Story from the Telegraph, London.
Ruth Scurr welcomes genuinely novel stories about families, children and war .
As a Man Booker Prize judge, I have read 110 novels this year, plus some ineligible for the prize that I couldn't resist. I'd never judged a book prize before, and I'm never going to do it again.
Not because I didn't enjoy it - it was fascinating - but I'm happy to be back in your position: browsing the literary pages and deciding, "Hmm, that looks interesting." Fiction, to me, is a whimsical private pleasure.
Anne Enright's The Gathering (Jonathan Cape, won the prize and deserved it.
The first time I read it, I was overwhelmed by its anger; the second time, I saw the beauty of its language; the third time, I was fascinated by its relation to James Joyce's Dubliners. In her interview, after winning, Enright said Joyce was a woman. Who knows what exactly she meant (she wasn't asked) but the answer is surely encoded in The Gathering.
The Man Booker Prize is often criticised for being too serious and elitist. My gift to the naysayers is Nicola Barker's Darkmans, (Fourth Estate, a tour-de-force of contemporary life set in Ashford, Kent.
When it was long-listed, the writer and journalist D J Taylor described Darkmans as a "left-field 838-page weird out"; and I celebrated.
Barker is a comic genius. Her imagination is incendiary. Her subject matter is Tesco, daytime TV, builders, chiropody, the family outing from hell when Dad's kagool has not been packed. She is also fascinated by history and language. Darkmans is the novel of the decade.
Of the novels submitted for this year's prize that did not make the deserving short-list, here are some that ought to have done.
Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero (Bloomsbury,) is a complex story that will delight fans of The English Patient. It is about a makeshift family in northern California (a farmer, his two daughters and the farm-hand who lives with them) whose lives are shattered by violence, and are then scattered to different continents.
It has an unforgettable opening: "When I come to lie in your arms, you sometimes ask me in which historical moment do I wish to exist. And I will say Paris, the week Colette died… Paris, August 3, 1954."
I loved A L Kennedy's Day (Jonathan Cape), about an inarticulate Staffordshire lad who sought refuge in the RAF during the Second World War, only to find the transition back to civilian life painful.
Trying to recover, Alfred Day accepts a part as an extra in a POW film, which takes him back to an ersatz German camp, scrutinising his memories and the clichés of war. It is a humorous and compassionate book. I fought for it, but lost.
Peter Ho Davies's The Welsh Girl (Sceptre) is a quiet, graceful book, set in Wales at the end of the Second World War (the number of novels set during the War this year is remarkable). It was another of my lost battles.
The elegant restraint of Davies's writing reminds me of Kazuo Ishiguro's. The story centres on Esther Evans, the 17-year-old daughter of a nationalist sheep farmer, dreaming of a life beyond her small valley.
Into the valley come Captain Rotheram, a German Jewish refugee, and the captive he is guarding, Rudolf Hess. Davies is delicate with the tangential connection between a Welsh village and the world-changing historical events. This is a book that powerfully evokes different kinds of entrapment, including the most intimate: being pregnant when you don't want to be.
This is only a third of her article. Read the rest here.
FOOTNOTE:
Bookman Beattie totally disagrees with Scurr's claim that Darkmans is the novel of the decade. What an astonishing comment. She says on the one hand that The Gathering was the deserved winner of the Man Booker Prize 2007 and then makes the claim that Darkmans is the novel of the decade. Hang on a minute Ruth, you can't have it both ways! Personally I thought Darkmans was lucky to make the shortlist.
It would appear from her comments about what books she would like to have been on the shortlist that had she been the only judge, instead of one of five, then the results would have been very different. Shows the importance of having a panel of judges!
3 comments:
Judges should not reveal the choices that "should" have been made. So many of us have been on judging panels of some sort or other and very often our choices are not winners. Sure, we go home and sulk...but you don't then go round saying you disagreed with the outcome.
What goes on in the judging room should stay in the judging room..
Roger Hall
I absolutely agree with you Roger.
This is very bad form on her part.
In fact the judging panels I have been on we have signed a confidentiality agreement to say we will not discuss any aspect of the juding or decision making other than what appears in the collegially prepared judges' report.
Frankly I am amazed at her comments.But on the other hand the Chair of that particular judging panel publicly discussed the short-list titles during the week prior to them taking the decision. Methinks the Man Booker Prize organisers should review their judging processes.
And I agree with both Hall & Beattie. It is , frankly, scandalous that a judge should be making comments like these. She was clearly totally out of step with the other judges and to come out now with this sort of view is clearly sour grapes on her part.
She should have just enthused about the books she liked as part of her Christmas picks without going on about the Man Booker Prize and which titles she would have shortlisted.The only consolation is that no one will ever ask her to judge a literary prize again! She should stick to her teaching and writing.
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