Well, that was interesting. Of the thirteen guesses I made, only one of them, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, turned out to be correct, and perhaps the best thing that can be said about this year’s Booker longlist is that it will have similarly confounded a lot of people’s expectations. A majority of the books here are by established writers – but not by writers whose names you’ll necessarily hear every day. This means that those who feel like making an educated guess about the shortlist and final result will all have something new to discover. Which can only be a good thing.
If there’s one huge area of disappointment it’s that there are no works of speculative fiction on this list. If you’re into statistics at all, you’ll see that actually makes it less progressive than last year’s list, which featured Sam Thompson’s amazing Communion Town and Ned Beauman’s The Teleportation Accident, both of which made fascinating and varied use of speculative ideas. If you felt like stretching the point you might also include Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse in that tally, as it has a distinctly slipstream vibe.
There’s nothing like that this year. I suppose you could include Jim Crace’s Harvest, sort of – the fact that I’ve never found myself particularly excited by Crace’s brand of fabulation is most likely my fault and not his.
I’m flabbergasted not to see Nick Royle’s First Novel make an appearance. All in all, I feel curiously deflated by this list, which feels more conservative to me in terms of subject and form than it might seem at first sight.
The novel I’m far and away most excited about here is Richard House’s The Kills. I’d heard of this vaguely prior to seeing it longlisted, but didn’t know much about it. On reading the synopsis – it’s a novel in four novels, a crime story within a crime story within a crime story – my first thought was ‘wow, it sounds as if Richard House has read Roberto Bolano!’ I was delighted, on reading an interview with House, to discover that this is indeed the case and that The Kills was inspired, among many other things, by House’s reading of 2666. I ordered the book straight away and can’t wait to read it.
I’ll also be looking forward to Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. Catton’s first novel, The Rehearsal, did amazing things with what on the face of it sounded like a conventional idea based around a high school teacher-pupil affair scandal, Reading it was a genuine surprise, one of those fabulous moments in a reading life where you find your own expectations subverted utterly, and all you can do is bounce around in your seat thinking ‘bravo!’ The Luminaries looks like being similarly ambitious, and I feel certain that I’ll love it, just from the incisive and ironical self awareness of Catton’s writing.
Is the rest of it all a bit trad Booker though or is that just that my own particular literary interests don’t jibe with the judges’?
Perhaps I’ll change my mind in the coming days.
Get to know the Booker longlist here.
And do read this excellent interview with Richard House here.