♫ Deck the halls with joy and folly
Fa la la laaa la la laaa
‘Tis the season of melancholy
Fa la la laaa la la laaa
For there’ll be awards and many bad choices
Fa la la la la laaa la la la
Good books jipped and some rewarded
Fa la laa la la la laaaa ♫
Don’t worry, I’m not singing this in the audio bit above. That has me venting about this year’s Booker Prize.
So yes, the season of literary prizes is indeed upon us, which means there’s so much to grumble about. Two seems to be the magic number, with both the Nobel and the Booker Prize announcing two winners.
In case of the Nobel, they picked two because there was no prize awarded for literature in 2018 after scandal rocked the Swedish Academy. “We find it necessary to commit time to recovering public confidence ... before the next laureate can be announced,” said its interim permanent secretary Anders Olsson last year. (Love “interim permanent” almost as much as “delayed live”.)
Anyway, so this year we had two Nobel prizes for literature. Last year’s award went to Olga Tokarczuk of Poland and Austrian author Peter Handke.
And so it was that a few hundred essays on the wonder of Haruki Murakami’s prose returned to the dark corners of desks and computers whence they came. We don’t know how Salman Rushdie reacted to not getting the call from the Swedish Academy and discovering instead that the man he’d dubbed the runner-up for “international moron of the year” did get said call, but it’s not exactly hard to imagine.
More seriously, if this year’s decisions really are an attempt at “recovering public confidence”, then they’re particularly interesting because
a) the “public” is clearly still Europe, and not much beyond that little continent,
b) considering how different Tokarczuk and Handke are, it’s almost as though the jury is trying to appease the divided world of literature.
Handke has gone from being relatively unknown to the English-speaking world to being notorious for his belief that the Bosnian Muslims of Sarajevo massacred and brutalised themselves in 1995. Whether his writing is a conduit for his personal politics, I don’t know, but I must admit, I’m not particularly keen to find out.
Meanwhile Tokarczuk — feminist, dreadlocked, Left-leaning, lover of libraries — stands at the other end of the political spectrum. Her liberalism definitely layers her writing. Flights — it’s the only book of hers that I’ve read — is a weird, wonderful collection of 116 vignettes, all narrated by a nameless woman traveller. “Tales have a kind of inherent inertia that is impossible to fully control. They require people like me – insecure, indecisive, easily led astray,” Tokarczuk writes at one point. This book is not a novel in the conventional sense. It’s more of a meditation on transitions, storytelling and fiction. If you like your fiction to have a recognisable beginning, middle and end, Flights is not for you.
If you’d like to read about her, there’s this lovely profile of Tokarczuk from the New Yorker and this one in the Guardian.
I enjoyed this essay on the Nobel prizes for literature which has a brilliant last line: “Perhaps the Nobel Committee’s main mission these days is not to diversify or evolve, but to troll.”
There were two winners for the Booker Prize too, which probably doesn’t seem like such a bad idea at first glance because the two authors are so totally awesome. Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo made history this year because Evaristo is the first black woman and first black British author to win the Booker. Sharing the Booker is a rebellion of sorts, it seems.
“Over five hours on Monday, discussions between the jury and Wood, who was acting as intermediary for the prize trustees, went back and forth. The jury won the day.
[Gaby] Wood [director of the prize] insisted she was resigned, rather than angry, about the “gesture”. “There was nothing unclear about my communication of the rules but that was the choice they made and you have to respect it.” She added that previous juries had entertained the idea of splitting the prize, but had accepted that it was not allowed.
It was the most dramatic act of Booker insurrection since the 1976 chair, Philip Larkin, threatened to jump out of the window if his favourite book didn’t win (it did).”
The reason why the Booker insists on one winner is because when there are two, one book inevitably eclipses the other. Chair of the judges Peter Florence may be confident that sharing the prize with Atwood won’t mean Evaristo is overshadowed, but there can be no question that had Evaristo been the only winner, she and her book Girl, Woman, Other would have got a hell of a lot more publicity than they are now.
I’m still reading this one by Evaristo, so I’m not going to talk about whether it ‘deserves’ to win or not, but I can tell you that I really enjoyed what she did in The Emperor’s Babe, a novel in verse set in London in the 3rd century AD, about Zuleikha, a child bride from Sudan who becomes the emperor’s mistress. It’s so well researched and so imaginative, full of as much wit as there is cruelty. The idea for the book came out of a conversation Evaristo had with curators at the Museum of London, who told Evaristo that there were no black people in London during the Roman empire (which is complete nonsense).
There were two books in the Booker Prize shortlist that really didn’t need publicity: Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and Quichotte by Salman Rushdie. Actually, I take that back. Quichotte probably did need that boost considering how close to unreadable Rushdie’s last two novels — Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, and The Golden House — were. Had Rushdie’s new one not been shortlisted, I probably wouldn’t have made any move towards either buying or reading it. As it turned out, I didn’t have to do the first because Penguin India very kindly sent a copy, which I promptly passed on to my father, who remains a Rushdie loyalist.
I eventually consumed Quichotte over a couple of days, not because it’s unputdownable but because I had a flight to catch and it seemed a little rude to kidnap the book that you have, days ago, proffered to your father. (Especially since he hadn’t finished reading it.) The good news is that Rushdie’s reimagining of Cervantes’s Don Quixote is not awful. It’s actually very enjoyable in parts and Quichotte offers glimpses of the old Rushdie with his swooping sentences, surreal situations and irreverent humour.
Set in America, the novel’s hero is Ismail Smile, a former pharmaceutical salesman and TV addict who decides he’s going to woo Salma, a famous TV star. Along the way he dreams into being a son who becomes the Sancho to his Don Quixote. Just as you think you’ve wrapped your head around Smile’s weird but epic road trip, it turns out that this is a book within a book. Smile’s story is actually being written by a not-so-successful crime fiction author. This author is estranged from his son and his sister, which explains a lot of what he’s putting Smile through. In the last section, Rushdie adds another twist to this tale. None of this is bad.
On the whole, Quichotte isn’t brilliant, but it isn’t bad despite lapsing into preachiness in parts. However, it’s arguably a lot less ambitious, accomplished and complex than, say, The Lost Children Archive, which also involves a long, hard look at contemporary America through the device of a road trip and surrealism. I’m still surprised it didn’t get shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
The only other novel I’ve finished from the Booker shortlist is The Testaments, which I ended up buying because being an unabashed Atwood fangirl, I couldn’t wait for the copy that Penguin sent out. As far as the Booker Prize is concerned, I can confirm that my love for Atwood has grown after reading about both her reaction to winning and her decision to give her share of the prize money to a scholarship for indigenous students.
If only I could say that my love for her grew after reading The Testaments. Here’s the thing: if you haven’t read The Handmaid’s Tale — which was a favourite to win in 1986, but got pipped by Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. Have you even heard of it? So much for prizes being for posterity and all that — or if your exposure to Gilead is limited to the web series, then I’m sure The Testaments is an absorbing read. I’m equally certain that the novel is a little more chilling if you’re in or familiar with the current state of affairs in America.
However, on its own, I found The Testaments competent but a little disappointing, especially as a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. The language doesn’t have the sharp, rhythmic force of Atwood’s prose at its best and the plot was thoroughly contrived. I kept thinking it would get better with the next chapter until I realised I was on page 400 of a 414-paged book.
The novel is told through three narrators: Aunt Lydia and two teenaged girls. One of the girls has grown up in Gilead and the other, in Canada.
SPOILERS AHEAD
We discover eventually that both of them are Offred’s daughters and that Aunt Lydia has basically been conspiring to overthrow the regime at Gilead from pretty much the moment she was made a founder Aunt. Aunt Lydia has not only been helping out the Mayday group, she goes on to figure out a way to bring Offred’s two daughters together. When they make it out of Gilead, they are reunited with Offred. It’s almost like a Bollywood moment.
SPOILERS DONE
(Please please read The Handmaid’s Tale if you haven’t. It’s brilliant. Also the Madaddam Trilogy. And Cat’s Eye.)
The Testaments doesn’t hold a candle to The Handmaid’s Tale. The older novel was laced with menace. You were constantly afraid for Offred and Gilead, a place of shadows and secrets, felt like a dangerous labyrinth. There’s none of that in the sequel. What we do get is an astonishing number of coincidences and convenient twists in the tale. Aunt Lydia’s backstory is obviously meant to humanise her, but that she’s explaining her every move and thought felt painfully artificial. Particularly in the last section of the novel, which rushes to conclude the story – it was almost as though Atwood was like, “Here, I’m telling you EVERYTHING of what happened to Offred and her girls. Do not pester me to write a third part” —The Testaments felt like well-written fan fiction.
Sure, The Testaments is a decent read, but it’s not a prize-winning novel by a long shot. I can only hope no reader ‘discovers’ Atwood through this book. If you have read her before, it’s pretty daunting to think that this story, which despite its flaws moves with swift and elegant grace, is Atwood’s imagination playing at ordinary.
While on the subject of the Booker shortlist, one moment’s silence for all those who read the 1,020-paged Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellman in the hope that it would win. I do intend to read it eventually and will totally award myself a cupcake if I manage to do so before the end of the year.
Because, dear reader, we’re in the middle of October and there are just two and a half months left to this wretched year. Rejoice!
Thanks for reading, and Dear Reader will be back soon.
The Testaments + Quichotte + The Emperor's Babe + more