January 7th 2015 started much like any other day for Philippe Lançon. He got up, took a shower, made coffee, replied to a few emails, exercised, and cycled to work. At around 11:30 he was sitting in a meeting when two gunmen walked into the conference room and murdered ten people. Lançon was shot in the face and was one of the few to survive what Wikipedia rather blandly calls the “Charlie Hebdo shooting”. Even the sudden intrusion of violent death didn’t immediately disrupt the banal routine of an otherwise typical day. Lying in his own blood on the meeting room floor and staring at the bodies of his dead colleagues, Lançon thought about work deadlines, making sure he had his phone, and keeping his backpack close.

I was about to write that Disturbance is Lançon’s account of his recovery, but it isn’t because recovery is meaningless in the context of his experiences. Let’s just say Disturbance is about what happened next. The surgeries to re-build his face, the long stay in hospital, the reactions of loved ones, and so much more, some of it woven around memories of his earlier life: books read, articles written, music heard, and places visited. Lançon would be forgiven some measure of self-pity in the circumstances, but there’s not a trace of it in Disturbance. He despises the sickly, attention-seeking sentimentality of American “victim memoirs”. Like the good journalist he is, he focuses his sharp eyes on what matters, caring not at all what the reader might feel about him. For Lançon, what matters is to be a truthful witness of events. Others can and will interpret and pass judgement, but Lançon witnessed, suffered, and remained. And reported for those who couldn’t and never will.

The Japanese art of kintsugi repairs broken pottery by inserting into the cracks and imperfections a lacquer that includes powdered silver, gold, or platinum. The goal of kintsugi is not to disguise damage but to treat it as an integral part of an object, drawing attention to and beautifying the flaw. The philosophy underpinning the art is a fascinating one and so different from how most of us treat human imperfections and damage. The fractures everyone picks up in a lifetime are the things we usually choose to conceal, the damage that gives the lie to the image of flawlessness we want to show to the world. I can’t make up my mind about kintsugi. By accentuating the imperfection, is the beauty of the original lost, or is something entirely new brought to life? Are the cracks what matter? Is it best to conceal the damage or give it prominence? Can art and beauty ever repair what is broken?

In Andres Neuman’s novel, Yoshie Watanabe survives the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by American forces in August 1945, the only member of his immediate family to do so. After the war he makes his career with a Japanese television manufacturer and is posted to Paris, New York, Buenos Aires and, finally, Madrid, returning to Tokyo in retirement before the tsunami of 2011 and the Fukushima nuclear disaster. A life book-ended by two catastrophes. Four women who knew him intimately – one in each city and none of them Japanese – add their stories to his and to that of a slightly obsessive Argentinian journalist. The result is six perspectives of a single man, six views of a life broken and re-made.

Fracture is a complex and ambitious novel. It is also, at its core, a cold one, looking unflinchingly at the horrors we inflict on one another, sometimes by design and sometimes unintentionally, and on the possibility of acceptance, redemption, and repair.

After finishing the one thousand or so pages of this two-volume biography, it’s hard not to be impressed by the life-long dedication of Lucian Freud to the art of painting and in particular to the painting of the human form. It was the driving passion of his life, provoking, absorbing, and stimulating him for the best part of eighty years. It’s a credit to his biographer that the single-mindedness of Freud’s devotion should be what lingers when the last page of these books is turned. Not the philandering, not the gambling, not the hobnobbing with aristocrats and villains, not the rivalry with Francis Bacon; the struggle to render individual lives in paint is what persists.

Freud has mellowed by the time we meet him in volume 2, but not by much. The casual cruelty, the snobbishness, and deep self-absorption are still in evidence, but as he starts to leave middle age his sharp eye focuses more on his artistic legacy, and with that comes the unrelenting concentration on his work. Partners, children, friends, and dealers all assume a distant second place as the painting takes more and more of his attention and the works become larger, more ambitious, and more demanding.

For Freud the work was everything. Read Feaver’s biography and enjoy the anecdotes and gossip, but, if you can, have reproductions of the work nearby and study them. (I recommend especially the Phaidon edition).

2020 was a bumper year for book publishers. It seems, cloistered at home, that we all bought more books. But have we been reading them? Several friends, all of them dedicated readers, told me last year that they found it difficult to concentrate on books, their minds infected with anxiety and sadness while their bodies stayed untouched by the virus. I read slightly fewer books in 2020 than I did in 2019 (thirty-seven versus thirty-eight), mainly because the places I’ve grown used to consuming them most intensively – airplanes, hotel rooms, departure lounges and the like – were denied to me.

For the first time I can remember I read slightly more non-fiction than fiction (nineteen versus eighteen). Why? I’m not sure. The year’s highlights were all non-fiction: Caste, Underland, Stories of the Sahara, The Man in the Red Coat, and A Month in Siena. Every one of these was wonderful. In contrast, while I read several good novels (The London Train, Here We Are, and especially Hamnet), not one was groundbreaking, brilliant, or completely captivating. I’ll need to choose my fiction more wisely in 2021.

Tana French is a sentimental writer. She believes in heroes (usually flawed), resolutions (sometimes improbable), and redemption. Sentimentality is a useful quality in a mystery novelist, especially when it’s laced with some cynicism. It makes for attractive leading characters and tends towards the kind of neatly resolved stories that are a big part of the genre’s attraction.

A year has passed since I last read one of her novels. That was The Wych Elm, an intricate, tightly knotted story set in Dublin that I remember as having been too long and too meandering to be entirely satisfying. A year on and the prolific Ms. French has taken us to a very different Ireland for her newest story, to its “wild west”, Connemara. It’s here, appropriately enough, that Cal, a former Chicago police officer, has chosen to retire, spending his time fixing up a dilapidated old farmhouse and getting to know his quirky neighbors before trouble comes calling. It’s the kind of trouble that makes it important to acquire a rifle, thereby completing the picture of a 19th century frontier man transplanted to 21st century rural Ireland.

At its heart, The Searcher is a straightforward morality tale, with echos of those black-and-white cowboy movies made by the likes of John Ford in the 1950s. (I assume the novel’s title is a conscious nod to Ford’s film of 1956). It appeals to our longing that right should prevail, even in times when the lines that separate good guys from bad, justice from injustice, and redemption from perdition get blurred. Bad things may happen to good people. Greed and stupidity may be rife and innocence in short supply, but good outcomes are still possible if individuals do the right thing. How much you enjoy The Searcher may depend on whether you believe that.

In my final book of 2020 I continued my journey through the works of Robert Macfarlane. That I should end the year in his company seems right in some way because he has been a delightful and consoling companion at various times in a year none of us will forget.

Ghostways brings together in a single, slim volume two essays previously published separately. Holloway first appeared in 2012 and Ness in 2018, with words by Robert Macfarlane and illustrations by Stanley Donwood. Both are works that defy categories. Ness is a prose-poem, a kind of elegy or lamentation inspired by Orford Ness, a ten-mile spit of shingle in eastern England where, for some seventy years or more, the British government tested deadly weapons in strict secrecy. Holloway tells of journeys in Dorset made by Macfarlane and his friends in 2004 and 2011 to find one of the ancient, sunken paths (hollow ways) that can be found carved into the soft landscape of Britain. “A route that centuries of foot-fall, hoof-hit, wheel-roll, and rain-run have harrowed into the land”.

As in other books he has written, the sense of place is strong in Ghostways, the experience of place not as something “out there” but as a realm in which a person can travel and slip – from one moment to the next – from the present into the past or the future. Language isn’t just how such experiences are communicated to oneself and others, but integral to the experiences themselves. Words are more than words, places are more than places. To experience is to express, and to express is to experience. In movement we encounter language, and in word-making we effect movement and change in the world. Places, like words, are vulnerable to loss, but both can be recovered with care and with sensitivity to our lived experience. Ghostways is a powerful and affecting hymn to the vulnerability of our world, and a strange and gentle reminder to us all to live in it fully and sensitively.

A woman sits in prison awaiting trial for murder. She dismisses her lawyer, preferring to conduct her own defense in spite of having no prior legal experience. How does she prove her innocence while incarcerated? Two thirds of House of Correction takes place within the prison, with the final third dedicated to the trial itself and its aftermath. Nicci French sets herself an interesting challenge, but it’s one she fails to pull off. Why? For the age-old reason that neither the central character nor the story line are interesting enough to make the experiment worthwhile. Plot ingenuity is all very well, but in itself it’s not enough to make a compelling novel.

Some books change how you think. The change is often a minute but permanent adjustment to how you see, experience, and explain the world, a deep, transformational shift that’s not necessarily visible to anyone else but you. Caste is such a book. It’s one of the two truly remarkable books I read in 2020, the other being Robert Macfarlane’s Underland.

America’s shameful history of racism is an ugly tapestry made up of millions of individual acts of discrimination, hatred, violence, and murder. Every generation, for more than three hundred years, has added to that tapestry and intensified its ugliness. Its persistence is due not just to those who actively wove it but to those who stood back and did nothing as it took shape. Isabel Wilkerson looks at American racism through the lens of caste, identifying and exploring parallels in two other notorious caste systems, the antisemitism of the Third Reich and the rigid, religiously defended divisions of India.

Although it has all the usual trimmings of an academic work (pages of notes, bibliography, and so on), Caste is written with the kind of affecting directness and warmth that is rarely displayed in a work of scholarship. It’s that combination that gives the book its remarkable power and authority. Wilkerson isn’t striving for lofty detachment. She wants to change her readers, their perceptions and attitudes. Whether or not you accept her central premise about caste (I did, but not entirely) doesn’t much matter ultimately. What matters is that her utterly compelling and brilliantly written account of racism in America should shake our understanding and that the jolt should reverberate insistently until far-reaching and permanent change is achieved.

Anyone who knows the work of Robert Macfarlane knows that it’s suffused with a sense of loss. Lost words, lost creatures, lost habitats. His most recent book, The Lost Spells, picks up the theme and opens with these words. “Loss is the tune of our age, hard to miss and hard to bear. Creatures, places and words disappear, day after day, year on year”.

This is Macfarlane’s second collaboration with the brilliant artist, Jackie Morris. It’s a gorgeous set of spells or incantations to be read aloud, celebrating the beauty and fragility of the natural world. Various birds, trees, and creatures are rendered in stunning combinations of words and pictures. Vivid enchantments for our beautiful, endangered world.

There are many celebrated contemporary novelists whose work I have never read. Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Stephen King, Michael Chabon, to name only a few. These omissions don’t bother me much. I’ll get to them eventually or I won’t. In other words, knowing they’re out there, famous and unread (by me), isn’t enough in itself to make me read their books. If, however, I learn about a well regarded novelist I’ve never even heard of before, I feel flashes of curiosity and irritation about my own ignorance that are strong enough to push me to the bookshop. That happened recently when I saw a profile in the FT of Mary Gaitskill. My local bookseller, who’s usually too well-mannered to show her disapproval about the gaps in my reading experience, was nevertheless surprised and suggested I start with the short story collection that launched Gaitskill’s career in the late 1980s called Bad Behavior.

Having now read these nine stories, I can better understand why Gaitskill’s reputation is so high and why her distinct and unusual style is so celebrated. The cast of characters here is uniformly unattractive and occasionally loathsome – cruel, narcissistic, exploitative, and deluded. But, unappealing as these people are, there’s a slice of life captured in these strange, cinematic stories, that feels vivid and authentic. I can’t recall reading in recent years anything about human relationships quite so relentlessly bleak as this collection, but it’s a testimony to Gaitskill’s talent that each of these small vignettes of unhappiness and solitude is made so compelling and memorable.