The January Book Poll – State of the Nation
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
A best selling anti-slavery novel, subtitled Life Among the Lowly, that helped to intensify the
conflict between slave-owning and abolitionist states which led ultimately to the outbreak of the
American civil war in 1861. Although committed to showing the cruelty of the slave-owning
system, Stowe perpetuated several stereotypes, most obviously in the figure of the black slave
Uncle Tom, who is portrayed as a deeply loyal and long-suffering family servant. The term "Uncle
Tom" has long been used to describe a black person who is over-deferential towards white
culture.
Kathryn Hughes
Albert Camus: The Plague (1947)
Often described as an allegory of German occupation and French resistance during the second
world war, Camus's novel about the reaction of an Algerian town to an outbreak of plague is
broader in scope and ambition. Not so much of an allegory, then, as a Kafkaesque parable (Camus
acknowledged the debt): it is about the human condition, in short, but never — unlike, say, his
contemporary Jean-Paul Sartre's work — heavy-handedly so.
Nicholas Lezard
Don DeLillo: White Noise (1985)
Jack Gladney is nesting comfortably, teaching Hitler studies in a bland Midwestern college town,
when a nebulously menacing "airborne toxic event" nearby takes the stopper off his chronic fear
of dying. It turns out that his life has been taking an experimental drug — Dylar — which is meant
to muffle the same terrors. Attuned like no other novel to the perplexities that hum away at the
margins of everyday experience, White Noise remains the most precise, and killingly funny,
portrayal of the way we live now.
Lindesay Irvine
Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
The titular cities are Paris and London. It is the best and worst of times: the age of revolution. Dr
Manette has been falsely imprisoned in the Bastille by the Marquis St Evrémonde. The doctor,
whose wits are gone, is rescued by a lawyer, Lorry, and brought to England with his daughter,
Lucie. The wicked Marquis's virtuous nephew, Charles Darnay, who loves Lucie, bears a striking
resemblance to the shiftless lawyer Sidney Carton, who later sacrifices himself on the guillotine to
save the lovers and makes the immortal eclaration: "It is a far better thing that I do, than I have
ever done." The Victorians loved this novel.
John Sutherland
EL Doctorow: The Book of Daniel (1971)
A novel spun from the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the pair of small-time communists who,
accused of passing atomic secrets to the Soviets, were executed by the US authorities in 1953. The
novel's hero is the son of scapegoats, scarred by the past and labouring to lay its demons to rest.
Doctorow's masterwork mounts an angry, impassioned study of the American left, contrasting
hardscrabble 1950s radicalism with 1960s counter-culture. Daniel's conclusion: "It's a lot easier to
be a revolutionary now than it used to be."
Xan Brooks
Theodor Fontane: Effi Briest (1896)
Effi von Briest, 17, gets married to a general twice her age, but her emotional life is stifled by the
tight net of social conventions in Bismarck's Germany. An affair with another offi cer ends in a
pointless but lethal duel. A Prussian Madame Bovary by one of the masters of 19th-century
realism, Effi Briest still makes for rich and rewarding reading. Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 1974 film
adaptation is worth watching, even if its full title is less succinct: Those who have a notion of their
capabilities and needs and yet accept the ruling system in their heads and through their actions
and affirm and even justify it thus."
Philip Oltermann
Colin MacInnes: Absolute Beginners (1959)
Never mind the disastrous 1980s fi lm adaptation: Colin MacInnes's novel is a peach. Not only is it
a snapshot of London at a particularly febrile time — as postwar austerity gives way to the first
stirrings of the "swinging" era — it also examines a new ethnic melting-pot, as immigrants from
the West Indies arrive in signifi cant numbers. It's all seen through the eyes of a never-named
teenage mod, a perfect vehicle for MacInnes' Runyonesque prose and mordant humour.
Andrew Pulver
David Malouf: Remembering Babylon (1993)
It begins with the unreality of a fairy tale: three children in a remote Australian settlement in the
mid-1850s see a stranger, not quite human, balancing precariously on a fence, somewhere
between earth and heaven. Their family takes hi in but contact with Gemmy Fairly, a white man
who has lived with the blacks and is a stranger even to himself, has repercussions for the whole
community. Malouf's wonderful tale of alienation, otherness and love is told with compassion and
insight.
Joanna Hines