LITERATURE: Web sites become increasingly elaborate, offering information in the speedy sound bites designed for our hasty society. Yet somehow, amid the chaos, impatience and absence of that luxury called time, the Book remains one of our most enduring feats of engineering.
The visual image, as Don DeLillo warned, threatens the word, but we still read. Imagination is our ultimate refuge as one highly original genius, J.R.R. Tolkien continues to prove. If it took the first movie of three to lure cinema-goers and readers back to the most mesmerising and sophisticated of literary fantasy trilogies - so much the better. And the sophistication of the imagination certainly began the literary year when finally an awards judging panel saw that the finest book and most obvious winner were one and the same and Philip Pullman won the Whitbread Book of the Year with The Amber Spyglass, the spectacular finale to the His Dark Materials trilogy.
It was a year that also began with a US literary master, one Saul Bellow, continuing at 85 to swagger justifiably with the late winter publication of his hugely impressive Collected Stories - the only catch was the gushy, cringingly coy preface added by his new fifth wife projecting herself as his muse. The Bellow collection was the only big offering from the US. The major American writers did not disappoint, they simply didn't publish in 2002 - aside from a good novel by Sue Miller, The World Below and a fine late summer collection from Richard Russo. The Whore's Child confirmed that with his shades of a darker Anne Tyler crossed with Russell Banks, Russo - author of big, fat enjoyable domestic epics such as Nobody's Fool and Empire Falls - could also perform well over the shorter distances.
A less celebrated, but convincingly gifted US writer, William Gay from the depths of Tennessee, a mix of Southern Gothic and the Coen Brothers, followed up the UK success of his second novel Provinces of Night, with a UK publication of his first, The Long Home. Approaching 60, here's a writer to consider.
In the absence of the major US novelists, came the long awaited second novels of two former outstanding debutants.
Since 1993 and The Virgin Suicides, a first novel in a million, Jeffrey Eugenides, has epitomised all that is to be admired in literary fiction; he has imagination, humour, precision, perfect tone, mastery of nuance, possesses daring, never labours for effect, is devoid of pretence, is original, writes like an artist, has something to say and respects story. What second novel can emulate all that? Well, nine years on comes Middlesex, a genetic odyssey, family story, history of 20th century America, chronicle of immigration and cultural assimilation. It is also, most importantly, a profound exploration of the always difficult business of growing up. It is funny; engagingly, vividly written with sufficient comic set pieces and plot twists to ensure the reader is hooked until page 529. If Middlesex is somehow not quite the book it could have been, it is largely because The Virgin Suicides, sustained by its sinister glamour of grace, mystery and horror, is so seductive, so chillingly good.
Donna Tartt, whose The Secret History (1992) is clever, if never approaching the surreal perfection of Eugenides's debut, finally presented her second novel. The Little Friendis an amusing but contrived and irritatingly self-regarding "little" novel running in execss of 500 overstated, over-written pages.
Along with absent US masters was the lack of the fourth Harry Potter novel - Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry appears to have taken an extended school holiday. Still, readers had Tolkien, Pullman and the exciting Bisto Book of the Year, Kate Thompson's The Beguilers, a strange, philosophical and profound allegory exploring the quest for knowledge. So, a special novel emerged through the ranks of a prize.
The same could be said of Madame by Poland's Antoni Libera. Erotic, funny, subtle and sad, its emergence was the achievement of this year's International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Although won by Michel Houellebecq's funny, provocative, at times sleazy, Atomised, IMPAC's real contribution was highlighting Madame. It is published by Cannongate in Edinburgh which claimed this year's Booker with Life of Pi and unleashed a stylish Victorian romp of no pretension and much humour, Michel Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White.
Speaking of pretension, whatever about a goodish Booker shortlist marred by Sarah Waters's slick Fingersmith, look to the longlist, which included some very poor British fiction including Jon McGregor's vastly pretentious If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things and Zadie Smith's haphazard one-gag shambles, The Autograph Man.
The year's disappointment was Fragrant Harbour, half a fine novel at the mercy of a mediocre other half. John Lanchester is gifted, which makes the novel's failure all the more baffling. Milan Kundera has long since give up on fiction, but Ignorance is an enjoyable quasi-intellectual interlude harbouring genuine feeling and emotion.
So to the year's most important book; Orlando Figes followed his history of the Russian Revolution, A People's Tragedy, with another masterpiece Natasha's Dance, spanning three centuries of cultural change in Russia.
As for the most beautiful, uplifting book? The Snow Geese by William Fiennes follows these majestic birds on their inspiring journey from Texas to the Arctic. Should you fear books have had their day, read this and reconsider.
Eileeen Battersby will be choosing her top fiction of the year in Saturday's Weekend Review.
