Books of the Year 2021

 

Photo by Florian Schmetz on Unsplash

Mercifully, I don’t have to be restricted to books published this year, only to books I have read this year. I think I failed to read a single  book that was actually published this year (although see below).

Book of the year must be Twelve who Ruled (R R Palmer, 1942). A truly remarkable book, covering one of the most hotly disputed themes in history: the Terror during the French Revolution. Given that the Committee of Public Safety left no records, this makes Palmer’s book all the more impressive. His depiction of Robespierre seems admirably balanced. Best of all, the book has a gripping narrative as good as any novel. The best history books tell a story, and this is quite some story.

I also greatly enjoyed Imperial Mud (James Boyce, 2020), a fascinating depiction of the Fens through history that brought some political thinking to an area that is usually presented without any apparent political awareness. My only complaint was that I see no sign of political radicalism in the Fens today – where did it go?

Tim Bolton’s Cnut the Great, in the Yale English Monarchs series, was an eye-opener. Here was a highly effective monarch, who at one time ruled not only England but a fair bit of Scandinavia as well. But, of course, it wouldn’t do to have a Dane as one of the mythical founders of England. He continues to appear rather incidentally in histories of England covering this period, which are usually titled “Anglo-Saxon England” or something similar.

I read The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and enjoyed every page, even though the fact that the book remained unfinished at Dickens’ death makes it more of a  mystery than perhaps even Dickens intended. Dickens, of course, is not a whodunit writer; he is more interested, like Simenon, in the motives and the feelings of the guilty parties, and so the identity of the murderer is immediately apparent. Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk, wins my prize for the best post-modernist work of the year. The unsettling tone of the first-person writing leaves the reader both enjoying the curious moral stance of the narrator, and at the same time struggling to identify what is actually happening – a rather similar technique to Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Case Study, which I thought was the only book I read that was published this year – but it turns out it first appeared back in 2016. Quite who is mad and who is sane is not easy to decipher – but it’s great fun to try to work it out.