Richard (K) Morgan

Sharp Teeth – Toby Barlow

For sheer balls-out nerve and lack of conformity, this is my vote for the whole of 2007. Sharp Teeth is a novel-length blank-verse poem about werewolves (well, were-dogs, if we’re being completely accurate) surviving in a variety of interesting ways in modern day Los Angeles. The book features some truly beautiful language, arresting imagery and tight word play, but it still manages to tell an equally tight, unashamedly cinematic story. It is by turns savage, romantic, realistically bleak, and unsentimentally heart-warming. I guess you could loosely term it urban fantasy, except that it cocks its leg with animal aplomb and pisses all over that whole genre. The truth is I’ve read nothing even remotely like Sharp Teeth – ever.

Bioshock – 2K Games

And while we’re stretching the boundaries of the form – 2007 saw another rare entry into that category I define as video games, no look, seriously, video games with the qualities of literature. You get about one of these a year if you’re lucky; in all the time I’ve been playing console games I can still count the ones that make this elevated grade on the fingers of one hand. (Personal favourites like Doom 3 and F.E.A.R., for example, though brilliant games in their own right, don’t quite get the cigar). Anyway, this year’s entry is Bioshock – a grim, terrifying tale of a city under the sea founded by political idealists (loosely based on Ayn Rand’s weirdo Objectivist sect) and now decayed into leaking, murderous chaos as everything falls apart under the pressures of human greed and rage, and gene technology run amok. As with the very small number of other ‘literary’ games I’d class in this category, Bioshock features powerful symbolic imagery, complex plotting and detailed characterisation, and a ferociously intelligent underlying social and political commentary. It also has a nice historical dimension to it, which I’ve not seen deployed before in this kind of gaming. It really is a thing of dark and horrific beauty.

Six Bad Things – Charlie Huston

Some of you may already recognise the name Huston for Charlie’s vampire PI stories featuring wisecracking, undead gumshoe Joe Pitt; but alongside this, the same guy has been quietly putting out a series of brutal modern noir thrillers which took my breath away. Six Bad Things is the second in a sequence of three books about damaged ex-jock, reluctant killer and all round loner Hank Thompson, but it kicks off with absolutely no concessions to its predecessor. You can pick up the story right here, on a beach in Mexico, where Hank is hiding out with a big stack of money belonging to the Russian mob. Huston’s style is deceptively basic – you feel like you’re reading something utterly stripped to narrative necessity, and then suddenly you realise Charlie is quietly building smart, complex images in your head and heart. Five words of dialogue open up an entire character or situation, short, sharp sentences etch out an entire relationship in a couple of lines. A single two word exclamation makes you, abruptly, laugh out loud. The last time I saw this kind of thing done so well was in Ellroy’s White Jazz, or possibly Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men – but Huston’s writing is altogether funnier and warmer hearted than either of those, somehow blending all the noir violence and bleak pain with a remarkable heed for the bonds of quiet love, friendship and family. I started with Six Bad Things, finished the last page and then went, quite literally, straight on to the follow up, A Dangerous Man. Now I have to back up for the first in that series, Caught Stealing and also lay my hands on Charlie’s latest The Shotgun Rule. You should do likewise – the guy is pure dynamite.

Air – Geoff Ryman

I must be the last person in the world, in genre, to have read this book. It’s been out there, winning praise and awards for more than two years now, and on my shelf almost as long. I finally took it on holiday with me and fell immediately into the world of Chung Mae Wang, shrewd peasant entrepreneur and village diplomat from Kizuldah, and last line of defence for her village against being gobbled up by an encroaching modern world that comes spilling out of telephone wires and television screens and ultimately the air itself. The village of Kizuldah, Yeshibozkent province where it lies, and the country of Karzistan which contains Mae’s world are all imaginary places, spun up from cultural stock borrowed out of Turkey and central Asia – but the whole thing is rendered with such beautiful jewellery-box detail and understated narrative confidence that it took me several chapters to notice this aspect of the fiction (the victimised ethnic minority wryly called the Eloi was what finally tipped me off). This surreptitious side step out of the real world enables Ryman to borrow what he needs without the corresponding need for travel writer cultural fidelity, but paradoxically the result still feels like a pitch perfect inside view from a real place. It’s the kind of book that wouldn’t look amiss in the company of novelists like Arundhati Roy or Louis de Bernieres, the sort of thing that ought to have been up for a Commonwealth Writers Prize – or maybe even a Booker. It is certainly the equal of anything by Booker winners like Yann Martel or DBC Pierre. If ever an SF novel deserved to shrug off the strictures of the genre and be appreciated simply as the finely executed cutting edge piece of fiction it is, then Geoff Ryman has written that novel.

The State of Africa – Martin Meredith

No use pretending this one is going to be a cheery read. In fact, I had to stop about a hundred pages from the end, leave the book for a while, go out and get some figurative fresh air before plunging back in. The State of Africa is a seemingly infinite catalogue of the political, economic and social catastrophe that has beset the continent since independence, and there’s scant hope to be seen anywhere on the horizon the book presents. For anyone who’s been paying political attention for the last couple of decades, a lot of this stuff probably won’t come as any great surprise, but there are still some fascinating – and rather uncomfortable – insights into how so much wealth and potential for development got pissed away in such a short time, as well as neat historical sketches of almost every corner of the continent over the last fifty years. Writers of books like these often try to end on a note of forward-looking enthusiasm, but Meredith rings truer than that – the best he can manage is a testament to the fortitude of all those Africans who have to somehow make a life for themselves under the yoke of so much corruption, mismanagement and blood-drenched malice. The State of Africa is grim stuff, but it’s grim stuff you ought to read.

Deer Hunting with Jesus – Joe Bageant

Now, for all those people who thought I was too harsh and stereotypical with my Jesusland future in Black Man / Thirteen – go out and read this book, goddamnit!! If you won’t believe me, believe Bageant. He is the real deal, a man rooted in the soil of redneck America, returning home after thirty years on the West Coast as a journalist, and he tells it like it is. There are no stereotypes here, just real people Bageant knows as kin or friends or neighbours, and the portrait they make up is frankly terrifying; twenty first century citizens of the most advanced nation on Earth crushed under social and economic conditions that wouldn’t look amiss in the third world, and leaking hate and rage and mangled misunderstanding of everything under the pressure; modern Americans casting out demons, waiting for the Rapture and – naturally – voting for Bush. Don’t think Jesusland could happen? It is happening – and Joe Bageant is your savagely ironic guide to the shambles. Read, and be very afraid.

Freakonomics – Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner

Something of a qualified recommendation here. Freakonomics has a patina of that rather irritating gosh-wow-aren’t-we-having-fun dynamic that seems to have taken non-fiction by storm in America, a sort of dumbing down in terror that people won’t buy your book or watch your documentary because it looks too, well, intellectual, y’know, just not fun enough… Thus the jingly, jangly ultra hip title, the brightly colourful collage cover and the ludicrously grandiose sub-line A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. Thus the bouncy, conversational style and the sometimes rather strained shock-wow comparison intro-lines. Why is crack cocaine like nylon stockings? Gasp! Why are the Ku Klux Klan like Real Estate Agents? No way! Wow! Are we having fun here or what? Fortunately, in this case, the patina is a fairly shallow layer. Scrape it back and what you have is a fascinating collection of research on subjects as diverse as school testing, abortion and sumo wrestling, all put together by the clearly quite brilliant Stephen Levitt, the ‘rogue’ economist in question. (‘Rogue’ here means that Levitt is not interested in the financial or macro applications of his field, but instead finds it far more interesting to apply the analytical tools of his trade to other elements of human behaviour and social process – like testing in schools for example. Or what names parents give to their children, and why. Or why so many drug dealers live with their mothers.) In truth, the book is a bit too episodic for my taste – look at this, now look at this, over here, isn’t this cool – and there are some sections which end up feeling a bit facile and forced (the Klan and Realty chapter, for starters) but others, on, for example, drug dealing or falling crime rates are simply too radically informative to miss. So – if you can fight your way through Dubner’s theme park barker’s patter and into the meat of the science that Levitt is deploying, then rest assured the book will eventually demonstrate its worth.

The Icarus Girl – Helen Oyeyemi

I confess to an insane jealousy here – Oyeyemi wrote this rather excellent first novel while she was still at school, studying for her A levels. She was published, to national acclaim, by the time she was 21. Aaaagh!!!! The Icarus Girl kicks off with a powerfully evocative, totally original opening, seizes for its themes childhood, alienation and ghosts, and then very rarely slows down to catch breath thereafter. It’s the story of Jessamy Harrison, an eight year old British Nigerian girl, and her – for want of a better word – demonic companion TillyTilly. But take note – TillyTilly is nothing so simple as a figure out of a YA fantasy novel, and the Magic that we see deployed is of a very Realist brand. What the book reminded me of most of all was some of Graham Joyce’s best work – the child’s eye magic world of The Tooth Fairy or the creepy haunted farmscape of The Stormwatcher – but Oyeyemi has the added advantage of her African background ansd that puts a whole other dimension into the mix. Where Joyce tried his hand at this kind of thing with Smoking Poppy, to me he always came across as a bit of a stranger to the Thai landscape he tried to borrow. Oyeyemi, in contrast, is utterly at home in African mode and what emerges during the Nigerian segments is something reminiscent of Ben Okri’s spirit-drenched narrative in The Famished Road. Now, all praise and impressive comparisons aside, I suppose it also has to be said that there is a certain amount of unevenness in the novel – Jessamy’s age seems a bit arbitrary at times, for example, the narration sometimes slips into levels of reflective maturity you wouldn’t really expect an eight year old to have – but carping like that about such a sharp new talent would be pretty mean-spirited. At less than twenty years old, Oyeyemi is writing better here than a fistful of other authors I could name who are twice her age at least and have a whole string of published work in print. No question about it, this is a name to watch.