Skios - Michael Frayn - Booker Prize 2012

Kingsley Amis was shortlisted three times for the Booker Prize (with “Ending Up” in 1974, “Jake’s Thing” in 1978 and finally winning the prize with “The Old Devils” in 1986), Frayn has been on the shortlist before with “Headlong” back in 1999. So a “masterful” exponent of farce is shortlisted more often than a new kid on the block? I suppose Frayn has further opportunity to make the list in future years.

“Skios” is farce, pure and simple farce. Mix in some scientific chaos theory mumbo jumbo but it reads very much like a stiff upper lip British comic farce from the 1970’s. This year we also had “The Yips” by Nicola Barker, a comic farce with intertwined characters set for the internet generation, and personally I found that novel had a lot more depth and pathos than Frayn’s latest offering.

Put simply we are on the Greek Island of Skios, and according to this novel the original home of Athena the Greek virgin Goddess of reason, intelligent activity, arts and literature. Of course she must be hidden as we have four intertwined (although they don’t know it) main characters Dr Norman Wilfred who has been hired by the gorgeous and ambitious Nikki to give the Annual Fred Toppler Foundation Lecture on “Innovation and Governance; the Promise of Scientometrics”, and Oliver Fox a playboy self-confidant womaniser who has arranged to meet a lady who he had previously met for a grand total of 5 minutes, Georgie, for a romantic rendezvous on the island of Skios.

Now things start to get a little complicated, Georgie is away on this interlude without telling her current partner Patrick, Oliver is using a villa, to meet Georgie, which is owned by friends of his ex-girlfriend (Annuka who has only recently thrown him out and whose luggage he is using). Georgie used to go to school with Nikki and she’s using their friendship as a cover for her “getaway”, Nikki is plotting to win control of the Foundation with her coup speaker and poor Dr Wilfred is just too busy on his mobile phone to realise someone has taken his luggage. Oliver pretends he is Norman, Norman ends up in a villa not the foundation, Georgie thinks Nikki is in Switzerland (“skiers” not “Skios”) and ends up in the same bed as Norman who she thinks is Oliver, Nikki thinks Oliver is Dr Norman Wilfred and is charmed, Oliver thinks he is Norman and on it goes.

She plainly wanted him to be Dr Wilfred, he could see. She would probably be disappointed later, of course, when he turned out not to have been Dr Wilfred after all. But later was later. The immediate priority was not to disappoint her now. In Any case, there was some truth in what he had said. He was not good at telling lies, and he never did. Not if he could manage without.

We also have Greek corrupt leaders, Russian magnates with clueless girlfriends, sheiks with impossibly long names, money laundering, about 30 episodes with mobile phones, drunk and tired journalists, inept security guards, twin? brother taxi drivers  and more. As a multi award winning playwright you can see this novel being firmly put upon a stage with people quickly moving in and out, ribald laughter from the stalls and oohhss and ahhhsss as we feel embarrassed at each and every wrong turn. But does it work as a novel? [SPOLIER ALERT] The one redeeming feature for myself was the chapter just short of the ending where the numerous plausible endings are put down, the explanation of seemingly random events and the causation of other events – the butterfly in Brazil flapping it’s wings causing weather events does rate a mention!!!!

All up a quick read, an enjoyable read but something I’d rather watch on a stage (and on a night where I’ve switched off a bit). So farce features twice on this year’s long list, so we must be in dark times if we are reduced to improbable, coincidental and quite simply absurd behaviour to take us away from the reality.

Communion Town - Sam Thompson - Booker Prize 2012

‘We’re always telling ourselves the story of ourselves, every waking moment, as if nothing matters more. Isn’t that a selfish way to live? Shouldn’t we try and get outside that?’

This novel is subtitled “A City in Ten Chapters” and we want to know the secret of this city, we spend 278 pages (in my edition) wandering around lost in this city, wondering about ourselves will we be gratified, will the novel answer all the questions it has raised, if only for my own gratification.

The city is a mystery when you notice it’s full of sunken side streets falling away from you beside river and canal, by yellow and pink brick terraces, in September for instance under castles of foliage, in deep light. Someone approaches and you’re sure you recognise him, you’ve met just once, and not long ago, but he vanishes away down one of those streets and you miss him. You feel you owe an apology. And it only gets deeper, the riddle of it, as years go by and the special creatures stay exactly the same, just as they were when Stephen went with them. The modulation of names and faces makes no difference at all.

The cover of my novel has a review snippet from Tash Aw “A strange remarkable work”, well I concur, this novel is strange, very strange. More like ten short stories all on the same theme of the city, with different voices, different tenses, different eras, first person, and third person, missing characters, choruses and probably more. We have tales that ring of Sam Spade, ones that are lifted straight from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (with a consulting detective and his sidekick – the sidekick narrating that chapter), others that are gothic and others that are drenched in heartache but also horror.

As you know I don’t like to put spoilers in my reviews but in this case I could probably point out the whole novel and it wouldn’t spoil it in any way as I must admit (it is my failing here) I just didn’t get it. Initially I thought it was being structured as a growing metropolis may be having an architectural theme, or slowly constructing a whole, later I thought it was all going to lead to a common theme as Colum McCann did brilliantly in “Let The Great World Spin”, even later still I thought it was probably a mixture of unconnected tales as would happen in a city, where your paths may never cross another individual. I still don’t know what this was, it is set in the past (maybe), the future (probably), the present (unlikely) and the disparate sections have minimal linking themes (maybe the “don’t go out at night” theme was common). We even have a “memory city” within the city:

And does our discipline not have a special affinity with the ancient practice of the memory house, for where does the detective live, if not in a memory city, a city that is less a physical place than a world of codes and symbols? Does she not, in her mind, walk the street at all times, in search of the meanings concealed there?

Yes this is a novel of codes and symbols, you could go back and reread it numerous times to search for the meanings concealed there, you could probably work out the literary references each chapter represents and then come to some conclusive whole. Personally I enjoyed a lot of the quotes, the language and the concept, pity is it didn’t reach the heights I thought were there, hate to say it but this is no David Mitchell, nor did it leave me with a sense of wanting more. 

The Yips - Nicola Barker - Booker Prize 2012

Initially I thought it a tad strange to have a definition of “Yips” at the start of this novel as it is a term that I have been familiar with for years. However, as there must be a number of people who haven’t come across the term before I’ll replicate the definition here:

Yips (y ps). Pl. n. Nervousness or tension that causes an athlete to fail to perform effectively, especially in missing short putts in golf. (The Free Dictionary)

Before I go into my usual précis of the novel I’d like to quote a section that appears quite late in this 548pg tome.

‘Yeah. Something nice and easily digestible – finger-food for the internet generation. Maybe a little toy hidden away inside somewhere…’

‘Like a Christmas cracker or a self-help Kinder Egg.’

‘Exactly!’ Jen enthusiastic.

‘And the basic philosophy?’

‘No philosophy. No guidance. No structure. No pay-off. No real consequences. Just stuff and then more stuff.’

‘Stuff?’ Gene double-checks that he’s heard her correctly.

‘Yeah, stuff. Like, here’s some stuff, here’s some other stuff, here’s some more stuff. Just stuff – more and more stuff, different kinds of stuff which is only the same stuff but in different colours and with different names; stuff stacked up on top of itself in these huge, messy piles…’

Now I don’t want to give away too much of the story here but once I came to this section of the novel I did think to myself, “This conversation is describing this book, it’s just stuff in different colours (but the same) all piled up on itself."

Basically we are in the mid 2000’s and have a has-been golfer, self-absorbed of course, who continues to believe he is still at the cutting edge of what the public wants. He is media savvy, broke and still expects to find his groove again one day. Whilst playing a small event in Luton he comes across a young barmaid who lives the new internet generation life, is full of bullshit and bravado, her part time boss (who has beaten cancer numerous times – it becomes more extreme as the novel progresses) who is married to a C of E clergy woman, who has unruly fringe problems. The golfer many years before hit a spectator with a stray ball and that caused court cases, premature deaths and more. The impacted family contains a psychotic mother who carries on in French, a lay about son (and his young child who seems to go about naked all the time), his sister who is an agoraphobic tattoo artist who specialises in merkins (pubic wigs) and her (now dead) father who taught her tattoo but who was also a collector of Nazi memorabilia. We also have a sex therapist and his pious Muslim wife, the Jamaican manager of the golfer (who has shipped all her children back home soon after birth), her sister who is an anti-environmentalist activist, entrepreneurs and more.

Of course all of these characters are interwoven in some way (you’ll have to read it to find out how), but despite all their idiosyncrasies I started to believe they were all a little alike (just more stuff piled on top of other stuff). Besides the obvious correlation to our main golfing guy having the yips, each and every character has them in some way too.

Obviously a comic social commentary on the internet generation and the lack of social interaction we currently pursue, this novel does contain quite a few gems:

I love tattooing but I’m my dad’s apprentice. I love the skin – I’m obsessed by it – it’s so magical and strong yet so unbelievably sensitive – it’s the thing that holds all the feelings in – the thing that touches the world; the mask, the source, the base, the surface….

I haven’t read Nicola Barker’s shortlisted novel from 2007 “Darkmans”, so this one was a revelation for me. At 548 pages it is not a novel you knock over quickly, and it did leave me a little flat, although amusing in parts and revealing in others it just seemed to wander on a little too long – finger food for the internet generation.

Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil - Booker Prize 2012

To say it has been a mad couple of months would be an understatement, holidays, catching up on the work that piled up whilst I was on holidays, charity work, running and all whilst attempting to be a dad!!! Thank goodness I’ve had a great Booker Prize shortlist to transport me away from the day to day grind, pity I haven’t had time to update my blog. This will be a short review only.

I read this novel about a month ago so please forgive me if my recollections aren’t fresh and straight  onto the page.  This is Indian poet Jeet Thayil’s debut novel and even though it is primarily a novel about drug addiction, it is also a social reflection on the city once known as Bombay (the novel begins and ends with the work “Bombay”).

This novel opens with our mysterious narrator stating, “…and since I’m the one telling it (the story) and you don’t know who I am, let me say that we’ll get to the who of it but not right now”, and moves throughout from first person to third person narrative across numerous characters. The eunuch prostitute and opium den worker Dimple, is the one who seems to appear most, but she is not the narrator. We also have den owner addict and family man Rumi, a celebrated artist who can’t control his addictions, an ageing Chinese refugee who laments on a place and time lost as well as our “narrator” recently returned from the USA.

The common bond being drugs, this is an hallucinatory story about loss of identity, motivations for addiction, peppered with dream like sequences, bold tales of the physical impacts of drugs containing graphic details of violence and sex. Through addiction, each character has lost more than their control of their lives, this is how the raw underbelly of a city existed in the 1970’s.

Only the rich can afford surprise and/or irony. The rich crave meaning. The first thing they ask when faced with eternity, and in fact the last thing, is: excuse me, what does this mean? The poor don’t ask questions, or they don’t ask irrelevant questions. They can’t afford to. All they can afford is laughter and ghosts. Then there are the addicts, the hunger addicts and rage addicts and poverty addicts and power addicts, and the pure addicts who are addicted not to substances but to the oblivion and tenderness that substances engender. An addict, if you don’t mind me saying so, is like a saint. What is a saint but someone who has cut himself off, voluntarily, voluntarily, from the world’s traffic and currency?

There is also the melting pot of religion, race, gender, poverty vs wealth and more in this dark tale, that reflects the seemingly better capitalist world of the future (Mumbai) against the not too distant past, as well as giving voice to the victims of that time. Is the new future life of being clean what the poor and addicted want?

Unlike any other Indian novel I have read before this debut strikingly delves into the city of Bombay and the tales of opium, cocaine and heroin addiction are startlingly real, and I could understand why some readers have found the subject matter, the style (who’s voice is talking now?) and the bleak moral a bit too much to handle. Another realist novel on the 2012 shortlist, looks like we’re living in very very dark times indeed.

Umbrella - Will Self - Booker Prize 2012

Where to start? Where to start? At the beginning? An epigram by James Joyce, well that’s the start isn’t it? Gives it away? Probably the easiest part of the book to read. A journey – rugged, with traps and snares galore, across 90 years. NINETY TWO to be exact. Covering Dr Zack Busner’s work with mental patients. More specifically a mental patient called Audrey Death. Death, De’Ath (something like that I can’t remember and can’t find it – how could you when the novel is 397 – THREE HUNDRED AND NINETY SEVEN – pages, PAYYY JEZZZ, long and there are no chapters, only paragraphs that go for 26 pages at a time, well not all of them but more than most. Oops forgot linear structure, no problems this book doesn’t have any, only reason I know it goes for ninety two years is the précis inside the front cover, a nice brown one too, just like the quick brown fox jumping over a lazy dog, no dogs in the war, or were there? Not sure, things can get frightfully muddled in the trenches, especially when your sister is working in an arsenal making the munitions – MOO NISCH ONS – that’s my sister Audrey. Gets encephalitis lethargica you know, that’s a sleeping sickness of the mind. What do you do with people who get that? Put them in a mental hospital of course, with others who have it too. Use an umbrella to keep the rain off, or as an insider’s term for the treatment.

Get the um-brella, Doctor! Get the umbrella! Which is a euphemism he knows to be widespread among the staff, and which he abhors. – Eeeerarrr’rrra’rrra -!

Had to put a quote in – always do – sometimes more than one, probably a good idea to put another one in, why not three short ones, gives the same idea

her brain…it’s outside of time…so far away…in another place… in another phase of development, Willis said when they all pitched up that morning.

told the psychiatrist he had experienced it as a continuous present, an awful and unchanging Now?

He knows – and understands also that using net curtains to guard against your privacy is as futile, surely, as employing tenses to divide time?

Did I mention we follow a Doctor? He treats these patients, tries to find a cure, manages to get a few of them awake, in retrospect of course, there’s no such thing as time in this novel, only give away are the lines from songs thown in every now and then. Sing along songs of WW1 days (World War One, the Great War, the war to end all wars, that one), pop tunes of the 70’s (who’s an ape-man? I’m an ape-man, I’m an ape ape man, I’m a ape-man….oops done it again, opening sentence given away) Italics would be useful, help you break up your thoughts – not that things would stay the same even mid senten

Chop and change, here we go ‘round the mulberry bush…the mulberry bush, could make sense and probably does if you have a repetitive mental illness where time has stood still. Especially working in a repetitive job, working a lathe, or making umbrellas (there they are again – what do they mean?). Have to red this again, can I do it? They’ll be reading this one for years, studying it in universities – YOU – KNEE – VERR – CITY – they will you know. Will win the prize, I’m confident of that, a standout book, one that’s the most challenging of reads, one that will infuriate about 92% of readers (that means 8% will read it right through– you know how it works 100% less the ninety two who didn’t finish it – hey there’s that NINETY TWO number again, could that mean anything?)

Will Self is credited with the following quotes – and as we know quotes from the web are always true -  "I don't write fiction for people to identify with and I don't write a picture of the world they can recognise. I write to astonish people.”,  "What excites me is to disturb the reader's fundamental assumptions. I want to make them feel that certain categories within which they are used to perceiving the world are unstable."  He’s achieved that here – a heroic, challenging but ultimately very rewarding novel, just don’t expect it to be easy. For me the absolute standout of the year’s shortlist of the ones I’ve finished to date.

PS – Just in case there are one or two of the 92% out there, this review is a poorly written parody - PARRROOOOODEEEE

The Teleportation Accident - Ned Beauman - Booker Prize 2012

Well I’m back from a couple of weeks annual holiday and time to update the blogs. The problem with taking this break was I finished this novel on my first day so the recollections could be a bit dimmed by the sun, reefs and rainforest.

Let me introduce you to Egon Loeser (you can follow him on twitter although you can’t find author Ned Beauman there), a set designer in 1930’s Berlin who is working on a play about the life of Adriano Lavicini, a fellow set designer from the Renaissance who presumably died when his teleportation machine destroyed the theatre on its debut. Egon is building a teleportation set, whereby people can travel across time and space and appear at any point of the stage almost seemlessly. But deep down Egon is struggling, he hasn’t has sex since he split up with his girlfriend a long time ago and a glamorous former student, Adele, has just returned to his life only to run off, for a one night stand, with an author who has stolen Egon’s hero and written an ill researched pulp story. A heartbroken Egon then proceeds to Paris to find Adele, unsuccessfully of course,come across a longevity plan where the transplanting of monkey glands might just work.  And then finally onto Los Angeles where he befriends a local writer (one of his heroes) and his charming wife Dolores Mutton as well the owner of a pulp fiction book store who introduces him to HP Lovecraft. Of course he becomes involved in time travel via a secret university study into a real teleportation device.

This novel is hilarious in parts, so much so I was laughing out loud on the train:

You could certainly write symphonies about Dolores Mutton. You could write at least a scherzo about her cleavage alone.

Dear Mother and Father. Good news: I am rich. I have cornered the market in foreskins.

As a result, no doubt, of some bureaucratic oversight, Sunset Boulevard had a beginning and a middle but no end. The cost was not far now, but Sunset Boulevard probably just rolled on down the beach and into the water and onwards to Shanghai.

I will stuff this book so far down your throat that your duodenum will autograph it in bile.

Ned Beauman’s novel is one weird piece of work. Besides the laughing out loud, the engagement with the writing styles and settings is engrossing. For over 240 pages I was totally extolling the virtues of this young writer, then the novel seemed to fall apart for 100 or so pages. The section covering the sci-fi style of Lovecraft was not my cup of tea. However I did enjoy the four leaps in time as the ending, which (for some reason or other) reminded me of David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas”.  This also had hints of David Foster Wallace, but not as detailed (no footnotes here). And the use of time (as part of a Teleportation Accident) was extremely clever – how can I person in the 1930’s discuss what it may be like in 2012 and be so uncannily accurate?

I can understand why this novel didn’t make this year’s shortlist, for me it was the flat section late in the novel, however I will be hunting down his debut “Boxer, Beetle” – as well as continuing to follow the fictional Egon Loeser on twitter. I will also be looking out for future work from Ned Beauman who, at only 27 years of age right now, will certainly become a well-known writer.

Next up will be my review of Will Self’s “Umbrella” – now that was a challenging read!!!

Swimming Home - Deborah Levy - Booker Prize 2012

Let’s hope that Oscar Wilde’s assertion that “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life” is somewhat off the mark, as this year’s Booker Prize long list is a reflection of us living in depressing times. “The Lighthouse” and “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” both bleak tales of broken relationships, journeys into finding one’s self and now we have “Swimming Home” a bleak tale of depression, mental instability and…you guessed it….broken relationships.

You could look at Deborah Levy’s latest work on face value and report that it covers eight days, in 1994, in the lives of a pair of couples, one daughter, a psychiatric doctor, a resident housekeeper and the drop in Kitty Finch who is asked to stay.

We have Joe (or Jozef or JHJ) a famous poet, his wife Isabel a foreign correspondent and their daughter Nina. They are holidaying in France (near Nice), is it an attempt to rekindle their doomed marriage? A mother who was always away and missed her daughter growing up? Their companions are Mitchell and Laura, two family friends who are sharing the villa with them for the summer, they are on the verge of bankruptcy, shop owners and gluttons, also questioning their marriage. Arriving as a naked floating “bear” in the bottom of their swimming pool is Kitty, a self-proclaimed botanist who has stopped her anti-depressant medication. As a regular visitor to the villa, Kitty is adored by the live in housekeeper/groundsman Jurgen and despised by another long term resident, retired “shrink” Madeleine. This is a perfect setting for love triangles, explorations of love and worth and family tensions.

The spare room was dark and hot because the windows were closed and the curtains drawn. A pair of grubby flip-flops lay on top of the tangle of drying weeds lying on the floor. Kitty’s red hair streamed over a lumpy stained pillow, her freckled arms wrapped around Nina, who was clutching the nylon fur rabbit that was her last embarrassed link with childhood. Isabel knew Nina was awake and that she was pretending to be asleep under what seemed to be a starched white tablecloth. It looked like a shroud.

But it is the depression edge and the unsettling sparse prose and the underlying tension (will Kitty do something disturbing?) that is the real stand out here. Without giving  you any spoilers I did spend quite some time wondering if Kitty would act in some demented manner, but at the same time thinking that such actions would only belittle the real issue of mental illness, but on the other side of the coin, if it was to portray mental illness truly then maybe something will occur. This is all drawn out in Deborah Levy’s stark but poignant prose.

To have been so intimate with Kitty Finch had been a pleasure, a pain, a shock, an experiment, but most of all it had been a mistake. He asked her again to please, please, please drive him safely home to his wife and daughter.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely.’

Although it may appear so, that’s quote is not a spoiler as it is on the second page of the book.

This is a novel which does for depression what Jon McGregor’s “Even The Dogs” (winner of the 2012 IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize) did for heroin addiction, and in my mind that is very high praise. This is a short book which demands to be reread and very much a worthy inclusion on the Booker Prize list. I should also point out the publisher of this novel “And Other Stories” who produce four books per year purely on subscription. Through “patrons” paying 35 pounds for all four books they can publish in line with their values and approach booksellers as their product is already being read. In my mind a great business model and one that should be supported (I will be doing so!!). For more details visit their site at www.andotherstories.org

I must congratulate this year’s judges, because on face value I did think it would be a difficult list to tackle, but I’m part way onto my fifth novel from the long list and am enjoying the whole experience. At this stage it appears to be a great year for fiction, even if I don’t judge” Philida” as highly as the others. Next up will be a review of “The Teleportation Accident” by Ned Beauman but I’ll do a post tomorrow once the shortlist is announced together with an update on the amounts I’ve donated to charity as a result of my links to the Book Depository.

The Lighthouse - Alison Moore - Booker Prize 2012

Back in 1985 Patrick Suskind came up with the best selling novel “Perfume” (Das Parfum) which attempted to explore the relationship between the sense of smell and the emotional attachments that those experinces may hold. This was made into a film by one of my favourite directors Tom Tykwer in 2006. I distinctly recall both art forms and the problem they had attempting to create an experience based on an olfactory response in the written word or on film, both being primarily sight driven.

Zoom forward to 2012 and we suddenly have an amazing first novel by Alison Moore which not only attempts to replicate the sense of smell but also covers the spectrum of balance, spatial awareness, light, dark, sound, taste and touch all pieced together in a bleak setting of failed relationships.

Our main protagonist is Futh, a middle aged and recently separated man, who is on a journey to Germany for a walking holiday. His recollections of his parents failed marriage kick in on page one and his revisitations of his childhood continue throughout this short novel.

Written in sparse dark prose, we actually feel our way through Futh’s darkness as he recalls the same haunting moments from his youth and his failed marriage over and over again. Each time, the darkness is broken by a new revelation (the lighthouse piercing the darkness) and slowly but surely a more holistic picture is formed. But are we fully aware of the danger ahead?

In the night, there will be a storm. It will be brief, if a little violent, and hardly anyone will even realise it has occurred, although they might hear it raging, thundering, in their dreams.

In the morning, by the time people are up and about, the sun will be out again, and the rain-soaked pavements will be dry, and there will be very little evidence of damage.

Short, sharp chapters with titles such as “violets’, “coffee, “beef and onion”, “perfume” and more each give us a snippet of Futh’s life or the life of Esther, the wife of the owner of the first hotel Futh visits in Hellhaus (German for bright house or light house).

He talked about flash patterns. ‘The light,’ he said, gazing fixedly at the hazy horizon, ‘flashed every three seconds and can be seen from thirty miles away. In fog, the foghorn is used.’ And Futh, looking at the lighthouse, wondered how this could happen – how there could be this constant warning of danger, the taking of all these precautions, and yet still there was all this wreckage.

This is a novel which addresses loneliness, fate, doomed relationships, isolation and a whole lot more of those remote, bleak, depressive and dark emotions and all in a setting of constant “lighthouse” reminders (Futh carries a silver lighthouse vial that used to contain perfume). Add in the clever attempt at presenting all the senses (hearing, sight, touch, smell and taste) throughout and we have a very bold and memorable first novel. If you are not entranced by the tight but accurate descriptions of stilettos on hardwood floors, or camphor as mothballs or sunburn and hot baths then this novel may not be to your liking.

Even though we almost know our main character's fate before we start page one (is Murial Spark's intro quote that much of a giveaway?) we cannot help but to be drawn closer and closer to the ending, as a moth to a lamp or a fly to a venus fly trap. 

My first novel from the 2012 long list was “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” another tale of a failed relationship and a walking journey (also with inadequate footwear) but really that is where the comparisons end. Both novels I’m glad to have had the privilege of reading and to think I was approaching 2012’s long list with such trepidation!

Philida - Andre Brink - Booker Prize 2012

I've just finished novel number two from the twelve on the long list and I must admit I haven’t read the 1976 shortlisted “An Instant in the Wind” or the 1978 shortlisted “Rumours of Rain” by the same author. So this was a new experience with a writer I hadn't come across before.

This is the fictionalised tale of a the very real Philida, a slave in South Africa in the 1830’s who we find travelling to the local town to lodge a formal complaint against the son of her boss, who had promised freedom in exchange for sexual favours. She has borne his children, been subjected to cruel punishments as a result and has finally decided that “no” is and answer she can pursue.

The early chapters are told in many narrative voices, although all are centred on the plight of Philida. The later part of the book becomes more her own narration with limited input from the other narrative voices. The early explanations of her plight are the ones that ring most true:

What Frans say. That thing he say that really make me know for the first time what he is and what I am. I am a slave. He is not. And that’s all. Nothing else matter, not ever. A slave. That is not because of the beatings or the work, it is not being hungry or cold when the snow lie white on the earth, or to feel myself dying in the heat of the summer sun when I cannot lie down in the shadow of the Baas’s longhouse, it isn’t the pain or the tiredness or having to lie down when Frans – Baas Frans – want to naai me. It isn’t any of this that make me a slave. No. Being a slave, like I was today in that white office in the Drostdy, with all the papers and the buzzing flies around me, mean always going back to the place they tell me to go back to. I am never the one to decide where to go and when to go. It’s always they, it’s always somebody else. Never I.

There is one thing that I occasionally come across on the Booker Prize list and I really struggle with it, that’s is when we have a female writer attempting to be convincing as a male narrator and completely missing the mark. This novel is an opposite case in point, I believe Andre Brink has really struggled to accurately portray how a lead female character would think, behave and act. This could be considered a minor criticism, however at times I was distracted by the lack of authenticity.

It feel like those last times when Frans and I were together: when I move the way he move, not against him, but along with him. As if we find ourselves inside a big, slow steady wind, a wind that come and go like the sea. In and out. This way and that way. I am I and Frans is Frans, but together we’re no longer two, only one, like the sea, like the wind. Then I know once more what I am and who I am, even though he now throw me away like a mealie cob that he wipe his arse with. Into the Binneland. Into the deepest inside of everything. Into myself. Where I can only be what I am. A duck cannot lay chicken eggs. It is what it is, it lay what it must lay. And it is good like that. I no longer want anything to be except what it is.

The early sections of the novel where we see the tale through many character’s eyes, understand their motivations and fears and can get a holistic view are the parts that I enjoyed the most and had so much promise. However, then we suddenly go into a strange abyss. There is a chapter almost singularly dedicated to listing all the material goods on the farm that are being auctioned off, item by item listed for page after page. In the acknowledge section at the end of the novel, Andre Brink explains that the actual auction papers for the items on the farm where Philida worked he found quite interesting – he may have, I found it tedious. Other sections that had me completely dumbfounded was the sudden comparisons between Christian faith and Islam, large quotes from the bible and occasional quotes from the Koran. Why the religious fervour all of a sudden? It left me with a feeling of disorganised mess, with a whole lot of concepts that were going to be pursued but none to any satisfaction.

Personally I was very disappointed with what looked to be a promising novel, and am not that keen to pick up Brink’s previously shortlisted works (although I will). Unless the remainder of the long list is quite weak I can’t see this one making the final six.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry - Rachel Joyce - Booker Prize 2012 - IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2014

After four months of non Booker Prize fiction I have returned. The packages have started arriving in the post and finally I've started the Long List for 2012 and this year there was neither rhyme nor reason as to the order I would read them. The first one I picked up off the pile sitting on the shelf just happened to be this one, as we know I'm in for a 12 novel pilgrimage so it seems a good enough place to start.

Harold Fry is retired, an assuming man who never reached great heights in his schooling  or career, a man who is sitting at the breakfast table ignoring his toast and wondering if he could mow the lawn again today (he’d done it the day before), when a mysterious letter arrives. A long lost work colleague has written from her death bed from Berwick-upon-Tweed, 627 miles away. Harold writes a polite reply and heads off to catch the morning return post. That’s when his pilgrimage begins.

A novel that reaches into the unassuming mind of Harold, his motivations, his fears, his regrets, his ordinariness and his life of being an under achiever. Could a retired man with no mobile phone, sailing shoes, minimal money and no training possibly walk the length of Britain to save a dying woman? Will it help him to understand the slippage in his love for his wife? His relationship with his only son?

So how was it that a truth that could make her smile once, and rest her head on his shoulder, would years later become the source of such resentment and fury? ‘You never held him!’ she had howled when things reached their worst. ‘All his childhood you never even touched him!’ It hadn’t been strictly true and he had said something along those lines; although she was right in essence. He had been too afraid to hold his own son. But how was it that once she had understood, and then years later she didn’t?

Although the story is peppered with interesting characters, motivators for Harold’s journey, and there are chapters speaking from his wife’s viewpoint, as well as her cries for help to the widower next door, it is the pilgrimage of Harold into his own past, confronting his demons, the places where he should have gone, his failing marriage, his darkest memories where the story rings most true. A “Heart of Darkness” trip by a retired brewery worker into his own self-loathing. Not a spiritual journey of Harold finding faith from a strictly religious sense (although we do have snow globes and other memorabilia of cathedrals) but a physical and spiritual journey of an ordinary man in 21^st century Britain.

This is Rachel Joyce’s first novel (after a distinguished career writing numerous BBC4 radio plays) and a fine debut it is, a thoroughly enjoyable, although emotionally draining, work which is a worthy inclusion on any Booker Prize Long List. Hard to judge where it sits against the other 11 novels which I’m yet to tackle though. Next up “Philida” by Andre Brink.

Booker Prize Long List 2012

Hot off the presses the Long List for this year's Man Booker Prize.

Nicola Barker, The Yips (Fourth Estate)

Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident (Sceptre)

André Brink, Philida (Harvill Secker)

Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (Myrmidon Books)

Michael Frayn, Skios (Faber & Faber)

Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (Doubleday)

Deborah Levy, Swimming Home (And Other Stories)

Hilary Mantel, Bring up the Bodies (Fourth Estate)

Alison Moore, The Lighthouse (Salt)

Will Self, Umbrella (Bloomsbury)

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis (Faber & Faber)

Sam Thompson, Communion Town (Fourth Estate)

A challenging list, I believe, as the judges have a history of academia, and have spoken out about last year being too "readable" - time will tell as I tackle them, but I'm hoping we don't have a plethora of unreadable books. It will be a few weeks before I get to the first of them but as per usual I will post all of my reviews here.