2016 Man Booker Prize Longlist
The longlist for the 2016 Man Booker Prize
has been announced,
and I'm sure the internet has ruined the Booker Prize. The judges clearly see
all our speculations and expectations and swerve them. My first instinct was
that the list looked a bit bloody, white, and American.
Paul
Beatty - The Sellout (Oneworld)
J.M.
Coetzee - The Schooldays of Jesus (Harvill Secker)
A.L.
Kennedy - Serious Sweet (Jonathan Cape)
Deborah
Levy - Hot Milk (Hamish Hamilton)
Graeme
Macrae Burnet - His Bloody Project (Contraband)
Ian McGuire
- The North Water (Scribner)
David
Means - Hystopia (Faber & Faber)
Wyl
Menmuir - The Many (Salt)
Ottessa
Moshfegh - Eileen (Jonathan Cape)
Virginia
Reeves - Work Like Any Other (Scribner)
Elizabeth
Strout - My Name Is Lucy Barton (Viking)
David Szalay
- All That Man Is (Jonathan Cape)
Madeleine
Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing (Granta)
Five are American writers, who would not
have been eligible for the prize before the rules were changed two years ago.
Six are published by Penguin Random House (as you may have noticed if you
received their newsletter).
Nothing at all from Africa or Asia. The gender balance is even enough, but then
would any Booker jury dare pick a mostly male longlist these days?
Still, maybe we shouldn't make the mistake
of feeding the list through simplistic "diversity
algorithms" as Sam Leith laments in
The Spectator. Maybe we should count the bodies instead?
A triple murder was the inspiration behind His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae
Burnet, and Ian
McGuire's The North Water sounds violent, cruel and bloody.
Justine Jordan in
The Guardian describes it as "so brilliantly nasty, one can barely tear one’s eyes from the
page." A description that reminds me of the last two winners: The Narrow Road to the Deep North and A Brief History
of Seven Killings.
I get the impression that brutal, abusive
men, and the damage they wreak on the world, might be a common denominator of a
number of these books. Maybe that is just the way of the world. Still.
Masculinity is certainly at the heart of David Szalay's All That Man Is. Some have questioned whether the nine separate segments,
each focussing on a different man, constitutes a novel; but challenging the
form of the novel should be part of the remit of a literary prize – and, as I
have said before, the first Booker Prize in 1969 ought to have been won by Nicholas
Mosley with a novel consisting of short stories. John Self
was impressed by All That Man Is, and I’m sure that one day he will tell us how
impressed he was by Impossible
Object. Elizabeth Strout also won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 with a
"novel-in-stories" (Olive
Kitteridge), and she makes the longlist with the minimalist My Name Is
Lucy Barton, which will
be the first longlisted title I read, almost as soon as I stop prattling on
here.
The view from the bookface seems to be that
this could be the most wide
open Booker field ever, but just to be curmudgeonly about it (sorry, you
will have to excuse me, I'm in a bad mood as my laptop crashed yesterday) this
list reminds me of 2011 - not because of its "readability" - but
because I see a lot of also-rans.
I had a hunch back then that the wide open
longlist full of unknowns left the way clear for Julian Barnes, who was far and
away the biggest name on the longlist, and this time around I'm wondering if
the same applies to JM Coetzee.
Coetzee would figure highly in any list of
the world's greatest living writers (even when no-one is quite sure who, or
what, he is writing about) so if The
Schooldays of Jesus is anywhere close to his best work he could be
heading for a Booker hat-trick. Although Booker judges love to be
unpredictable, and do usually drop the favourite at the shortlist stage...
Barnes' himself missed out this year, and I
wonder whether that is because The Noise of
Time was
eclipsed by Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We
Have Nothing which has
a similarly highbrow mix of 20th-century communist politics and classical
music.
Apart from Coetzee, the only other nominee
to have been longlisted before is Deborah Levy with her “hypnotic”
“dreamscape” of
a novel Hot Milk. I’m sure people
don’t mean to imply that it is sleep-inducing. (Although comparisons to
Virginia Woolf don’t help.)
I was pleasantly surprised to see AL
Kennedy finally make the longlist with her eighth novel, Serious Sweet, and pleasantly stunned to
see David Means' Hystopia there - I
left it off my list of contenders because I thought it sounded too far-fetched
for the Booker. Previously known for writing short-stories, Hystopia is
Means' first novel and is one of four debuts on this list - the other 'unknown
unknowns' being Work Like Any Other by Virginia Reeves,
Ottessa Moshfegh's Eileen and The Many by Wyl Menmuir: whereof I must
be silent.
If most of the longlist are also-rans, then
they sound like very interesting ones. Not least The Sellout by
Paul Beatty, which has been compared to Martin Amis – inevitable for a satirical
novel whose protagonist has
the surname Me. On reflection I am far more intrigued than disappointed by this
list and I am going to assume
that the omission of Megan Bradbury’s Everyone Is Watching was down to it not
being among the 155 novels submitted to the judges: historian Amanda Foreman,
actor Olivia Williams, author Abdulrazak Gurnah, writer and academic Jon Day,
and the poet David Harsent.
The shortlist, which I rashly predict to be
Coetzee, Levy, McGuire, Strout, Szalay, and Thien, will be announced on Tuesday
13th September. The £50,000 winner will be revealed at the traditional posh do
in London's Guildhall on Tuesday 25th October.
Many are read, few are chosen.
Did I mention that I don't like the Man Booker Prize longlist? It means that instead of spending August reading books I hope the judges will choose, I spend it trying to get hold of the ones they did. It also means seven weeks less time to read some of the possible contenders, and that makes trying to predict which books will be on the longlist when it is announced on Wednesday (27th July) even more foolish, so please ignore any predictions I may accidentally make here.
I added as many possible contenders as I could to the
list of eligible titles on Goodreads, which this year has ballooned to accommodate almost two hundred possibilities, but I have no doubt that the judges will descry a few more. There are a number of others that I couldn't squeeze on, including several highly-recommended books whose publication date on Goodreads suggested they were not eligible. I think if I were a publisher, getting the correct information onto the internet would be quite high on my to-do-list. Apologies to any authors who have been overlooked. Feel free to console yourself by getting your book repeatedly nominated for the Guardian's
Not The Booker Prize by people who haven't read it.
We live in increasingly
interesting times, where dystopias feel far too close to home, giving science fiction tropes more leverage than they have had for decades, something Val McDermid explored in her
Artsnight programme this week. Which brings me to the old bugbear of Booker judges bypassing books set in the future.
Take
The Sunset Pilgrims by Jenni Fagan, which is set in the winter of 2020-21 - a date that, despite its imminence, still looks and sounds like one of Captain Kirk's stardates to my generation. With characters coming to terms with cataclysmic climate change and transgender issues, it is a book of our times, and would sit nicely on a Booker shortlist.
I also enjoyed Ros Barber's excellent
Devotion, which had echoes of
Brave New World,
Enduring Love and - inevitably for a book set in the near-future whose protagonist is a paranoid, suicidal, psychiatrist - the works of JG Ballard (who, you will remember, only got shortlisted for the Booker when he wrote about the past in
Empire of the Sun.) But I'm still not sure what to make of Aliya Whiteley's small and perfectly odd
The Arrival of Missives -
A Month In The Country meets the new-weird?
Other futuristic or dystopian novels I am keen to read and would be delighted to see on the longlist include A Field Guide to Reality by Joanna Kavenna, The Countenance Divine by Michael Hughes, Hunters & Collectors by M. Suddain, The Mandibles by Lionel Shriver, When The Floods Came by Clare Morrall and The Unseen World by Liz Moore. I am not holding my breath on their behalves though.
Booker juries are always more receptive to historical fiction, and this year there are a couple of North American century-spanning epics for them to consider:
The Fortunes by Peter Ho Davies, and Annie Proulx's
Barkskins - her first novel for over a decade - which was my tip for the prize until it received rather mixed reviews. I would expect one or both of them to be on the list.
Other 800+page gorillas that the judges may have tackled include Garth Risk Hallberg's
City on Fire; and Louis Armand's 888-page behemoth
The Combinations, which has been described as “Kafka’s
The Trial meets Robert Musil’s
The Man Without Qualities” (possibly by the author himself for all I know); but not Alan Moore's
Jerusalem - which is published too late for this year's prize.
In recent years Booker juries have tended to choose winners who are either very well-known (Hilary Mantel, Julian Barnes) or very much unknown (Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga, Eleanor Catton, Richard Flanagan, Marlon James), so perhaps some Rumsfeldian Analysis is called for...
Known Knowns - well-received works by established writers
The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes and Graham Swift's
Mothering Sunday have both received citical acclaim making them strong favourites, and Edna O'Brien's
The Little Red Chairs also has a lot of admirers.
I would be surprised if Howard Jacobson isn't on the longlist as per usual with his contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series
Shylock Is My Name. It is full of his customary satirical wit - including the odd sentence that, if Jane Austen were alive, she would want returned.
Unknown Knowns - forthcoming works by established writers
New books are on the way from Ali Smith (Autumn), Jonathan Safran Foer (Here I Am) and previous winners Ian McEwan (Nutshell) and JM Coetzee (The Schooldays of Jesus).
Known Unknowns - Books by unknown writers with a buzz around them
Winners of other prizes that are eligible for this year's Booker include
The Sympathiser by Viet Thanh Nguyen, which won Pulitzer prize earlier this year and Kevin Barry's
Beatlebone - winner of the Goldsmith's Prize for 2015. Chinelo Okparanta's first novel
Under the Udala Trees, won the 2016 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and Garth Greenwell's
What Belongs To You seems to be this year's nominee for “
the Great Gay Novel for our times”. Two other debut novels I would not be surprised to see on the longlist are
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi and
Taduno's Song by Odafe Atogun.
And many, many more as the K-Tel advert used to say...
Unknown Unknowns - books we haven't heard of by writers we don't know
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
My sleepy eyes are struggling to read as many books as I would like these days, and I do not believe that I have read this year's Booker winner yet - although I am hoping that will change when I finally get hold of
The Cauliflower® by Nicola Barker. And I will stick my neck out and predict that Megan Bradbury's debut novel
Everyone Is Watching ought to be on the shortlist. Art, love, and life dance through the pages of this "beautiful, kaleidoscopic imagining of the artists' creation of New York“ (Eimear McBride). My fingers are crossed for both.
The judges for the prize are chaired by the historian Amanda Foreman, alongside actor Olivia Williams, author Abdulrazak Gurnah, writer and academic Jon Day, and the poet David Harsent.
Judges for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize have also been
announced. In the chair is Nick Barley, Director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and he is joined by translator Daniel Hahn; authors Elif Shafak and Chika Unigwe and the poet Helen Mort. They can all be followed on Twitter... @nickbarleyedin @danielhahn02 @HelenMort @Elif_Safak & @chikaunigwe and, of course, there is a list for potential contenders at Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/95298
