could directly reflect the fearful, tamped-down reality of living through a pandemic, Covid-19 did get a couple of mentions, notably in Summer (Hamish Hamilton, £ 16.99), the conclusion of Ali Smith’s “real time” seasonal quartet. Her triumph of symphonic storytelling juxtaposes the bitter rifts in post-referendum England with the connective possibilities of art. Covid nearly appeared in Don DeLillo’s The Silence ( Picador, £14.99), too, until the American objected to an editor inserting coronavirus into an early proof of his opaque yet resonant novella, set in the aftermath of a mass power meltdown in New York. And Emma Donoghue’s utterly gripping The Pull of The Stars ( Picador, £16.99), completed before the pandemic, achieved an eerie relevance with its tale of a Dublin maternity ward at the height of the 1918 Spanish Flu crisis.

Elsewhere, a more general dread loomed large. It’s there in Jenny Offill’s compulsively alarming Weather (Granta, £12.99), a Brooklyn librarian’s jittery interior monologue about climate change and life under Trump. Rumaan Alam dismantles white, middle- class privilege in his elegant disaster novel Leave the World Behind (Bloomsbury, £14.99). And, in A Children’s Bible ( W W Norton, £13.99), Lydia Millet maps the consequences of an environmental apocalypse with unnerving, fable-like simplicity.

The future for literature, though, looks cheerful – in young and diverse hands. Indeed, with the exception of Roddy Doyle – who, in Love (Jonathan Cape, £18.99) structures a marvellous novel around two men talking over a few pints – 2020 was remarkable for the number of veteran white male authors who made themselves, if not entirely irrelevant, then certainly peripheral. Martin Amis produced the autobiographical Inside Story ( Jonathan Cape, £20), which had brilliant moments, but whereas Karl Ove Knausgaard can transform the raw material of his life into mesmerising autofiction, Amis’s attempt is a self- congratulatory mess. David Mitchell took us on an enjoyable but cliché-riddled trip into the 1960s glory days of the music industry in Utopia Avenue (Sceptre, £20). Jonathan Coe, usually so good at ironfist-in-a-velvet-glove satires, offered only a limp handsake with his portrait of the ageing film director Billy Wilder, in Mr Wilder and Me ( Viking, £ 16.99). And Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies (Faber, £14.99), about a man confronting the terminal diagnosis of a childhood friend, is stifled by nostalgia for a musicsaturated youth.

All feel like a retreat into a somewhat glorified past, away from such highly charged subjects as race, entitlement and sexuality, even though that is what now defines our cultural landscape. This is tricky territory to navigate in fiction without crossing the line between literature and activism, a misstep to which the Booker judges again proved susceptible: was the shortlisting of The Shadow King (Canongate, £9.99), an overwrought novel about the Ethiopian women who took up arms against Mussolini, motivated more by the book’s feminist purpose than by literary quality?

On the other hand, Brandon Taylor’s Real Life ( Daunt, £9.99), also shortlisted, about a gay black graduate compelled to see every social interaction through the prism of race, pulls off its almost suffocatingly interior storyline thanks to luminously self-aware prose. Kiley Reid’s debut Such A Fun Age ( Bloomsbury, £ 12.99), about the toxic relationship between a black babysitter accused of kidnap and her mortified white employer, may have been overhyped, but it lands enough blows to make the white liberal targets of her satire wince. Brit Bennett, meanwhile, marries modern- day identity politics with epic narrative in The Vanishing Half ( Dialogue, £ 14.99), a generationspanning account of the mixed fortunes of light-skinned black twins born in 1950s Louisiana.

In two very different novels about modern masculinity, Garth

Greenwell beautifully parses the tensions of homosexual desire in the lyrical Cleanness ( Picador, £14.99), while Gabriel Krauze takes the reader through the dopamine highs and nihilistic monotony of gang life in his autobiographical debut Who They Was ( Fourth Estate, £14.99). But whichever way you looked at it, fiction in 2020 belonged to women.

Novels exposing buried or untold stories of historic female figures abounded; none more sensual than Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet (Tinder, £ 14.99), winner of the Women’s Prize. In a series of hushed, painterly scenes, O’Farrell follows Anne Hathaway at home without her husband, William Shakespeare, in

Stratford-upon-Avon in the months leading up to their 11-year-old son’s death from the plague. (One hauntingly pertinent passage describes the virus travelling from Alexandria to Warwickshire with the help of a flea bite and a box of glass beads.) Hamnet’s trick of revealing the wife obscured by a famous spouse was echoed by Kate Grenville in A Room Made of Leaves (Canongate, £16.99), a playful, absorbing novel about the Australian settler John Macarthur and his entrepreneurial sheep farmer wife, Elizabeth.

Polly Samson’s A Theatre for Dreamers ( Bloomsbury, £ 14.99) reminds British readers of Charmian Clift, the Australian writer who spent the early 1960s on Hydra with Leonard Cohen and a bunch of boozy creative types. One of the year’s most lushly enjoyable novels, published during lockdown, it transports us straight to a Greek island and leaves us yearning for the sight of a lemon tree against a turquoise sea. Evie Wyld produced a Chinese box of stories about women’s lives shaped by violence in the underappreciated The Bass Rock ( Jonathan Cape, £16.99), while the debut Irish novelist Elaine Feeney delved into her country’s shameful history of mother-and-baby homes in the cacophonous As You Were ( Harvill Secker, £14.99), told from the perspective of a terminally ill woman in hospital.

The ghosts of dead women, notably Anne Boleyn, haunt the bloated, bleakly beautiful concluding instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror and the Light (Fourth Estate, £25). And in one of the year’s most quietly affecting books, Clare Chambers goes behind the headlines of two sensational events from the 1950s – a devastating train crash and a putative virgin birth. Her Small Pleasures ( W&N, £14.99) is an achingly tender portrait of an unmarried journalist trapped in the dreary “eggs for tea” routine of living with her mother.

In The Lying Life of Adults (Europa, £20), Elena Ferrante examines the ways in which storytelling can be a form of deception. In a novel that stands apart from her bestselling Neapolitan quartet, Ferrante follows a 12-year-old girl coming of age in early-1990s Naples as she learns to recognise the lies used like weapons by her divided, middle- class family. Confronting the girl’s sexual awakening with an honesty that feels almost savage, Ferrante shows the extent to which adolescence demands a reckoning with the myth of femininity.

Self-deception also runs through Anne Tyler’s Redhead at the Side of the Road ( Chatto & Windus, £14.99), about an unmarried computer maintenance man who starts to wonder if life is leaving him behind. Compassionate and alert to the complexities in even the most ordinary lives, the book reminds us why, at 79, Tyler is held in such high regard. And Susanna Clarke gave us a startling novel of austere magical realism in Piranesi ( Bloomsbury, £14.99), which combines questions about memory and identity with the story of a man living alone in a strange, empty house.

Clarke affirmed herself as one of Britain’s most singular novelists in a fractured, febrile year otherwise surprisingly short on intellectual high-jinks or formal experimentation. The standout novel, Shuggie Bain ( Picador, £ 14.99) – a heartyanking debut by the 44-year- old Glaswegian Douglas Stuart, about a boy growing up with an alcoholic mother in 1980s Scotland – was an unusually conventional, popular choice to win the Booker Prize, but it also felt like the right one. Above all else, readers in 2020 needed the consolation of old-fashioned storytelling like never before.

The heart-yanking Shuggie Bain was exactly the Booker winner we needed

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