It’s that time of the year again: whispers, murmurs and tedious droning about the quality of the Booker Prize shortlist which was announced this Tuesday. There’s just no way to please the sceptics is there? If you put all the heavyweights through to the last round there are cries of ‘predictability’ and resentment for favouring ‘intellectualism’. If you put too many novices through then it’s a case of hidden agendas. I’m ready to throw my towel in the ring; I mean who really gives a damn, right? Any publicity is good publicity, and if the Booker Prize will sell books and get people into bookshops then surely everyone’s a winner.
Everyone except Allen Hollinghurst I expect. Winner of the
Booker for his fine, but if you ask me, boring The Line of Beauty in 2004, he was the surprise omission from this
year’s shortlist. The clear favourite when the longlist was released, the
‘he-deserves-it’, ‘will-he-at-last’ mantle (gratefully received by Howard
Jacobsen last
year), has this year been wrapped around Julian Barnes. Shortlisted for the
fourth time without having won this prestigious *yawn* award, Barnes is now
widely tipped to win. His book, or rather novella, The Sense of an Ending actually sounds very interesting: a
middle-aged man’s meditation on life and the role memory plays in the
perception of one’s life.
Maybe it is a reaction to everyone finding fault with this
year’s shortlist that I am strangely excited by it. Part of the reason, I
admit, is the fact that five of the six books are published by independent
publishers rather than the traditional literary giants such as William
Heinemann (Random House) or Hamish Hamilton (Penguin). Not surprisingly
perhaps, I consider these to be the most exciting on the list.
Top of that list for me is Carol Birch’s Jamrach’s Menagerie, published by one of
my favourite publishers, Cannongate. It
is the story of an unusual friendship between Jaffy Brown and Charles Jamrach,
a nineteenth-century eccentric entrepreneur and wild animal collector. A work
of historical fiction, it is meant to be very poetic and imaginative and somewhat
reminds me of one of my favourite books, Measuring
the World and the standout debut of 2010 (in my opinion), Boxer, Beetle.
Pigeon English,
published by Harry Potter’s Bloomsbury,
was hailed by BBC
2’s Culture Show as one of the promising debutant novelists to look out for
and has also been shortlisted for the 2011 Guardian
First Book Award. Not bad going. The story is told from the point of view
of a 11-year-old Ghanaian boy, Harrison Opoku. Reminiscent of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-Time it centres around inner-city life, suspense, innocence, growing
up in an alien country and gang culture, all of which seems particularly
pertinent given the recent London riots.
Patrick deWitt’s The
Sisters and Brothers published by Granta is an “offbeat western
about a reluctant assassin and his murderous brother”. If the Cohen Brothers wrote
books, this is probably the kind of book they would write. Apprently. The other
two books, Half Blood Blues (Esi Edugyan) and Snowdrops (A D Miller) published
by Serpent’s Tail and Atlantic respectively, don’t really
take my fancy so I won’t write about them. Crazy, huh? You can read about them here,
though, if you are interested.
After my cynical rant last year I vowed to never do it again
and yet, like those inevitable ‘will-he-won’t-he’ rumours circling overhead
like preying vultures, I have gone and done it again. Oh well. My money this
time round is on Barnes, the heavyweight whom that elusive prize has eluded
until now, the veteran who kept getting knocked down in the final round. I
don’t yet know if his book is a knock-out, but hey, he deserves it right?
Matthias Mueller
Check out Matthias Mueller’s excellent Cultural Constellations blog