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The 100 greatest novels of all time
The British love to read and, as the BBC prepares to reveal the nation's best loved books, The Observer has compiled its own list of essential fiction from the past 300 years. Don't like the list? Feel free to disagree and put your thoughts direct to Robert McCrum
Sunday October 12, 2003
The Observer
Britain is a nation of inveterate book readers. Per capita, we borrow, buy, and possibly steal, more books than any country on earth. Literary festivals and book clubs, an extraordinary contemporary phenomenon, flourish here as nowhere else. Like Shakespeare's Don Armado and Holofernes we have 'lived long on the alms-basket of words'; we have eaten folios and drunk ink.
In a few days, the BBC's Big Read campaign is going to ignite this papery landscape in a firestorm of bookish discussion. In place of the eternal 'What shall I read next?', a series of nine programmes will answer that not-so-simple question, 'What's my favourite novel?' and broadcast the result of a massive poll into the nation's 'best loved' books.
The BBC should be congratulated on this bold initiative, which is bound to excite controversy. It's safe to predict that there will be every possible reaction, from eye-rolling disdain to chin-wagging enthusiasm. Lists - we love them and loathe them. Books - we care passionately about our reading. The books on the bedside table and in the coat pocket shape the inner landscape of our secret lives. Put the two together and you have the fissile materials for some literary fireworks.
Here at The Observer, we have no idea what the BBC's list, a closely guarded secret, will look like, though we have heard on the grapevine that it reflects the popular reading preferences of the past 20 years. No doubt Gandalf and Harry Potter will be competing for votes with Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett. To add to the debate, and to join the beginnings of a national conversation, we have humbly compiled our own list of One Hundred Books which, we felt, our readers could not do without.
Ours is not a list of 'best loved' books. It is less sentimental, and probably less contemporary. It is a catalogue of just a hundred 'essential' titles - as we see it. Of course it is not scientific. Neither Mori nor Gallup was involved. It is partial, prejudiced and highly personal. It reflects whim and fashion. And as we compiled it we began to see actually how difficult - even questionable - the idea of such a unified literary inheritance has become at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Even more agonising are the impossibly hard choices that a list of a hundred forces one to make.
First of all, our list is fundamentally English and inevitably reflects the age, sex and education of its Observer contributors. We started with an intra-office email, inviting nominations for a top 10. The matrix of replies produced a surprising unanimity.
Top of the list were the universal favourites: Austen and Dickens, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. When a vociferous and influential minority, led by the editor, argued for Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales, we had to introduce a few basic rules. This is a list of prose fiction, not poetry, and not plays. Never mind that Beowulf has the same plot as Jaws, it's a long poem in Old English, by Anon. This rule also eliminated the Iliad and the Odyssey, both of which are, by any standards, books for a desert island. In that category we also included the Authorised Version of the Bible.
The play and poetry rule also excluded Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot and Auden. With great reluctance we also decided that The Canterbury Tales could not be part of our list. We began at the beginning, with Daniel Defoe and the founding fathers of the English novel. So far, so good.
But what about the European tradition? A new set of anxieties hove into view. Ever since Skelton translated Don Quixote, English readers have been dazzled and diverted by the importation of foreign classics. The English Channel exercises its own rough form of literary criticism, and no doubt some important French, Spanish and German titles have been overlooked down the centuries, but we felt we could not exclude, for example, Cervantes, Laclos or Flaubert. Among reluctant omissions were Victor Hugo and Chateaubriand.
Once we had passed the Romantics and reached the Victorians, a coherent English list became further complicated by the competing claims of American literature. Just as many nineteenth-century English writers crossed the Atlantic to find audiences and make money in the New World, so American writers became enthusiastically adopted here. Once again, we let the tastes of previous generations of English readers shape the list. Exercising some retrospective affirmative action, we replaced James Fennimore Cooper with Melville and Hawthorne.
By the turn of the century, the Anglo-American literary hegemony was firmly established but, to modern tastes, it has become alarmingly dominated by men: James, Crane, Kipling, Wells... You have to look hard to find a woman writer of any consequence, excluding E. Nesbit and Beatrix Potter, between, say, 1880 and 1910. The achievement of Virginia Woolf is all the more remarkable for its assertion of the woman's right to join what had become an exclusive men's club.
The mass mobilisation of the Great War finally enfranchised women. It also revolutionised British reading habits. With the arrival of mass culture, which had been in development from late Victorian times, a new strain creeps into the list: the genre novel, from spy thrillers to science fiction. We have tried to select the most distinguished examples of these but are only too painfully aware that some important examples, especially of detective fiction, have been left out.
One genre that accounted for several valuable nominations was children's books but, in finding space for Philip Pullman, we had to exclude Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series and C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which some will find perverse, even baffling. Julia Donaldson's The Gruffalo , another recent children's book for which The Observer has shown a particular liking, was also excluded for being a picture book for the under fives. We had to draw the line somewhere.
Time is a ruthless critic. Books that 50 years ago seemed essential have already dwindled in significance. Virtually nothing survives from 1903. After the Twenties, and after the watershed of Modernism, there are decades when many of the books we considered seemed to be scarcely more than footnotes to the works of Joyce and Woolf.
Approaching our own time, if you were to characterise the postwar English literary tradition in a single phrase it would be: The Empire Strikes Back.
The proliferation of competing literatures from Australia, India, Canada and South Africa has produced a host of important writers, from David Malouf and Rohinton Mistry to Michael Ondaatje and the recent Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee. The superabundant vitality of so-called Commonwealth literature has made it correspondingly difficult to arrive at a list that has the earlier clarity and simplicity. Gone are the days when almost all the English writers of consequence lived within a short coach ride of one another.
From so many points of view, this has also been a golden age of Anglo-American writing: there has certainly been strong competition from the United States, though The Observer's list has not found space for a number of important figures, from John Steinbeck to Lorrie Moore.
At times, a Top Hundred seems cruelly limited. Several women writers were edged out by the intense contemporary competition for space, and also by the inclusion of big names from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Among the men, too, in the battle for space, there were some other notable casualties. How - alas - could we leave out Christopher Isherwood and Jonathan Coe whose What a Carve Up!, a memorably indignant comic assault on Thatcher's Britain, has been one of The Observer's favourite contemporary novels? No doubt there are many more we have wrongly overlooked. This was always a list intended to provoke discussion.
There's a further difficulty about selecting contemporary work. The books you read as a teenager, the books you devour in all-night sittings, are the books that enter your imaginative bloodstream like a fierce, exotic drug and stay with you for decades. These are the titles you are likely to nominate for such a list. But The Observer is not written by teenagers. Already it is too late for the books of the 1990s to have that narcotic effect.
No doubt in 20 years' time another list will include Don DeLillo's Underworld, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Monica Ali's Brick Lane. For the moment, our list largely draws a line at 1989.
The year the Wall came down was the end of an era in a double sense. In historical terms it saw the end of the Cold War that had provided the political backdrop to two generations of European writing. In English literary terms, it was the end of a decade that had seen the emergence of an exceptional new generation, from William Boyd and Timothy Mo to Maggie Gee and Vikram Seth. Those, I remember, were stirring times for new fiction. It is tempting to declare 1980, the year of Midnight's Children, as a literary Year Zero. Tempting but wrong. We cannot ignore our inheritance.
Who did we miss?
So, are you congratulating yourself on having read everything on our list or screwing the newspaper up into a ball and aiming it at the nearest bin?
Are you wondering what happened to all those American writers from Bret Easton Ellis to Jeffrey Eugenides, from Jonathan Franzen to Cormac McCarthy?
Have women been short-changed? Should we have included Pat Barker, Elizabeth Bowen, A.S. Byatt, Penelope Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch?
What's happened to novels in translation such as Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Hesse's Siddhartha, Mishima's The Sea of Fertility, Süskind's Perfume and Zola's Germinal?
Writers such as J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Anthony Burgess, Bruce Chatwin, Robertson Davies, John Fowles, Nick Hornby, Russell Hoban, Somerset Maugham and V.S. Pritchett narrowly missed the final hundred. Were we wrong to lose them?
Let us know what you think. Send your own suggestions for the 100 best books ever to:
observer@guardianunlimited.co.uk
Or debate the choices live with Robert McCrum at 3pm on Wednesday.
Don't like the list? Put your thoughts direct to Robert McCrum
Sunday October 12, 2003
The Observer
1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes
The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers for centuries.
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2. Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan
The one with the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair.
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3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
The first English novel.
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4. Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift
A wonderful satire that still works for all ages, despite the savagery of Swift's vision.
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5. Tom Jones Henry Fielding
The adventures of a high-spirited orphan boy: an unbeatable plot and a lot of sex ending in a blissful marriage.
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6. Clarissa Samuel Richardson
One of the longest novels in the English language, but unputdownable.
7. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne
One of the first bestsellers, dismissed by Dr Johnson as too fashionable for its own good.
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8. Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
An epistolary novel and a handbook for seducers: foppish, French, and ferocious.
9. Emma Jane Austen
Near impossible choice between this and Pride and Prejudice. But Emma never fails to fascinate and annoy.
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10. Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Inspired by spending too much time with Shelley and Byron.
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11. Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love Peacock
A classic miniature: a brilliant satire on the Romantic novel.
12. The Black Sheep Honore De Balzac
Two rivals fight for the love of a femme fatale. Wrongly overlooked.
13. The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal
Penetrating and compelling chronicle of life in an Italian court in post-Napoleonic France.
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14. The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
A revenge thriller also set in France after Bonaparte: a masterpiece of adventure writing.
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15. Sybil Benjamin Disraeli
Apart from Churchill, no other British political figure shows literary genius.
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16. David Copperfield Charles Dickens
This highly autobiographical novel is the one its author liked best.
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17. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have passed into the language. Impossible to ignore.
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18. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
Obsessive emotional grip and haunting narrative.
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19. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
The improving tale of Becky Sharp.
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20. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
A classic investigation of the American mind.
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21. Moby Dick Herman Melville
'Call me Ishmael' is one of the most famous opening sentences of any novel.
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22. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
You could summarise this as a story of adultery in provincial France, and miss the point entirely.
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23. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins
Gripping mystery novel of concealed identity, abduction, fraud and mental cruelty.
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24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll
A story written for the nine-year-old daughter of an Oxford don that still baffles most kids.
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25. Little Women Louisa M. Alcott
Victorian bestseller about a New England family of girls.
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26. The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope
A majestic assault on the corruption of late Victorian England.
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27. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
The supreme novel of the married woman's passion for a younger man.
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28. Daniel Deronda George Eliot
A passion and an exotic grandeur that is strange and unsettling.
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29. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky
Mystical tragedy by the author of Crime and Punishment.
30. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James
The story of Isabel Archer shows James at his witty and polished best.
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31. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
Twain was a humorist, but this picture of Mississippi life is profoundly moral and still incredibly influential.
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32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson
A brilliantly suggestive, resonant study of human duality by a natural storyteller.
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33. Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome
One of the funniest English books ever written.
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34. The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde
A coded and epigrammatic melodrama inspired by his own tortured homosexuality.
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35. The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith
This classic of Victorian suburbia will always be renowned for the character of Mr Pooter.
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36. Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy
Its savage bleakness makes it one of the first twentieth-century novels.
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37. The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers
A prewar invasion-scare spy thriller by a writer later shot for his part in the Irish republican rising.
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38. The Call of the Wild Jack London
The story of a dog who joins a pack of wolves after his master's death.
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39. Nostromo Joseph Conrad
Conrad's masterpiece: a tale of money, love and revolutionary politics.
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40. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame
This children's classic was inspired by bedtime stories for Grahame's son.
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41. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust
An unforgettable portrait of Paris in the belle epoque. Probably the longest novel on this list.
42. The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence
Novels seized by the police, like this one, have a special afterlife.
43. The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford
This account of the adulterous lives of two Edwardian couples is a classic of unreliable narration.
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44. The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan
A classic adventure story for boys, jammed with action, violence and suspense.
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45. Ulysses James Joyce
Also pursued by the British police, this is a novel more discussed than read.
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46. Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf
Secures Woolf's position as one of the great twentieth-century English novelists.
47. A Passage to India E. M. Forster
The great novel of the British Raj, it remains a brilliant study of empire.
48. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
The quintessential Jazz Age novel.
49. The Trial Franz Kafka
The enigmatic story of Joseph K.
50. Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway
He is remembered for his novels, but it was the short stories that first attracted notice.
51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The experiences of an unattractive slum doctor during the Great War: a masterpiece of linguistic innovation.
52. As I Lay Dying William Faulkner
A strange black comedy by an American master.
53. Brave New World Aldous Huxley
Dystopian fantasy about the world of the seventh century AF (after Ford).
54. Scoop Evelyn Waugh
The supreme Fleet Street novel.
55. USA John Dos Passos
An extraordinary trilogy that uses a variety of narrative devices to express the story of America.
56. The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler
Introducing Philip Marlowe: cool, sharp, handsome - and bitterly alone.
57. The Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford
An exquisite comedy of manners with countless fans.
58. The Plague Albert Camus
A mysterious plague sweeps through the Algerian town of Oran.
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
This tale of one man's struggle against totalitarianism has been appropriated the world over.
60. Malone Dies Samuel Beckett
Part of a trilogy of astonishing monologues in the black comic voice of the author of Waiting for Godot.
61. Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
A week in the life of Holden Caulfield. A cult novel that still mesmerises.
62. Wise Blood Flannery O'Connor
A disturbing novel of religious extremism set in the Deep South.
63. Charlotte's Web E. B. White
How Wilbur the pig was saved by the literary genius of a friendly spider.
64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
Enough said!
65. Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis
An astonishing debut: the painfully funny English novel of the Fifties.
66. Lord of the Flies William Golding
Schoolboys become savages: a bleak vision of human nature.
67. The Quiet American Graham Greene
Prophetic novel set in 1950s Vietnam.
68 On the Road Jack Kerouac
The Beat Generation bible.
69. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert's obsession with Lolita is a tour de force of style and narrative.
70. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass
Hugely influential, Rabelaisian novel of Hitler's Germany.
71. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
Nigeria at the beginning of colonialism. A classic of African literature.
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
A writer who made her debut in The Observer - and her prose is like cut glass.
73. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee
Scout, a six-year-old girl, narrates an enthralling story of racial prejudice in the Deep South.
74. Catch-22 Joseph Heller
'[He] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.'
75. Herzog Saul Bellow
Adultery and nervous breakdown in Chicago.
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A postmodern masterpiece.
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor
A haunting, understated study of old age.
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carre
A thrilling elegy for post-imperial Britain.
79. Song of Solomon Toni Morrison
The definitive novelist of the African-American experience.
80. The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge
Macabre comedy of provincial life.
81. The Executioner's Song Norman Mailer
This quasi-documentary account of the life and death of Gary Gilmore is possibly his masterpiece.
82. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino
A strange, compelling story about the pleasures of reading.
83. A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul
The finest living writer of English prose. This is his masterpiece: edgily reminiscent of Heart of Darkness.
84. Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee
Bleak but haunting allegory of apartheid by the Nobel prizewinner.
85. Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson
Haunting, poetic story, drowned in water and light, about three generations of women.
86. Lanark Alasdair Gray
Seething vision of Glasgow. A Scottish classic.
87. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster
Dazzling metaphysical thriller set in the Manhattan of the 1970s.
88. The BFG Roald Dahl
A bestseller by the most popular postwar writer for children of all ages.
89. The Periodic Table Primo Levi
A prose poem about the delights of chemistry.
90. Money Martin Amis
The novel that bags Amis's place on any list.
91. An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro
A collaborator from prewar Japan reluctantly discloses his betrayal of friends and family.
92. Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey
A great contemporary love story set in nineteenth-century Australia by double Booker prizewinner.
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera
Inspired by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, this is a magical fusion of history, autobiography and ideas.
94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories Salman Rushdie
In this entrancing story Rushdie plays with the idea of narrative itself.
95. La Confidential James Ellroy
Three LAPD detectives are brought face to face with the secrets of their corrupt and violent careers.
96. Wise Children Angela Carter
A theatrical extravaganza by a brilliant exponent of magic realism.
97. Atonement Ian McEwan
Acclaimed short-story writer achieves a contemporary classic of mesmerising narrative conviction.
98. Northern Lights Philip Pullman
Lyra's quest weaves fantasy, horror and the play of ideas into a truly great contemporary children's book.
99. American Pastoral Philip Roth
For years, Roth was famous for Portnoy's Complaint . Recently, he has enjoyed an extraordinary revival.
100. Austerlitz W. G. Sebald
Posthumously published volume in a sequence of dream-like fictions spun from memory, photographs and the German past.
Who did we miss?
So, are you congratulating yourself on having read everything on our list or screwing the newspaper up into a ball and aiming it at the nearest bin?
Are you wondering what happened to all those American writers from Bret Easton Ellis to Jeffrey Eugenides, from Jonathan Franzen to Cormac McCarthy?
Have women been short-changed? Should we have included Pat Barker, Elizabeth Bowen, A.S. Byatt, Penelope Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch?
What's happened to novels in translation such as Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Hesse's Siddhartha, Mishima's The Sea of Fertility, Süskind's Perfume and Zola's Germinal?
Writers such as J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Anthony Burgess, Bruce Chatwin, Robertson Davies, John Fowles, Nick Hornby, Russell Hoban, Somerset Maugham and V.S. Pritchett narrowly missed the final hundred. Were we wrong to lose them?
Let us know what you think. Send your own suggestions for the 100 best books ever to:
observer@guardianunlimited.co.uk
Or debate the choices live with Robert McCrum at 3pm on Wednesday