Sheersy's Top Five: Novels

Finally, a post format I can run and run with.

I love nothing better than making lists [mmm - lovely, lovely lists], and formulating my Top Five in a particular genre is something I just can't help doing. It's perfectly in keeping with my various other OCD tendencies, so I'm not especially concerned about it. Anyway, Nick Hornby got a novel out of it, so back off.

Comics excepted, prose fiction rates higher on my pastime scale than music, film or videogames, but there'll be plenty of time to cover all of those later.

Covers shown are not necessarily the ones I own, just the ones I most covet:

#5 H.G. Wells - The War of the Worlds

Wells's hugely influential 'scientific romance' is original steampunk apocalypse of the first order, as Victorian England becomes the bridgehead for invasion by a warlike, technologically superior alien race. Having crash-landed in massive interplanetary cylinders, the Martians mobilize now-iconic armoured tripods and effortlessly decimate the British Army's meagre resistance. Faced with the enormity of the catastrophic events unfolding around him, our unnamed protagonist is powerless to do anything except catalogue his traumatic experiences as he travels the corpse-choked wasteland. Apart from a few brief moments of triumph - a direct hit by artillery on one tripod and HMS Thunder Child's suicidal assault on a further two - hope for survival of the human race looks increasingly bleak. Just when things couldn't look any worse, however, Wells drops a solid platinum plot device bomb - a beautifully simple resolution that gets us off the hook without cheating [I think I'm supposed to say ++++++SPOILERS++++++]: with no immunity to simple earthly bacteria, the Martians all snuffle themselves to death and everyone can get back to the serious business of expanding the bally Empire, what?

Cover designers have been massively over-egging the whole tripod imagery thing for decades, but the 2005 Finnish edition shown here is pretty much spot on.

#4 Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves

Danielewski's debut novel revolves around a fictional documentary called The Navidson Record. This film investigates the Navidson family's new home, which they notice - and corroborate by measuring - is slightly bigger on the inside than the outside. Shortly after this discrepancy is confirmed, the house starts to grow additional hallways and corridors at random, and a door eventually appears that opens onto a vast underground labyrinth of featureless grey stone. The Navidsons call in experienced adventurer Holloway Roberts, who mounts a full-on expedition into the Stygian depths - then things get really weird.

This is a pretty tough book to read. It's a doorstop, for a start, and weaves together the viewpoints of dozens of different characters, each in their own distinct font type. The book is littered with hidden codes, some sentences for instance spelling out additional messages in the first letter of each word. Danielewski also structures the text to reflect the events of the story, so when characters are exploring the dark miles of empty hallway beneath the house the text is crammed into tiny, claustral boxes in the centre of the page; later, when the characters are chased through the labyrinth by an entity - either real or imagined - there are only a few words per page for the duration of the pursuit. Certain sections feature blocks of text embedded within other text, while others have the text printed upside-down, backwards or following spiral patterns around the page. This catalogue of stylistic trickery - an example, apparently, of ergodic literature - adds to the reader's general sense of disorientation and unease. House of Leaves is also notable for its use of detailed, faux-academic footnotes, a literary quirk employed to similar expository effect in both Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman [the footnotes in the latter become more and more absurdly extensive as the novel progresses and eventually overwhelm the actual story].

Despite all of that - and I'm a lazy reader at the best of times - House of Leaves delivers more satisfying, high-concept horror than any of yer Stephen Kings or yer Conrad Williamses.

#3 Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake

In the not-too-distant future, the last remaining human - Snowman - struggles to survive in a genetically unrecognizable environment of blank-canvas posthumans and dangerously intelligent wild animals. His story is told in a series of flashbacks, beginning in an unspecified near-future where corporations house their ultra-rich employees in sealed compounds, while the poor languish in abject poverty in the neglected pleeblands outside. In his youth, Snowman was Jimmy, a privileged boy growing up in the compound of a corporation that his father worked for. He becomes friends with Glenn, who goes by the alias Crake throughout the book [the player name he adopts for the computer game Extinctathon - a sort of bleak-minded Pokémon that deals with extinct species]. Jimmy and Crake both obsess over a young Asian girl whose image they find on a child porn site, and when Crake later becomes a brilliant geneticist he hires a woman who may or may not have been that anonymous girl. She takes the name Oryx and acts as tutor to Crake's genetically tweaked humanity - the Crakers - as well as a lover to both men. Catastrophe eventually strikes when Crake's god complex goes into overdrive, and he sets idealistic but unhinged plans in motion for a new world order in which humanity plays no part.

Atwood is no stranger to satiro-dystopian sci fi [or spec fi, as she would prefer us to think of it], having previously penned The Handmaid's Tale, a scathing critique of patriarchal, organized religion, and more recently The Year of the Flood, itself a semi-sequel to Oryx and Crake. Here, she has grim fun concocting bland and simultaneously terrifying corporate entities - HelthWyzer, OrganInc, RejoovenEsence - and consumer products - the quivering, headless, limbless organism lab-designed to yield a ChickieNobs Bucket O'Nubbins. Often unfairly criticized for perfunctory characterization in favour of making a point, this presents a brilliantly unsettling vision of a future that's almost upon us.

#2 Cormac McCarthy - The Road

An emaciated father and son trudge the blasted landscape of a world that has been devastated by some unspecified [but probably nuclear] global catastrophe. Ash clouds obscure the sun and nearly all flora and fauna have died out. For the few human survivors, life has become a constant, desperate search for food, taking care to avoid the roving cannibal gangs that lie in wait or patrol the highways. Our protagonists heap essential provisions in a battered shopping cart, with a rear view motorbike mirror fitted to its handle to prevent unexpected attack. The environment they travel is littered with fresh atrocities that display not so much man's inhumanity to man, but the depths to which people will inevitably sink when faced with the dismal choice between survival and starvation. The father is single-minded in his mission to reach the coast in the hope of finding a better existence, and remains immensely suspicious - often with good reason - of other survivors. He can tell from his worsening, wracking cough that his time is short and is intent on instilling in his son both a strong moral code and a dependable survival instinct. By contrast, the boy is idealistic and willing to see the best in those they meet, sometimes putting the pair in danger but more often facilitating their few benevolent encounters.

I make time to scan the Grauniad's books supplement every Saturday and bought The Road on the back of Alan Warner's captivating review. The book is sparsely written and necessarily grim - the pop promo post-punk posturing of Mad Max is nowhere to be seen in The Road's feudal drudgery - but compelling in its depiction of the world that will probably exist in those last terrible moments before mankind's extinction. I'm big enough to admit that I had a good old cry at the end, which is testament to the emotional intensity of this outstanding work.

#1 David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas

Mitchell's third novel still rates as his most ambitious. Six stories, each written in markedly different popular literary styles, are nested within each other like a Russian doll; only the sixth tale, at the centre of the book, remains intact. The other five stories are interrupted halfway through, some of them mid-sentence [when I came across the first instance of this, I was convinced I'd been sent a duff copy]. The second half of the book then resolves each of the stories in reverse order. The tales span several centuries, from the first story's nineteenth century nautical yarn to the sixth's far future, post-apocalypse [spot a theme yet?] adventure, and Mitchell strongly hints that the later protagonists are direct descendents of the earlier ones, since they all have a unique, comet-shaped birthmark just below their right shoulder blade. During the events of their own story, each protagonist also has cause to read the recorded story of the preceding main character, so that these fictional characters experience the various stories - and their interruptions - simultaneously with the reader.

I was literally knocked sideways when I first read this - it's an absolute blinder. On the strength of Cloud Atlas, I bought Mitchell's previous books - Ghostwritten and number9dream [both excellent] - and immediately jumped on Black Swan Green as soon as it was published. I'll admit to having been somewhat slower on the uptake with The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but it's on the list.

Five honourable mentions: Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby; Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell; George and Wheedon Grossmith - Diary of a Nobody; DBC Pierre - Vernon God Little; Luther Blissett - Q.