The winners of the National Book Awards for 2009 have just been announced. The winners are:

Fiction: Wolf Hall: A Novel by Hilary Mantel
General Nonfiction: The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes
Biography: Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey
Autobiography: Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir by Diana Athill
Poetry: Versed by Rae Armantrout
Criticism: Notes from No Man's Land: American Essays Eula Biss

I own the fiction and the general nonfiction winners; guess it's about time I read them! And the Athill sounds particularly fascinating to me. It is a memoir of old age -- which is creeping up on me faster every year. (I'm not old yet: I'm 53. But I can see it on the horizon.)

Many of the links above are to paperback versions of these books, and for others paperbacks are due out relatively soon.

The Hotel Under the Sand
Kage Baker
Tachyon Publications, 2009
U.S. trade paper, first edition
ISBN 978-1-892391-89-6
144 pages; $8.00

Kage Baker left us on January 31, 2010, at the much-too-young age of 57. Those of us who read and loved her Company novels and short stories, beginning with In the Garden of Iden, will miss her more than we can collectively say – though we tried, in those last few weeks, many of us, to tell her what her work had meant to us.

There is still more of her work to come: The Bird of the River, a fantasy novel set in the same milieu as The Anvil of the World and The House of the Stag, will be published by Tor in July 2010. In the meantime, though, her delightful children’s book, The Hotel Under the Sand, will tide us over.

Nominated for the 2009 Andre Norton Award for Young Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Hotel Under the Sand is the kind of book that you resolve to send to your nieces and nephews even before you have finished the first page. Any book that starts, “Cleverness and bravery are absolutely necessary for good adventures,” is a book you know those budding book lovers in your family are going to enjoy, and maybe even the non-readers who are usually busy playing sports instead. The book starts with a terrible storm, as all good books should (think of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, after all). The storm sweeps Emma away and out to sea, and she must swim for her life. She winds up on an island that has almost nothing but sand – and shipwrecks – for as far as she can see.

Soon, though, she finds that the sand hides something wonderful, and I don’t mean just the ghost who finds her. The Grand Wenlocke, a magnificent hotel, is uncovered by the same storm that brought her to the island. Above the registration desk is a sign that reads, “Time is Forgotten Here,” and sure enough, as long as one remains on the hotel grounds, time outside stands still. The idea was to allow vacationers to spend a month or more without missing more than a weekend or so from their jobs, which I think is an invention that really ought to be perfected in the real world.

The hotel has a magnificent library, of course, putting one in mind of the library from the Disney movie, Beauty and the Beast. There’s a cook who has been there since the hotel slipped under the sand (time stands still, remember; the cook was frozen in time with the hotel, as was the bread she was baking; nothing burned!). A dachshund named Shorty immediately takes to Emma. Before long, a pirate shows up, complete with parrot (yes, this story has everything), and a search for treasure begins. The search has very unusual clues to guide it, and turns up all types of treasures, and even a person who might not be very treasurable at all; it rather depends on how spoiled he is.

The Hotel Under the Sand is an instant classic. Read it to your nine-year-old, or let your 12-year-old read it to you. Or if you’re a grown-up, like me, just sit back and enjoy it. One is never too grown up for this sort of book.

Peripheral Vision
Patricia Ferguson
Other Press, 2008
U.S. hardcover, first U.S. edition
ISBN 978-1-59051-287-6
376 pages; $24.95

Sylvia is a medical specialist; in the nomenclature of the United Kingdom, she is a consultant. Her specialty is eye surgery, and her work with those who have impaired vision forms the continuing metaphor for all of the characters of this confused and confusing novel.

We meet Sylvia first in 1995, shortly after she has had her first baby. Immediately after we learn how tired this baby has made her, we flash back to the tale of how she and her partner came to be together. We learn of the troubled birth of her child, and her lack of love for the infant – and by the end of the chapter, we’re 20 years in the future, after Sylvia has spent all this time caring for a child she did not love.

Do we get the story of how this relationship works next? No; oddly enough, that story is never told in this book. Instead, after 23 pages we switch to Will and his mother, the latter dying, the former a “resting” actor who is taking care of her. After introducing the characters, Ferguson suddenly whisks us to 1953 and the story of an accident suffered by a young boy named George, which tells us about a number of individuals who will come to occupy different niches in this continuing story: George (who has managed to put his eye out), Ruby (his mother), Iris (one of George’s nurses), and Rob (one of the medical students who has observed the surgery).

Then it’s back to 1995 and more about Sylvia for three pages, then back to Will for six pages – and then we’re in 1954, and Rob and Iris are now a couple. The reader now feels dizzy and disoriented, especially because there is no connection at all between any of the characters in the 1950s and the characters in the 1990s; why are these stories all jumbled together?

The answers are very slow in coming, with one revelation uncovered only in the final two or three pages of the book, entirely unforeseen or unforeseeable, and encompassed in a single sentence. In an effort to produce a complicated plot, it seems that the author has started so many threads that she dropped a few stitches somewhere along the line, and has simply gathered them up into a big heaping mess and tied them in a bow at the end of the book.

It’s unfortunate, because there are so many threads that would have supported interesting stories all on their own. I’d like to know more about Sylvia’s relationship with her child, Clio, for instance. By the end of the first chapter I know that Sylvia “was to live for twenty years in the closest possible service of someone she did not love,” but I don’t know what this means, precisely. Is she a cold mother who leaves her child’s care to a nanny, faking enthusiasm on those occasions when she cannot avoid Clio’s company? Is her devotion explained solely by the generous financial support she is able to give the child based on her income as an eye surgeon? How does Clio react to her mother’s disinterested devotion – a contradiction in terms if there ever was one? This could be an entire book in itself, but in fact we learn almost nothing about Clio except that her mother doesn’t love her.

Nor do we learn enough about eye surgery to justify it as a continuing metaphor. There are a few tantalizing tidbits, but this isn’t a story of anyone’s career in the field. It is a merely a device, which diminishes both the force of the metaphor and the power of the book as a whole. I would have enjoyed reading more about eye surgery in the 1950s compared to the 1990s, and the miracles that can be wrought with these strange orbs we all carry in our heads, and use for the sublime pleasure of reading books. Instead, though, we learn tiny bits about England’s class system, lingerie in the immediate aftermath of World War II, French cheeses, British sitcoms and a dozen other things.

I was surprised to read on the cover of this book that it was long-listed for the Orange Prize when it was first published in Great Britain in 2007, and even more surprised to read that this is the author’s sixth novel. I would have guessed that this was a first novel by someone not yet in control of her evident gifts at characterization and historical accuracy. It is promising in some ways, but ultimately no more than an interesting failure.

Peripheral Vision is Patricia Ferguson’s first novel to cross the Atlantic and see publication in the United States. And perhaps that explains it: the book simply didn’t translate to this American reader.