I’d already logged off by midnight last night, when the Women’s Prize longlist was announced, but I caught up with it first thing this morning with mixed reactions. I was actually very surprised to find that I’d succeeded in guessing four out of the sixteen titles – but the flavour of the longlist as a whole felt so different from my own wishlist that my overall feeling has been somewhat muted.
There are some books on the longlist that I did not get on with at all – My Sister, the Serial Killer, for example, failed for me entirely as a crime novel and felt gauche and deeply retrograde as a novel of relationships. ‘I could help Tade bleach his whites, if he would let me’ is the quote that best sums up the book’s many, many issues for me, and if I had to choose one word to describe it, it would be overhyped.
There are two books I don’t feel tempted to read because we seem to be drowning in Greek myths retellings at the moment – did the judges really have to pick The Silence of the Girls and Circe? This is just a personal bugbear and conversely I am always excited by novels that take mythology more as a starting point, resetting archetypical stories in a modern context – Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie is a prizewinning example, see also Laurence Norfolk’s masterpiece In the Shape of a Boar. Neither the Barker nor the Miller feels essential to me.
It is interesting to note that there is no dystopian fiction on this list – could this enthusiasm have run its course, at least for the moment? – and the most openly speculative novel in contention is not, as many seemed to predict, Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under but Melissa Broder’s The Pisces. I have enjoyed the vigorous debate sparked by this book, but haven’t read The Pisces yet and don’t feel in any particular hurry to do so.
This longlist does feel diverse and surprising and – its most laudable quality – it does include something for everyone. I would defy any reader not to find at least one book here that they can get wholeheartedly behind! Personally, I’m pleased and satisfied to see Milkman in contention. It could be argued that as the winner of last year’s Booker Prize, Milkman is not exactly crying out for extra publicity. However, it is an important, innovative and truly great novel – perhaps the only truly great novel on this list – and a Women’s Prize longlist that did not include it in its year of eligibility would be a nonsense. I’m delighted to see Ghost Wall, not only because it’s a superbly achieved book but also because it’s high time Sarah Moss received this kind of recognition – I hope she goes straight to the shortlist stage. I’m glad to see Sophie van Llewyn, too – her novel Bottled Goods was also longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and both the setting and the sensibility make it an instant ‘yes’ for me. Similarly, I was reading a review of Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive just a day or two ago and felt immediately that I wanted to read it, that this book’s autofictional approach would put it right up my street.
I loved what Akwaeke Emezi said in interview about inserting pages from their journal directly into the narrative of Freshwater: “There are a couple of things about writing it this way: first, the things that people think are fictionalised are not fictionalised. Second, I wanted to make clear it was autobiography, otherwise it would be considered to be very fantastical. I wanted readers to be sure that it was not magical realism or speculative fiction. It’s what has actually happened! I’m using fiction as a filter for it”. Yes, please! Diana Evans’s Ordinary People might almost be an alternative commentary on Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, its core quartet of characters moved twenty years into their futures and with a whole new set of problems. The plot summary makes it sound like yet another London mid-life-marriage-in-crisis novel, but the way it is written – free-flowing language, tumbling streams of cultural references, time shifts and jump cuts – makes it feel radical and new and very contemporary.
So that’s my kind-of preferred shortlist. I have absolutely no idea which book will go on to win. But that’s an exciting conundrum to have, and one that big prizes in literature should throw up more often.