Booker Longlist Announced

The longlist for the 2010 Man Booker Prize for Fiction was announced just a short time ago.  Apparently this  "Booker's Dozen" of 13 books was selected from a total of 138 books, 14 of which were called in by the judges. 

Peter Carey - Parrot and Oliver in America 

Emma Donoghue - Room 

Helen Dunmore - The Betrayal

Damon Galgut - In a Strange Room

Howard Jacobson - The Finkler Question 

Andrea Levy - The Long Song

Tom McCarthy - C 

David Mitchell - The Thousand Autumns of Zacob de Zoet  

Lisa Moore - February 

Paul Murray - Skippy Dies

Rose Tremain - Trespass

Christos Tsiolkas - The Slap 

Alan Warner - The Stars in the Bright Sky

 I'll post links to each of the books and the general discussion later.


Afterthought :

Yes - where IS McEwan????


Postscript :


John Self twittered a summary for lazy journos :

Hooks to hang your Booker story on: 1. List very white. 2. One's a sequel. 3. No McEwan. 4. Not many new names. You're welcome

Farrell's Troubles Wins Lost Booker

Troubles by J.G. Farrell, the first novel of his Empire Trilogy,  has been declared the winner of the Lost Man Booker Prize, forty years after it was first published. You may remember reading on this blog that this special prize was awarded by the Booker committee to honour the books that fell through the net when the rules were changed in 1970.

The press release describes the book :

Set in Ireland in 1919, just after the First World War, Troubles tells the tragic-comic story of Major Brendan Archer who has gone to visit Angela, a woman he believes may be his fiancée. Her home, from which he is unable to detach himself, is the dilapidated Majestic, a once grand Irish hotel, and all around is the gathering storm of the Irish War of Independence.

Claire Armistead in The Guardian says :

... to say that Farrell is a predictable winner is to undervalue his extraordinary resurrection and what it says about readers' continuing ability to recognise a great book when they see one. Troubles is a work of characteristic depth and humour, which views the decline of the British empire through the prism of a decaying seaside hotel – pointedly named the Majestic – in Wexford. ... Farrell's gift was the ability to immerse himself so thoroughly in his worlds, whether early 20th-century Ireland or mid-19th century India, that he never seems to preach as he tackles the big issues of race, culture and class.

It sounds as if the finding of the Lost Booker was a very valuable exercise indeed.  If Farrell had actually won in 1970, he would have been the first author to have won the prize twice.

Sadly, Farrell drowned while out fishing, aged 44.

Postscript :

Sam Jordison on The Guardian blog says :

Farrell's portrayal of the fast-decaying Majestic Hotel and England's even more rapidly crumbling rule in Ireland surely adds up to one of the best books of the last half-century, let alone 1970.

The Lost Booker

The longlist for the 1970 Booker Prize has just been announced. Nope, you didn't read that wrong.  We're talking about what's come to be known as The Lost Booker.

When entry criteria for the prize changed in 1971, books published the previous year were ineligible.  Peter Straus, honorary archivist to the Booker Prize Foundation comments :

I noticed that when Robertson Davies's Fifth Business was first published it carried encomiums from Saul Bellow and John Fowles both of whom judged the 1971 Booker Prize. However judges for 1971 said it had not been considered or submitted. This led to an investigation which concluded that a year had been excluded. I am delighted that, even in a Darwinian way, this year, with so many extraordinary novels, can now be covered by the Man Booker Prize.

But now a team comprising newsreader Katie Derham, poet and novelist Tobias Hill and Observer journalist Rachel Cooke (pictured above ... and all born around 1970) have put together a longlist of 21 titles :

Brian Aldiss - The Hand Reared Boy
Paul Bailey - Trespasses
H.E.Bates - A Little Of What You Fancy
Nina Bawden - The Birds On The Trees
Melvyn Bragg - A Place In England
Christy Brown - Down All The Days
Len Deighton - Bomber
J.G.Farrell - Troubles
Elaine Feinstein - The Circle
Shirley Hazzard - The Bay Of Noon
Reginald Hill - A Clubbable Woman
Susan Hill - I'm The King Of The Castle
Francis King - A Domestic Animal
David Lodge - Out Of The Shelter
Iris Murdoch - A Fairly Honourable Defeat
Shiva Naipaul - Fireflies
Patrick O'Brian - Master and Commander
Mary Renault - Fire From Heaven
Ruth Rendell - A Guilty Thing Surprised
Muriel Spark - The Driver's Seat
Patrick White - The Vivisector

More here at The Guardian.

The Independent highlights the irony of Australian author Patrick White being nominated for such an award posthumously when he loathed literary accolades, and hated the thought of winning the Booker. He demanded to have his name removed from the list in 1979, and sent a friend to collect his Nobel Prize!

Boyd Tonkin points out that bestselling and genre fiction does well on the list, something which has changed since :

The past also looks different once formerly low-ranking kinds of writing rise in our esteem. JG Farrell would go to win with Booker in 1973 (for The Siege of Krishnapur), but in general his brand of richly researched and densely plotted historical fiction would not see its critical stock inch up until well into the next decade. As for the presence of Mary Renault on this shortlist, it indicates a fairly recent willingness to celebrate high-quality bestsellers for literary as well as commercial reasons. Yet change can still be slow. A contemporary equivalent of her much-admired tale of the young Alexander the Great would still struggle to make a Man Booker shortlist today.

Mantelpieces

There's another excellent interview with Man Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel, this time in The Independent with Boyd Tonkin. And on the same page there is a video of her reading from Wolf Hall which was filmed in my favourite bookshop - Daunt Books in London - so do have an oggle.

And the author has contributed an exclusive short story - The Heart Fails Without Warning - to The Guardian.

Postscript :

Robert McCrum sees similarities between Mantel and this week's Nobel prize winner, and salutes their hard work and dedication in the face of considerable adversity :

Müller suffered horribly under Ceaucescu, and her work has been shaped by political repression. Mantel's early adult life was blighted by a debilitating, undiagnosed illness. Müller committed herself to her writing in great privation and obscurity. Mantel laboured for years on a book (A Place of Greater Safety) that was repeatedly rejected, and finally shoved into a drawer before its belated publication in 1992. Now, after years of quiet dedication, both women have been fully recognised. This underlines a fundamental truism I have always believed about the book world: it's the work, not the life, that matters.

Bookies' Book Bags the Booker!

Just for once, the bookies favourite won! Hilary Mantel was awarded the 2009 Man Booker Prize last night for Wolf Hall, which is set in the 1520s and tells the story of Thomas Cromwell's rise to prominence in the Tudor court.

James Naughtie, chair of judges said :

Hilary Mantel has given us a thoroughly modern novel set in the 16th century. Wolf Hall has a vast narrative sweep that gleams on every page with luminous and mesmerising detail. ... It probes the mysteries of power by examining and describing the meticulous dealings in Henry VIII's court, revealing in thrilling prose how politics and history is made by men and women. ... In the words of Mantel's Thomas Cromwell, whose story this is, "the fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes."

Mantel is the first British winner of the Booker in 5 years. Of the £50,000 prize money, Mantel is quoted by The Daily Telegraph as saying :

It's earnings. That may seem a very cold way of looking at a major award, but cost out what an author earns per hour and it's far, far less than the minimum wage. The return is not great. The money from prizes, welcome though it is, must be used to pay the mortgage.

Worth reading is this review of the novel by Janet Maslin in The New York Times. There's an interesting interview with Mantel up on the Booker website and another by Ada Edemariam in The Guardian. You can read the extract from the novel (which appeared in The New York Review of Books) here. You can also hear Nabtel talk about the book and read from it on the BBC website.

Booker Countdown

There's just a few hours to go before the man Booker Prize winner 2009 is announced. No time to read the books first? Well you can cheat and enjoy John Crace's condensed versions of all the shortlisted novels at The Guardian.

Meanwhile the punters have been placing their bets, but Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall remains favourite.

Best British Literature ... is Sci-Fi

Alison Flood in today's Guardian reports that award-winning science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson (left) has hit out at the literary establishment, more particularly Booker judges for ignoring science fiction, which he calls

... the best British literature of our time.

Literary fiction he says, usually turns out to be historical novels (and that is certainly true of most of the books on this year's shortlist) :

In his original piece published in New Scientist (and very well worth reading) he says :

... these novels are not about now in the way science fiction is. Thus it seems to me that three or four of the last 10 Booker prizes should have gone to science fiction novels the juries hadn't read. Should I name names? Why not: Air by Geoff Ryman should have won in 2005, Life by Gwyneth Jones in 2004, and Signs of Life by M. John Harrison in 1997. Indeed this year the prize should probably go to a science fiction comedy called Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts.

And he throws down this challenge to the magazine's readers (I reckon its one we could all take up) :

Read science fiction, read historical fiction, make your own judgement, and then talk about it. Try this as a kind of experiment: read 30 writers new to you. It's a big project, but what a lot of good reading would come of it. And New Scientist readers will be quickest of all to see that the literature that best expresses our time, that speaks to our time, is science fiction. How could it be otherwise? Our world is a science fiction. ... This is important, because you need the literature of your time. You can't get the meaning of our life in 2009 from historical fiction, nor from science alone. Novels serve us, and are treasured, because we want meaning, and fiction is where meaning is created. Scientifically minded people could perhaps conceptualise novels as case studies or thought experiments, both finer grained and wider ranging in their approach to meaning than cruder genres such as religion, psychology or common sense. A literary life is an ongoing moral education, a complete geography of the human world.

Incidentally, New Scientist also announced a Sci-Fi flash fiction competition, and nowhere in the rules does it say that it isn't open to international readers - so go for it.

Anglocentric Nostalgia for the Past?

What, then, of the 2009 shortlist? At first glance, it breaths the spirit of the 1970s. Fiercely English, it is strongly inclined to the historical narrative. Every one of these books explores the past in some form.

Taking few risks, it offers JM Coetzee and AS Byatt the prospect of a return visit to the winner's podium. In a recession, it's a list that will transmit a warm glow of reassurance into the troubled breasts of nervous UK booksellers. God knows what they will make of it in Beijing or Kuala Lumpur.

Occasionally, as it has every right to do, the prize turns its back on posterity. This year, Booker is in denial, big time.

Robert McCrum weighs up this year's Booker shortlist in The Observer, and it's very nice of him to consider what we think here in KL, isn't it? (I think we just shrug and say "Fine, just guarantee us some quality reading." You all agree?)

Tim Adams in the same paper makes a very good case for the Booker shortlist this year being symptomatic of the general British desire to escape into the past.

Fiction editor at The Telegraph, Lorna Bradbury, is very happy with the selection:

There hasn’t been a Man Booker shortlist to match this one since 2005, when the shortlisted novelists Kazuo Ishiguro and Zadie Smith went on to split the judges so irrevocably that John Banville came out the ultimate winner. ... If the longlist contained the requisite number of outsiders and eccentrics, such as James Lever’s comic novel narrated by Cheeta the Chimp, the shortlist concentrates on quality and seriousness

In an interesting piece at The Irish Times, Fintan O'Toole, reckons that Irish authors William Trevor, Ed O’Loughlin and Colm Tóibín didn't make the cut this year because :

The advance word had hinted at a feeling that there have been quite enough Irish winners for the moment, thank you. .... (And also because) Irishness is losing its gloss.

So much can be read into a shortlist!

Will Coetzee Make it a Hatrick?

The Man Booker Prize shortlist has just been announced and here 'tis :

A S Byatt - The Children's Book
J M Coetzee - Summertime
Adam Foulds - The Quickening Maze
Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall
Simon Mawer - The Glass Room
Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger

Says Chair of Judges James Naughtie :

We're thrilled to be able to announce such a strong shortlist, so enticing that it will certainly give us a headache when we come to select the winner. The choice will be a difficult one. There is thundering narrative, great inventiveness, poetry and sharp human insight in abundance. ... These are six writers on the top of their form. They've given us great enjoyment already, and it's a measure of our confidence in their books that all of us are looking forward to reading them yet again before we decide on the prizewinner. What more could we ask?

What more indeed? It's a formidable list. Coetzee has won twice before for Life & Times of Michael K in 1982, and Disgrace in 1999. Sarah Waters has been shortlisted twice and Hilary mantel previously long-listed,

The winner will be announced on Tuesday 6 October 2009.

Full details and information about all the novels on the award website. Let the fisticuffs begin!

Not the Booker Prize - What Readers Think

The Guardian blog invited reader nominations for the Not the Booker prize - an alternative list of novels they thought should be considered for the annual award : it includes both books that did make the Booker longlist, and many more besides which were ignored. (Tash's novel among them.)

Here's the readers' list :

1. Ghosts and Lightening by Trevor Byrne
2. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
3. Map Of The Invisible World by Tash Aw
4. Summertime by JM Coetzee
5. The City and The City by China Miéville
6. John The Revelator by Peter Murphy
7. Solo by Rana Dasgupta
8. The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton
9. Jerusalem by Patrick Neate
10. Spirit by Gwyneth Jones
11. This Is How by MJ Hyland
12. The Earth Hums in B Flat by Mari Strachan
13. The White Woman On The Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey
14. The Quiet War by Paul McAuley
15. The Harrowing by Robert Dinsdale
16. Hodd by Adam Thorpe
17. The Tin-Kin by Eleanor Thom
18.The Winter Vault by Anne Michael
19. White Is For Witching by Helen Oyeyemi
20. The Father Of Locks by Andrew Killeen
21. The Children's Book by AS Byatt
22. Stone's Fall by Iain Pears
23. Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
24. Down On Out On Murder Mile by Tony O'Neill
25. Rose by Gillian Green
26. Cockroach by Rawi Hage
27. Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
28. Grace, Tamar and Laszlo The Beautiful by Deborah Kay Davies
29. Ten Storey Love Song by Richard Milward
30. Mark Illis by Tender
31. Jeff In Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
32. Little Gods by Anne Richards
33. A Kind Of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth
34. Great Waters by Kit Whitfield
35. Black Rock by Amanda Smyth
36. Red Dog, Red Dog by Patrick Lane
37. Harare North by Brian Chickwava
38. Generation A by Douglas Coupland
39. Tomas by James Palumbo
40. Neverland by Simon Crump
41. The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville
42. All The Colours Of The Town by Liam McIvanney
43. Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
44. Best Served Cold by Joe Abercrombie
45. The Outlander by Gil Adamson
46. How To Paint A Dead Man by Sarah Hall

The six books with the most nominations will go on to the final round of voting. Polling day is August 23rd.

Mantel is Booker Frontrunner

Short of a bedroom imbroglio, what else can ever thrust an esteemed author of literary fiction onto the front pages?

Aberrant behaviour at the bookies it seems! There has been a huge rush of Booker wagers on just one of the longlisted author, Hilary Mantel. 95% of the bets have been for her novel Wolf Hall. Bookies William Hill said that it had never seen a betting pattern like it and slashed the odds on a win for Mantel's longlisted Wolf Hall from 12-1 right down to 2-1.

But of course, a Booker win for Mantel is not a dead-cert, says Boyd Tonkin at The Independent. And any Booker winner will know that the front-runner often fall long before the finish line. But says Tonkin :

Anyone who frets at this vulgar intrusion of cash and chance into the august enclosures of literature should read Wolf Hall at once. Closer in style and mood to Tom Wolfe than Walter Scott, Mantel's racy and rocketing account of Thomas Cromwell and his rise to power at the court of Henry VIII stitches a canny materialism deep into the fabric of the new, rational and businesslike, England that Cromwell did so much to create. Indeed, she takes care to specify one trait among the other qualities that make her Putney blacksmith's son such a stellar arbitrator, plotter, trader, deal-closer and all-round fixer for the crown. "He will take a bet on anything." And so will we.

It was the only Booker longlisted title I managed to find at Kinokuniya the other day (though I'm assured all the titles will be in soon) so I guess my Booker read starts here. Having enjoyed Beyond Black, I'm anticipating this read with great pleasure.

Chimp Longlisted for Booker

The longlist for the 2009 was announced a couple of days back, and contains some names you will recognise for sure :

AS Byatt - The Children's Book

JM Coetzee - Summertime

Adam Foulds - The Quickening Maze

Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man
Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness

James Lever - Me Cheeta

Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall

Simon Mawer - The Glass Room

Ed O'Loughlin - Not Untrue & Not Unkind

James Scudamore - Heliopolis

Colm Toibin - Brooklyn

William Trevor - Love and Summer

Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger

So ... 13 titles - a Booker's dozen. A safely literary list. A list of authors who feel to me like old friends and I am already happily anticipating the hours spent in their company.

Coetzee has of course won the Booker twice before, and A.S. Byatt, once. William Trevor has been previously shortlisted four times, Sarah Waters and Colm Toibin twice each, and Hilary Mantel once.

I read Simon Mawar's Mendel's Dwarf, and felt then that he should have received more recognition for his work.

I'm glad that the prize has also highlighted some deserving new (at least to me) names.

But there isn't much of an international showing on the list this year, is there? Where are the Indian authors? And of course, for us in Malaysia, where's our Tash?

Postscript

Booker back in the mainstream says Boyd Tonkin :

After years of praise or blame (according to outlook) about the readiness of the Man Booker Prize panels to flatter and promote the boom in fiction from or about India or Pakistan, this year's judges seem to have declared war on the Subcontinent. ... Yet the relative absence of surprising names, and of independent publishing houses, tells its own story. Since the millennium, with off-the-wall or debutant victors such as DBC Pierre, Yann Martel, Anne Enright and (last year) Adiga, the Man Booker has drifted down the scenic byways of the promising, the untried, the quirky, the left-field. This long-list shoves it back into the mainstream with a vengeance.

There's also a summary of each of the books here.

Fiction at the Crease

Q : How do you start a book?

Joseph O'Neil : As inadvertantly as possible. Then I continue as accidentally as possible.

I'm sure I wasn't Joseph O'Neil's ideal reader. I began Netherland some weeks ago. It wasn't the all-absorbing holiday read I was looking for and I put it down left the last 30 pages or so unread until today when I picked up it again today to take with me into that wonderful reading zone - the hairdressers.

The novel, which, you may remember, won a great deal of critical praise and was longlisted for last year's Booker Prize, as well as being nominated one of the ten best novels of 2008 by The New York Times and sweeping up the Pen/Faulkner Award. Obama was apparently also reading it.

The cover is decorated with words lifted from reviews - Wonderful (Jonathan Safran Foer), Stunning (New York Times), Breathtaking (Observer). I felt a measure of guilt most of the way through the novel that I felt some ambivalence towards it. Most of the way through I just felt I couldn't get a handle on it, there didn't seem enough that was cohesive to hold it together, and I longed for that simple, old-fashioned thing - a good story, to take over.

Netherland is a pretty unusual book : it's a novel about New York but focuses more on immigrant communities than the skyscrapers of Manhattan; it's a post-9/11 novel in which the incident is hardly mentioned (yet casts an enormous shadow); and its a novel about cricket set in a country where there sport is scarcely played at all.

Financial analyst Hans van der Broek finds himself alone in New York when his wife Rachel leaves him to go back to London, and finds refuge in cricket, played almost entirely by immigrants, mainly Asian and from the Caribbean. He becomes friendly with Chuck Ramkissoon, the "oddball umpiring oracle", a wheeler-dealer businessman with dubious connections who takes him under his wing. Later Chuck is found murdered - his wrists handcuffed and his body thrown into the Gowanus Canal.

But if if the reader expects the solving of and fallout from the murder to drive the story, this isn't the case at all. O'Neil actually says in the notes that accompany the novel that he actually abandoned a first draft because it was:

... undermined by a preoccupation with plot.

And then there is Hans marriage to Rachel. We're never quite sure why she decides to leave him and take their son, Jake, back to London, and why she can't get back together with him. We're not privy to her thoughts and we aren't given the opportunity to warm to her, while Hans who comes across as ineffectual and inert. He drifts and allows matters to take their course, rather than taking any kind of decisive action. It isn't surprising that he finds himself following in the wake of the charismatic Chuck.

Yet O'Neill catches Han's depression and sense of dislocation most convincingly, in the first person narration. He employs an almost stream-of-consciousness style where one memory flows back into another (very much in the style of John Banville in The Sea - I don't think that it is coincidence that O'Neill is also an Irish author), the novel moving between layers of time and recollection. I was also reminded very strongly - perhaps because of the introspection and aching melancholy - of Richard Ford's The Sportswriter : we get the sense of a real man doing his best to make sense of his circumstances.

It occurs to me too that this might be another example of what Atwood calls The Male Labyrinth Novel.

There are some beautifully observed scenes of New York, especially those which centered on his quirky neighbours in the Chelsea Hotel (where the author actually lives), and his visits to Brooklyn. I appreciate too what I learned about cricket (especially how pitch conditions and the weather affect play, and about how it is a game of perspectives - knowing when to switch from the wide view to the telescopic).

But I'm still not sure what to tell you about whether I enjoyed the novel or not. I still feel I'm pulling together the threads and making sense of it, but I suspect that this might be one I want read again.

If you want a taste of Netherland, you can read the first chapter here.

Now then, what are you reading?

Time for Adiga's Tiger

Aravind Adiga has won this year's Man Booker Prize with The White Tiger. Months back, Janet de Neefe who is the director of the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival wrote to tell me that I simply had to read this book. She was so impressed that she invited Adiga to the festival, though sadly for us but happily for him, he flew to London to be there when the announcement was made. Maybe Bali will get him next year?

Although I am only one book into the Booker shortlist this year, I picked the right title to bring away with me on holiday and to write a review of for Starmag. So in that sense I'm happy. As for whether I'm happy with it as the winner ... well I think it will prove a popular choice. It is highly readable (quite zippy actually!), very well written, with relevant and important stuff to say about India's economic miracle, corruption as the only means of survival, the haves and have-nots.

But I am also feeling a little underwhelmed by it. Maybe this is because some of the books I've read recently (including The Brief Wondrous Life of Osar Wao by Junot Dias and We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver - both of which I need to write about here) blew me away in a way this book just hasn't managed to yet. (And I'm two-thirds of the way through.) It isn't getting under my skin.

At least, though, I do not feel like chucking it into a Balinese swimming pool as almost happened to Anne Enright's book last year! (A novel I hasten to add that I came to greatly appreciate on second reading.)

I also keep comparing it to Indra Sinha's Animal's People which was shortlisted last year and with which I feel it shares certain similarities. Yet I feel that Sinha's book is far the stronger ... I connected with Animal far more than I'm able to connect with Balram.

But I'm happy for Adiga. He's only the fourth debut novelist to have won, and the second youngest ever, and the fifth Indian author. Michael Portillo, chair of the judges, said that for the panel in the end :

... what set this book apart was its originality; for many of us this is entirely new territory - India the dark side. It was in many ways perfect.

Charlotte Higgins writes about the winner on the Guardian website and there is also an extract from the book to whet your appetite. John Sutherland writes an amusing piece about the categories that Booker winners fit into and ask where this book belongs. (He concludes that Adiga is both shooting star and uncommonly readable.) Sam Jordison reviews the novel here.

There's another extract on the Telegraph site, and you might like to read Neal Mukerjee's review here.

I'll append any other relevant links here later.

Academic Men a Menace on Booker Panel

There must be a lot of authorly fingernail chewing going on at the moment as we await the result of this year's Man Booker Prize. (I'm sitting here in yet another Ubud internet cafe waiting for the result to come in ... 'cos I don't have anyone but you guys to talk to tonight and everything closes so early here.)

Ahead of the results though, Louise Doughty, one of this year's Booker judges has had a swipe at male judges as she tells the Independent that they :

... "always have their eye on their reputations" and are too concerned with picking a "highbrow" author rather than a readable one. She added that they tended to made judgements based on "how well the winning book reflected on them", often choosing the most obscure and self-consciously highbrow novelist, rather than considering the best entry. ... "I don't think it's a good idea to have academics as judges on these prizes," she said. "Academics always have their eye on their reputations and always have a vested interest to pick someone as literary and obscure as possible. I think academics are always looking over their shoulder.

John Sutherland (as a male academic) disagrees with her (of course).

I'm not sure whether she's right or not, but it would be really nice to have a novel win that's capable of catching the public imagination ... as previous winners Enright and Banville really haven't.

Odds Now on White Tiger

Some first reactions to the Booker shortlist.

John Sutherland in the Guardian calls it :

... the least metropolitan, least up-to-the-minute, shortlist I can recall.

Julie Bosman in the New York Times focuses on those who didn't make the final list :

“Netherland,” by Joseph O’Neill, a novel set in post-9/11 New York that was a best seller and a critical darling, was omitted from the finalists. “The Lost Dog” by Michelle de Kretser, another favorite from the 13 books on the previously released Booker longlist, also did not make the cut. ... More surprising, “The Enchantress of Florence” by Salman Rushdie was not chosen as a finalist, both startling and delighting British critics and subsequently prompting the Booker judges to explain why Mr. Rushdie had been snubbed.

The bookmakers have apparently been thrown into disarray. Said spokesman Graham Sharpe :

We were convinced that the winner would be either Joseph O'Neill or Salman Rushdie and are amazed that neither even made the shortlist. As a result it looks like a very open competition with everyone in with a chance.

The revised odds are :

2/1 Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture
3/1 Linda Grant - The Clothes on Their Backs
3/1 Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole
6/1 Amitav Ghosh - Sea of Poppies
8/1 Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency
8/1 Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger

If you haven't time to read all the books, Jim Crace does a sterling job of giving you the condensed versions.

Six Weeks, Six Books

The Man Booker Prize 2008 shortlist was announced today. The finalists are :

Aravind Adiga - The White Tiger
Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture
Amitav Ghosh - Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant - The Clothes on Their Backs
Philip Hensher - The Northern Clemency
Steve Toltz - A Fraction of the Whole

According to the official announcement :

Two first-time novelists, Aravind Adiga and Steve Toltz, survived the cull of the longlist from thirteen novels to just six. Previous winners of the Booker Prize, John Berger and Salman Rushdie, failed to make this year's shortlist and Sebastian Barry is the only novelist shortlisted for this year's prize to have been previously shortlisted (in 2005). ... Linda Grant, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000 and longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002, is the only female author to make the shortlist of six. She is joined by Philip Hensher, longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002 and a Booker judge in 2001, and the widely-acclaimed Indian writer Amitav Ghosh.

The statment goes on to say that the panel of judges (chaired by Michael Portillo former MP and Cabinet Minister) :

... commend the six titles to readers with great enthusiasm. These novels are intensely readable, each of them an extraordinary example of imagination and narrative. These fine page-turning stories nonetheless raise highly thought-provoking ideas and issues. These books are in every case both ambitious and approachable.

Our friend Louise Doughty blogs about the shortlist meeting and points out that we have six weeks to read the six books before the winner is announced on 14th October.

Booker Hits 40

It was nearly called the Bucklesbury Prize, it's now forty years old, has managed to stoke up plenty of controversy in that time, and is probably the world's most recognised literary prize.

Yep, the Booker hits early middle age and celebrates it's birthday with an exhibition at London's V&A Museum. John Coldstream looks at :

... the tempestuous opening chapters

of the award in the Telegraph, while in the Guardian, all the previous judges dish the behind-the-scenes dirt about about The Tiffs, The Tears and The Triumphs.

The shortlist for this year's prize is announced on 9th September.

Booker Post-Mortemising

The post-mortemising of the Man Booker longlist has been playing out on the book pages and on the Booker bulletin boards, and these are so far the biggest controversies.

There were howls of protest of course for the novels readers feel should have been listed but weren't - the loudest for The Spare Room by Helen Garner (none more so than Canongate publisher Jamie Byng), and Tim Winton's Breath.

Then, over and over there's the same protest about Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 : "But it's a thriller!!"

"So what?" is my response, all that matters is that it measures up in terms of the quality of writing.

I wouldn't say this is the first thriller on the Booker longlist, as Brian Moore's 1990 shortlisted Lies of Silence fits the bill very nicely ... except that it wasn't called a thriller, because to call it a thriller would be to pander to the masses who aren't up to litfic.

I argued against such snobbish pigeon-holing here and I'm already grateful to Child 44 for widening the conversation.

Update 9/8/08 :

Scott Pack's post on this year's Booker kerfuffle is well worth reading.

The Booker's Dozen

And here. 'tis, the Booker longlist which is again this year a baker's dozen. (Should that now be a Booker's dozen?)

There are some very good choices which make me very happy as I wanted to read them anyway. I have the Rushdie and the Ghosh and Linda Grant's book, none of them read yet. The rest are still to be bought. (Booker watching is an expensive business!).

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Girl in a Blue Dress by Gaynor Arnold
The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry
From A to X by John Berger
The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif
The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz

Says Chair of judges, Michael Portillo :

With a notable degree of consensus, the five Man Booker judges decided on their longlist of 13 books. The judges are pleased with the geographical balance of the longlist with writers from Pakistan, India, Australia, Ireland and UK. We also are happy with the interesting mix of books, five first novels and two novels by former winners. The list covers an extraordinary variety of writing. Still two qualities emerge this year: large scale narrative and the striking use of humour.

The shortlist will be announced on 9th September.

More comment from Michelle Pauli and Mark Brown in the Guardian, and Boyd Tonkin in the Independent.

For more discussion and a useful list of the ones that got away, go join the debate on the Booker website.