The Booker Prize 2011 Candidates Reviewed
Julian Barnes ‘The Sense of an Ending’ (Jonathan Cape - Random House) £12.99
Rating *****
A certainty for the short list and a possible winner.
Julian Barnes’ collection of short stories ‘Pulse’ was reviewed in this column two months ago.
Whether ‘The Sense of an Ending’ wins the Booker prize or not this year makes very little difference to Barnes’ stature as a literary eminence. In this case the man is bigger than the prize.
The ‘Sense of an Ending’ is an exploration of memory. How reliable is a memory? Does it need corroboration or can you trust your capacity to resist emotional distortions? When the enduring memory of an event and the personae involved leads you to erroneous conclusions do you blame yourself for this philosophical gaffe?
Barnes examines these questions by means of a simple narrative that starts with a quartet of cerebral schoolboys who are disturbed by the suicide of a contemporary. The boys reach adulthood, and have unfortunate love affairs resulting in the suicide of the most promising youth Adrian Finn.
‘The Sense of an Ending’ opens with a syllogism of memories namely: a shiny inner wrist; steam in a kitchen sink; sperm down a plughole; the Severn Bore; the less turbulent Thames; and bathwater gone cold behind a locked door.
These are the threads of memory that are knit together in our protagonist Tony Webster’s mind, a fabric that unravels in the course of the narrative.
How logical do the deductions and inferences Tony draws from these memories turn out to be? The answer forms the body of the narrative, a story told in Barnes’ sharply honed phrasing and taut prose. The resulting maze of misunderstanding and misconstrued situations demands a high level of engagement by the reader - you cannot afford to skip a single sentence or you will lose the thread of logical development that is the fulcrum of this distinguished novel. (Post script: The exquisite cover design involves a black title smudged into greys on an old-ivory background. Each page has a coal-black edge An absolute tactile and visual delight. Won’t get that with Kindle….)
Alan Hollinghurst ‘The Stranger's Child’ (Picador - Pan Macmillan) £20.00
Rating *****
A certainty for the short list and a possible winner.
Alan Hollinghurst was a Booker winner 7 years ago for his magnificent ‘Line of Beauty’. He was also shortlisted in 1994 for ‘The Folding Star’. ‘The Stranger’s Child’ was reviewed in the August 2011 issue of TheBAY magazine - to read the review, log onto TheBAY website
Sebastian Barry On Canaan's Side (Faber) £ 16.99
Rating *****
A certainty for the short list and a possible winner.
Irish writer Sebastian Barry appeared on the Booker shortlist for ‘The Secret Scripture’, 2008 and for ‘A Long Long Way’, 2005.
In a field of three literary titans Sebastian Barry emerges as the most poetic and the most powerful this year. I was disappointed when the Booker judges failed to see how superior Barry’s ‘The Secret Scriptures’ was to the 2008 winner ‘White Tiger’…. indeed to all the contenders that year. And in 2011, it seems to me that Barry’s ‘On Canaan’s Side’ is a clear winner despite the very strong presence of Julian Barnes and Alan Hollinghurst in the 2011 longlist.
AN OUTSTANDING WORK OF ART
‘On Canaan’s Side’ is told by IRA target Lily Bere, the daughter of the Chief Superintendent of Dublin Police. Lily and her fiancé Tadg are secreted away to America to escape the assassin’s bullet—in vain. Despite living in the safety of Canaan’s side, Tadg is murdered in Chicago, and Lily’s flight across America begins.
The narrative of how Lily Bere tries to find peace and happiness, pursued by tragedy and a wholly justified fear of assassination is told in impeccable prose and succeeds in holding one’s attention unrelentingly.
The suicide of her grandson Bill makes her feel the need to end her own life and she decides to confess the whole truth over a period of seventeen days following Bill’s death.
As is evident the narrative is riveting, more so when her would-be assassin reveals on his deathbed that he has lived as her close friend and neighbour for decades.
It is Barry’s lyrical style that makes this narrative an outstanding work of art. The beauty of his prose, the poetic quality of his portrayal of land and people, all place ‘On Canaan’s Side’ firmly on the winning podium.
Barry’s inventive genius and acute perception bring freshness and novelty to age-old situations and well- trodden scenarios of plot and character. This astonishingly good novel establishes Sebastian Barry once more as a contemporary literary hero. You absolutely must read this book.
Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books) £8.99
Rating *****
A certainty for the short list and a possible surprise winner.
This is the first ever appearance of a Welsh publisher on the Booker longlist. McGuinness is a distinguished poet – this is his debut novel.
The only debut novel to win my 5 star rating, ‘The Last Hundred Years’ is a story of the death of a dictatorship as told by a young English lecturer in Bucharest. It is by no means a ‘thriller’ but is in fact a fictional first person account of the death throes of an evil era, an expression of deep feelings of loss and fear and love for a country.
McGuinness dazzling aphorisms and precise prose are set off perfectly by the erudite sharpness of his observations. He is a master of the paraprosdokian (look it up—lovely word). I revelled in these paradoxical statements:
“Totalitarian boredom…is a state of expectation already heavy with its own disappointment” and “It was surreal, or would have been if it wasn’t the only reality available”
I have just picked two notable examples from the first ten pages…the book is full of these telling descriptions.
Our young protagonist has not been named—to sustain this anonymity through nearly 400 pages of narrative is a literary feat in itself – so I shall call him P for reasons of expediency.
P arrives in Bucharest from Britain some three months before the fall of the Ceausescu regime. He enters a city rotten with corruption, taking up a post in the university for which he was never interviewed. His quarters are luxurious and the front door bears the name of his predecessor Belanger, a sinister figure whose non-presence pervades all P’s doings in Romania.
P’s English colleague Leo is a fixer and a wheeler-dealer of frightening proportions who fulminates at the daily demolition of beautiful old Bucharest and tries to capture as much as he can by way of artifacts and documentation, preserving the past in a book he is writing called The City of Lost Walks. Leo engages happily in all the politicking, the bribery, the smuggling, the violence and the constant outwitting of the bureaucratic regime that is part of daily life in Romania and seems to be completely in charge and completely at ease in his role as P’s mentor and protector.
Three other characters play a significant role in P’s life: Trefim, the out- of- favour politico and writer who uses P to make a comeback; Cilea the daughter of a powerful Ceausecu politician who has a desultory affair with P, and Petre a musician whose clandestine activities as a subversive helper of the betrayed classes end in disillusionment.
P joins his companions on the slippery slope of compromise terrified by his own daring in playing the roles they allocate to him.
Ceausecsu finally falls, but P is unable to exchange the excitement of the last hundred days for his arid existence in Britain and opts to stay on to see his adventure through to whatever end it might lead him.
An important novel, a significant contribution to the contemporary literary world. Read it.
Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta) £12.99
Canadian novelist
Rating ****
This ought to be on the shortlist.
‘The Sisters Brothers’ has not been received very well critically. I find myself going against the tide: I absolutely loved its creative brilliance and very funny comic- book ‘bam- wham- crash- bang’ style of physical violence.
Imagine a campfire, with an elderly cowboy telling tall tales of badness from his past. His stories are peopled with baddies, red Indians, faithful horses, bawdy women and young invincible anti-heroes who shoot their way out of a dozen tight corners
That is the ambience evoked by deWitt as he tells us the story of professional assassins Eli and Charlie Sisters who are sent on a special mission to eliminate a prospector in the California Gold Rush in 1850.
The Wild West couldn’t get any wilder. The brothers start off from psychopathic rock bottom and take us into an abyss of violence, theft - and murder as a work-strategy. The situations are bizarre and laugh-out-loud funny.
But Eli, the narrator, reveals a tender concern for his horse and a fear of the heedless trail of mayhem that his older brother leads him onto. The novel would be a slapstick ride through non-stop violence if it were not for the counterpoint of Eli’s generosity, sweetness with the small and weak and his occasional compunctions about their murderous path.
‘The Sisters Brothers’ is original and vividly told. The tongue- in-cheek narrative style is cleverly executed. A very stimulating and entertaining novel which could find a place on the shortlist. (Post script: The jacket design is the best of all the longlist contenders. Very striking –a work of art that projects the import of the novel brilliantly.)
Carol Birch ‘Jamrach's Menagerie’ (Canongate Books) £ 12.99
Rating ****
A possibility for the shortlist.
Carol Birch was on the Booker longlist in 2003 for her novel ‘Turn Again Home.’
‘Jamrach’s Menagerie’ is a great big odyssey of a book with adventures on the high seas, epic battles with whales and dragons, and deeds of derring-do galore for our little Ulysses Jaffy Brown.
We meet eight year old Jaffy walking along a filthy street in Dickensian London - a street that suddenly empties and goes very quiet as he encounters an enormous and brilliantly beautiful tiger. He stops to pat it on its silken nose and has to be rescued from its jaws by its owner Mr Jamrach.
Life changes for little Jaffy. He meets Tim - his colleague at his new workplace, Jamrach’s Menagerie and a few years later both embark on a sea voyage aboard the whale ship Lysander on a quest to capture a dragon in Sumatra.
Jaffy’ s wonderful adventures with his mates in the course of their successful search for the dragon end with shipwreck and other horrors.
This epic novel is pacy, well written and completely absorbing. It lacks the philosophic content required to be a Booker winner but it could make the shortlist for the sheer power of the narrative - a narrative that has all the cliff-hanging vigour wielded by David Mitchell in his 2010 short-listed novel ‘Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.’ (Post script: The striking embossed jacket of ‘Jamrach’s Menagerie’ features the tiger’s enormous orange head tricked out in gold and black. Won’t get that with Kindle …)
Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)£12.99
Rating ***
A possibility for the shortlist.
Another debut novel. This is also the first appearance of publisher Oneworld on the Booker longlist.
Wow! This is an electric novel, which tells an electrifying story with a speed and energy that is quite remarkable.
Our protagonist Jinx has never come to terms with the murder of her beautiful mother and fails in her marriage and in her own maternal duties. The release of her mother’s violent lover and murderer from prison brings back the trauma of that dreadful period and acts as a cathartic agent for family friend Lemon to reveal hidden truths to Jinx. Jinx has her own unbearable secrets to unburden.
Revelations tumble forth as each of the stronger- than- life characters seek expiation and their own redemption. All Edwards’ characters are immigrants from the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat (as indeed is the author herself).
This arresting novel is the work of a significant new talent and Oneworld Publishing deserves kudos for spotting it. It is a likely contender for the shortlist for its originality, and for its compassionate analysis of the morality of possessive love.
Stephen Kelman ‘Pigeon English’ (Bloomsbury)£12.99
Rating ***
This is Stephen Kelman’s first novel and has already featured on BBC2’s Twelve Best Debut Novelists of the year.
‘Pigeon English’ is a novel about growing up in the violent atmosphere of a London slum as told by Harrison Okopu, a little Ghanaian immigrant boy.
You will be reassured to hear that this recipe is not as awful as it sounds. ‘Pigeon English’ is actually a very straightforward narrative told simply and well. There is a minimum of irritating dialect and very little sanctimonious political correctness. The plot centres around the recent real life murder of a 10 year old black youth Damilola Taylor – our fictional protagonist Harri and his friends form a secret pact to find the killer using all the means of detection at their disposal.
A pigeon that flies into Harri’s ninth floor flat is witness to the activities of these schoolboy detectives.
Stephen Kelman is not black, he did not grow up in London’s Tower Hamlets and the book seems to benefit from his unfamiliarity with his subject. There is a detachment, a sensitive aloofness that lends objectivity to the narrative. The style has great charm—Kelman is a natural storyteller and as in all good stories, the denouement is unexpected.
This is an unusual novel, not complex enough, however, to be a winner and unlikely to make the shortlist.
Alison Pick ‘Far to Go’ (Headline Review) £12.99
Rating **
Alison is Canadian and a published poet.
‘Far To Go’ documents the Kindertransport rescue mission to evacuate Jewish children to Britain from Nazi persecution in Czechoslovakia. It is a far too familiar saga of violent anti-Semitism, a dismal and depressing account of one family’s experience of betrayal, and of futile attempts to escape genocide. ‘Far To Go’ is a doom-laden and dreary novel as are others in this genre, a litany of suffering following a well-trodden path. It brings nothing new to the table.
The massacre of six million Jews during World War II was not just a horrendous crime against humanity—it also deprived the world of the intellectual potential of six million members of the race that has always been the most significant contributor to every aspect of science and the arts.
The whole world has been impoverished by the lost potential of these six million victims.
Alas, ‘Far To Go’ misses the opportunity to emphasise this crucial aspect of genocide, an omission noticeable in that the murder of children was the greatest loss of all.
Alison Pick is a competent but uninspired writer. This novel is unlikely to make the shortlist—in fact it is a surprise that it made the longlist at all.
A.D. Miller ‘Snowdrops’ (Atlantic) £7.99
Rating **
Snowdrops is Miller’s debut novel.
When a corpse emerges from the snow in the streets of Moscow during the Spring thaw it is called a snowdrop.
‘Snowdrops’ the novel, is a story of modern day Russia, a nation which does appear to emerge as a rotting corpse from the thaw of Glasnost.
Miller’s Moscow is no different from that of numerous earlier novelists, from Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn to Martin Cruz Smith; it continues to be dirty, dismal, freezing and heartless. The scene shifts from MI5 and KGB to modern banking and finance but the players do not change and the sense of déjà vu is inescapable.
Miller trots out some stereotypes that have stood the test of time – the naïve Englishman Nicholas Platt, a banker; mendacious prostitute Masha, her spurious family, crooked Russian businessmen, malevolent middlemen, double crossing deals—it’s all there in ‘Snowdrops’.
Casual homicide and savage brutality continue to flourish and when Nicholas hands over twenty five thousand dollars to Masha knowing full well that he will never see it again you begin to lose patience with this wimp and with this very predictable novel as a whole.
I look at the blurb on the jacket and wonder if there is something that I have missed. I did not find the novel ‘totally gripping,’ nor was it any way ‘disturbing and dazzling’.
What does surprise me is that it is in the Booker longlist at all---there’s a mystery for you…..
Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press) £7.99
Rating*
This is the first appearance of publisher Sandstone Press on the Booker longlist.
In Jessie Lamb’s dystopic world, a killer disease MDS sweeps the world, fatal to pregnant women. To combat drastic falls in population, young girls are being asked to sacrifice themselves in the interests of procreation—they face certain death once pregnant.
Panic sweeps the world. Jessie’s private world is also disintegrating. Her parents fight constantly, schoolfriends who get pregnant die, the fabric of society breaks down and she feels isolated and unloved.
She decides to commit certain suicide by enrolling for the Sleeping Beauty program. She will be impregnated and put into a coma till her baby is born when the life support will be turned off.
This is Jessie’s rather melodramatic plea for attention which is ignored by all the people she wants to impress. She feels exalted, the sick pleasure of a true martyr, and despite her father’s last minute attempts to restrain her, commits her sacrifice for the good of the world.
Yes, it is pretty thin and rather dull. The story line starts off promisingly but soon peters out, exhausted by its own implausibility. A rather ordinary novel which has no place in this longlist.
Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent's Tail - Profile) £10.99
Rating *
Canadian author.
Canadian writers seem to have re-discovered the Third Reich—this is the second Canadian novel in the 2011 Booker longlist that is set in Nazi Germany. A group of jazz musicians, American, German, Polish, some black, some white - none of whom appear to speak any intelligible sort of English - are undergoing standard Nazi persecution in Berlin and are making their way to Paris to meet Louis Armstrong.
I am approaching this review very carefully because I am loath to comment on matters that I have not understood. Impenetrable black – speak and assorted versions of the German vernacular translated into this same unintelligible American black-speak left me uncomprehending and soon unimpressed - exacerbated by the fact that the narrative is in the first person, using this type of pidgin English. There is also a great deal of pointless dialogue that was difficult to decipher and did not serve to take the story any further.
The Booker judges have scored three Brownie points by including ‘Half Blood Blues’ on the longlist: 1) Edugyan is a Commonwealth citizen. 2) She is a woman writer. 3) Her name suggests that she belongs to an ethnic minority group.
These are sound reasons and perhaps the only reasons for this novel’s appearance on the longlist.
DJ. Taylor Derby Day (Chatto & Windus - Random House) £17.99
Rating : Nil
I hang my head in shame. I have failed my readers by being unable to read ‘Derby Day.’ In all fairness I gave it several chances, but having dropped off three times in the first 25 pages, I tried skipping dull paragraphs and then entire pages – and then skipped the whole book. I apologise sincerely, but in my view it is the author’s duty to sustain my interest and not mine to struggle with the terminal boredom he induces.
The book jacket is also of extraordinary insipidity with a fusty look of having been on a dusty bookshelf for ages.
Oh dear! I am sorry. But I give up in the face of genuine apathy.
