20th Century Foxed - my favourite 30 novels

I’m currently rereading one of my favourite novels, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (I’ve joined a book group and it’s the one we’re kicking off with, as no one else had read it, and I bigged it up - now I’m worried they’ll all hate it!). 

Given how often I use the phrase “That’s one of the all-time great novels”, I decided, in the early hours of this morning, to list my Top 30 20th Century novels off the top of my head – i.e. without reference to the bookshelves or online lists. (I actually meant it to be a Top 20, but I got to that number without drawing breath.)

Each author was allowed no more than one entry, but I cheated by counting  trilogies and groups of books about one character as one big book. I tried not to include works just because they were intriguingly obscure, or because they would make me look intellectual or well-read. I decided not to exclude genre books, as they’ve loomed so large in my life, and many of them are much better written than the majority of those pretentious whingefests that regularly deface the Booker shortlist. 

I came up with about forty to start with, then boiled  the list down by only including works I’d be eager to read again - and again. I also tried not to include novels where my high opinion might have been over-influenced by seeing the movie version first. (Contrariwise, I’ve never seen Speilberg’s film of Schindler’s Ark, because I enjoyed the book so much.)

In each case, these books had an immediate impact on first reading, and have resonated in the mind ever since. While they had to have someliterary merit, the list is not based on literary merit.

Here, in no particular order, we go:

The Master and Margarita, Mikail Bulgakov

The Orchid Trilogy, Jocelyn Brooke

The Gormenghast Trilogy, Mervyn Peake

The Levant and Balkan Trilogies, Olivia Manning 

The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov (could have been Lolita)

Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh

Queen’s Gambit, Walter Tevis

Any Human Heart, William Boyd

The Mask of Dimitrios, Eric Ambler

Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd

The Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood (Prater Violet, Mr. Norris Changes Trains, Goodbye to Berlin)

The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith 

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis

Code of the Woosters, P.G. Wodehouse 

Schindler’s Ark, Thomas Keneally

Dune, Frank Herbert (the sequels are unreadable)

The George Smiley Novels, John le Carré ((Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is probably my favourite)

The Magus, John Fowles

A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving

Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons 

The Malayan Trilogy, Anthony Burgess

The Siege of Krishnapur, J.G. Farrell

The Claudius Novels, Robert Graves

Salem’s Lot, Stephen King (could have been The Shining, or, indeed, TheTalisman, co-written with Peter Straub)

The Secret History, Donna Tartt

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Persig (often dismissed as New Age twaddle, but I loved it – several times)

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Bubbling under: 

1984, George Orwell

Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak  (again, I saw the movie first, but the book was infinitely better) 

Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut

Rites of Passage, William Golding

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee  (but I saw the film first, so I’m not sure)

Dead Babies, Martin Amis 

Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow

The House on the Borderland, William Hope Hodgson (not well written, but truly weird)

The Stars my Destination, Alfred Bester  (he and Robert Sheckley are the most sparkling speculative fiction authors I’ve ever read)

Regeneration Trilogy, Pat Barker

My favourite children’s books were Richard Adams’s Watership Down, C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, and How to be Topp by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle, while the most over-rated book of the century was undoubtedly Salman Rushdie’s execrable Midnight’s Children.