It’s hard not to feel that the cull from Man Booker longlist to shortlist was a calculated effort by the judges to strip this latest round of “posh bingo”, as Julian Barnes famously dubbed the prize, of its excitement. The longlist not only contained a number of extraordinary novels, it also seemed constructed to celebrate younger writers – six of the 13 longlisted authors were 40 or under, with two in their 20s. The longlist asked us to reconsider both what we think of as literary writing – one sensed the presence of judge Val McDermid in the selection of Belinda Bauer’s crime thriller Snap, while Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel Sabrina was the first of its genre to be included.
In the end, the shortlist managed to dispose of both the establishment – dropping Michael Ondaatje’s mesmerising Warlight the same year that his The English Patient won the Golden Booker (celebrating the prize’s 50th anniversary) – and the majority of the more youthful names. Sally Rooney’s Normal People, the follow-up to last year’s Conversations With Friends, was discarded despite being both very, very good and heavily tipped in the lead-up. We also lost the superb In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne and Sophie Mackintosh’s exquisite debut The Water Cure.
If the judges hoped to change the literary world’s perceptions about genre fiction, they ought to have chosen a better novel than Bauer’s Snap. It thankfully didn’t make the cut, although Bauer can take some comfort from the fact that she’s outselling the shortlisted novels by a country mile. Drnaso’s Sabrina was stunning, both in terms of its visual impact and the complexity of its narrative, which explores questions of privacy and identity in the internet age. Again, according to figures from Nielsen BookScan, Sabrina is outselling all the books on the shortlist. Indeed, none of the five bestselling books on the longlist made it on to the shortlist.
Turning to that shortlist, we should start with the bookmakers’ clear favourite, The Overstory by Richard Powers, which Ladbrokes had at 5-2 at the time of writing. Powers is a feted novelist, winner of the National Book award for The Echo Maker (2006), although perhaps not as well known in Europe as he is in the States. He’s a writer of rolling plains and wide skies, with a Don DeLillo-ish interest in complex scientific ideas. The Overstory is his 12th novel, a sprawling tale that uses the lives of trees to offer new perspectives on narrative time. The writing is glorious, the environmental message timely, the way he interweaves and overlaps the various strands of his story quite masterful.
Those inscrutable bookies have Canadian Esi Edugyan second favourite, at 3-1, for her Washington Black. I preferred Edugyan’s previous novel, Half Blood Blues, which was shortlisted for the prize in 2011, but there’s no denying the power of her continent-hopping tale of slavery and escape. Her eponymous hero finds himself taken up by an eccentric abolitionist who helps him flee his Barbados plantation-prison. When the abolitionist, Titch, disappears, Black must go it alone. Based on a true story, this novel has big-screen adaptation written all over it.
Daisy Johnson’s Fen was one of the most impressive collections of short stories in recent years, a strange, fantastical squelch through watery East Anglia. Everything Under, her first novel, is even better, and success on 16 October would make 28-year-old Johnson the youngest-ever winner, pipping Eleanor Catton by a few months. I’m never quite clear how the bookmakers come up with their odds, but I’m delighted that Johnson seems to be well in the running at 5-1. Her novel is really special, a contemporary reworking of the Oedipus myth that is as readable as it is dazzling, full of unsettling twists and dark revelations. It would be a worthy winner.
Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, also at 5-1, challenges what we think of as a novel, being written in a mixture of lyrical prose and luminous poetry. Robertson is a celebrated Scottish poet, and The Long Take contains some of the most beautiful writing of this or any other shortlist. It’s the story of Walker, an Odysseus figure who returns to the US after the second world war to find the country – and himself – changed utterly. He moves from New York to San Francisco to Los Angeles, America passing by like an Edward Hopper painting behind him. There’s a deal of sniping at the Man Booker, but it seems to me that bringing a book like The Long Take to the attention of a wider audience is an act of unequivocal good. I’m not sure I’d have read it if it hadn’t been longlisted and am so pleased I did.
Milkman, Anna Burns’s fourth novel, is further back in the betting at 6-1, maybe because it is the most clearly experimental work on the list. Burns’s first book, No Bones, a dark and often painful bildungsroman set in Troubles-era Belfast, was shortlisted for the Orange prize for fiction. Milkman, which is again set against the backdrop of the Troubles, although this time in an anonymous city, sees a young, bookish girl with no interest in politics begin an affair with the milkman – a senior paramilitary figure. It’s a book that works through voice, nailing the reader’s sympathies to the unnamed narrator and showing what daily life is like for those living with the threat of terrible violence. It doesn’t sound like it should be a funny book, but it is, full of bleak Beckettian humour.
I’ve no idea why Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room has the longest odds of any on the shortlist, at 7-1. Perhaps it’s a relic of the noise around the 2011 prize, when judge Chris Mullin said that he’d been looking for books that “zip along”. While nobody could accuse Powers’s near-500-page The Overstory of doing that, it does feel like Kushner and Burns are the most formally and thematically daring authors on the list, and may be penalised for that. In fact, you could easily imagine Kushner winning for this extraordinarily of-the-moment tale of a young mother’s life inside a female prison in California. It’s never an easy read, but it is unquestionably brilliant, and could make a mockery of the bookies’ Booker odds once again.
Picking a winner at this stage is a mixture of rune-reading and guesswork, aided by a knowledge of the judges and whom they might favour. Opening the prize to American authors in 2014 seemed to pique a large swath of the British literary establishment. With the last two winners – George Saunders and Paul Beatty – coming from the US, there might be a lurking impulse among the judges that three in a row would be too many, especially an all-American male like Powers. It’s now been five years since a woman (Catton) won the prize. Of course none of these things should matter – it’s the quality of the novels that’s at stake – but one knows from the loose lips of previous judges that they do. I tipped Warlight before the longlist was announced, which shows the foolhardiness of such predictions. I’d like Johnson to win – Everything Under is gripping and fabulously inventive, a novel that feels at once timeless and of its moment. Now it’s time to sit back and wait for that very poshest of bingo callers, HRH Duchess of Cornwall, to do her job on 16 October.
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