The worst thing for fiction in Britain in 2001 was the untimely death of W. G. Sebald, not long after his Austerlitz was published in English. He died at the wheel of his car in a head-on collision with a lorry on the edge of Norwich, where he lived and wrote. I say fiction in Britain because that skirts the issue of just how British Sebald was. But why that reluctance? For in many ways he was a quintessential modern British novelist his exile otherness, his outsiders alienation, his incomers foreignness all being rather normal in our post-imperialist, post-Holocaust, multicultural times. He was born in Germany, preferred writing in German, but had lived in Britain since the sixties, teaching at English universities, latterly at East Anglia. His great subject was the forced movements of persons around Europe and into the UK. The topography of Britain obsessed him. He was a writer between languages, between cultures, but then so are V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie and Abdulrazak Gurnah and Zvi Jagendorf and the newcomer Rachel Seiffert, who all also feature strongly this year. The tense struggle between modes in Sebald's writing hauntingly mirrors this in-betweenness. It was exemplified luminously in Austerlitz: a documentary, or pseudo-documentary faction-fiction (supported as ever by mysterious photographs and other reproduced documents), about a Czech lad rescued from the Holocaust, fostered by an apocalyptic Calvinist couple in Wales and denied any knowledge of his personal history, who spends his adult years searching for his lost mother and father around Europes old ghettos, the sites of concentration camps, Jewish graveyards. Its a story of terrible times uncovered in laboriously unpeeled layers of collected recollections the I-narrator, the usual voice of Sebald, for instance, telling of his friend Austerlitz telling of his old Prague nurse Vera telling of Austerlitz's father reporting hearing Hitler in Nuremberg. Such are the narrative recessions of modernism, employed here with impressive moral and political point to make us feel the near-unspeakability of great modern distresses and pains. Austerlitz was surely the strongest British fiction of 2001, both morally and formally.

In an obvious fashion, of course, Austerlitz's inventiveness does not involve innovation. Sebald had produced this kind of performance before. But that should not worry us. Why expect a master to vary his stroke? The demand that novelists make it absolutely new every time is absurd. Good Novelists Do It All Over Again. And yet the commonest complaint around is about the dire sameness of British fiction. Granta Magazine, that powerhouse of contemporary writing in English, came to its latest birth in 1979 (the title was a revived one) with a complaint in its very first number about British novels being neither remarkable nor remarkably interesting they were mainly more and more of the same old same, and mostly much of a muchness. Granta's first issue celebrated New American Writing. Editor Bill Buford was soon proclaiming The End of the English Novel. These familiar grousings are kept aglow for us in the rather fine twenty-first Birthday anthology Twenty-one, The Best of Granta Magazine. Its full of typical Granta fare: documentary, autobiography, travel writing, Americans. It has only non-fiction offerings from novelists such as Rushdie, Adam Mars-Jones, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Hanif Kureishi, which makes a very clear statement: Brit and Commonwealth writers, not too bad; English fiction, not very worthy of inclusion. They're the kind of doubts about the English novel, Helen Reed, the creative writing teacher another fictional creative writing teacher in David Lodge's Thinks... allows herself.

Too many novels?

Are there too many novels, she wonders: a fiction-mountain an immense quantity of surplus novels, like the butter mountains and milk lakes of the EEC? Its frightening to think of how many novels I must have read in my lifetime, and how little I retain of the substance of most of them. All avid novel readers (and critics) will sympathise with what is guessable as David Lodge's own fervent worry. But still this spokesperson for the Concerned, even the Pissed-Off, reader, goes on encouraging the production of more fictions by her pupils, ones that will never be absolutely new, and all this in yet one more novel, and one, what's more, that is clearly proud to jump through all the old artful Lodge hoops all over again. For Thinks is vintage Lodge, a vintage whose taste you know and love a campus novel, involving a clash of two cultures (the novel-writing, creative-writing teachers take on the self versus a loud and chuffed Cognitive Science Professors), full of lectures and lecturettes on either side (a novel, this, and once more from Lodge, of ideas: there's a huge reading list, of course), involving (yet once more) Roman Catholic angsts about religious belief in modern times, and dense with textual varieties (taped confessions, diaries, e-mail relationships: all old formal hat, by the way) and textual play (intertextual intercourse with Henry James; intertextual incest as the theorist Robyn Penrose pops in from Lodge's earlier novel Nice Work, which this novel resembles a lot; much metatextual self-reflection). Its even, unsurprisingly, a set of love and lust stories, packed with adulteries, not least across the Humanities-Cognitive Science divide, with Cognitive Prof. Ralph Messenger one more of Lodges dons with astoundingly busy dongs (Lodge's own jest). But these well-tried formulas Lodge doing his old fictional things once more are good, enticing, amusing, they woo you, carry you along, they have intellectual force and potent social critique, they teach you about novels and the mind, and they leave you at the end wanting more. You'll read the next one. Which is to say that Lodge provides a rather complete set of Novel satisfactions.

What a carrying on

And in fact 2001 is a good year for more of the same, for good novelists, name novelists, important novelists even, certainly novelists established in various modern canons, doing their stuff, once more. The mere list of these notable reappearers has the ring of a good years worth the likes of Rushdie and Naipaul, of Jim Crace and Michele Roberts, of Helen Dunmore, Ian McEwan, John Le Carre, Nadine Gordimer, Fred DAguiar, Justin Cartwright, Pat Barker and Clive Barker, of Melvyn Bragg, Irvine Welsh, Alan Brownjohn, Iain Sinclair, of Jonathan Meades and Piers Paul Read and Francis King. Of course, merely carrying on, even simply marking time, is never not a problem. All novelists will talk of the terrors of the blank page. And some serious producers do have continuity problems. Nicholas Mosley is one whose recent contunations I have problems with, and The Hesperides Tree, his latest wrestle with the subject of a son overwhelmed by a huge father (the unshakeable ghost of Sir Oswald, I fear), his latest talk-talky novel of the massive ideas (here reality and games and apocalypse), is for me too theory-heavy and people-light, despite its strongly contemporary IRA-Israel-Armageddon weld. As for Louis de Bernieres's Red Dog, its patently minor stuff, an Aussi shaggy-dog saga, maybe an allegory of gritty Western Australian selfhood, all right in its brief way, but in effect just a publisher-satisfying space-filler, a few jots while de Bernieres does the difficult business of coming up with something to match Captain Corelli's Mandolin. On the other hand matching past inventiveness is not something that, say, Jim Crace or Michelle Roberts appear to be greatly troubled by. Crace's The Devils Larder is a set of engrossing food encounters, of mouth engagements, serious, farcical, vengeful which may well be construable as mere footnotes to Crace's earlier body narratives, but what a lexicon of bodiliness this is, and not least, as wed expect from Crace, so marvellously good at the grim entrancements of bodily decay, the rot beneath the skin. Not dissimilarly, while Michele Roberts' Playing Sardines finds her in short-story mode, her little narratives of cross-Channel loving and reading and eating especially eating ooze her customary lip-smacking, body-hugging realisms with continuing lovely aplomb.

Playing games and redoing love

A good way of playing it again, as Lodge and Rushdie, not least, well realise, is to sport with the literary past. It's what Alan Isler does very nicely (and once more) in Clerical Errors (Edmond Music, Chicago Semite Viennese and an unbelieving Catholic priest to boot, makes money selling off church literary treasures, especially a faked Elizabethan Shakespeare Poems, in a very toothsome satire on Christian Jewish relations). Its what Jasper Fforde gets up to very post-modernistically in The Eyre Affair (lovely literary time-travelling first novel romp in which a Litera Tec called Thursday Next investigates literary crimes: gangs of Impressionists mug Surrealists; hijackers of literary history steal canonical manuscripts, rubbing out major Dickens, rejigging scenes in Jane Eyre). This is Flann O'Brien wedding Christine Brooke-Rose in Sci-Fi land. Somewhat less hyperactively, you can go in for the oldest of narrative professions and do another love story. Which is the impressive way, among lots and lots of examples this year (for like Lodge's Thinks all sorts of novels have a tendency to turn out motored by the most persistent of human desires, the erotic ones), of Justin Cartwright's Half in Love (falling politician makes up with actress entrapped by intrusive media a defence of lovers against the assaults of modern lie-machineries wrapped with a certain curious force around stories of horses, especially in the Boer War), and of Alan Brownjohn's A Funny Old Year (characteristic Brownjohn melancholies about monochrome adulteries and polytechnic despairings a sort of downbeat Tom Sharpe), and of Sally Vickers' Instances of the Number Three (erotic triangles and threesomes involving the ghostly presence of a dead husband and lover, with much assistance from Hamlet and quite a lot from the lovelorn transvestism of the film The Crying Game), and of Robin Jenkins' Childish Things (a not altogether likely family and inheritance tale involving old Scots and their loves and pharmaceuticals, a Jilly Cooper novel for grey-beards by the Scottish Thomas Hardy though how Jenkins won that accolade does rather beat me).

Looking back in …?

All love stories look back, formally speaking, in some measure, and looking back is of course British and Commonwealth fictions happiest posture (it's true what they say). You can easily tell the hardest-nosed looking-back fictions by the long lists of Acknowledgements and the fat bibliographies they come with their proofs of historical authenticity. History books are, it appears, novelists favourite reading nowadays. Fictional reconstructions must above all be testably accurate. And they are indeed, and with a certain dutiful doggedness, in Meira Chand's A Far Horizon (the Black Hole of Calcutta myth artfully if rather gently rewritten The Siege of Krishnapur this is not); in Francis Kings Prodigies (wonderfully shambolic travels of moneyed Dutch Alexine with hetero- and homo-sex as main point of this renovated nineteenth-century adventurism); in Piers Paul Read's Alice in Exile (Whites fighting Reds in Russian revolutionary tangles involving spry socialist feminist from London Bohemia engaging ins and outs of love in a hostile climate, even if rather too extravagantly plotted); in the poet Blake Morrison's worthy first novel The Justification of Johann Gutenberg (mild-mannered jog through the life of printings inventor, built with a certain canniness around some of the meanings of justifying, i.e. making excuses and tidying lines of type); and in Rosalind Belben's seemingly expert celebration of Boer War period fox hunting Hound Music (history as a matter of Horse and Hound, an oddly attractive affair as young fry of horsey family resist break-up of their old dads stables and kennels: a nostalgic wallow in an unfallen world of bitten-off men, doggy women and gent-adoring hunt followers).

Keen nostalgia's

Nostalgia is a great feeder of interest in the past. It especially animates growing-up fictions, especially when the subjects of these Bidlungsromane are based on the writers own growing pains as in some rather fine remembrances this year of authorial times past: Jonathan Coe's The Rotters Club (laddish growing up in seventies Birmingham, all school dramas, mags, music, pashes and rival penis measurements, played deftly against contemporary trades union troubles and some electrifying encounters with Danish Holocaust memories: a sequel is, happily, promised); Bernard MacLaverty's The Anatomy School (Catholic Ulster school thriller and rite-of-passage novel set in the Troubles: a most welcome return to fictional form by one of Ulsters sharpest recording angels); Melvyn Bragg's A Son of War, very nice successor to A Soldiers Return, about growing up in proley forties and fifties Cumbria, densely local and particular, with the splendid class-conscious, regional-apologetic realism perennially associated with Bragg-landia (and, cheeringly, set up for yet more sequels); Irvine Welsh's Glue (urgently stacked-up Scottish Housing Scheme realities, from fifties boozing and razor-slashings to current Ecstacy-fuelled clubbing scene erotics and erratics: a curiously warm festival of blood, guts, semen, music, stabbings, rendered with Welsh's familiar Tourettes Syndrome of a dialect); Anglo-Austrian-Israeli Zvi Jagendorf's Wolfy and the Strudelbakers (tight, anxiety-jammed account of crazy Jewish refugee growing-up, a fine elegiac mapping of lost boyhood times); D. J Taylor's The Comedy Man, recreating the life of Ted King, Yarmouth boy turned comedy-duo straightman, a celebration too of the fictional methods of the Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Dickens, Bennett, Lawrence, it happily recalls; and, for its part, Matt Thorne's Pictures of You, a work of sibling brattishness and laddish hedonism (its own phrases) involving youthful sexual messes around porno mags, which owes much more to Nick Hornby than to the New Puritanism Matt Thorne was last heard propounding. (The same applies more or less, to All Hail the New Puritans, contributor Scarlett Thomass youthie druggie bonk-fest of a first novel Bright Young Things. A generation-defining masterpiece, says Matt Thorne. Lets hope not.)

Even darker pasts

Though some of the years nostalgics engage, like Coe and Jagendorf and, for that matter, Bragg, with the morally shadier sides of history, the last thing the many novels steeped in the utter bleakness of the past have room for is nostalgia. Its obviously hard, as Sebald amply proves, to be fond of Holocausts, apocalypses-now, wars though they do mightily energise the imagination. As in The Dark Room by the very superior newcomer Rachel Seiffert (German parents, brought up in Oxford, graduate of the Glasgow Strathclyde Writing programme taught phew! - by Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and Tom Leonard, lives and writes in Berlin), a novel about Germans living through the Hitlerzeit, the chaos of the collapse of the Third Reich, and subsequent burdens of complicity, guilt, seared family memories (rendered in a wonderfully sharp, clear prose, a pointilliste history canny with fact and cunning about memorys fracturings: rightly getting shortlisted for the Booker). And in Helen Dunmore's caring narrative of domesticated female surviving in the rubble of besieged Leningrad The Siege (another fine story of women under threat from Dunmore: I was surprised it didn't actually win the Orange Prize for which it was nominated). And in Andrew Miller's Oxygen (death undoing so many amid the tormentings of guilty recollection of the 1956 Hungarian uprising). And in an admirable clutch of fictions tangled in post-colonial plights Fred DAguiar's verse novel Bloodlines (a new mode for him), celebrating miscegenation and slavery resistance messy, disarticulated at times, but potently indignant; Abdulrazak Gurnah's ace narrative weave By the Sea, about the exiles (impossible journeys) of two Zanzibarian's whose melancholically intersecting lives end them up in a not-friendly England saddening reflections animated by contemporary concerns about asylum seekers; and V. S. Naipaul's latest engagement with the migrant problematic Half a Life, about the sad wanderings in London, Portuguese Africa and Germany of perpetual in-between Indian Willie Somerset Chandra. Wonderfully polished as to its prose, Half A Life has all the raw emotionality of perhaps too many unsettlable personal accounts with women, parents, inheritances, whole continents (no wonder, you think, that Naipaul tends to shun being pressed about his meanings: as in the comically truncated telephone interviews haplessly recorded as Only Disconnect by Akash Kapur in the Naipaul tribute volume The Humour and the Pity: Essays on V. S. Naipaul recently edited by Amitava Kumar).

In comparison with the power of Naipaul's fraught recall, William Riviere's Kate Caterina (English wife entangled in family divisions in Mussolini's Italy), and Derek Beavan's If the Invader Comes (life and loves and growing-up through the Blitz and D-Day), and Sebastian Faulks' On Green Dolphin Street (personal lives messed about in McCarthy and Cold War era: superior on melding historical data with fictionalising, excellent on the French debacle in Vietnam), all come across as less emotionally wrought-up than their historical material suggests they should be (and all of them keep heeding too much the tug of rather conventional love stories). There's little here to suggest, as there is with Naipaul and Gurnah, that historical fiction might have much to do with making some amends for the awfulness of the past, with grappling as it were a redemptively ethical-mindedness with past defilings and trangressings of the human. To do with some kind of atonement, in fact. Which is, not least, what Atonement, Ian McEwan's latest, and rather grand, venture into the miry past of the Second World War-time is about. On the eve of war, a silly story-telling girl thoroughly ruins the lives of her sister and the sisters boyfriend with false accusations against him of raping a cousin. The stupid and the conservative and the war profiteers prosper while good and maligned Robbie Turner languishes in prison and, condemned to the ranks, is badly wounded at Dunkirk. Regretful Briony, who becomes a writer, essays personal amends, but real atonement isn't possible: the results of her wickedness are inerasable, even, or especially, as it turns out, through story-telling. Briony can imagine happy endings for her sister and Robbie and this novel Atonement is her narrative but what fictionalising can achieve remains, provokingly, just that, mere fiction. Which is impressive going in all kinds of directions, theoretical, narratological, moral and historical. Atonement could easily have won the Booker (but was pipped by Peter Carey's History of the Ned Kelly Gang whose original Australian imprint was welcomed in Fiction 2000).

Bad presents too

It's by no means just the badnesses of the past which incite and ignite fictions; contemporary awfulness is, as ever, an absolute staple of the novel. This is, of course, the traditional zone of the Krimi, perennial flagship of the novels interest in criminal proceeding, and its good to have the latest policing offerings from John Harvey (In a True Light: a post-Reznick foray into busy misdoings in the art-forgery world, but still with room for lots of knowledgeable reflection on Reznick's favourite jazz music), and from admirably crafty Nicci French, portmanteau ID of cultural journalists Nicci Gerrard and her husband Sean French (The Red Room: forensic psychiatrist Kit Quinn up against the scurvy porn-obsessed bad guy who scarred her face, in a truly chilling set of intricately linked lurid London killings), and from David Peace (Nineteen Eighty, third in his West Riding Quartet, this number devoted, pleasingly unpleasantly, to the Yorkshire Ripper killings).

But criminal proceedings aren't the sole prerogative of the Krimis that specialise in them. They're the essence of so much of the contemporary normality this years novels account for. Like John Le Carre's The Constant Gardener (vile doings of a pharmaceutical giant protecting its profits as its murderous African drugs-trials scams are exposed). Or Nadine Gordimers latest post-apartheid transition shocker The Pickup, glooming about the New Africa's problems of politics and society and gender across the old whiteblack divides, a replay of Lord Jims despondency about how white atoners cant ever win. Or Pat Barker's tense psychological thriller Border Crossing, digging into manipulative malignancy old lady murder, arson, child abuse in the Geordie North of England, a scene slick with evil in a novel almost slick about it (shades of Barker's earlier fiction about mental illness and Wilfred Owen and Co). Or in Clive Barker's latest massive hunks of goriness Coldheart Canyon, a gothic feeding frenzy about dire doings in Hollywood the Dream Palaces as awful nightmarish ruins. Or even in James Kelman's Translated Accounts, enigmatic variations of police-state suppressions and cruelties set in (for me) a rather wilfully abstract Kafkaesque allegorical place. But especially in Salman Rushdie's Fury a wonky, but magnetic melange of stories of erotic obsession and violence linking explosive New York murderousness and a zany Caribbean freedom coup, involving, expectably enough, the usual magnificent Rushdie riffs on metamorphosing selves and stories, on dollification (the doll collecting-inventing hero is wonderfully apt to Rushdie's theory and practice), and potently embracing the modern, the modern self and city and politics and, now, above all, the USA, as the targets of fury, the furious, the recrudescing ancient Furies themselves. Not a message to be stomached readily in the US after 11 September around about Fury's publication date so that this novel has been more or less shunned in that country. Rushdie is a fictional prophet with a knack for hitting the political target so discomfitingly well it keeps rebounding on his own head. Or for setting fiction in the right places for his novels but the wrong places for him.

Bad place-settings as well

Places of wronging have been for a long time the trademark settings of the Serpents Tail school of bad-girl bad-boy authors, and Mark Ramsden's The Sacred Blood (fetishistic couple in loud pursuit of the Dungeonmaster, a large chunk of heavy-metal neo-Nazi †ber-badness), and Danny King's (first novel) The Burglar Diaries (black-comic toe-rag doings of a pair of housebrakers, a sort of lighter Genet, or Oliver Twist redone as Bill Sikes), don't let this particular show down though as bad-lad, bad ladette publishers go Sceptre are pressing rather hard on Serpents Tails tail. As witness the extremely watchable talent of P. P. Hartnett, a kind of Geoff Dyer soundalike, whose Sixteen is an utterly unnostalgic account of a boy growing up in Greater Manchester. Its a kind of richly downmarket version of Alan Hollinghurst's The Swimming Pool Library (1988), a modern tragedy in fact, in which a fanatical swimmer comes into self-knowledge as a young gay musician exploited by a sinister paedophile producer of Boy Bands who lurks in wait for lads at swimming baths and leisure centres.

Few places come, of course, more programmed for misdeeds than London's naughtiest quarter, Soho. Its the aptly louche locale for Keith Waterhouses lovely practised Rakes Progress, Soho, or Alex in Wonderland, involving Leeds boy Alex's quest for his disappeared girlfriend among the dives, pubs, transvestite clubs and fabled bohemian types of a famous literary locale gone to seed. Here a raucous, raunchy, murderous topography is gorgeously mapped in full-on literary knowingness (for example, a dead drunks body is carried memorially from pub to pub in a mocking recreation of the mock-heroic processings Pope parodied in the Dunciad). Of course dark geographies can also be conjured out of the milder places of the earth like the flat mid-century Australian settings of Murray Bail's Camouflage: an empty airfield, a banal street, the caravanned bush; or the south-east London in which the macabre undertakers of Jonathan Meades's The Fowler Family operate (good to have this flash word-mongering delver into entrancing disagreeables back after too long away few can assemble a list of nasty stuff or engage with an ontological slump like this impressive wielder of the sleaze-bag). As for Iain Sinclair (a Meades admirer, by the way), what he does is find and invent dark topographies, scenes of joyous menace, and then obsessively revisit what has become personal turf in the boozy company of the cast of bibliophiliac toughs and hards, lords of reading misrule, who comprise Sinclairs sort of text-traversing private army. As in Landor's Tower, doings in Sinclair territory all over again, an unsparingly lippy, associationist Shandeyesque foray westwards, ostensibly in search of material for a book about Walter Savage Landor, but resulting in a book about not managing to write a book about Landor but achieving one, rather, which plots the ley-lines, so to say, that link all Sinclairs' westward-hoeing chums and reading-matter, the usual books and bookshops, the artists, writers, villains, booksellers, Driff the booksellers curse, Daniel Farson, the whole regular shady crew. Its a parodic, intertextualising, encyclopedic picaresque run inside and outside the mind of Iain Sinclair, and all of it attractively self-mocking. A friend called Bad News Mutton puts the boot into all of Sinclair's awesomely rambling texts (Every novel starts with a stalled car, a squabble of booksellers. What's this three-part structure?, and so on). Sinclair likes falling like this among his own marvellous bric-a-brac. But whatever the occasion, verbal magic rules. In fact its all as good a case as you could find of how great fictionalising wordsmiths triumph by Doing It Again. And Again.

About the Author
Our Contemporary Writers web site contains a brief biography of the author.