Contrary to what this blog suggests I’ve actually read the
entire Booker shortlist - helped no doubt by absence of any 600 page epics and
the overall readability of the novels.
The very readability that a
new literature prize, just announced, seems
to attempt to challenge. Now I don’t
have a problem with readability, but equally I felt rather let down by most of
the Booker books I read this year – none of them seemed to bear the mark of a
truly special book, a standout winner from recently published literature. Perhaps my ambivalence to most of the novels
explains my lack of blogging about them…
But, in advance of the prize announcement on Tuesday I
wanted to briefly summarise my thoughts on those I haven’t yet mentioned, and
thereby justify picking my own winner.
Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending felt like the
obligatory wordy, witty man’s book – but I rapidly found myself warming to
it. The characters were as believable as
they were irritating. The narrators
self-confessed unreliability as he takes a handful of memories and fleshes them
out spoke so strongly of human truth – how would our own lives be any different
if we tried to do the same? Barnes
subtly presents Tony’s priorities with pages of the narrative devoted to his
friendship and only the odd paragraph to his wife and child.
I feared that The Sisters Brothers was going to be a bit
silly, but I was wrong – Patrick DeWitt wrote a surprisingly sensitive
story. Scene by scene we are offered
characters more outlandish than the last but our brothers, particularly Eli are
there to guide us and help us make sense of this strange land - ‘The harbor, at first sight, I did not understand it. There were so many ships at anchor that their
masts looked to be tangled impossibly; hundreds of them packed together so
densely as to give the appearance of a vast, limbless forest rolling on the
tides’. Despite all the killings and surgical
procedures not a lot actually happens, it’s more like a catalogue of near
misses, but enjoyable to witness nonetheless, and throughout the plot acts as
an efficient backdrop for the portrait of the brothers.
Pigeon English was also a character led novel and I enjoyed
time spent in Harrison’s company. Stephen Kelman gave him a distinctive voice
and world view and it was pure pleasure to witness familiar things through his
eyes - ‘The devil is stronger here because the buildings are too high.’. And the pigeon gets my vote for best
supporting actor – I could have read an entire book focused on him alone. Sadly I felt the novel as a whole was quite
weak, it seemed to drift and then peter out quite suddenly and I was left
feeling that Kelman had somewhat wasted a strong character on a weak plot.
And my last Booker trip was in the hands of Carol Birch
aboard the good ship Jamrach’s Menagerie.
Initially feeling like a cross between Oliver Twist and Doctor Doolittle
I had high hopes, immediately revelling in her descriptive skills – ‘We went up
a ladder to a place where there was a beast like a pie, a great lizard mad and
grinning, and monkeys, many monkeys, a stew of human nature, a bone pile of it,
a wall, a dream of small faces’. I’m a
long-time fan of seafaring stories and usually can’t wait to set sail. But a strange thing happened here - once we
took to the waters my interest started to sink, and like the characters
themselves I found myself craving a return to dry land, and when we did things
seemed to pick up again.
