Jim Crace is the narrow favourite, while Colm Tóibín may provoke the most serious soul-searching… Here's a reminder of the six novels in contention
The Booker contenders, clockwise from top left: NoViolet Bulawayo, Jim Crace, Eleanor Catton, Colm Tóibín, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ruth Ozeki.
After 45 years, Tuesday night at the Guildhall will see Booker's swansong, at least from the point of view of those who believe that letting American novels into the competition signals the arrival of the Visigoths. Actually, this violation is a done deal: with the exception of Jim Crace, every author on the shortlist has strong North American connections, and all six have explicit links to US creative writing schools.
In Booker's lifetime, literary fiction has not merely joined the academy, it has become big business. In the 21st century, new fiction in the English language is a global phenomenon, long decoupled from its Anglo-American past. Man Booker is sensible to recognise this. The new rules will not mean the end of the prize. This annual sweepstake will remain as much part of the sporting calendar as the grouse season or the Grand National.
So what do we make of the runners and riders in Booker's Farewell Stakes? What does the lost Eden of "British and Commonwealth" fiction look like in this watershed year? The short answer is: good, but not great.
First, alphabetically, comes NoViolet Bulawayo from Zimbabwe and, more recently, Kalamazoo, Michigan. We Need New Names reflects this new global literary consciousness. Bulawayo tells the coming-of-age story of Darling and her shanty-town friends who dream of their escape from the horrors of Mugabe's Zim to the imagined paradise of Obama's America. At a visceral level, this novel is a howl of protest at what has been done to Bulawayo's homeland. We follow Darling as she makes the break and renews her life in the snows of the midwest. But she has paid the price of exile; her new world is as troubled as the old. We Need New Names introduces a young writer with a fine ear for dialogue. Bulawayo, already a Caine prize-winner for African writing, will probably not win the big one this year, but she must be a name to watch.
Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries is the polar opposite. This sprawling mystery, a Victorian pastiche set in Victorian New Zealand, is replete with red herrings, astrological symbolism, and suspended revelations. A doorstop of a novel, by a New Zealander who appears to have swallowed a dictionary, it is by Trollope out of Wilkie Collins, possibly suckled by John Fowles. At more than 800 pages, it left this reader wishing that Catton had also paid homage to Robert Louis Stevenson whose best line, surely, is "the only art is to omit". On page 342, Catton supplies a story-so-far from the point of view of the protagonist Walter Moody. If you are unemployed, or marooned on desert island, this timely round-up might give you the courage to investigate the next 500 pages about the mysterious death of Crosbie Wells, and explore the games Catton is playing. Then again, it might not. I doubt that a sophisticated Booker jury will inflict this monster on the reading public, even if it does look like the thing British readers crave – "the good read".
After Catton, the lyrical subtlety of Harvest is a relief. Crace, who announced his retirement from the fray earlier this year, inhabits an imaginative world that's either hypnotic and timeless, or maddeningly contrived, depending on your point of view. Harvest, set in the midst of the enclosure movement, a time of forgotten bloodshed and pastoral violence, is an allegory of rural Britain, loosely in the William Golding tradition. Its language is biblical, and so is its narrative arc. In the course of a dark week, the protagonist Walter Thirsk watches his world ruthlessly turned upside down by mysterious and increasingly savage violence. Witchcraft, the pillory, the sinister Mr Quill: Crace revels in his rustic apocalypse and finally burns down the manor house in a fiery climax. If Booker wanted to sign off as the champion of the English literary novel, it might do worse than give the nod to Crace, who offers a serious challenge.
Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland takes the reader into an Indian world, once fashionable Booker terrain. This spare, understated novel, the work of a gifted short-story writer, explores the fortunes, in India and the US, of two brothers raised together in the Calcutta of the late 1960s but brutally separated by ideology and the Naxalite uprising. This feels like an important novel for Lahiri to have written, but I doubt it's a prizewinner.
Almost every Booker list contains a literary confection that dazzles on first reading, but fails to sustain its appeal. A Tale for The Time Being by Ruth Ozeki comes garnished with claims of its life-changing powers. Ozeki is a film-maker and a Zen Buddhist. Her novel – the improbable tale of a Japanese diary washed up in a lunchbox on the Canadian pacific coast – reads like the forced marriage of mysticism and film scenario. Ozeki must be the rank outsider on this list.
And so to the very slim volume, The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín, that may provoke the most serious soul-searching among the judges. Tóibín is a contemporary master and this strange, electrifying threnody – the recollections of Jesus's mother, Mary – takes its inspiration from the narrative punch and brevity of the gospels. Tóibín's audacity singles out this thrilling tour de force as a very serious contender. Tightly wound, with many infinitely haunting reverberations of meaning, The Testament of Mary is a small miracle. But will it win? The bookies, rarely a reliable guide in this contest, have made Crace narrowly the favourite.
Robert Macfarlane and his team have an interesting session ahead of them. My guess is that it will be Crace v Tóibín, possibly with a lucky third benefiting from any deadlock. You never can tell.
In Booker's lifetime, literary fiction has not merely joined the academy, it has become big business. In the 21st century, new fiction in the English language is a global phenomenon, long decoupled from its Anglo-American past. Man Booker is sensible to recognise this. The new rules will not mean the end of the prize. This annual sweepstake will remain as much part of the sporting calendar as the grouse season or the Grand National.
So what do we make of the runners and riders in Booker's Farewell Stakes? What does the lost Eden of "British and Commonwealth" fiction look like in this watershed year? The short answer is: good, but not great.
First, alphabetically, comes NoViolet Bulawayo from Zimbabwe and, more recently, Kalamazoo, Michigan. We Need New Names reflects this new global literary consciousness. Bulawayo tells the coming-of-age story of Darling and her shanty-town friends who dream of their escape from the horrors of Mugabe's Zim to the imagined paradise of Obama's America. At a visceral level, this novel is a howl of protest at what has been done to Bulawayo's homeland. We follow Darling as she makes the break and renews her life in the snows of the midwest. But she has paid the price of exile; her new world is as troubled as the old. We Need New Names introduces a young writer with a fine ear for dialogue. Bulawayo, already a Caine prize-winner for African writing, will probably not win the big one this year, but she must be a name to watch.
Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries is the polar opposite. This sprawling mystery, a Victorian pastiche set in Victorian New Zealand, is replete with red herrings, astrological symbolism, and suspended revelations. A doorstop of a novel, by a New Zealander who appears to have swallowed a dictionary, it is by Trollope out of Wilkie Collins, possibly suckled by John Fowles. At more than 800 pages, it left this reader wishing that Catton had also paid homage to Robert Louis Stevenson whose best line, surely, is "the only art is to omit". On page 342, Catton supplies a story-so-far from the point of view of the protagonist Walter Moody. If you are unemployed, or marooned on desert island, this timely round-up might give you the courage to investigate the next 500 pages about the mysterious death of Crosbie Wells, and explore the games Catton is playing. Then again, it might not. I doubt that a sophisticated Booker jury will inflict this monster on the reading public, even if it does look like the thing British readers crave – "the good read".
After Catton, the lyrical subtlety of Harvest is a relief. Crace, who announced his retirement from the fray earlier this year, inhabits an imaginative world that's either hypnotic and timeless, or maddeningly contrived, depending on your point of view. Harvest, set in the midst of the enclosure movement, a time of forgotten bloodshed and pastoral violence, is an allegory of rural Britain, loosely in the William Golding tradition. Its language is biblical, and so is its narrative arc. In the course of a dark week, the protagonist Walter Thirsk watches his world ruthlessly turned upside down by mysterious and increasingly savage violence. Witchcraft, the pillory, the sinister Mr Quill: Crace revels in his rustic apocalypse and finally burns down the manor house in a fiery climax. If Booker wanted to sign off as the champion of the English literary novel, it might do worse than give the nod to Crace, who offers a serious challenge.
Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland takes the reader into an Indian world, once fashionable Booker terrain. This spare, understated novel, the work of a gifted short-story writer, explores the fortunes, in India and the US, of two brothers raised together in the Calcutta of the late 1960s but brutally separated by ideology and the Naxalite uprising. This feels like an important novel for Lahiri to have written, but I doubt it's a prizewinner.
Almost every Booker list contains a literary confection that dazzles on first reading, but fails to sustain its appeal. A Tale for The Time Being by Ruth Ozeki comes garnished with claims of its life-changing powers. Ozeki is a film-maker and a Zen Buddhist. Her novel – the improbable tale of a Japanese diary washed up in a lunchbox on the Canadian pacific coast – reads like the forced marriage of mysticism and film scenario. Ozeki must be the rank outsider on this list.
And so to the very slim volume, The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín, that may provoke the most serious soul-searching among the judges. Tóibín is a contemporary master and this strange, electrifying threnody – the recollections of Jesus's mother, Mary – takes its inspiration from the narrative punch and brevity of the gospels. Tóibín's audacity singles out this thrilling tour de force as a very serious contender. Tightly wound, with many infinitely haunting reverberations of meaning, The Testament of Mary is a small miracle. But will it win? The bookies, rarely a reliable guide in this contest, have made Crace narrowly the favourite.
Robert Macfarlane and his team have an interesting session ahead of them. My guess is that it will be Crace v Tóibín, possibly with a lucky third benefiting from any deadlock. You never can tell.
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