The Results Are In...

You voted in your scores (well, a score to be exact) and I can now reveal the results of the Books, Time, and Silence greatest literary achievement of the last decade poll:

In first place, with a whopping 7 (yes seven!) votes is JK Rowling for not only getting people reading, but inspiring fun launch evenings the world over. Given the pressure she was under, just completing the series has to be seen as a pretty big achievement in itself. So congratulations to JK, I'm sure this award will mean just as much to her as the giant cheques she routinely receives from Bloomsbury.

In second place – and my own choice despite holding mixed opinions on A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – comes Dave Eggers. Eggers was shortlisted not just for his writing, but the contributions he has made to literature in a wider context. McSweeneys has established itself at the forefront of literary journals while 826 Valencia is an inspirational model for how to engage young people in writing activities. On their own each of these is a great achievement. Put together they are nothing short of remarkable.

Finally, tied for the bronze medal (there are no medals) we have one of my favourite books of the decade, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and Carol Ann Duffy becoming the first female Poet Laureate. I'm still more impressed by her popularity than gender, but since they are so linked in her poetry it is difficult to separate one from the other.

Congratulations all. They are achievements worthy of a doffing of the cap.

The full results are:

• JK Rowling - 7 Votes 
• Dave Eggers - 4 Votes
• Cormac McCarthy - 3 Votes
• Carol Ann Duffy - 3 Votes
• Naomi Klein - 2 Votes
• Jonathan Safran Foer - 2 Votes
• Yann Martel - 1 Vote
• The person who designed the jacket for The Da Vinci Code - 0 Votes
• Richard Dawkins - 0 Votes
• David Peace - 0 Votes

A huge thank you to all who voted. 22 votes may not sound a lot, but I treasure each and every one. And if you disagree with the outcome, please comment below. It is always a pleasure to see what other people think.

To summarise: Bill Gates joins Twitter and within 14 hours has 150,000 followers. I get 22 votes spread over one week (and 50 hits in a day!) on my utterly pointless blog. I ask you: which one of us is the richer man?

Poppy Shakespeare - Clare Allan

Read: April 2007

Clare Allen’s debut novel has been one of the best received debuts of the last year. Shortlisted for the Guardian First Book award, Longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and favourite to win the Orange New Writers title, her novel about a Mental Health hospital in North London has struck a nerve with readers and critics alike.

It is told through the eyes of N, a self-confessed ‘dribbler’ whose only ambition is never to be discharged. But when Poppy Shakespeare arrives sporting snakeskin heals and insisting she is not crazy N’s routine life is thrown into chaos. Together they must prove that Poppy really isn’t mad, but they are in a Cactch-22 situation: to prove she is sane she must pretend to be mad. What follows is a journey to the very heart of the bureaucratic hypocrisy of modern mental health care and a wry and terrifying liturgy on the impossibility of being an individual faced with the power of the system.

Comparisons to Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest have inevitably gushed from the pens of critics. There is certainly something of the surreal absurdity of Catch-22 here, although it is not as laugh-out-loud funny. In its potential ramifications for the perception of mental health care in Britain its legacy could be as great as One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. The story is perfect for film adaptation, the characters fresh and instantly likeable. The story is written in N’s vernacular dialect which takes a little getting used to but is used consistently well and N grows to become a wonderful anti-hero.

Poppy Shakespeare owes something to Clare Allen’s own biography. Her eye for irony and well honed observations were learned during her own ten year stint in a mental-health day centre. This experience, far from making this story overly emotional or self indulgent, gives ‘Poppy Shakespeare’ a real air of authenticity. The portrayal of the claustrophobic world of the Dorothy Fish is so alive with insight that you come away from it with real and justifiable fears. It is a book which asks the most elemental of questions: who is mad? Who is sane? And most importantly, who decides?

Clare Allen has written a very good debut novel, it is technically astute and a moving story. Few books should be made required reading, but this in all its political incorrectness, is one of them.

7 out of 10

The Outlander - Gil Adamson

It is a cold night, and the widow is fleeing across thee wilds of Canada, desperate to escape the two identical twins pursuing her. She is tired, cold, and hungry, still mourning the loss of her child, and in shock at the murder she has just committed. If they catch her, she is doomed. But she is a survivor, of that there is no doubt, and as her flight leads her into ever more perilous terrain, it is only her adaptability and strength that will give her any chance of survival.

The Outlander is a good debut novel, well written and with a powerful plot and some interesting characters. Its feel lies somewhere between the bleakness of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, the very female survival instinct of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, and something of the cold road to perdition of a book I know I have read but cannot for the life of me think what it is. Perhaps it is the cold liberation of this books setting.

I read The Outlander after it was highly recommended to me by a colleague, and I have to say that while I thought it was good, I am not sure it is great. There is something which prevented me from loving it. The plot is excintingish, but not quite gripping enough. The characters are likeable, but not strong enough for me to empathise with. The prose is okay, but the tense is too far in the past for my liking, as though the book is written as a history of another time.

The Outlander comes to this side of Atlantic after huge praise in its native Canada where the likes of Michael Ondaatje and Ann Patchett have garnished it with high praise. It was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and big things are expected from it here. Perhaps I am wrong, but I just didn’t quite get what all the fuss is about.

5.5 out of 10