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.
Now let's all go to http://www.flipsnack.com/booker-prize/
and play with their Booker Predictor...
posted by PJE @ 2:52 PM
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