Man Booker Prize long list 2017

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Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor

Reservoir 13 was long listed for the Man Booker Prize 2017 and won the Costa Book Award for Best Novel that year as well. It was also nominated for the Goldsmith Prize for experimental fiction, about which he had this to say:

“It felt like a very experimental book while I was writing it, but it’s not necessarily that experimental on the surface, although it demands quite a lot of the reader … a certain patience.”

In terms of the story, it is an impersonal narrative, a series of snapshots into the lives of people living in an English village, beginning in the year that a teenage girl goes missing, an event that in small ways touches the lives of most of the residents, an event that remains permanently associated with it.

The novel continues to zoom in on village life, each chapter equivalent to one year, each subsequent first sentence of the chapter referencing the local fireworks, each chapter resembling a kind of closely knitted pattern. As you would expect, over the years, young people grow up and leave, families are created and fall apart, seasons pass, work is done, animals tended, relationships formed, the past remembered. Likes waves breaking, there is a continuous monotony to life in just another ordinary village, where once upon a time a girl went missing.

“His sister wanted to know where the Tuckers had gone and who would move in next. He said he didn’t always have the answers. He asked her not to ask so many bloody questions, and when the tears came he said he was sorry. It went on like this. This was how it went on.”

I agree it is an accomplished novel, it has been well thought out, structured, it’s almost a piece of modern architecture, in its linear, logical, detached approach. However, I found it almost impossible to be swept into the narrative without the constant awareness of the author’s orchestration and presence, even in some of the voices. It felt very controlled.

There is much that is clever, and intellectually it is something to admire. I reread the comments made on the cover and thought, yes, all that is true, so what did it lack for me? It made me think of a review I read recently for Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar reminding me of that reading experience, which was the anti-thesis of this one. Of being drawn inside a story versus feeling completely outside of it, of the open air art installation versus the museum piece vitrine.

“The passive voice was really deliberate because it just feels very English to me,” McGregor says. “It’s a gossipy village, but they would never think of themselves as gossips. ‘Somebody was seen.’ They’re not going to say: ‘I saw so and so.’ Small communities can be very inclusive, but they can also be very claustrophobic.”

Some books you read and you yourself are far far away from what is happening, you are unable to empathise or relate, you see words on the page, that speak of things happening in and around people, but they are told in a way that keeps them on the page, they refuse to enter your imagination or evoke empathy.

And then there are books that by some kind of magic awaken the imagination, they affect the senses, they can make you feel hot, cold, dehydrated, in pain, terrified, joyous, curious, relieved, all manner of emotions and feelings, and you feel relieved almost that it’s only a story, you will recover. They are not always comfortable, in fact I love reading outside my comfort zone, about other cultures, other experiences, other everything than the familiar.

Reservoir 13 certainly provoked the analytical part of my brain, in fact everything it provoked was in that left hemisphere of the brain and that’s possibly why it was only an okay read for me, it was too far in one direction, admirable as that may be, it leaves me with little to say about it, and little of an impression.

So I’ll finish with a link to the author in an interview with Justine Jordan from The Guardian, which gives greater insight into what the author was attempting to do.

Further Reading:

The Guardian: Jon McGregor: ‘I’m allergic to trying to make points in fiction’ – The prizewinning novelist and short story writer on capturing daily rural life and the joy of a bad review

Have you read it? How was the reading experience for you?

 

 

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Exit West by Mohsin Hamid #ManBookerPrize

Exit West is Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s fourth novel and the first one I’ve read. It is on the Man Booker Prize 2017 longlist. When I read about it earlier in the year, I decided this would the one where I would get on board, and with its themes of refugees fleeing war and the challenges of emigration, it seemed pertinent.

It is a story of a young couple Nadia and Saeed who meet in their unnamed home country, which felt to me while reading as if I were reading about Syria, just before the conflict in their country escalates. They meet in the classroom, he with his “studiously maintained stubble”, she in”flowing black robe”. She brushes off his invitation to have coffee initially, eventually agreeing and slowly they develop a friendship, a relationship.

Interspersed with their narrative are brief snapshots of lives being lived at that moment elsewhere – an incident between and man and a woman happening in Australia, a man nursing his Irish whiskey drink in Tokyo. To be honest, I didn’t get what these intrusions into the story were about – perhaps just that life continues elsewhere, oblivious to the dramas of others?

Saeed lives at home with his parents, Nadia lives alone, her robe is her protection, allowing her to live more freely than the alternatives. However as war approached the city, their lives must change and after hearing about an escape route, the couple decide to flee and to create a life elsewhere.

While they are in their hometown it is a story of a young couple attempting to overcome the lack of trust that exists in a culture where independent women live in fear, once they leave it becomes something else, they lack family, friends and community, they try to recreate those things in an environment that is antagonistic towards them. Their memories of what they have left change shape as the are afflicted by nostalgia, regret, loss. They struggle to find their place and even their relationship morphs into something unrecognisable in foreign lands.

There is no voyage, the journey takes place through a door, a portal to another world, to an island in Greece, to London, San Francisco, but the places they travel to bear little resemblance to those places as you and I might know them. They are inaccessible, frightening, there is a sense of them being hunted, of needing to be ready to run, always, it is a fearful dystopian view of supposed freedom from terror; death may have been a more desired alternative after all. And the slow unwinding of their relationship.

The combination of the real and surreal was a bit much for me, somehow it’s easier to go with at the hand of Haruki Murakami, which in a way this reminds me a little of, but while Murakami feels more like pure fantasy, Moshin Hamid invites us to consider a subject that is very real in the modern world today and succeeds in making it disorienting to the reader. Perhaps that is the point.

I read Hala Alyan’s novel Salt Houses (click title to read review) this year, which was also a novel of displacement, centred around multiple generations of Palestinian refugees, who attempt to make new lives in Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon and America and the challenges they face, even when they are able to retain certain family connections. It’s a cultural loss that is not apparent on the surface, that Alyan digs deep into to reveal the subtle layers.

It makes an interesting complement to Mohsin Hamid’s perspective of loss and dislocation.

For a more enlightened view of what this novel portends to show the reader, check out the following reviews:

Further Reading:

The Atlantic – Exit West and the Edge of Dystopia, by Sophia Gilbert

The Guardian – Magic and violence in migrants’ tale by Andrew Motion

Note: This book was an ARC (Advance Reader Copy) kindly provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

Man Booker Prize Long List 2017

 

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Man Booker Prize Long list 2017

Today the Man Booker Prize long list for 2017 was announced, a prize that was introduced originally to try to get people to read the more literary titles, that often struggled to attain the popularity or success of their bestselling genre cousins, it was promoted as a prize for “the best novel in the opinion of the judges”, an objective that remains true today, and one of the reasons that for me, given its subjectivity, the long list is where the true gems lie!

I have only read one on the list, Exit West and have yet to review it, and I have one on the shelf Zadie Smith’s Swing Time. I’d like to read The Underground Railroad, Solar Bones, and Resevoir 13. I’m also interested to read a Kamila Shamsie novel, not sure if it will be this one or an earlier novel. What are you tempted by from the list?

Here is the list below, with summaries extracted from the Man Booker website:

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster (US) (Faber & Faber) – Archibald Isaac Ferguson, only child of Rose and Stanley is born in New Jersey on March 3, 1947. Ferguson’s life then takes four simultaneous and independent fictional paths. Four Fergusons made of the same genetic material, four boys who are the same boy, go on to lead four parallel, entirely different lives.

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry (Ireland) (Faber & Faber) – After signing up for the US army in the 1850s, Thomas McNulty and John Cole, barely 17 years, go to fight in the Indian wars and, ultimately, the Civil War. Having fled  hardships themselves, they find these days vivid and filled with wonder, despite the horrors they are both witness to and complicit in. Their lives are further enriched and endangered when an Indian girl crosses their path.

History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund (US) (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) – Linda, 14, lives on a dying commune on the edge of a lake. She and her parents are the last remaining inhabitants, the others having long since left amid bitter acrimony. She has grown up isolated both by geography and her understanding of the world, an outsider at school, regarded as a freak.

One day she notices the arrival of a young family in a cabin on the opposite side of the lake. She starts to befriend the mother and son and for the first time feels a sense of belonging that has been missing from her life, until the father arrives home and she fails to see the terrible warning signs.

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Pakistan-UK) (Hamish Hamilton) – In a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, Saeed and Nadia begin to fall for each amid the sound of bombs getting closer and despite the radio announcing new laws, curfews and public executions. Not safe for a woman to be alone, or to stay any longer, they hear rumours of strange black doors in secret places across the city, doors that lead to London or San Francisco, Greece or Dubai. Nadia and Saeed to seek out one such door, joining the great outpouring of those fleeing a collapsing city, hoping against hope, looking for their place in the world.

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (Ireland) (Canongate)  – Marcus Conway has come a long way to stand in the kitchen of his home and remember the rhythms and routines of his life. Considering with his engineer’s mind how things – bridges, banking systems, marriages – are constructed – and how they may come apart.

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor (UK) (4th Estate) – Midwinter, a teenage girl on holiday has gone missing in the hills at the heart of England. Villagers join the search, fanning out across the moors as police set up roadblocks and news reporters descends on their quiet home. Meanwhile, work must continue: cows milked, fences repaired, stone cut, pints poured, beds made, sermons written, a pantomime rehearsed. The search goes on, as does everyday life. As the seasons unfold some leave the village, others are pulled back, come together or break apart. There are births and deaths; secrets kept and exposed; livelihoods made and lost; small kindnesses and unanticipated betrayals. Bats hang in the eaves of the church and herons stand sentry in the river; fieldfares flock in the hawthorn trees and badgers and foxes prowl deep in the woods – mating and fighting, hunting and dying.

Elmet by Fiona Mozley (UK) (JM Originals) – Daniel is heading north, looking for someone. The simplicity of his  life has turned sour and fearful. Back then, Daniel and Cathy were not like other children at school, and were less like them now. Sometimes Daddy disappeared, and returned with rage in his eyes. But when he was home he was at peace. He told them the little copse in Elmet was theirs alone. That wasn’t true. Local men, greedy and watchful, circled like vultures. All the while, a terrible violence in Daddy grew. A lyrical commentary on contemporary English society and one family’s precarious place in it; an exploration of how deep the bond between father and child can go.

The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy (India) (Hamish Hamilton) – In a city graveyard, a resident unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet between two graves. On a sidewalk, a baby appears suddenly, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter. In a snowy valley, a father writes to his five-year-old daughter about the number of people who attended her funeral. 

A cast of characters caught up in the tide of history. Told with a whisper, a shout, tears and laughter, it is a love story and a provocation. Its heroes, present and departed, human and animal, have been broken by the world we live in and then mended by love – and for this reason, they will never surrender.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (US) (Bloomsbury) – On 22 February 1862, two days after his death, Willie Lincoln is laid to rest in a marble crypt in a Georgetown cemetery. That night, shattered by grief, his father Abraham arrives at the cemetery, alone, under cover of darkness.

All evening, Abraham Lincoln paces the graveyard unsettled by the death of his beloved boy, and the grim shadow of a war without end. Meanwhile Willie is trapped between the dead and the living – drawn to his father with whom he can no longer communicate, existing in a ghostly world populated by the recently passed and the long dead. Unfolding over a single night, narrated by multiple voices, Lincoln in the Bardo is an exploration of death, grief and the deeper meaning and possibilities of life.

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (UK-Pakistan) (Bloomsbury) – Isma is free. After years raising her twin siblings following their mother’s death, she is studying in America. But she can’t stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister in London – or their brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew.

Then Eamonn enters the sisters’ lives. The son of a powerful British Muslim politician, Eamonn has his own birth right to live up to – or defy. Two families’ fates are devastatingly entwined in this searing novel that asks: what sacrifices will we make in the name of love?

Autumn by Ali Smith (UK) (Hamish Hamilton) – How about Autumn 2016? Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The UK is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer.

Autumn is a meditation on a world growing ever more bordered and exclusive, on what richness and worth are, on what harvest means. This first in a seasonal quartet casts an eye over our own time.  Who are we? What are we made of? Shakespearian jeu d’esprit, Keatsian melancholy, the sheer bright energy of 1960s Pop art: the centuries cast their eyes over our own history-making. From the imagination of Ali Smith comes a shape-shifting series, wide-ranging in timescale and light-footed through histories, and a story about ageing and time and love and stories themselves.

Swing Time by Zadie Smith (UK) (Hamish Hamilton) – Dazzlingly energetic and deeply human, Swing Time is a story about friendship and music and true identity, how they shape us and how we can survive them. Moving from north-west London to West Africa, it is an exuberant dance to the music of time.

Two brown girls dream of being dancers – but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about black bodies and black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s, never to be revisited, but never quite forgotten, either…

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (US) (Fleet) –  Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. All the slaves lead a hellish existence, but Cora has it worse than most; she is an outcast even among her fellow Africans and is approaching womanhood, where it is clear even greater pain awaits. When Caesar, a slave recently arrived from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they take the perilous decision to escape to the North.

Whitehead’s Underground Railroad has assumed a physical form: a dilapidated box car pulled along subterranean tracks by a steam locomotive, picking up fugitives wherever it can. Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom. At each stop, Cora encounters a different world. The narrative seamlessly weaves the saga of America, from the brutal importation of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day. It is a story of one woman’s ferocious will to escape the horrors of bondage and a reflection on history.

Happy Reading!

The Short List will be announced 13 September

Winner announced 17 October

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