Category: writers (Page 1 of 23)

What exactly is a Booker book? According to the Booker website, the prize is awarded each year ‘to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland.’ A definition that is frustratingly, deliciously and deliberately vague, open to any interpretation a panel of judges – or an individual reader – cares to place on it. That weasel-word ‘best’, which can only ever be subjective, and as mutable as time and literary fashion might allow.

The only answer I can give, then, is bound to be a personal one: what exactly is a Booker book, for me? I would say that what I want to see in a Booker book more than anything is boldness. The voice of an author who, whilst being aware of current literary trends, fashions and discourse, does not allow them to influence their output. Who goes their own way, yet who speaks to readers in their present. Whose work is intensely personal, yet timeless, universal. A novel that takes account of literary history and past excellence yet delivers something new. A novel that is – without question – literary, yet has the power to excite. The page count need not matter, but the true Booker book should be big, a future classic.

Among the lists of winners and nominees I would single out as being ‘true’ Booker books: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea, JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun, Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies, Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, AS Byatt’s Possession, Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, James Kelman’s How Late it Was, How Late, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, Martin MacInnes’s In Ascension, Anna Burns’s Milkman. There are others, of course, plenty of them – I am snatching titles more or less at random. Equally there are so, so many books on those longlists one looks back on and can only think: whaaat?

Why am I going on about all this? Well, because I’ve been thinking about David Szalay’s quietly moving, brilliantly executed and distinctly timely novel Flesh and trying to decide if it truly is a Booker book, for me. In the quality of its writing, sure – it’s flawless. In its relevance to our present moment, again, yes. My hesitation – my inability to answer the question – lies in the sense that this book is – like its protagonist – too private to be a Booker book, too closed in upon itself, too much alone. And I don’t mean any of that as negative criticism. I think this book is superb.

We first meet Istvan at the age of fifteen, living with his mother in a post-Soviet apartment block in their native Hungary. He is like any other teenage boy: recalcitrant, vaguely lazy, finding his level among his coevals. Then an upstairs neighbour – a woman around the same age as his mother – starts paying him extra attention. Istvan is bemused and slightly repulsed, a feeling that soon shifts first into excitement and then attraction. The odd, imbalanced relationship between the two of them has tragic consequences – and the course of Istvan’s life is changed in a single second.

We then follow Istvan through the final decades of the twentieth century, and through the various twists of fate that bring him first into the army and then to London, where his fortunes take an upward turn – or so it seems. Whether rich or poor, married or single, the essential Istvan remains the same: resilient, guarded, resourceful, emotionally withdrawn. He is not lonely so much as alone – even when he is with someone. In Flesh, Szalay shows us modern masculinity in all its contradictions as Istvan’s potential for openness, for self expression and self realisation is stymied again and again by the background hostility of a world that refuses to allow him a seat at the table. Keenly intelligent and almost preternaturally observant, Istvan is patronised by his wife Helen’s rich friends, who automatically assume that a man ‘like him’ – just flesh – will be uncultured and uncouth.

One particularly beautiful sequence sees Istvan showing Helen around the BMW museum in Munich. He has a close-to-photographic memory, and knows everything about the cars: history, make and model. Here, for the first time, we see him animated, openly passionate about something, though for Helen the cars are just cars. Leaving the museum, Istvan guides them to the U-Bahn. He wonders when was the last time Helen found herself having to use public transport.

Flesh is a novel about the fallout of trauma – Istvan’s time in the army and his inability to talk about it is a recurrent theme – but more than that, it is a novel about the tragic mismatch between the male human animal and the world he has constructed for himself. The title of an earlier work by Szalay – All That Man Is – would have fitted Istvan’s story equally. At the surface level, a more different character than Ben Markovits’s Tom is difficult to imagine – but dig a little deeper, and it becomes evident that they share many of the same problems.

At a certain point in the narrative (you’ll know it when you get to it) I found myself comparing Flesh with Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, shortlisted for the Booker back in 2015. The two novels share a broadly similar trajectory, yet could not be more different. A Little Life is all high drama and torrid emotion; Flesh is cool, pared back, reticent. Both novels make an impact through the quality of characterisation – but in terms of its economy, pathos and flawless technical control of the words on the page, Flesh is the better novel, or at least it is for me.

Could it be a contender?

I guess the question is: does this novel feel big enough? The answer will depend on the reader – and of course the judges.

The narrator of Audition is a famous actor. Not Hollywood-A-List-famous, but famous enough to be recognised, by those in the know, in a public place. At the novel’s opening, she walks into a restaurant and is shown to a table where a young man is already seated. The two have not met in person before, yet already there is tension between them. The young man – Xavier – has asked for a meeting, because he has something important to tell her. Xavier believes that he might be her son, a piece of speculation our narrator immediately rejects as being impossible. In the moments following Xavier’s dropped bombshell, our unnamed narrator is shocked to see her husband, Tomas, entering the restaurant. Tomas does not normally frequent this part of town, so what is he doing here? Our narrator is immediately filled with anxiety, that Tomas will see her sitting with Xavier and jump to the wrong conclusion.

Part Two of Audition sees us entering what might be an alternate world, a timeline in which Xavier really is the grown-up son of Tomas and the narrator. The narrator is still a famous actor, with a recent, ongoing success in a feted new stage play. Xavier is working as personal assistant to the play’s director, Anne. Then Xavier asks if he can return for a while to live in the family apartment and everything goes Roman Polanski (Repulsion/Cul-de-sac era) pretty damn quick.

A couple of years ago I reviewed Ian Reid’s third novel, We Spread, in which recently widowed Penny finds herself trapped in a sinister care home whose other occupants appear to have been subsumed into some sort of group identity. To be honest, I preferred Reid’s earlier novel – and its brilliant film adaptation by Charlie Kaufman – I’m Thinking of Ending Things. But We Spread is expertly done, a novel that makes perfect sense on its own terms, tautly imagined and strongly achieved by a writer fluent enough in genre conventions to successfully undermine them. Audition feels as if it’s working from some of the same tropes – fear of stasis, erosion of identity, one’s life being encroached upon and taken over by exterior forces. Are we to intuit that we are all playing parts – accustomed roles – within our own lives, that we are ‘auditioning’ for a part that has been pre-ordained for us? Are we the version of ourselves that we present on the ‘stage’ of public life, or is there a deeper, hidden reality that is only kept within bounds by the forces of convention? Is the whole thing just a play within a play??

Yeah, probably. But to my own unbelieving horror, the peerless expertise in undermining the tropes of detective fiction that made Kitamura’s earlier novel A Separation such a landmark text for me is a total no-show in Audition. Even the title – which must for horror fans immediately summon the ghost of Takashi Miike’s brilliant and unsettling 1999 screen adaptation of Ryu Murakami’s 1997 novel of the same name – hints at riches that are never delivered.

In his previously discussed masterpiece One Boat, Jonathan Buckley achieves his desired atmosphere of uncanniness, of underlying doubt through specificity: his diamond-bright evocation of a particular landscape makes its shadows deeper, the narrator’s own ruthless self-examination reveals a grief that may never be fully describable but is nonetheless felt. Audition appears on the surface to be similarly rigorous in its approach, similarly pared-back; in fact it is mushy, non-specific, a woolly, careless mass of might-bes and perhapses. The game-changing cameo role that cements the narrator’s reputation is never described, just as the play she is acting in now remains just a title. What kind of a ‘writer’ is Xavier? Or indeed Tomas? Who did the narrator have an affair with in the hinterland of Part One? In terms of language as well as action, Kitamura falls into the trap that is the undoing of many would-be horror writers in equating vagueness with subtlety. We don’t really know what’s going on here – but worse, we don’t really care.

A couple of days ago, I was discussing with some friends this recent review of Audition by Adam Roberts. Not having yet read the novel, I came out hotly in defence of Kitamura: Adam, I felt convinced, just didn’t get her. Turns out he was right, and I was wrong. Given how much I have loved and admired A Separation and its follow-up, Intimacies, Audition is a significant disappointment.

Could it be a contender?

No, just no. I could waste the rest of the morning listing books that would have been more interesting and worthy additions to the Booker longlist. To put an overused but in this case appropriate question: what were they thinking??

Tom Layward is a lawyer. He didn’t set out wanting to be a lawyer, but in the end it seemed the safest option: easier than following his ambition to play professional basketball, more secure than his other pipe dream, to become a writer. Thirty years down the line, Tom is married to Amy. Their son Michael has left home, their daughter Miriam is about to go to college. Tom has been asked to take a sabbatical from his law firm while a delicate workplace situation is resolved. He has not told Amy, though. Twelve years earlier, Amy had a brief affair with a guy she knew from synagogue. The Laywards’ relationship has been in emotional limbo ever since. After dropping Miri off at college, Tom keeps driving. His plans are vague. Perhaps he’ll go and see his brother, Eric. As for what happens after that, he’s undecided.

The Rest of Our Lives is pure reading pleasure – if it were a car, you’d say it handles like a dream. There are no bad guys in this book (except for the racist, conspiracy-theorist basketball player Tom briefly meets with – and silently rejects – as a possible client) but that’s the point.

I thought, what if I moved in with Jill and became friends with these people, so that the last thirty years of our lives turned out to be just an interruption. Would Katie eventually think of me as her father? The thought made me… It wasn’t even a feeling of guilt, it was a deeper horror than that. (Miri, Michael.) I don’t even mean that it seemed impossible, because this is basically what my dad did. There’s almost nothing you can’t do to yourself, that’s what I thought. And whatever it is, you’ll probably survive and maybe even end up happier than you were before. But that doesn’t make it less terrible.

I don’t often read novels like this these days. But when I happen to stumble upon one as good as this, I feel a quiet, deep-seated joy that there are still writers out there who are capable of this kind of solid, no-frills, intelligent, introspective, perfectly executed, honest, old-fashioned writing. The Rest of Our Lives could almost be a Philip Roth novel, only without the sexism and merciless egotism. Markovits is less biting, less frenetic, possibly because he is more self aware. Certainly more aware of women. Alive and attentive to the world through which he moves.

This book does nothing new. It is just a very good book. I have loved my time with Tom and with Amy, Michael, Miri, Eric, Jill, Betty and Brian, the complex, immersive network of their friendships and problems. The Rest of Our Lives is an engrossing, involving novel of character: restrained, reflective, nourishing, and not a word out of place.

Could it be a contender?

Ideologically, I’d probably argue against it, because it doesn’t challenge. But if Markovits won, I’d say good on him, and be secretly pleased.

It’s a shame, in a way, that I succumbed to the temptation to read this so early in my journey through the Booker longlist. Because I doubt very much that the longlist has anything better to offer me. I doubt I’ll read anything better for the rest of the year.

Jonathan Buckley’s slim novel – poised, elegant, restrained, every word chosen and placed with knowledge and intent – embodies the Platonic ideal of good writing. One Boat also demonstrates the far extremes to which the ‘mystery novel’ template may be stretched, and yet still be successful in promoting a state of enchantment.

A wide river, smooth, with long flights of bright stone steps on both banks, and people processing down to the water. Overhead, large low-flying & slow-flying birds, one per person, as if each person has a designated escort. At the river’s edge, the people do not pause. They walk down the steps, which extend a long way into the water, and when the people are in the water they continue to descend, untroubled. I take my place in the procession.

Nine years after the death of her mother, a woman returns to a seaside town in Greece to mourn the loss of her father. Teresa, who works in contract law, claims not to be a writer but makes notes constantly: her impressions of the town and how it has changed, the people she meets (and has met before), even her dreams. On her previous visit, she had recently separated from her husband, Tom, a split that brings back memories of her own parents’ divorce, to which it bears similarities. Nine years later, Teresa’s memories of Tom have taken on a more abstract quality, and it is the town itself – and a story she was told when she was there before – that preys on her mind and may even be having an impact on her future.

Some days, he told me, he argued with himself, making the very same points that I had made, ‘if not so eloquently’, but reasonableness could never prevail. The fire is never completely extinguished. He had come to think that people never change their minds because they’ve been persuaded to. If they change their minds, it’s because they want to. The door only opens if it’s already unlocked… He smiled as he shook my hand, but his eyes, I noted later, made me think of a man going into exile – to his execution, even.

Though it is a fraction of its length, the book that kept coming to mind as I read One Boat was John Fowles’s The Magus. The Greek setting, of course, but more than that – the nature of mortality and the aftershocks of violence, the sense of a deeper mystery buried. Of a clear-eyed narrator from whom truths remain hidden, of histories that turn on the result of a single decision. Buckley reveals how much of the art of the mystery lies in making a virtue of the unresolved, of the unresolvable. Of the art of fiction itself, and how it is finally inextricable from the conflicted, exterior fact of the writer’s life.

If you like Chris Priest’s novel The Glamour, you will like this. If you like Alain Resnais’s film Last Year in Marienbad, you will like this, too.

There will be a particular tranche of readers who will rise up in opposition to the final chapter, complaining about having the rug pulled, about being ‘thrown out of the narrative’. This book was not written for you, it was written for me.

With his previous – and equally brilliant – novel Tell shortlisted for last year’s Goldsmiths Prize, it is wonderful to see Jonathan Buckley finally getting some of the recognition he has long deserved.

Could it be a contender?

What was it John Banville said the year he won? It would be nice to see a work of art winning the Booker Prize. Going by the current state of things, it’ll probably not make the shortlist…

The Booker longlist was announced on Tuesday. This is a moment I always look forward to as I love the discussions about books, prizes and literature in general that invariably arise during Booker season. As to the actual list, after the initial rush of discovering who is actually on it, I often find myself feeling disappointed. I don’t think there’s ever been a year where there hasn’t been at least one book that snags my interest, that feels like a choice I myself would have made – some years, that book might even go on to win! And maybe that’s the point of the Booker, that it showcases a whole spectrum of literary styles, attitudes and concerns, that the longlist really does provide ‘something for everyone’. Fair enough – that’s not a bad mission to have. But as someone notorious for enjoying a ‘statement’ prize list, a shortlist that coheres around a particular vision, the Booker longlist has often felt a bit flabby, a bit medium, dominated by books that are ‘about’ something but that don’t do anything exciting at the level of text.

This year’s longlist, I was delighted to find, feels rather different.

Not only did it include books by two of my favourite writers – Katie Kitamura and Jonathan Buckley – but it also included a generous handful of other books I have been genuinely interested in reading. Books and writers that push the boundaries a little, that do stuff with form and that take a few risks. I like this longlist. And so I’ve decided to try and read as much of it as I can before the shortlist announcement, and post my findings here. First up is…

UNIVERSALITY by Natasha Brown

I still haven’t got round to reading Assembly, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to discover Brown’s work. My initial impressions weren’t great. But this book won me over. I love it when that happens!

Universality opens with what purports to be a piece of longform journalism investigating an act of violence at a farm in Yorkshire. An experiment in ‘intentional living’ seems to have gone badly awry, culminating in a clash between two would-be eco-warriors that leaves one of them in hospital with a severe concussion. The weapon? A gold bar, net worth half a million and current whereabouts unknown. Is what happened at Alderton Farm a microcosm of society’s wider conflicts, or just some stupid fight?

Reading this, I was finding it difficult to understand why someone would spend time satirising the kind and class of people who write opinion columns for The Spectator. I was also becoming wearied by the multiple iterations of the words ‘late capitalism’ – we have opinion columns in the Guardian for that. But the deeper I dived into this book, the more I found myself smiling, raising my eyebrows in delight and admiration. Universality is relentlessly satirical – not always my bag – and it is, relentlessly, about a certain milieu, and relentless in a way that risks tipping over into caricature. The fact that it does not – quite – is a measure of Brown’s confidence as a writer, her passion for her subject and her adept handling of her material. She is showing us a particular stratum, the place where a lot of soft power lies and where, deliberately or arbitrarily, decisions are taken about ‘what we think’ and how ‘opinion’ and thus society will be steered.

The ending, for me, was genius. And that moment between Richard and Claire is proof that the book has a beating heart beneath its corporate sheen.

It is a smart book, and it is a funny book. But it’s more than that. There’s muscular writing, some genuinely wonderful sentences, entire flocks of acute observations. It is a disturbingly accurate portrait of Britain today – or at least some parts of it. Universality is a slim novel – less than 200 pages – but it does plenty of heavy lifting. Hats off.

Could it be a contender?

It’s pertinent. It’s relevant. You know, I really think it could.