Author: Nina (Page 48 of 64)

Well, that was interesting. Of the thirteen guesses I made, only one of them, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, turned out to be correct, and perhaps the best thing that can be said about this year’s Booker longlist is that it will have similarly confounded a lot of people’s expectations. A majority of the books here are by established writers – but not by writers whose names you’ll necessarily hear every day. This means that those who feel like making an educated guess about the shortlist and final result will all have something new to discover. Which can only be a good thing.

If there’s one huge area of disappointment it’s that there are no works of speculative fiction on this list. If you’re into statistics at all, you’ll see that actually makes it less progressive than last year’s list, which featured Sam Thompson’s amazing Communion Town and Ned Beauman’s The Teleportation Accident, both of which made fascinating and varied use of speculative ideas. If you felt like stretching the point you might also include Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse in that tally, as it has a distinctly slipstream vibe.

There’s nothing like that this year. I suppose you could include Jim Crace’s Harvest, sort of – the fact that I’ve never found myself particularly excited by Crace’s brand of fabulation is most likely my fault and not his.

I’m flabbergasted not to see Nick Royle’s First Novel make an appearance. All in all, I feel curiously deflated by this list, which feels more conservative to me in terms of subject and form than it might seem at first sight.

The novel I’m far and away most excited about here is Richard House’s The Kills. I’d heard of this vaguely prior to seeing it longlisted, but didn’t know much about it. On reading the synopsis – it’s a novel in four novels, a crime story within a crime story within a crime story – my first thought was ‘wow, it sounds as if Richard House has read Roberto Bolano!’ I was delighted, on reading an interview with House, to discover that this is indeed the case and that The Kills was inspired, among many other things, by House’s reading of 2666. I ordered the book straight away and can’t wait to read it.

I’ll also be looking forward to Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. Catton’s first novel, The Rehearsal, did amazing things with what on the face of it sounded like a conventional idea based around a high school teacher-pupil affair scandal, Reading it was a genuine surprise, one of those fabulous moments in a reading life where you find your own expectations subverted utterly, and all you can do is bounce around in your seat thinking ‘bravo!’ The Luminaries looks like being similarly ambitious, and I feel certain that I’ll love it, just from the incisive and ironical self awareness of Catton’s writing.

Is the rest of it all a bit trad Booker though or is that just that my own particular literary interests don’t jibe with the judges’?

Perhaps I’ll change my mind in the coming days.

Get to know the Booker longlist here.

And do read this excellent interview with Richard House here.

I saw an amazing photo online yesterday. Posted by the Man Booker Prize at their Facebook page, it’s an image of all this year’s Booker subs, stacked deliberately in such a way that we can’t see what they are. I suppose it might theoretically be possible to work it out from what is visible, but I wouldn’t fancy trying. It did occur to me though that, surprising though it may seem, I’ve never tried to call the Booker longlist before, and so I thought it might be fun to try that instead.

When last year’s longlist was first announced I thought it was great. Looking back on it now it just seems weird. Some odd inclusions, and the usual kind of disparate air to the whole thing that makes you feel faintly deflated. More interesting than 2011’s, sure, but still not totally amazing, and when the eventual shortlist was published what I mostly felt was disappointment and a kind of rage that Nicola Barker wasn’t on it. Oh well. All this is pretty much par for the course with the Booker, and as with all literary prizes, the point, so far as I’m concerned at least, lies not in who wins or even what gets shortlisted, but in the discussion about books the prize provokes: the passion, the evangelism, and most of all the disagreements. That the Man Booker Prize gives readers one possible starting point for looking at the year in books – that’s enough to justify its existence in itself.

And so we come to 2013. One notable fact about this year’s eligibles is that many of the usual suspects aren’t among them. There’s no new Amis this year, no McEwan, Swift, Boyd, Smith (Zadie or Ali), Enright or Mantel. There’s Coetzee, and he’s a writer I love, but I’m just not fancying The Childhood of Jesus for the line-up. There’s Atwood, but her new book is the third in a series, and unless it turns out to be totally amazing – which we won’t know for another month as it’s not out until August – I can’t see Maddaddam making the cut either. This temporary shortage of ‘big beasts’ can only be a good thing, so far as I can see, because it opens things up a bit, and the presence – or lack of presence – of starry names on the longlist won’t immediately dominate the discussion around it.

So – who will get longlisted? Your guess is as good as mine, and I hope we will see some more guesses going up in the five days that remain before the Booker judges make their announcement at midday on Tuesday July 23rd. But here we go with my own attempt at predicting it. In alphabetical order then:

Americanah – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This still forms part of the TBR pile on my bedside table (along with Lanark and Traveller of the Century) but from what I’ve sampled of it so far this is an amazing book, far reaching and provocative and, like everything Adichie has produced, just superbly written. I think it’s a cert for the longlist – and deservedly so.

Life After Life – Kate Atkinson. I love Atkinson’s writing. She’s sensitive and perceptive and obviously cares a great deal about the craft. There’s been a lot of discussion about how well the speculative elements of this novel succeed – some have enjoyed the subtlety of it, others have felt the book doesn’t go far enough in tackling its central idea – but I think it’s great to see Atkinson trying a new direction and perhaps the good press she’s received for Life After Life will encourage her to be bolder next time around. In any case, she’s a thoughtful and committed writer who should be on this list.

Idiopathy – Sam Byers. I read the extended extract from this when it was published in Granta and was hugely impressed by it. Amazing writing, and the tone of the thing – darkly ironic, with a kind of surly rage bubbling away underneath – really got to me. The word on the street says that the novel as a whole more than lives up to that Granta extract, so on it goes. I’m going to have a sneaky extra punt here and say that Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles is most likely running neck and neck with Idiopathy for this year’s bravura debut spot, and that either or indeed both of them might make it through.

The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton. Still not out yet, so I haven’t read it, but I loved, loved, loved Catton’s first novel The Rehearsal – boldly original and one of the most brilliantly written debuts I’ve read in ages. I can’t see The Luminaries being anything less than equally fascinating, and the advance press has been very positive. Catton is surely a contender.

Meeting the English – Kate Clanchy. I love her short stories – quietly considered and perfectly crafted, they make every word count. A first novel from a mature writer is always an interesting prospect and I feel certain that Clanchy can more than hold her own here. I think we’re going to see her on the list.

The Hired Man – Aminatta Forna. Again, I love her short stories. She’s a wonderful writer, sensitive and wide ranging and able to pack a lot of emotional punch into a very few lines. I love the premise of The Hired Man and I want to read it soon. I have the distinct feeling that the judges will have been impressed by what Forna has produced here.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia – Mohsin Hamid. I’ve not read The Reluctant Fundamentalist yet, but I started reading Hamid’s new one the other day and was completely and utterly hooked in less than a paragraph. This book feels so powerfully essential I can’t see it being overlooked. I absolutely love and envy this kind of writing – both informal and impassioned, yet still poetic and so masterfully put together, it conveys its anger through a searing brand of humour that this writer is making his own. I wish I could write like this but I know I can’t and never could. Go for it, Mohsin.

Perfect – Rachel Joyce. Joyce’s debut made the Booker longlist last year and attracted a lot of positive attention, but I must admit I’m liking the premise of her follow-up a whole lot more. I love the idea of basing the central conceit of a book around the two seconds that were added to time in 1972 – that’s pure slipstream. This novel has a good feeling about it, and from what people are saying it’s a neat step forward in terms of technical achievement from Harold Fry.

Questions of Travel – Michelle de Kretser. I loved The Lost Dog, and the opening of de Kretser’s new novel is just beautiful. De Kretser is so accomplished as a writer it’s scary. The book’s receiving some wonderful press and I’m sure it’ll longlist.

The Adjacent – Christopher Priest. Yup, I am so biased. But there have been calls for some years now to see a genuine contender step forward from SF to turn the Booker on its head, and following the abject failure of last year’s judges to list M. John Harrison’s Empty Space, surely The Adjacent has to be it.  It’s a book packed with ideas, surprise, wonderful mysteries and allusive writing. It’s unlike anythng else that has been published this year and plays games with form few writers dare even to attempt. It’s arguably Priest’s most ambitious book to date and most importantly you don’t need to have read a single word of science fiction to be able to understand, love and appreciate it. I’m hoping that the judges will have rightfully been enthralled.

The Professor of Truth – James Robertson. I love Robertson – I think he’s a wonderful writer, sincere and boundlessly imaginative and just what we need. The Testament of Gideon Mack was one of my favourites of the year it came out, and the premise of The Professor of Truth grabs me very hard indeed. More people need to discover Robertson and I hope that this year they will.

First Novel – Nicholas Royle. I love this book. It was one of the first things I read this year, and I’m having a really hard job finding any new novels that match it in terms of excellence. If it doesn’t get longlisted, the judges are mad. Simple as that.

All the Birds, Singing – Evie Wyld. Wyld’s first novel made a considerable splash and it’s not hard to see why. Like de Kretser, she writes amazing sentences. Also like de Kretser, she has a way of packing emotion into those sentences that is hard to emulate. Her accomplishment in considerable. I think this book, like the Adichie, is a cert.

So there’s my Booker dozen. Before I leave you to go and get on with making your own predictions, I’d like to add two footnotes:

Five books I would love to see on the longlist but think won’t quite make the cut

(OK, so these are just five extra punts, basically)

The Secret Knowledge – Andrew Crumey
The Falling Sky – Pippa Goldschmidt
The Machine – James Smythe
Strange Bodies – Marcel Theroux
Secrecy – Rupert Thomson

Five books that should be on there but won’t be because they’re by yanks

(The Americans have their own prizes, sure. That’s the official argument for not letting them in on the Booker – but are we just afraid to let them in, because we secretly think they’ll kick our arses?)

The Round House – Louise Erdrich
The Woman Upstairs – Claire Messud
The Accursed – Joyce Carol Oates
Big Brother – Lionel Shriver
Sisterland – Curtis Sittenfeld

So – there we go. Roll on July 23rd, and let the games commence!

At just over four hundred pages, The Adjacent is Christopher Priest’s longest book to date. It would have to be, to contain as much as it does – depending on how you count them, there are up to eight different narrative strands in The Adjacent – but at its most basic level, the novel is a simple love story. The story of Tibor Tarent, a freelance photographer searching for the truth about what really happened to his wife Melanie, is the driving engine of this marvellous narrative from the first page until the last. As Tarent travels through a near-future Britain devastated by climate change and by other, still more sinister forces, further stories reveal themselves, offering us glimpses of the past and of other realities that may themselves somehow – mysteriously – also be a part of Tarent’s personal odyssey.

For me, one of the most remarkable aspects of Christopher Priest’s fiction has always been its way of combining complicated, elusive truths with addictive readability. There are very few writers I know of who can do this. There are writers who tell amazing stories – but their novels do not always hold enough in the way of philosophical or formal complexity to survive much in the way of critical analysis. And there are those writers who can not only survive critical analysis, they’re gifted and erudite enough to chew up the critics for a snack and still get part of a new chapter written before bedtime – but they are not always the writers you turn to for sheer visceral excitement and page-turning pleasure.

The writer who can provide both intellectual sustenance and a true sense of narrative wonderment is a very special writer indeed, and Christopher Priest is one of them. No matter how big and how complex Priest’s story arcs – and the story arc of The Adjacent might be his biggest and most complex yet – they are guaranteed to provide the kind of reading pleasure that has you flying through the pages, desperate to discover what is going on and what will happen.

Tibor Tarent had been travelling so long, from so far, hustled by officials through borders and zones, treated with deference but nonetheless made to move quickly from one place to the next. And the mix of vehicles: a helicopter, a train with covered windows, a fast-moving boat of some kind, an aircraft, then a Mebsher personnel carrier. Finally he was taken on board another ship, a passenger ferry, where a cabin was made ready for him and he slept fitfully through most of the voyage. One of the officials, a woman, travelled with him, but she remained discreetly unapproachable. They were heading up the English Channel under a dark grey sky, the land distantly in view – when he went up to the boat deck the wind was stiff and laced with sleet and he did not stay there for long.

This is the first paragraph of The Adjacent – and by the time we reach the end of it we are already in the midst of story. The prose is descriptive but economical, as Priest’s prose always is – there’s enough detail here to fascinate, but not so much as to make us feel bogged down in extraneous words. And we want to read on – indeed, it would be difficult not to. Who is Tarent and where is he going? Why is he in the company of these officials? What is a Mebsher?

More to the point, when are we?

All these questions get answered relatively swiftly, but others arise with equal rapidity to take their place. We travel with Tarent, we lose track of him for a while and then we find him again. The cast of characters shifts, then changes, then realigns itself. The more we read, the more we learn – or at least we think we do. And we are committed to this journey, constantly exhilarated by it, because no matter how far-flung or how strange the events we witness, there is always at the back and in the heart of them the hot pulse of story.

Chris first began writing what would eventually become The Adjacent in 2008. The difficulties that attended the first publication of The Separation some six years earlier had a paralysing effect (ask him and he’ll tell you about it) and so when The Adjacent finally got going, it was clear from the start that it would necessarily be a big book, a novel that would be both a continuation of some of the themes explored in The Separation, and a radical formal departure from the kind of book The Separation was. A gap-bridger and a bridge-burner, in one.

Such a book demanded perseverance and endurance. Soon after beginning to write it, Chris also embarked on what started as a personal entertainment, something to play with in the evenings as a break from the more protracted, intense concentration needed for work on The Adjacent: a list of the islands of the Dream Archipelago and their various social and geographical idiosyncracies. For a while he continued working on these two projects in tandem, but then gradually his interest in what would be The Islanders took over to such an extent that it became impossible for him not to write it. The Adjacent remained in stasis, frozen at the end of Part 2 (Tibor Tarent in the military compound at Long Sutton, Tommy Trent getting out of the train at Charing Cross) and with the future-ghost of forward momentum almost painfully palpable. Chris resumed work on the novel almost immediately after delivering The Islanders to Simon Spanton at Gollancz in the autumn of 2010, but as a novelist you can never go back, and the very act of writing another book in between had worked seismic changes upon what this next book was about to become.

The Adjacent, like The Separation, is a novel about war and the folly of war. Somewhere towards the end of The Separation, one of its twin protagonists, Joe Sawyer, describes war as a set of vested interests, and one of the central thrusts of that novel lies in demonstrating how even so-called just wars have a tendency towards unpredictable and often undesirable outcomes. This theme is broadened and deepened in The Adjacent, which plays heady games with narrative form and risky subject matter, even as it obliquely warns of the stupidity that is always inherent in deploying super-weapons. That this warning comes giftwrapped in further uncertainties will not come as a surprise to seasoned Priestophiles. Priest’s unreliable narrators and narratives backlight the subjectivity of human experience. More than anything, they remind us of how no two accounts of a thing or an event – a war, an argument, a transformative journey, the reading of a novel – can ever fully coincide, because such experiences are renewed and transformed by each individual who undergoes them.

For every reader of The Adjacent there will come an ‘ah-HA’ moment, a moment when the novel expands to become something else, something greater than the reader thought it might be, offering insights and themes and panoramas they did not see coming. That no two readers will experience this moment the same way, or even at the same point in the book, is something that as The Adjacent‘s first reader I guarantee.

Chris and I first met in 2004. Prior to that I experienced his novels as any other reader would experience them: as fully formed artefacts, as completed works. I had little idea of what to expect in advance beyond the cover blurb, and I came to them with the excitement of discovery that always accompanies the purchase of a new or previously unread novel by a favourite author. My experience of both The Islanders and The Adjacent has been very different. Because I am now so close to Chris’s novels as he is writing them, I can never again have that first delirious Priestian reading experience that many people will be anticipating today as The Adjacent is published, and in some ways there’s no denying that I envy them! I can barely imagine what it might feel like to come upon The Adjacent unprepared, to discover it page by page, with only the smallest clue of where its story might eventually lead me.

But then as Chris’s first reader, one of the things I have in exchange is the immense privilege of being present at all those ‘ah-HA!’ moments, when some completely new and unanticipated element of story or narrative comes into play. A sudden insight, or a character that has remained in the shadows up till now, and whose appearance casts the evolving novel in a whole new light.

The Adjacent is an incredible novel. Intricate and robust, dynamic and contemplative, angry and tender, it demands to be read, and talked about, and argued over. Above all though, it demands to be enjoyed.