tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/topics/book-prizes-17610/articles
Book prizes – The Conversation
2023-11-22T10:27:37Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/214865
2023-11-22T10:27:37Z
2023-11-22T10:27:37Z
Booker prize 2023: the six shortlisted books reviewed by our experts
<p><em>From a longlist of 12, six novels have been shortlisted for the 2023 Booker prize. Our academics review the finalists ahead of the announcement of the winner on November 26.</em></p>
<h2>Western Lane by Chetna Maroo</h2>
<p>Chetna Maroo’s subtle novel follows a British Asian girl, Gopi, who plays squash fiercely to cope with the grief of her mother’s death. </p>
<p>In Western Lane, the squash court becomes an arena for playing out the conflicting emotions flowing between a grieving father and his daughters. Here other tensions also come to the fore, such as her father’s memories of Mombasa in Kenya, the delicate negotiations between British people of diverse south Asian heritages and interracial tension and budding romance. </p>
<p>Powerful descriptions of the physicality of competitive racket sport are accompanied by evocative hints of Gujarati foodways and familial codes. Together, these aspects of Gopi’s life define her adolescent sensibility but also help alleviate loss. </p>
<p>This is a story that defies one genre. At once, Western Lane is a wonderful coming-of-age narrative about a girl navigating her adolescence – exploring identity, familial expectations, first love and more. </p>
<p>It is a story about grief and that which can often go unsaid in the process of mourning. It is also a sports story that uses the physical and mental demands of being an athlete to heighten its emotional narrative. A marvellous read. </p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Ananya Jahanara Kabir, professor of English literature, King’s College London</em></p>
<h2>The Bee Sting by Paul Murray</h2>
<p>Paul Murray’s fourth novel, The Bee Sting, is a rare thing: a 600-page page-turner. It’s also a masterclass in narrative perspective. Starting off in the third person, four novella-length sections introduce us to the Barnes family. There’s failing car salesman Dickie, his frustrated wife Imelda, teenage Cass who dreams of life beyond small-town Ireland, and tween PJ who, like the rest of the family, is nurturing a secret. </p>
<p>The following section, Age of Loneliness, ricochets between the second-person viewpoints of the four protagonists, with brief snatches of ancillary perspectives as the narrative reaches its rapid-fire crescendo. It’s a novel about class and wealth, isolation and connectedness, and the secret histories that lie beneath a family’s stories of itself. </p>
<p>The Bee Sting’s occasional distractions, such as the sparing punctuation in Imelda’s sections, do not take away from its many successes: the gripping atmosphere, its capacity to surprise – even shock – and the rich symbolism that surrounds the titular wound. </p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Bethany Layne, senior lecturer in English literature, De Montfort University</em></p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/paul-lynch-wins-booker-prize-2023-why-were-in-a-golden-age-of-irish-writing-217740">Paul Lynch wins Booker prize 2023: why we're in a 'golden age' of Irish writing</a>
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<h2>Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein</h2>
<p>Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience is a polished pebble of a novel: opaque, contained, unyielding. The story seems to begin when the unnamed female narrator relocates to look after her elder brother, whose wife and children have left. </p>
<p>However, the narrator’s insistent attention on duty and deference is linked to echoes of historical oppression and exclusion rooted in her identity. Though not named, it is inferred by repeated allusions to her scapegoating by the Christian community she lives among.</p>
<p>While there are glimmers both of the narrator’s resistant subjectivity and of her reclaiming service as power, the story preserves its polished surface, committed only to studying obedience as a behaviour. </p>
<p>Not claiming to speak for anyone is part of the moral discipline the narrator prides herself on. But the absence of any dialogue and the sterility of the voice ultimately crafts a narrator who is constrained not just by her brother’s demands but by her own self-perception.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Alison Donnell, professor of modern literatures in English, University of East Anglia</em></p>
<h2>Prophet Song by Paul Lynch</h2>
<p>In his powerfully atmospheric fifth novel, Paul Lynch imagines a near-future Ireland that is inexorably mutating into a repressive, authoritarian state under the control of a right-wing populist government. The reader’s focalising guide to the novel’s ever-darkening moral universe is commercial scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack, who lives in suburban Dublin with her husband Larry, a teacher and trade unionist. </p>
<p>Larry’s summary arrest and detention by the newly formed secret police acts as the catalyst for Eilish’s awakening to the reality that “the state they live in has become a monster”. Once “the great waking begins”, the pace of Eilish’s engulfment by fear and panic accelerates precipitously, in tandem with the country’s spiralling descent into societal breakdown and civil strife. </p>
<p>Lynch’s dense, monolithic paragraphs potently enact Eilish’s tightening encirclement by malevolent forces, from which she desperately tries to shield her family. Prophet Song, like the best dystopian realism, exerts a compelling hold upon the imagination because of its chillingly plausible cautionary message.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Liam Harte, professor of Irish literature, University of Manchester</em></p>
<h2>If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffrey</h2>
<p>If I Survive You tells the interconnected stories of the men from a Jamaican family that migrate to Miami. The novel moves between stories from brothers Trelawny and Delano, their father Topper and their cousin Cukie as they navigate issues of belonging, racial identity, displacement, father-son relationships and hurricanes in 20th- and 21st-century America.</p>
<p>Perhaps the most striking element of Escoffrey’s novel is its lyrical narrative voice. It moves between characters and between first, second and third person to create a kaleidoscopic, cinematic meditation on black masculinity and the immigrant experience. </p>
<p>The novel’s opening chapter recounts Trelawny’s childhood experiences. He reflects on being asked “What are you?” in relation to his racial identity. Escoffery does a skillful job of highlighting the complexities of this question, and the ways in which blackness is understood differently across cultures.</p>
<p>If I Survive You is a beautifully written novel that introduces many unforgettable characters, captivates its reader with humour and heart, and demonstrates Escoffrey’s unmistakable aptitude for the art of storytelling.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Leighan Renaud, lecturer in Caribbean literatures and cultures, University of Bristol</em></p>
<h2>This Other Eden by Paul Harding</h2>
<p>The title of Paul Harding’s richly textured novel, with its wry invocation of Shakespeare’s scepter’d isle, points to the long literary legacy of islands as places of imaginative possibilities. </p>
<p>The story explores the shattering of a mixed-heritage community on the fictional Apple Island, off the coast of Maine, by racist forces of missionary zeal and eugenicist thought. A dazzling array of narrative perspectives bring this world to intense sensory life. </p>
<p>The novel’s elaborate, dreamlike prose sits uneasily at times with the brutal dispossessions of American history, especially the fates of the real-life Malaga Islanders. Its plot strains to accommodate the complexities of transatlantic slavery, colonial conquest and Irish settler diaspora. </p>
<p>Yet Harding’s work is best read, not as historical fiction, but rather as a form of speculative writing. This Other Eden imagines vivid possibilities for human connection, dignity and hope – even as it reminds us of the terrible fragility of these visions.</p>
<p><em>Reviewed by Muireann O'Cinneide, lecturer in English, University of Galway</em></p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
From a longlist of 12, six novels have been shortlisted for the 2023 Booker prize.
Ananya Jahanara Kabir, FBA Professor of English Literature, King's College London
Alison Donnell, Professor of Modern Literatures in English, University of East Anglia
Bethany Layne, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, De Montfort University
Leighan M Renaud, Lecturer in Caribbean Literatures and Cultures, Department of English, University of Bristol
Liam Harte, Professor of Irish Literature, University of Manchester
Muireann O'Cinneide, Lecturer in English, University of Galway
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/146740
2020-10-20T13:21:24Z
2020-10-20T13:21:24Z
Graphic novels are overlooked by book prizes, but that’s starting to change
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/363280/original/file-20201013-23-v88pwg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C22%2C1911%2C1054&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Teresa Wong’s ‘Dear Scarlet,’ Jeff Lemire’s ‘Essex County,’ and recently nominated for a 2020 Canadian literary prize, Seth’s ‘Clyde Fans.’ </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Arsenal Pulp Press/Penguin Random House/Drawn&Quarterly)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the midst of a global pandemic, almost nothing is proceeding as normal. And yet, on a dim October morning, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIRXztO7YKk&t=8s">the Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist announcement</a> went brightly, briefly and virtually streaming into homes and revealing the five books that had moved one step further towards winning <a href="https://www.straight.com/arts/1326886/ubc-creative-writing-prof-ian-williams-wins-scotiabank-giller-prize-reproduction">Canada’s largest</a> and arguably most prestigious literary award. </p>
<p>In some ways, however, this business as usual was a disappointment. After all, the Giller recently <a href="https://scotiabankgillerprize.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2020-Scotiabank-Giller-Prize-Submission-Guidelines-1.pdf">changed its submission guidelines</a> to allow graphic novels to be submitted to the prize, and even more recently <a href="https://quillandquire.com/omni/14-titles-announced-for-giller-longlist-including-first-graphic-novel/">announced that a graphic novel was, indeed, included on the longlist</a> — <a href="https://drawnandquarterly.com/clyde-fans"><em>Clyde Fans</em></a>, by highly acclaimed <a href="https://drawnandquarterly.com/author/seth">Canadian author and cartoonist Seth</a>. </p>
<p>But after raking in <a href="https://sequentialpulp.ca/2020/09/08/seths-clyde-fans-nominated-for-giller-prize/">praise</a> and <a href="http://www.multiversitycomics.com/news/the-rundown-090920/">aplomb</a> for featuring a graphic novel on its longlist for the first time, the Giller — like so many other book prizes — just couldn’t bring itself to put <em>Clyde Fans</em> on the shortlist. Business as usual, indeed. </p>
<p>And are we really surprised?</p>
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<h2>Prizes reflect readership</h2>
<p>Book prizes have long overlooked and excluded graphic novels from their submissions: if not officially barred from entry (as with the Giller, which <a href="https://scotiabankgillerprize.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/2019-Scotiabank-Giller-Prize-Submission-Details-1.pdf">excluded graphic novels in its submission guidelines</a> for a quarter of a century), then unofficially (as with Canada Reads, which does not specifically bar graphic novels from consideration but hasn’t shortlisted one <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/books/essex-county-1.3986163">since 2011</a>). As a result, graphic novels are a kind of literary elephant in the room: a format of literary fiction which many, including book prizes, refuse to recognize as “literary” fiction.</p>
<p>This is, however, beginning to change. Increasingly, book prizes are beginning to reflect a reality many readers, professors, librarians and publishers have known for years: that <a href="https://theconversation.com/graphic-novels-are-novels-why-the-booker-prize-judges-were-right-to-choose-one-for-its-longlist-100562">graphic novels do, in fact, have serious literary value</a>. Graphic novels <a href="https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/6930/1/YALS-2005-GraphicNovelsSurvey.pdf">span a wide variety of content</a>, and they’re visual narratives with the same complexity and depth as purely textual novels. It’s taken decades, but public perception has changed. And now, too, so are prizes. </p>
<p>After all, “good literature” is not — and never has been — a static category, but rather an ever-shifting, nebulous definition built collaboratively by anyone who’s ever picked up a book. After decades of marginalization, graphic novels are now inarguably coming to be included in this mainstream definition of what is “literary.” </p>
<p>Furthermore, this process of acceptance is helped in no small part by book prizes’ increasing support of graphic novels; <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674030435">the connections between canonization and prizes are well studied</a>. When literary institutions hold up a graphic novel as one of “<a href="https://scotiabankgillerprize.ca/the-scotiabank-giller-prize-presents-its-2020-longlist/">the most powerful pieces of fiction published this year</a>,” as the Giller did when it announced its longlist in September, the reading public begins to rethink their own biases against what they think is or isn’t literary — whether they know they hold those biases or not.</p>
<h2>A troubling trend</h2>
<p>When we start to look at the history of graphic novels and book prizes, however, a more troubling trend seems to spring up: that despite their increasing presence on book prize long- and shortlists, graphic novels don’t ever seem to win book prizes. </p>
<p>For instance, <em>Sabrina</em>, a graphic novel by Nick Drnaso about <a href="https://thebookerprizes.com/books/sabrina-by">“the story of what happens when an intimate, ‘everyday’ tragedy collides with the appetites of the 24-hour news cycle,”</a> was longlisted by The Booker Prize in 2018 — the first time a graphic novel had ever been longlisted by the Booker. </p>
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<p>Like <em>Clyde Fans</em>, it too, failed to make the prize shortlist. Earlier this year, Canada Reads similarly <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/here-is-the-canada-reads-2020-longlist-1.5411178">longlisted — but didn’t shortlist — graphic memoir <em>Dear Scarlet</em> by Teresa Wong</a>, which deals with post-partum depression. </p>
<p>Ironically, graphic novels seem to have had better chances in the book prize world the further back we look: <em>Essex County</em>, a graphic novel by Jeff Lemire about a rural community in Southwestern Ontario, <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/past-canada-reads-contenders-and-winners-1.4034451#2011">made the Canada Reads shortlist in 2011</a> — making it further in the process than <em>Clyde Fans</em>, <em>Sabrina</em> and <em>Dear Scarlet</em> only to get <a href="https://nationalpost.com/afterword/jeff-lemires-essex-county-first-book-voted-off-canada-reads">knocked out on the first day of competition</a>. </p>
<p>Going back even further, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/171058/maus-i-a-survivors-tale-by-art-spiegelman/">the highly-acclaimed <em>Maus</em></a> by American author and artist <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/29291/art-spiegelman">Art Speigelman</a> won a Pulitzer in 1992. The book (full title: <em>Maus: A Survivor’s Tale</em>) shows Spiegelman interviewing his father, a Polish Jew, about his memories of surviving the Holocaust during the Second World War. </p>
<p>Even so, <em>Maus</em> didn’t win a Pulitzer for literature, but rather a <a href="https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/art-spiegelman">Pulitzer Special Citation</a> — which basically equates to a Pulitzer given by a jury when they’re not quite sure what category to put it in. Is it literature? Is it art? Is it memoir? Is it history? The answer: it’s a special citation. </p>
<h2>Literary evolution remains slow</h2>
<p>If these kinds of approaches to recognizing graphic novels seems like gatekeeping what we consider “serious literature,” that’s because it is.</p>
<p>These prizes have been slow to shift away from a European high-culture approach, demonstrating <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo3634644.html">how infuriatingly slowly the western literary canon evolves</a>, especially in any direction away from the exclusionary principles it was and is founded on.</p>
<p>It is, frustratingly, a sluggish and non-linear progression — both in the public perception of what is and is not “literary,” and the ways in which literary institutions such as prizes reflect those perceptions. </p>
<p>This is only underscored by the fact that a graphic novel won’t win the Giller this year, and a graphic novel probably won’t win it next year, either. But eventually, one day, it’ll happen — and if this new trend of graphic novels hitting prize longlists is any indication, it’s a future we’re moving closer to all the time.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/146740/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dessa Bayrock has previously received funding from the Ontario Graduate Scholarship. </span></em></p>
Canada’s Scotiabank Giller Prize didn’t shortlist a graphic novel, but are we surprised? The slow but increasing acceptance of graphic novels suggests the glacial pace at which literary canons grow.
Dessa Bayrock, PhD Candidate, Department of English, Carleton University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/99465
2018-07-06T13:26:08Z
2018-07-06T13:26:08Z
Golden prize: which Booker-winning novel is the best of them all?
<p>The Booker Prize has been Britain’s most influential award since its inception in 1969. Following its original <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/fiction/history">mission statement</a> of awarding a prize to “the best novel in the opinion of the judges”, the prize has created headlines and controversy over five decades, including <a href="https://theconversation.com/booker-prize-reform-heralds-a-cultural-revolution-for-2014-19254">argument</a> over the inclusion of American authors after 2014. But it has also, and surely most importantly, rewarded writers, brought them to increasing public attention, and ensured them both critical acclaim and higher sales. </p>
<p>Past Booker winners are now on both school and university curricula, enriching the traditional canon of literature that all too often focuses on male, white and (upper) middle class writing that is no longer in keeping with the times. The prize has also spawned some important spin-offs, most prominently the Man Booker International Prize, first awarded in 2005 that has, over the past few years, evolved into a prize that awards both international writers and, uniquely, <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/international/history">their translators</a>.</p>
<p>In February 2017, following on from the success of previous special anniversary prizes, the Man Booker foundation launched the Golden Man Booker Prize to celebrate the prize’s 50th anniversary. Rather than having to (re)read all 51 winners, the five appointed judges – writer Robert McCrum, poet Lemn Sissay, novelist Kamila Shamsie, broadcaster and writer Simon Mayo, and poet Hollie McNish – were each allocated one decade of prize winners and tasked with identifying what they thought was the outstanding winner of those particular years. The shortlist was announced at a special event at the Hay Festival on May 26. The winner of the Golden Booker will be announced on July 8. So who’s in the running?</p>
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<h2>1970s</h2>
<p>For Robert McCrum, the outstanding text of the 1970s winners was V S Naipaul’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/dec/21/lookingbackatthebookervs">In a Free State</a>. It tells the story of two British people, Bobby and Linda, travelling across an unnamed African country in the midst of an ethnic war that suggests the Uganda of the Idi Amin years. Despite their privileged position as members of the white colonial class, Bobby and Linda come to experience firsthand the escalating violence in the country. </p>
<p>McCrum, <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/books/free-state-by-0">in his summary</a> of why he chose the text, explained that it was: </p>
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<p>Outstandingly the best novel to win the Booker Prize in the 1970s, a disturbing book about displaced people at the dangerous edge of a disrupted world that could have been written yesterday, a classic for all seasons. </p>
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<h2>1980s</h2>
<p>Lemn Sissay chose Penelope Lively’s often overlooked 1987 winner <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/mar/19/booker-club-moon-tiger">Moon Tiger</a>, surprisingly ignoring Booker heavyweights such as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List (1982) or Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989).</p>
<p>Moon Tiger tells the story of Claudia Hampton, who recounts her colourful life as she lies dying, covering much of the 20th century in the process. Hampton is a fascinating heroine: not quite likeable, yet immensely intriguing and fascinating, and it was this that was most remarkable <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/books/moon-tiger-by-0">for Sissay</a>.</p>
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<h2>1990s</h2>
<p>The 1990s novel that stood out for Shamsie was Michael Ondaatje’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/mar/04/booker-club-english-patient-ondaatje">The English Patient</a> (1992). Ondaatje shared the prize with Barry Unsworth’s slave narrative Sacred Hunger – one of only two cases of a divided jury in the prize’s history. Set in Florence at the end of World War II, the novel recounts the life of a badly burnt soldier, who relives his ill-fated love affair with the married Katherine Clifton for his three companions: the spy Caravaggio, who administers morphine to the patient; his nurse Hana; and the Sikh bomb disposal expert Kip. </p>
<p>Ondaatje’s novel, turned into an award-winning film starring Ralph Fiennes, has always been considered one of the most high-profile winners of the award. For Shamsie, this is <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/books/english-patient-by">entirely justified</a>: it is “that rare novel which gets under your skin and insists you return to it time and again, always yielding a new surprise or delight.” </p>
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<h2>2000s</h2>
<p>Mayo’s outstanding winner was Hilary Mantel’s <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/books/wolf-hall-by-dame-hilary-mantel">Wolf Hall</a> of 2009, the first in a planned trilogy of Tudor novels. It charts the rise to power of Thomas Cromwell at the court of Henry VIII. Its sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, won the Man Booker Prize in 2012, making Mantel one of only three authors – alongside Peter Carey and J M Coetzee – and to date the only woman to have won the award twice.</p>
<p>The final instalment of the trilogy – The Mirror and the Light – is highly anticipated and scheduled for publication in 2019. What stood out <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/books/wolf-hall-by">for Mayo</a> in his choice was “its questioning of what England is” - a question that is, despite the novel’s historical setting, surely pertinent in the present.</p>
<h2>2010s</h2>
<p>It is the most recent Man Booker Prize winner, George Saunders’ <a href="https://theconversation.com/george-saunderss-lincoln-in-the-bardo-is-a-genuinely-startling-novel-85917">Lincoln in the Bardo</a> of 2017, that was the most outstanding recent novel for McNish. The novel covers a single night, set in a graveyard where a grieving Abraham Lincoln mourns the death of his young son Willie. Featuring a plethora of diverse voices, Lincoln in the Bardo explores ideas of life, death and mourning in a way that, <a href="https://themanbookerprize.com/books/lincoln-bardo-by-0">according to McNish</a>, was simultaneously “funny, imaginative and tragic” as well as “a piece of genius in its originality of form and structure”.</p>
<p>Narrowing down 51 Man Booker Prize winners from five decades to a shortlist of five is a herculean task. What makes this shortlist remarkable for me is its absence of the “big” winners, the ones that are most often associated with the prize: Ishiguro, Rushdie, Keneally, Coetzee, Martell. Maybe the judges tried to steer clear of them precisely because they have had so much coverage in the past.</p>
<p>2018’s shortlist is very varied – historical narratives, fictional biographies, explorations of war and genocide all feature. For the judges of each decade’s “best” winner, it was a very personal decision; as it will have been for the members of the public who have voted for their favourite of the five shortlisted texts.</p>
<p>What do I think will happen? I’m hesitant to say … but rather than truly judging “the best” of the Booker winners, perhaps 2018’s special award will reward that novel that still manages to best capture the public mood.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/99465/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christine Berberich does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The Booker Prize is 50 – and to celebrate it, there’s a mega prize.
Christine Berberich, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, University of Portsmouth
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/85918
2017-10-18T12:15:59Z
2017-10-18T12:15:59Z
George Saunders Booker win: why the British shouldn’t be sore at American literary success
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190815/original/file-20171018-32338-qvchm1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">jannoon028/Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“In the four quarters of the globe,” <a href="http://www.usgennet.org/usa/topic/preservation/epochs/vol5/pg144.htm">asked</a> the British writer and cleric Sydney Smith in 1820: “Who reads an American book?” Smith was a career eccentric, known for odd sayings and doings, such as wearing a self-designed <a href="http://www.sydneysmith.org.uk/pdfs/Reformer%20and%20Wit.pdf">tin helmet</a> as a defence against rheumatism. However, his scorn about the impoverished state of literature in the upstart nation across the Atlantic was no mere individual fancy, but a judgement backed by his nation’s sense of cultural superiority.</p>
<p>But pose the same question now, almost exactly 200 years later, and such complacency is hardly the response you’re likely to get. The most esteemed British literary prize, after all, has now been awarded to an American author two years running.</p>
<p>American writer George Saunders’ victory in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/man-booker-prize-12944">The Man Booker Prize for Fiction</a>, for his debut novel <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/08/lincoln-in-the-bardo-george-saunders-review">Lincoln in the Bardo</a>, follows on from US novelist Paul Beatty’s 2016 win for <a href="https://theconversation.com/as-man-booker-winner-paul-beatty-is-about-to-find-out-literary-celebrity-changes-everything-66653">The Sellout</a>. Fears of the Americanisation of this piece of British literary heritage are likely to be renewed. Saunders and Beatty face being seen as the high-cultural wing of an ongoing transatlantic takeover of national life that recently took more bone-crushing form in the series of <a href="http://www.espn.co.uk/nfl/story/_/id/20769092/why-better-get-used-nfl-staging-games-london">NFL fixtures in London</a>.</p>
<h2>Changing the rules</h2>
<p>Worries about precisely such literary colonisation by the United States were voiced, in fact, when the organisers of the Booker changed its eligibility rules in 2013. Formerly a prize only for novelists of the United Kingdom, Ireland and the Commonwealth, with winners including such non-UK citizens as Nadine Gordimer and John Banville, the parameters were altered so as to make the language of composition itself the key criterion. The <a href="http://themanbookerprize.com/sites/manbosamjo/files/uploadedfiles/files/MB2017%20Rules.pdf">new rules</a> invited submissions of “any novel in print or electronic format, written originally in English and published in the UK by an imprint formally established in the UK.”</p>
<p>A S Byatt, a former judge as well as winner, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24126882">said at the time</a> she feared such an expansion of the field would result in “good work” going unrecognised. Her qualms were based not on nationalistic unease but in the spectre of unmanageable piles of novels to be sifted. But for literary scholar John Mullan, the risk of the rule change was indeed that the Booker would decline into a series of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24126882">spectacular US/UK faceoffs</a>. He imagined the new Booker as: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>A Ryder Cup of Literature … Toni Morrison versus Hilary Mantel, or Jonathan Franzen against Ian McEwan.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Nevertheless, it is not as if the Booker’s previous criteria for eligibility were beyond criticism. How convincing a defence can be assembled for a prize whose original geographical coverage mapped exactly onto that of Britain’s recent colonial and imperial dominance? These embarrassing parallels were pointedly addressed in 1972 by John Berger, also a Booker <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/19/john-berger-g-classics-booker">winner</a>. On being awarded the prize for G., he <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2317-i-have-to-turn-this-prize-against-itself-john-berger-on-accepting-the-booker-prize-for-fiction-23-november-1972">remarked</a> that the sponsor, Booker McConnell, had derived much of its wealth from “exploitation” during “extensive trading … in the Caribbean for over 130 years”.</p>
<h2>Novels without borders</h2>
<p>If writers in English from Durban had always been eligible for the Booker, then why not those from Denver? If Delhi, why not Detroit? While the organisers’ announcement in 2013 triggered expressions of anxiety in the UK that the novelists of Hampstead would be ill-equipped to compete with those from Harlem, others welcomed the prize’s reimagining so as to include writers in English from beyond Britain’s recently relinquished imperial citadels. As the Scottish author A L Kennedy <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24126882">said</a>: fiction is “deeply international, deeply humane. It has no borders. It’s lovely that the Booker is reaching out”.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190821/original/file-20171018-32345-awgrcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/190821/original/file-20171018-32345-awgrcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190821/original/file-20171018-32345-awgrcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190821/original/file-20171018-32345-awgrcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190821/original/file-20171018-32345-awgrcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190821/original/file-20171018-32345-awgrcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/190821/original/file-20171018-32345-awgrcm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">George Saunders with his award.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Man Booker</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There are striking affinities, in fact, between Kennedy’s rhetoric and that of George Saunders in his <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/17/man-booker-prize-2017-second-american-author-george-saunders-lincoln-in-the-bardo">acceptance speech</a> after winning for Lincoln in the Bardo. His novel’s subject could not be more closely affiliated with the national narratives and icons of the US: its key figure, of course, is the grieving President Lincoln. Nevertheless, Saunders’ model of literary composition and reception remains resolutely non-jingoistic: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Well this tonight is culture, it is international culture, it is compassionate culture, it is activist culture.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Two responses, perhaps, are possible in the face of nationalistic concern that the Americans are taking over British literary prizes. </p>
<p>The first is to recall more of Berger’s wise words in what was as much a speech of refusal as acceptance in 1972. Even at a time when coverage of the prize was modest, with the only media “platform” provided by a few broadsheet papers, Berger <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2317-i-have-to-turn-this-prize-against-itself-john-berger-on-accepting-the-booker-prize-for-fiction-23-november-1972">complained</a> about “the deliberately publicised suspense, the speculation of the writers concerned as though they were horses, the whole emphasis on winners and losers”. The task now, perhaps, is to extricate Saunders, and Beatty before him, from conversations about their passports and instead to give their thematically challenging and formally inventive fictions the serious attention they deserve.</p>
<p>But a second possible response to Saunders’ victory may offer a better cure for the prize envy of the smaller-minded British reader, currently sore at US literary success. Yes, Saunders may have won the Booker. But in <a href="https://theconversation.com/kazuo-ishiguro-wins-nobel-prize-in-literature-for-novels-of-great-emotional-force-85191">Kazuo Ishiguro</a>, Britain currently has the holder of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-kazuo-ishiguros-writing-won-him-the-nobel-prize-in-literature-according-to-research-85424">biggest literary trophy of all</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85918/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Andrew Dix does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
George Saunders has become the second American to win the Man Booker.
Andrew Dix, Lecturer in American Studies, Loughborough University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/66653
2016-10-26T08:40:19Z
2016-10-26T08:40:19Z
As Man Booker winner Paul Beatty is about to find out, literary celebrity changes everything
<p>Paul Beatty has won the Man Booker prize, becoming the first American to win the award since it was opened up to authors outside the Commonwealth in 2013. Most won’t yet have heard of the 54-year-old author of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/04/the-sellout-by-paul-beatty-review-galvanizing-satire-post-racial-america">The Sellout</a>, a satire of US racial politics. Because if one thing united this year’s shortlist, it was the lack of literary celebrity.</p>
<p>As the Man Booker website itself <a href="http://themanbookerprize.com/news/man-booker-prize-2016-shortlist">commented</a>, of the six authors shortlisted, only Levy had even been heard of before in Booker circles. All were on the list on the literary merit of their books. But celebrity such as the Booker changes all this.</p>
<p>Literature is generally held to be the opposite of popular culture, something that requires solitude and sustained engagement with words and ideas beyond the everyday. So its relationship with celebrity, that most visual and ephemeral of phenomena, is in some ways unique.</p>
<p>It is certainly true that even a very famous writer is unlikely to pack out a football stadium, although the award of the Nobel Prize to Bob Dylan, coupled with his signature <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/17/nobel-prize-committee-gives-up-trying-to-contact-bob-dylan/">failure to acknowledge it</a>, must make the literary establishment check their assumptions about both literature and celebrity. But what is peculiar about literary celebrity is that it is not about “the literary” at all. It is about our obsessions with the biographical person.</p>
<h2>Elena who?</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143250/original/image-20161026-11239-l7a003.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143250/original/image-20161026-11239-l7a003.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/143250/original/image-20161026-11239-l7a003.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143250/original/image-20161026-11239-l7a003.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143250/original/image-20161026-11239-l7a003.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143250/original/image-20161026-11239-l7a003.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1171&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143250/original/image-20161026-11239-l7a003.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1171&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/143250/original/image-20161026-11239-l7a003.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1171&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Enter the author. Following the announcement of any major literary prize in the UK and Europe, the immediate focus falls on the author’s biography. In the case of Elena Ferrante, <a href="http://www.authorsandtheworld.com/?p=3017">as we have recently seen</a>, this public hunger for the personal can suppress pretty much everything else, including the actual writing. Although Ferrante’s efforts to keep her private person out of the public eye are as extreme as <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/10/02/elena-ferrante-an-answer/">the Italian journalist</a> Claudio Gatti’s distasteful obsession with tracking her down, her dislike of the celebrity machine is shared by the many other authors who also try to shift attention back to their books. </p>
<p>Beatty clung to his after the first awkward minutes during which he foundered on the podium after winning the prize, clearly uncomfortable with having to share his immediate thoughts and emotions with the international media. “Maybe I should talk about the book a bit,” he suggested. But his book will not hide him now. Herta Müller’s <a href="http://www.berlin1.de/berliner-ideen/berliner-kpfe/herta-mller-die-literaturnobelpreistrgerin-20141849">claim</a> that it was her books that won the Nobel Prize in 2009 could not do anything to stop speculation about her hairstyle and choice of dress <a href="https://www.welt.de/lifestyle/article4799022/Elke-Heidenreich-raet-Herta-Mueller-zu-neuer-Frisur.html">doing the rounds</a> in the international broadsheets.</p>
<p>Beatty will also have to get used to the invariable <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/oct/10/booker-prize-2012-winners-sales-data">discussion of the cash</a>, and <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/man-booker-prize-has-an-unhealthy-effect-on-the-market-says-author-deborah-moggagh-a6907851.html">whether it is really desirable</a> for one author to hit the jackpot at the exclusion of everybody else. Mention of money sullies the literary for some. </p>
<p>All of this could be uncomfortable for Beatty, who told the Booker dinner guests of how he cried with joy in front of readers in Detroit some years back when he read aloud from his work for the first time. He had realised just how perfectly it replicated the language in his head. This touching tale from an author who loves his craft made up for his being, in his own words, “woefully underprepared” for speaking as a celebrity at the gala dinner.</p>
<p>Not so the publishers, who have been working up to this for months and will now take every opportunity they can to push their product with shiny stickers and prime displays, just as the laws of celebrity require. Beatty should expect to have numerous meetings with numerous publicists lined up to expedite sales at home and abroad. He may start to feel a little bit like Beyoncé. Unlike Beyoncé, however, literary celebrity doesn’t travel. This could be his writerly salvation.</p>
<h2>Beyond English</h2>
<p>Although the English-speaking book market is huge and highly influential, it is still just one geographically-bounded market, and not a very cohesive one at that. </p>
<p>Julian Barnes has a strong following in the UK. But he is not such a big deal in the US, where he is (justifiably) described as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/books/julian-barnes-wins-the-man-booker-prize.html">particularly British</a>. Jonathan Franzen is an A-list literary celebrity in New York, and he’s pretty famous in the UK, but the further east he travels, the more he is in need of mediators. While still a well-known face in Germany, he mainly goes there to bird watch. </p>
<p>Travelling back the other way, Joël Dicker’s French blockbuster <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/24/truth-about-harry-quebert-affair-joel-dicker-review">The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair</a> sold 2m copies in Europe, but <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/francophone-hit-american-letdown">bombed in the US</a>. Just 13,000 of Penguin’s 125,000 copies sold on its much trumpeted launch, and reviews quickly turned negative. Routinely accosted in his home town of Geneva, he is safe in New York.</p>
<p>Can Beatty take some comfort from these regional quirks that accompany even bestsellers? “I love being lost,” he quipped on the stage as he searched for words. “It’s the only way I get anywhere.” He has been found for English readers, but once his book starts to travel to other places, there are no guarantees that the same piece of writing will arrive as set off. There could be an escape route here. </p>
<p>Readerships are diverse, knowledge and expectations are different, and the more mediators are needed (translators, foreign-language editors, international rights departments), the more the book becomes detached from its biographical author. Some famous authors make it on a global stage, for sure. But there is often remarkably little left of the original author by then.</p>
<p>So here’s a plan for Beatty. He can take the money and settle down to write somewhere where English is not the primary language. He doesn’t have to deny the literary establishment entirely like Bob Dylan, but he could look to put more of the rest of the world on the literary map. Not by selling books there, but by writing them. That would be another kind of sellout – one that might just make people stop and think.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/66653/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rebecca Braun received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK, 2014-16 which funded the research underpinning this article. </span></em></p>
Some advice to Man Booker winner Paul Beatty on how to cope with his newfound fame.
Rebecca Braun, Senior Lecturer in Languages and Cultures, Lancaster University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/67079
2016-10-18T09:21:45Z
2016-10-18T09:21:45Z
Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize – and what really defines literature
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142013/original/image-20161017-12425-r837ll.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Yulia Grigoryeva/Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Bob Dylan’s Nobel prize win and the ensuing debate as to whether a musician should have been considered is a striking comment on the seemingly glib question of what literature actually is. And with the Man Booker prize also just around the corner, how and why literature matters are topics currently animating plenty of cultural debate.</p>
<p>Assessing the literary merit of Dylan’s work is nothing new. Christopher Ricks, a former Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, published a <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060599249/dylans-visions-of-sin">book on Dylan</a> back in 2003, and a <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/the-cambridge-companion-to-bob-dylan/ACD7194EAB1B73788B8E5D86EC16177C">Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan</a> was released a few years later. But others have argued that his Nobel award snubs those who write “literature” — as in, <a href="https://theconversation.com/in-honouring-dylan-the-nobel-prize-judges-have-made-a-category-error-67049">in books</a>.</p>
<p>The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to a writer who has produced for the field of literature, in Alfred Nobel’s words, “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Dylan won the prize for having “created new poetic expressions”. The UK’s former Poet Laureate Andrew Motion commented that Dylan’s songs are “often the best words in the best order”. And Professor Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, spoke of Dylan’s “<a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/announcement.html">pictorial thinking</a>”. The week before Dylan’s win, David Szalay’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/03/all-that-man-is-review-david-szalay-short-story-collection">All That Man Is</a>, shortlisted for the Man Booker, <a href="http://www.thebookseller.com/news/david-szalay-wins-gordon-burn-prize-2016-407521">won the Gordon Burn prize</a>. The judges said the novel “subtly changes the way you look at the contemporary world”.</p>
<p>But what is an “ideal direction” for literature? And how exactly does literature change our relationship with “the contemporary world”? </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2VGvCCymqUg?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>Changing minds</h2>
<p>The idea that reading influences us is something we hear throughout our lives. Children are encouraged to read for more reasons than developing literacy, and huge claims are made for the power of literature at all stages from childhood to old age. Many have spoken of how literature <a href="https://readingagency.org.uk/news/blog/neil-gaiman-lecture-in-full.html">engages the imagination</a>; others emphasise its <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/loves-knowledge-9780195074857?cc=gb&lang=en&">empathetic and political values</a>.</p>
<p>It’s not just writers and scholars who stress literature’s importance. The Guardian recently <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/05/improving-books-for-dyslexics-dyslexia-awareness-week">published an article</a> about a <a href="http://www.barringtonstoke.co.uk/">charity</a> that publishes books especially for children with dyslexia. The newspaper began by wondering how children could be enticed to read, citing evidence that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/sep/16/reading-improves-childrens-brains">reading improves academic ability</a> and <a href="https://readingagency.org.uk/news/media/reading-for-pleasure-builds-empathy-and-improves-wellbeing-research-from-the-reading-agency-finds.html">happiness</a>.</p>
<p>Some people are sceptical about such powerful claims for literature. Philosophy professor Gregory Currie <a href="https://theconversation.com/can-reading-fiction-literally-change-your-mind-62726">has argued</a> against fiction’s power to “change our minds”. While I disagree with Currie about whether or not literature can have a significant impact on its readers, he’s right about how difficult it is to assess the claim.</p>
<p>Figuring out what counts as “literary” is famously difficult. There aren’t strict criteria for literary prizes – there couldn’t be, as there is no prescription for writing well. But Dylan’s prize highlights an important fact: what counts as literature emerges from use of language. Genre – whether you’re talking about realism, science fiction, or folk song – doesn’t have much to do with it.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142016/original/image-20161017-12450-yei9f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/142016/original/image-20161017-12450-yei9f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142016/original/image-20161017-12450-yei9f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142016/original/image-20161017-12450-yei9f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142016/original/image-20161017-12450-yei9f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142016/original/image-20161017-12450-yei9f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/142016/original/image-20161017-12450-yei9f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Science fiction and fantasy still tend automatically not to be recognised as ‘literature’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/zepfanman/8334281469/in/photolist-dGtnw6-aF1NgM-8ixQYw-8xWaUk-8xWaDk-6Vm5M3-4tVmYR-8xZdgL-98BHv6-7PhWCP-cQRXx3-4Umt4m-9Jzje8-97BMFB-8xWc7F-83CJxB-8xWaLc-83Ps6s-7PhWCH-83FQuA-2mvxVJ-83Ps6A-7kCo2q-7gtjxh-piMqnb-9rkXAQ-4Fst7X-dkjYkM-GdKts-gJxHQT-83Ps6w-fbBG9-9qoAj1-8Heunw-83FQfU-8xZdbL-56v3kX-dvpSVw-5XEuR4-7rVXe8-dvpQbd-5NXqeh-7PhWCM-e4LWcv-5y2K5H-aF5D6W-4fe7ju-8xZe6q-bqBP8J-6LwAHr">zepfanman/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This isn’t always acknowledged within academia. For example, <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27490164">experiments concerning literature</a> tend to focus primarily on whether or not a book is fiction when accounting for its impact. But while the fictional world is important, the way that world has been created is more so. Rather than generic distinctions or the status of a book as fiction or non-fiction, it is literary language – “the best words in the best order” – that makes a book matter to us.</p>
<h2>Linguistic risks</h2>
<p>We’re now just a few days away from finding out the winner of the <a href="http://themanbookerprize.com/">Man Booker Prize</a>. Announcing the shortlist, the judges <a href="http://themanbookerprize.com/news/man-booker-prize-announces-2016-shortlist">spoke of their excitement</a> around “the willingness of so many authors to take risks with language and form”.</p>
<p>Their emphasis on language and form seems right. If Dylan’s prize win shows anything, it’s that words have a unique ability to deepen engagement with human emotion and experience, whether they come in songs, plays, poems or prose. It is the <em>way</em> words are used that makes “literature”.</p>
<p>We care hugely about literature. When David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/377">published a study</a> in 2013 proposing that fiction has a positive impact on our ability to empathise, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/oct/08/literary-fiction-improves-empathy-study">the news made the national press</a>. They suggested that “fiction may change how, not just what, people think about others”. In fact, it’s likely that literature in general – literary prose, poetry, and songs whose lyrics are as generative of meaning as Dylan’s – only changes “how” we think, shaping our concepts and ways of perception more than it influences thoughts directly. It might not change “what” we think at all.</p>
<p>This is because the way a book is written is what creates the experience for readers. Take Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, currently being <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1667321/">adapted for the screen</a>. Tell someone it’s about a failure to have sex on a wedding night, and they’re unlikely to take it seriously or meaningfully. But get them to read it, and they’ll find its tone one of “<a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n08/colm-toibin/dissecting-the-body">almost reverent care</a>”.</p>
<p>It’s the form of a book or a song that prompts the way we engage with it – whether it enables <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/prime-your-gray-cells/201606/what-you-read-matters-more-you-might-think">“deep reading” or merely “light”</a> – not its genre, or its status as fiction. As Dylan’s prize shows, it’s the power of language that has an impact on readers and listeners. What really matters are words.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/67079/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Emily Holman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
What counts as literature? It’s less to do with genre than we think.
Emily Holman, DPhil in English Literature, University of Oxford
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/65303
2016-09-13T14:16:25Z
2016-09-13T14:16:25Z
Man Booker shortlist 2016 announced – with some surprises
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137628/original/image-20160913-4942-1q8931j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C638%2C1834%2C1430&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Janie Airey</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The announcement of the Man Booker Prize shortlist has been greeted with the usual razzamatazz. From an initial longlist of 13 hopefuls, <a href="http://themanbookerprize.com/news/man-booker-prize-announces-2016-shortlist">six lucky authors have been chosen</a> to go through to the final award ceremony in October: Paul Beatty, Deborah Levy, Graeme Macrae Burnet, Ottessa Moshfegh, David Szalay and Madeleine Thien. </p>
<p>As always, the shortlist is not without a surprise or two. Yesterday William Hill had Deborah Levy’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/27/hot-milk-deborah-levy-review">Hot Milk</a> and Iain McGuire’s <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/ian-mcguire-the-north-water-subtle-as-a-harpoon-in-the-head-but-totally-gripping-book-review-a6856011.html">The North Water</a> neck and neck, both at 5/1. But it’s only Levy who makes the cut – Iain McGuire’s violent tale of Arctic whaling was a surprise omission. For me, McGuire’s violent depictions of frozen wastes take some beating. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137623/original/image-20160913-4944-8y1xi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137623/original/image-20160913-4944-8y1xi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137623/original/image-20160913-4944-8y1xi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137623/original/image-20160913-4944-8y1xi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137623/original/image-20160913-4944-8y1xi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=544&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137623/original/image-20160913-4944-8y1xi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=544&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137623/original/image-20160913-4944-8y1xi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=544&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Deborah Levy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Sheila Burnett</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Another eyebrow or two might also be raised at the failure of JM Coetzee’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/18/the-schooldays-of-jesus-jm-coetzee-review">The Schooldays of Jesus</a> to go any further. Coetzee joins a long list of jilted stars in this year’s competition, including Don DeLillo, Ian McEwan and Jonathan Safran Foer, authors who didn’t even make the longlist. Personally, I thought it would have been good to see Virginia Reeves’ <a href="http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/work-any-other">Work Like Any Other</a> go forward. Although not without its faults, the evocation of rural Alabama in the 1920s was quite brilliant, as was its central storyline of rural electrification.</p>
<p>What was already clear from the longlist was that this year’s competition was going to include a more eclectic range of writers than perhaps we’ve become used to. The expansive sweep of previous winning novels such as Richard Flanagan’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-writer-richard-flanagan-wins-the-man-booker-prize-32995">The Narrow Road to the Deep North</a> or Eleanor Catton’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/youngest-author-longest-book-final-commonwealth-booker-19224">The Luminaries</a> seemed to be out. Instead, there was a focus on more intimate stories, narratives grounded in what Wyl Menmuir, one of the longlisted authors, <a href="http://themanbookerprize.com/news/wyl-menmuir-interview">termed</a> the exploration of geographical and psychological space. From rural Alabama, to London, a Cornish fishing village, and a remote Scottish crofting community, the longlist seemed to exude a fascination with the intimate spaces of our lives. </p>
<p>The overt experimentation of David Means’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/21/hystopia-david-means-review">Hystopia</a> seemed an anomaly in this sense, a rather uncomfortable nod to a very different tradition of writing. It went against the general trend emerging from the longlist: a thematic anxiety around home, an existential interrogation of what such a thing might mean, and the myths and evasions such a concept relies on. Perhaps in part the longlist can be read as a response to globalisation and to the continued, localised, threat of terrorism on our streets.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137629/original/image-20160913-4972-13i7j77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137629/original/image-20160913-4972-13i7j77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137629/original/image-20160913-4972-13i7j77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=634&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137629/original/image-20160913-4972-13i7j77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=634&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137629/original/image-20160913-4972-13i7j77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=634&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137629/original/image-20160913-4972-13i7j77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137629/original/image-20160913-4972-13i7j77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137629/original/image-20160913-4972-13i7j77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The short list.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Man Booker</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The six contenders</h2>
<p>Unsurprisingly, these themes continue across into the shortlist. Paul Beatty’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/04/the-sellout-by-paul-beatty-review-galvanizing-satire-post-racial-america">The Sellout</a>, one of two American authors to make it through, is a literary tour de force, a stream-of-consciousness ride through the social and racial absurdities of suburban America. </p>
<p>Ottessa Moshfegh’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/01/eileen-ottessa-moshfegh-review-random-act-violence">Eileen</a>, the second American author, has an equally captivating first person voice, but the story is far darker, told by a narrator profoundly disturbed by the events in her life. For a debut novel, Moshfegh’s exploration of deep and lasting emotional damage is quite brilliant.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137630/original/image-20160913-4958-salblq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137630/original/image-20160913-4958-salblq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137630/original/image-20160913-4958-salblq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137630/original/image-20160913-4958-salblq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=735&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137630/original/image-20160913-4958-salblq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137630/original/image-20160913-4958-salblq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137630/original/image-20160913-4958-salblq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Madeleine Thien.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Canadian Madeleine Thien’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/14/do-not-say-we-have-nothing-by-madeleine-thien-review-chinas-20th-century-tragedy">Do Not Say We Have Nothing</a> examines the recent history of China, exploring the country’s recent global dominance through the lives of three young people. Yet central to the story is the way the author uses both Western music and Chinese art as a means of unlocking the hidden emotional landscape of her characters. </p>
<p>Then there’s David Szalay’s fourth novel, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/09/all-that-is-man-by-david-szalay-review">All That Man Is</a>, which emerges out of nine separate stories, each about a different man. What seems to connect each of them is a need to find a sense of meaning in their lives. Under Szalay’s forensic gaze, the contradictions of modern masculinity are laid bare.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137625/original/image-20160913-4944-1otfh3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137625/original/image-20160913-4944-1otfh3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=761&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137625/original/image-20160913-4944-1otfh3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=761&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137625/original/image-20160913-4944-1otfh3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=761&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137625/original/image-20160913-4944-1otfh3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137625/original/image-20160913-4944-1otfh3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137625/original/image-20160913-4944-1otfh3j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=956&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Graeme Macrae Burnet.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Of the British interest, it’s good to see Graeme Macrae Burnet’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/12/his-bloody-project-by-graeme-macrae-burnet-review">His Bloody Project</a> through to the shortlist. His novel is unashamedly an historical crime thriller, set in a small crofting village in mid-19th century Wester Ross. The novel’s shortlisting is as much of a success for the publishers as the author – Saraband is a tiny Glasgow-based house run by just two people.</p>
<p>But if one were to <a href="http://sports.williamhill.com/bet/en-gb/betting/e/9668009/Man%2BBooker%2BPrize%2B2016%2B%252d%2BWinner.html">believe the bookies</a>, the other UK contender – Levy – is already well ahead of the pack with Hot Milk. (Although I’ve often wondered how they come up with the odds for these sorts of things – it’s not as if past form has any tangible impact.) Hot Milk explores troubled family relationships, and through that, sexuality and love. Once again, we have a strongly internalised voice, a pared-down minimalism, that nevertheless remains hypnotic and beguiling. It is here, in the quiet and insistent gaps within the writing that the real power of the story emerges. </p>
<p>So, what are we left with? The shortlist certainly contains a somewhat more global flavour than the longlist, which was almost half British. Two of the six are British then, two American, and, perhaps surprisingly, two from Canada (I’ve included the British-raised David Szalay here). </p>
<p>Although we’ve lost some great novels along the way, the shortlist is still a fascinating collection of stories, a breathtaking ride across the troubled land of this world and the voices of those who live on it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65303/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Spencer Jordan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
This year’s competition includes a more eclectic range of writers than perhaps we’ve become used to.
Spencer Jordan, Deputy Director for Creative Writing, University of Nottingham
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/47654
2015-09-24T14:46:45Z
2015-09-24T14:46:45Z
Review: Satin Island by Tom McCarthy
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/96089/original/image-20150924-17092-nhc50q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">isaravut/Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>How many novels can truly be called epoch-defining? <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/04/100-best-novels-ulysses-james-joyce-robert-mccrum">Ulysses</a>, obviously. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/dec/13/classics.miguelcervantes">Don Quixote</a>, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/aug/01/war-and-peace-stories-lives-leo-tolstoy-james-wood">War and Peace</a> and maybe <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/01/werther-goethe-david-constantine-review">The Sorrows of Young Werther</a>. Beyond Europe’s insular frontiers, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-sensualist-books-buruma">The Tale of Genji</a> defined its epoch way back in 11th century Japan. Though only a handful of novels ever achieve it, something about the genre seems to lend itself to the job of encapsulating or incarnating the eras we live in.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95915/original/image-20150923-2617-w1flgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/95915/original/image-20150923-2617-w1flgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95915/original/image-20150923-2617-w1flgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95915/original/image-20150923-2617-w1flgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95915/original/image-20150923-2617-w1flgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95915/original/image-20150923-2617-w1flgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/95915/original/image-20150923-2617-w1flgq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Tom McCarthy’s <a href="http://www.randomhouse.co.uk/editions/satin-island/9781446444085">Satin Island</a> is certainly an epoch-defining novel, at least inasmuch as it revolves around the task of defining our epoch. </p>
<p>Its protagonist, a youngish man named U, works for a bafflingly large corporation, and is commissioned by his superiors to write “the Great Report”. This document, U is told, needs to be “the First and Last Word on our age”, and will “name what’s taking place right now”.</p>
<p>It’s interesting that McCarthy sees this as a task not for a novelist, but for an anthropologist. What qualifies U for this mission is his background in ethnology: he’s a former academic, and a disciple of the great Claude Lévi-Strauss, the founder of structural anthropology. U’s Great Report, his boss tells him, must “sum the tribe up” – his tribe, our tribe, your tribe. Satin Island, then, is a novel of colossal ambitions.</p>
<p>Once, we expected our novelists to harbour these ambitions as standard. It was simply understood that a Zola or a Steinbeck or an Orwell or a Camus wrote books with the aim of epitomising their zeitgeist – showing us truths about it we all knew, but couldn’t see. Nowadays, our novelists seem content turning out none-too-gripping tales of turbulent lives in Tudor courts, or fantasy kingdoms, or 21st century multicultural Britain. Whatever happened to the sense of a bigger picture?</p>
<p>That’s not to say that Satin Island is a state-of-the-nation saga, in the vein, say, of Jonathan Franzen. McCarthy resolutely deprives his readers of the comforting paraphernalia of conventional plot, memorable characters, and the satisfaction of closure. It’s as if he blames the trappings of fiction for the slump in the aspirations of the novel.</p>
<p>Instead, Satin Island takes its form from the numbered paragraphs of a social scientist’s report, probably because anthropology hasn’t (yet) given up on the idea that it needs to tell us something worth reading about the way people inhabit their world. This is a novel that is sober and clear-sighted about the prospects for fiction in today’s culture – a novel suggesting that today’s novelists are probably the last people you’d seriously ask about such things.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/96059/original/image-20150924-17087-heczxt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/96059/original/image-20150924-17087-heczxt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96059/original/image-20150924-17087-heczxt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96059/original/image-20150924-17087-heczxt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96059/original/image-20150924-17087-heczxt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96059/original/image-20150924-17087-heczxt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96059/original/image-20150924-17087-heczxt.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tom McCarthy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Penguin Random House</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Through anthropology, Susan Sontag <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1963/nov/28/a-hero-of-our-time/">once wrote</a>, Lévi-Strauss came to see that subjectivity could be translated into purely formal code. Satin Island has the bravery to suggest that our subjectivity can no longer be decoded. I’ve met McCarthy a few times. When our paths first crossed, back in the early 2000s, he was already obsessed with encryption and transmission. This would become the most explicit theme of his last novel, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/31/c-tom-mccarthy-novel-review">C</a>. Satin Island takes this idea further: U can’t figure out which bits of our world he’s supposed to decipher, and which he isn’t.</p>
<p>And so we follow U on a series of directionless meditations on the beauty of oil slicks, speculations on the existence of a global suicide cult among sky-divers, and recollections of police brutality at the notorious G8 summit in Genoa. </p>
<p>At one point, he muses that the flow of traffic circling a roundabout traces the same pattern as the buffering symbol on his computer screen, which traces the same pattern as the never-ending <a href="http://www.britannica.com/topic/Ouroboros">ouroboros</a>, the ancient cyclical symbol of a serpent with its tail in its mouth, continually devouring and being reborn from itself. That’s not a bad metaphor for the whole book. It’s an odyssey through the debris of today’s world, the episodes of which are as disjointed as an evening spent browsing the web or channel-flicking.</p>
<p>Charged with summing up contemporaneity, U finds the task impossible, for two good reasons. In the first place, no anthropologist or novelist could hope to achieve an overview of the complexity of present-day life. Second, the Great Report on the contemporary is already being written by the software that tracks and tabulates even the most humdrum forms of our activity – but it’s written in a form only readable by other software.</p>
<p>The point is that this epoch – whether we call it “postmodern” or “altermodern” or “digimodern” or whatever the coinage of the month is – won’t allow us to define it. And that is what defines it. U’s Great Report isn’t so much a heroic failure as an anti-heroic one.</p>
<p>The spirit of the age and the role of fiction in it: McCarthy’s subject matter is nothing less than this. Most publishers simply assume that today’s readers don’t want to bother with such things. Most recent Booker judges seem happy with this status quo. If they want to relegate the novel to the status of the glossy celeb mag, they’re going the right way about it. But if they want to make an epoch-defining statement, then they have no choice but to award the 2015 Man Booker Prize to Satin Island.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/47654/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Rudrum does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island is certainly an epoch-defining novel, at least inasmuch as it revolves around the task of defining our epoch.
David Rudrum, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Huddersfield
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/47603
2015-09-15T15:54:25Z
2015-09-15T15:54:25Z
Booker shortlist: publishing’s bastion against the death of the novel
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94862/original/image-20150915-29636-1o4m8ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Man Booker</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>This year’s Man Booker shortlist, just announced, features two Britons, two Americans, one Jamaican and a Nigerian (four men and two women) and has been applauded for its <a href="http://home.bt.com/news/uk-news/two-britons-named-on-diverse-booker-prize-shortlist-11364003886401">diversity</a>. Some of those considered frontrunners – such as Pulitzer winner Marilynne Robinson and former winner Anne Enright – were overtaken by new writers. </p>
<p>The listed novels certainly comprise an eclectic and exciting mix. Marlon James’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/dec/10/brief-history-of-seven-killings-marlon-james-review">A Brief History of Seven Killings</a> is a tale of gang violence in Jamaica and the attempted assassination of Bob Marley. Then there’s UK author Tom McCarthey’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/22/satin-island-tom-mccarthy-review">Satin Island</a>, a short but dense avant garde novel narrated by a “corporate anthropologist” called U. The 734 pages of American Hanya Yanagihara’s widely acclaimed <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/05/a-little-life-hanya-yanagihara-review">A Little Life</a> explore love and friendship between four middle-aged men in New York, whilst mediating on the trauma of child sexual abuse.</p>
<p>Literati the world over will now be pencilling the six down on to-read lists. At least one is sure to appear in your stocking this Christmas. The publishers of the happy few will have sent out new orders for vastly inflated print runs, anticipating the heightened demand. </p>
<p>And herein lies the reason why we have the prize. It is the publisher’s answer to the persistent grumble that fiction is in its death throes, something that has been a regular and common strand to accompany this art form for the past couple of centuries, but more prevalent with the rise in digital publishing.</p>
<p>While the argument today is couched in new terms – and the fear of the digital creating or sustaining substantial change is a hallmark of debates across a number of fields – the questions raised just aren’t particularly new in terms of fiction.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94889/original/image-20150915-29639-9c7d2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94889/original/image-20150915-29639-9c7d2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94889/original/image-20150915-29639-9c7d2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94889/original/image-20150915-29639-9c7d2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94889/original/image-20150915-29639-9c7d2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94889/original/image-20150915-29639-9c7d2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94889/original/image-20150915-29639-9c7d2n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeffrey Skemp</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The floodgates are open</h2>
<p>There’s the concern that digital publishing is wary of opening the floodgates – everyone can publish! There are no safeguards in terms of quality! How will we know what is a “good” thing to read anymore! </p>
<p>We’ve been here before. Women writing novels? Indeed, anyone not a part of a male and white establishment writing novels? More books published in a year than might be read (a real concern in the mid-19th century)? The concern about quality and how we can know what to read is paramount, and long standing. </p>
<p>There’s also the concern about how people read books. If people can dodge, duck, dip, and dive through the hundreds of thousands of pieces self-published each year online, how will the traditional form of The Book – with its contribution to understanding about the human condition (as agreed by the author, agent, editor and publisher), its lovely covers, its capacity to fit neatly in two hands, even its organisation into chapters – survive? </p>
<p>This debate is partly fuelled by traditional publishing houses who see the threat to their economic livelihood. But concerns about how The Book will survive are hardly new either. The shift from hardcover to paperback raised similar concerns, as did the impact of the penny dreadfuls in the late 19th century, and the marketing of books on train platforms by Penguin in the 1930s. While the contexts of the debate may have changed, what is at stake has not. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94890/original/image-20150915-29636-ou2lj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/94890/original/image-20150915-29636-ou2lj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94890/original/image-20150915-29636-ou2lj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94890/original/image-20150915-29636-ou2lj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=655&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94890/original/image-20150915-29636-ou2lj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=824&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94890/original/image-20150915-29636-ou2lj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=824&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/94890/original/image-20150915-29636-ou2lj8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=824&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jenny Westerhoff</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Answering fears</h2>
<p>It’s no surprise that book prizes have <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-double-win-for-ali-smith-indicates-there-are-too-many-book-prizes-but-so-what-33422">exploded in quantity</a> over the past 20 years.</p>
<p>The book prize assuages those fears that we won’t know what to read. A prize, even being longlisted, is a sign of a “good” novel. And a “serious” book prize, such as the Booker, is also a coup for publishers, leading to investment in print runs and therefore the physicality of text, with new cover design and art, re-printing on higher-quality paper, possibly a re-set with a more arty font. This then becomes an object to own and to display. The book prize, therefore, is a reification of the novel in its “proper” form. </p>
<p>But of course, such an idea about the “proper” form of the novel are by no means set. When J M Dent started his Everyman’s Library series in 1906, the front matter contained a quotation from a <a href="https://theconversation.com/it-may-be-a-medieval-morality-play-about-death-but-everyman-works-40988">medieval morality play</a>: “Everyman, I will go with thee, and be they guide.” In the play, the character of Everyman is given moral and intellectual sustenance from another character, Knowledge. </p>
<p>The purpose of the Everyman’s Library was to publish beautiful editions of classic texts. Here again are the same long-standing debates about The Book which are currently encapsulated in the book prize: the “good” novel’s purpose is both to look good on the shelf, and to act as a social commentary or moral guide. In both cases, this is about showing what you know, to others, and to yourself.</p>
<p>This year’s shortlist contains some established names and others who will be new to most. While the award of the Booker is of tremendous impact for the winner in any given year, both in terms of financial and cultural capital, the debates about what constitutes a “good” novel do not change substantially. This year’s shortlist will indubitably result in op-eds and reviews which lament the state of The Novel, and in the place of the book prize in contemporary culture. But this is nothing new – we’ve been here before, many times.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/47603/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stacy Gillis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The book prize is the publisher’s answer to the persistent grumble that fiction is in its death throes; an attempt to combat the perceived threat of the digital.
Stacy Gillis, Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature, Newcastle University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/45265
2015-07-29T16:55:06Z
2015-07-29T16:55:06Z
Man Booker 2015: not much better than Lewis Carroll’s caucus race
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90170/original/image-20150729-30879-1o9wemj.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">'Alice thought the whole thing very absurd.'</span> </figcaption></figure><p>The <a href="https://www.cs.indiana.edu/metastuff/wonder/ch3.html">caucus race</a> that Alice happens upon in Alice in Wonderland has no start line and no finish line – perhaps because Lewis Carroll knew that we cannot agree where such lines might be drawn. As a result, everyone wins, in one fashion or another.</p>
<p>What does it mean for a writer to win a literary prize? Famously, Samuel Beckett’s wife, Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil, responded to the news that Beckett had won the Nobel Prize in 1969 with the lament “<em>quelle catastrophe</em>”. More winningly, Doris Lessing’s response on being told she had won the same prize in 2007 was “Oh Christ”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/vuBODHFBZ8k?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>It is perhaps embarrassing to win a literary prize, as it is embarrassing to be lavishly rewarded or celebrated for doing anything that comes as a vocation. In Déchevaux-Dumesnil’s mannered dismay, one can hear a genuine resistance to the idea that literature and prizes should have anything to do with one another.</p>
<p>But if it is embarrassing to win a prize, it is also embarrassing not to win one. The myth is that Jorge Luis Borges regarded his failure to win the Nobel Prize as a cruelty and an injustice <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/10/jorgeluisborges">difficult to bear</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Not granting me the Nobel Prize, has become a Scandinavian tradition; since I was born they have not been granting it to me. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90171/original/image-20150729-30846-1iygpvj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90171/original/image-20150729-30846-1iygpvj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90171/original/image-20150729-30846-1iygpvj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90171/original/image-20150729-30846-1iygpvj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90171/original/image-20150729-30846-1iygpvj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90171/original/image-20150729-30846-1iygpvj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90171/original/image-20150729-30846-1iygpvj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Time to get to the library.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/118118485@N05/16438065636/in/photolist-r3zodL-2XUSwK-7UKb4z-admap5-jSP7rT-4eWnzB-38wtvn-3Ht7Cd-59gKXG-ab91CJ-sqjv3U-ju2oG-8MuvLc-9bazKB-ghnoDc-4FqFGV-8WtZQw-4Cn766-ooFNGw-nU97kn-cYVDFh-4fpmBA-8dpeZZ-9AiLeq-aAWrcF-bCmPMN-dCcXMW-41gZtc-iS3V6d-miUDYz-4RjZxv-kF7j7X-fow1Qa-eAeTQa-og2Waz-2hUSHR-6jvjQF-4o9oWQ-oXSXSr-kakfbr-9WCQqL-9gDKtp-fkmUov-7S5Sqa-chakay-6irK2s-WmfVS-i9nuTS-axBBXr-7oGnyy">118118485@N05/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As long as prizes exist, they exert a kind of influence both on writers and readers that is hard to escape. To win a prize is to have one’s work tarnished by the consolations of “approval”; to fail to win a prize is to find oneself in the category of “the neglected writer”, like one of those tennis stars habitually regarded as “the best player never to win a grand slam”. It is as hard for an undecorated writer to say they don’t want to win a prize as it would have been for Andy Murray, before the summer of 2013, to say he didn’t really want to win Wimbledon anyway.</p>
<h2>Booker season</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90173/original/image-20150729-30854-6urhh6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90173/original/image-20150729-30854-6urhh6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90173/original/image-20150729-30854-6urhh6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90173/original/image-20150729-30854-6urhh6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90173/original/image-20150729-30854-6urhh6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90173/original/image-20150729-30854-6urhh6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90173/original/image-20150729-30854-6urhh6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90173/original/image-20150729-30854-6urhh6.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
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</figure>
<p>With the announcement of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/booker-prize">Man Booker</a> longlist, the question of who wins and who does not is again set to dominate literary discussion. The 2015 list is impressive in many ways. It is unusually international in scope, including novelists from New Zealand, India, Nigeria and Jamaica, as well as from Ireland, Britain and five from the US. It also contains some exciting novels, both by established writers and by debut novelists, suggesting that the novel as a form is thriving, despite the endless prophecies of its demise (most recently by <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/02/will-self-novel-dead-literary-fiction">Will Self</a>).</p>
<p>It is not surprising to see Marilynne Robinson’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/12/lila-marilynne-robinson-review-john-ames-gilead">Lila</a> on the list, or Andrew O’Hagan’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/01/the-illuminations-review-andrew-ohagan">The Illuminations</a>, or Anne Tyler’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/01/spool-of-blue-thread-anne-tyler-observer-review">A Spool of Blue Thread</a>. But these major figures are placed alongside works such as Tom McCarthy’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/22/satin-island-tom-mccarthy-review">Satin Island</a> – reminding us of how difficult McCarthy found it to publish his first novel Remainder and how such difficulty was seen by some as proof of the literary market’s dogged resistance to experimentation. </p>
<p>Most pleasing of all is the inclusion of work by debut novelists, Bill Clegg, Chigozie Obioma and Anna Smaill, the originality of whose work suggests that the novel continues to develop and diversify even as the culture becomes more homogenous.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90172/original/image-20150729-30862-8ll0ts.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90172/original/image-20150729-30862-8ll0ts.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90172/original/image-20150729-30862-8ll0ts.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90172/original/image-20150729-30862-8ll0ts.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90172/original/image-20150729-30862-8ll0ts.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90172/original/image-20150729-30862-8ll0ts.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90172/original/image-20150729-30862-8ll0ts.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Zach Mueller</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The bereft</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90176/original/image-20150729-30886-fyqjh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90176/original/image-20150729-30886-fyqjh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90176/original/image-20150729-30886-fyqjh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=962&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90176/original/image-20150729-30886-fyqjh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=962&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90176/original/image-20150729-30886-fyqjh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=962&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90176/original/image-20150729-30886-fyqjh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1209&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90176/original/image-20150729-30886-fyqjh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1209&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90176/original/image-20150729-30886-fyqjh1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1209&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So the announcement of such a list should be an uplifting moment for those who love reading books. But the inevitable logic and rhetoric of prize culture makes it difficult to respond to the announcement as a simple celebration of talent, either of the wonderful luminosity of Marilynne Robinson’s prose, or the musical complexity of Smaill’s. Because immediately, attention turns to those who are not on the list. </p>
<p>Harper Lee’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/go-set-a-watchman">Go Set a Watchman</a>, the bookies’ favourite to take the prize, doesn’t even make it onto the longlist – a difficult gesture from the judges to interpret. I had hoped Ben Lerner’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/04/10-04-review-ben-lerner-great-writer">10:04</a> might be included, but was disappointed. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90175/original/image-20150729-30882-mmcukp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90175/original/image-20150729-30882-mmcukp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90175/original/image-20150729-30882-mmcukp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90175/original/image-20150729-30882-mmcukp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90175/original/image-20150729-30882-mmcukp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90175/original/image-20150729-30882-mmcukp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90175/original/image-20150729-30882-mmcukp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90175/original/image-20150729-30882-mmcukp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There is no place for Kazuo Ishiguro’s <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/04/the-buried-giant-review-kazuo-ishiguro-tolkien-britain-mythical-past">The Buried Giant</a>. Is this because readers and critics accused the author of straying into the territory of “fantasy”? And if so, does genre fiction not really count as literary fiction, and is this what the judges are implying by leaving him off the list? No doubt such questions are already being asked.</p>
<p>Even when attention is not focused on the losers, the nature of the discussion tends towards a kind of meanness, a narrowing of the range, which leads us to choose between one kind of fiction and another, between, say, Tom McCarthy’s “experimentalism” and Marilynne Robinson’s “realism”. </p>
<h2>The caucus race</h2>
<p>The criteria and aims of the prize are laudable and surely non-controversial. It simply sets out to honour the best novel written in English each year, and to increase the readership of all of those nominated, thus raising the profile both of good novels and good novelists. </p>
<p>But the problem – which emerges, in fact, whenever one seeks to promote the arts – is that this simple value judgement tends to do violence to the work we are judging. We all make value judgements all the time, but evaluating an art work is a delicate task which tends to be fraught with contradiction. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90177/original/image-20150729-30886-di9frr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90177/original/image-20150729-30886-di9frr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90177/original/image-20150729-30886-di9frr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90177/original/image-20150729-30886-di9frr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90177/original/image-20150729-30886-di9frr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90177/original/image-20150729-30886-di9frr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90177/original/image-20150729-30886-di9frr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Andrew O'Hagan, The Illuminations.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Tricia Malley Ross Gillespie</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is the job of literary criticism to acknowledge these contradictions, and to make them part of the process of judging and discrimination itself. Literary criticism has to suspend fixed conceptions of value in order to evaluate; but the job of naming the best novel of the year will always involve us in a kind of brutality – the kind of barbarism that, as Walter Benjamin <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm">discovered</a>, is the underside of any “civilized” gesture.</p>
<p>All literary prize announcements draw us all into this kind of brutality, this tendency to substitute the open generosity of reading with the absurd competition of Lewis Carroll’s caucus race. It leads us to a kind of judgement that is perhaps inimical to the work of what Philip Roth rather pompously calls the “serious writer”, who “writes in order to think”.</p>
<p>Yes, this is a somewhat vacuous claim, begging the question of what we mean by a serious writer rather than helping us to escape from its triviality. But for the serious reader – who reads in order to think – the entire apparatus of competition and corporate endorsement can be a distraction, like trying to read with the radio on (even if it is tuned to Front Row).</p>
<p>The annual discussion of the state of literary fiction in the UK triggered by the Booker is surely welcome, as is the “boost” that the prize gives to sales. But when I hear that the list has been announced, I am always reminded of Lessing, at the moment of her triumph, muttering: “Oh Christ.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/45265/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Boxall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The release of the long list has opened the gates to the annual torrents of literary hobnobbing.
Peter Boxall, Professor of English, University of Sussex
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/44716
2015-07-22T20:11:50Z
2015-07-22T20:11:50Z
Literary awards and Joan London’s The Golden Age
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89287/original/image-20150722-31237-xq5l30.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Deciding on the winner of a literary award is, in the end, a highly subjective process.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">RebeccaVC1</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Does Australia have too many literary awards? Almost every year there seems to be a new one, a far cry from the 1950s when Miles Franklin left a bequest to establish the award that now bears her name. </p>
<p>My response has always been that few Australian authors get anything like adequate recognition and payment for the time and effort they put into their writing. So any prize money is a bonus, especially if winning also means they sell more books, though only the Miles Franklin seems to have a marked impact on sales. </p>
<p>This year, as chair of judging panel for the <a href="http://www.perpetual.com.au/kibble/">Nita B Kibble Literary Awards</a> for Women Writers, I had a front-row seat – as I have had in the past – on the judging process.</p>
<p>Deciding on the winner of a literary award is, in the end, a highly subjective process. It is not too difficult to sort out the best dozen or so books from the many other entries. So there is usually a lot of overlap between shortlists for awards, allowing for differences in their rules and date ranges. But rarely does a book win more than one of them. </p>
<p>This year, it seemed that Joan London’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22825770-the-golden-age?from_search=true&search_version=service">The Golden Age</a> (2014) might do so. It received great praise from reviewers when published last August and later appeared on many “best books of the year” lists. So it was no surprise to find it shortlisted for the awards so far announced this year: the Stella Prize, the Miles Franklin, the NSW Premier’s, the ALS Gold Medal, the Australian Book Industry Awards, and the Nita Kibble Award. </p>
<p>But London was to win neither the Stella nor the Miles, which went to less experienced novelists, <a href="http://thestellaprize.com.au/2015/04/announcing-the-winner-of-the-2015-stella-prize-emily-bitto-for-the-strays/?utm_content=bufferab9c1&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer">Emily Bitto</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/sofie-lagunas-miles-franklin-win-helps-keep-half-the-world-visible-43769">Sofie Laguna</a> respectively. When our judging panel decided in early April to give the Kibble Award – <a href="http://www.perpetual.com.au/pdf/2015-Kibble-award-winner-MR.pdf">announced last week</a> – to The Golden Age, the winners of the other five awards were still unknown. I assumed that London would already have won at least one of them, making the Kibble prize less significant for her. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89288/original/image-20150722-31195-1n3rvjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89288/original/image-20150722-31195-1n3rvjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/89288/original/image-20150722-31195-1n3rvjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89288/original/image-20150722-31195-1n3rvjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89288/original/image-20150722-31195-1n3rvjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89288/original/image-20150722-31195-1n3rvjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89288/original/image-20150722-31195-1n3rvjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/89288/original/image-20150722-31195-1n3rvjl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Joan London.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Abby London</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I have admired London’s fiction ever since the publication of her first collection of stories, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/292227.Sister_Ships_and_Other_Stories">Sister Ships</a>, in 1986. As a member of the Miles Franklin judging panel in 2002, I very much wanted her first novel <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/179574.Gilgamesh?from_search=true&search_version=service">Gilgamesh</a> to win. But that was the year of Tim Winton’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35306.Dirt_Music?from_search=true&search_version=service">Dirt Music</a>.</p>
<p>With only two collections of stories and three novels published over almost 30 years, London has been much less prolific than her fellow Western Australian. This is probably one reason why her work has received much less attention. Although each of her books has won at least one award and been shortlisted for many others, they have attracted little in the way of extended critical response. </p>
<p>That’s even more surprising when one thinks how rare it is for a fiction writer to be equally good at short stories and novels. Most of the great writers of short fiction, such as Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield and Henry Lawson did not publish longer works. The fiction of Winton and David Malouf, who have also published acclaimed novels and stories, has attracted several book-length studies as well as numerous critical essays.</p>
<p>Why has London been neglected? Is it that her novels and stories are less recognisably Australian than Winton’s and Malouf’s? They do not deal with big national stories or iconic landscapes, and have tended to focus on female rather than male characters. </p>
<p>The latter is less true of The Golden Age, whose central character is Frank Gold, a young Jewish refugee who has survived the Holocaust in Europe only to fall ill with polio after arriving in Perth with his parents. We meet Frank in a former pub called The Golden Age, now converted into a convalescent home for children recovering from polio. At 13, he is the oldest patient there and is immediately attracted to Elsa, who is nearest his own age. </p>
<p>Later, in a flashback, we see a terrified younger Frank hiding from the Nazis in the apartment of his mother’s piano teacher. And in the beautifully judged ending, we meet a much older Frank in New York and learn of his and Elsa’s later lives. </p>
<p>But while Frank is the bridging character who links the novel’s past and future times to its present of 1954, all London’s characters are drawn with great care and insight, even the minor ones. There is Sullivan Backhouse, whose privileged background cannot stop him dying in an iron lung, though not before he has bequeathed to Frank his poetic vocation. </p>
<p>And there is young Albert, so desperate to get back to his large family that he tries to run away in his wheelchair. Not to mention Frank and Elsa’s very different parents, the home’s nurses and the other parents and children. </p>
<p>Unlike much contemporary Australian fiction, The Golden Age is not narrated in the first person or from the perspective of one character. This makes the author’s task more complicated but results in a much richer reading experience since we are allowed into each character’s inner life, making them all vividly present. </p>
<p>While not a long novel – 240 pages of fairly large print – the skills of selection and compression London honed in her short stories allow her to recreate the contrasting worlds of The Golden Age in compelling detail. The extensive historical research needed to depict Budapest before and during the second world war and Perth in 1954 is never intrusive. </p>
<p>In 1954, the year of young Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Australia, the old colonial order is being increasingly challenged by new arrivals from Europe like the Golds. They, in their turn, are also forced to change – Ida to accept that her audience will now be “The émigrés, the petit bourgeois, the nouveau riche”, Meyer to find a sense of belonging in farming. </p>
<p>Unlike the winners of the Stella and Franklin prizes, both of which featured dysfunctional families, with violent or neglectful parents, The Golden Age offers a message of hope and survival, of making the best of the hand one has been dealt. While neither conventionally happy nor fashionably unhappy, like all the best novels it is filled with the stuff of life.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/44716/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Elizabeth Webby chaired the judging panel for the 2015 Kibble Literary Awards.</span></em></p>
Joan London’s The Golden Age won the Kibble Award last week, having been shortlisted – but unsuccessful – in several high-profile prizes previously. Deciding on winners is a highly subjective process.
Elizabeth Webby, Emeritus Professor of Australian Literature, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/42836
2015-06-05T05:12:51Z
2015-06-05T05:12:51Z
Women still need to fight for publishing deals and book prizes
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/83959/original/image-20150604-3365-q2b8wq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Some who made it.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Baileys</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>I take double pleasure in the fact that Ali Smith has won this year’s Baileys Prize. First, because I deeply admire her books. And second, I find it extraordinarily satisfying that it is a book about the difficulties faced by female artists that has come up trumps in a women-only literary prize. It broadcasts the fact that we’ve far from solved gender problems in the arts. </p>
<p>How to be Both is a work that interweaves past and present, love and injustice, art and reality. There are two cleverly layered narratives: the first is set in Renaissance Italy and focuses upon the artist Francesco del Cossa, a real (male) 15th century artist from Ferrara who is imagined by Smith as a girl disguising her sex in order to become a successful artist. The second is about a 1960s girl called George who lives in Cambridge. </p>
<p>There has never been any question about del Cossa’s male identity, so it is particularly significant that Smith altered history in order to explore the difficulties faced by woman of artistic talent to have a successful career. While Smith chooses to focus upon a painter, she could have as easily decided upon a poet, dramatist or writer of prose. Women in the Renaissance were expected to be good daughters, wives and mothers – certainly not artists and writers. For Smith, the character of the woman artist speaks across time and place in order to draw our attention to the continued inequalities between male and female authors. </p>
<p>And this, of course, takes us back to the Baileys Prize. Launched in 1996 (originally as the Orange Prize), it seeks to celebrate the “excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing from throughout the world”. The need for such a prize was clear: while women published more novels than men (<a href="http://www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk/about/history">60%/40%</a>), men won many more literary prizes; by 1992 only <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/01/books-about-women-less-likely-to-win-prizes-study-finds">10%</a> of the winners of the Man Booker Prize had been women. </p>
<h2>Little improvement</h2>
<p>Things haven’t changed much. Recent <a href="http://nicolagriffith.com/2015/05/26/books-about-women-tend-not-to-win-awards/">research</a> into the 15 years of the six major literary awards found:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When women win literary awards for fiction it’s usually for writing from a male perspective and/or about men. The more prestigious the award, the more likely the subject of the narrative will be male.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Between 2000 and 2014, for example, nine Man Booker awards went to men, writing about male protagonists.</p>
<p>So, if you’re a woman, and particularly if you’re writing about female characters, your chances of winning a literary prize, with all the financial remuneration and recognition that entails, are extremely limited. As always, this reflects the continued inequality between women and men. It’s significant that the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jun/01/books-about-women-less-likely-to-win-prizes-study-finds">Guardian’s article</a> on the topic goes on to discuss the lack of equality in the publishing industry as a whole. The three biggest corporate houses (Penguin, Random House and HarperCollins) are now run by men, even though a high proportion of their lower-paid staff are women. </p>
<p>Since women publish more novels than men, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/warren-adler/why-do-women-read-more-no_b_5830852.html">read more novels than men</a> and because there are more women than men working in the publishing industry, the lack of prizes awarded to female authors and the dearth of senior female publishers is particularly damning. </p>
<h2>Righting the balance</h2>
<p>This is where the Baileys Prize comes into its own. Its all-women shortlist seeks to redress an imbalance and to challenge the male domination of the publishing world. Looking at the judges for this year’s prize it appears that an emphasis on equality and, in particular, gender equality probably had some influence. The Chair of the committee was Shami Chakrabarti, the director of <a href="https://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/who-we-are/structure/liberty-director">Liberty</a> (the British civil liberties advocacy organisation). She sat alongside Cathy Newman, Grace Dent, Helen Dunmore, and Laura Bates, founder of the <a href="http://everydaysexism.com/">Everyday Sexism</a> project. </p>
<p>We can have no way of knowing whether any of these judges sought consciously or unconsciously for a novel that spoke to the injustices experienced by women here in the UK and around the globe, but we are able to detect how creative and political elements come together in Smith’s successful novel. </p>
<p>When Ali Smith created the characters of del Cossa, a woman who must hide her sex in order to be artistically successful, and George, whose name surely recalls the famous nom de plume, George Eliot, she made sure that all readers, female and male alike, recognise how hard it is for a woman to be successful, to get published, and to be awarded the same recognition and pay as men. </p>
<p>And while How to Be Both may be set in the Renaissance and the 1960s, its truths about inequality are just as relevant today. Even if women don’t have to hide their sex or change their name, they still need to fight for those glittering prizes.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/42836/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Marion Wynne-Davies does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
While How to Be Both may be set in the Renaissance and the 1960s, its truths about inequality are just as relevant today.
Marion Wynne-Davies, Professor of English Literature, University of Surrey
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/42830
2015-06-04T11:56:18Z
2015-06-04T11:56:18Z
Ali Smith wins Baileys Prize – historical fiction is on the up
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/83925/original/image-20150604-11713-p50nj2.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ali Smith accepting her award.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Baileys</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The runaway success of Ali Smith’s <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-32995250">How to be Both</a> signals a new and original approach to 21st-century historical fiction. Its shimmering linguistic audacity has been rightly celebrated. Her Bailey’s award scoops a hat trick of prestigious prizes – she has already won the Costa and the Goldsmiths – and the novel was shortlisted for the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/booker-prize">Man Booker</a>. </p>
<p>Split into two halves that can be read in either order, it evokes the passing moment with passionate intensity, and questions our ability to recall or understand such moments. It’s exciting to see such a playful and audacious novel given such accolades.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/83932/original/image-20150604-11723-nerywo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/83932/original/image-20150604-11723-nerywo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=718&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83932/original/image-20150604-11723-nerywo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=718&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83932/original/image-20150604-11723-nerywo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=718&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83932/original/image-20150604-11723-nerywo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83932/original/image-20150604-11723-nerywo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83932/original/image-20150604-11723-nerywo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=902&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Thanks to Mantel, Cromwell has a new face.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But Smith is not alone in experimenting with the past. Hilary Mantel’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/wolf-hall">Wolf Hall</a> and Bring up the Bodies aren’t conspicuously experimental in the manner of Smith. Mantel’s territory is familiar: the terrible Tudors and their predilection for the block. Yet her revisionist portrayal of Thomas Cromwell – the courtier formally known as a Machiavellian torturer – is powerfully subversive. Not only is this a reappraisal of his character, but a formal experimentation with point of view. Time is slippery and disorientating in her novels, as it is in Smith’s, though in a more conventional context. Mantel conveys the consciousness of Cromwell as she darts forward and backwards: recalling, assimilating, plotting.</p>
<h2>Out of time</h2>
<p>Conventional historical novels are fundamentally anachronistic. Planting a modern sensibility in the past should stretch credulity beyond its limit, yet it’s one of the tropes of realist historical fiction that readers accept almost without question. “Factual accuracy” is highly prized – but how is this defined? All sources are biased, all experience is partial, even our own memories are flawed and confused. Facts aren’t reliable blocks of certainty that form the basis of true knowledge – historians know this just as novelists do. The past is malleable and mysterious.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/83934/original/image-20150604-11723-1ikvjjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/83934/original/image-20150604-11723-1ikvjjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/83934/original/image-20150604-11723-1ikvjjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83934/original/image-20150604-11723-1ikvjjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83934/original/image-20150604-11723-1ikvjjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=982&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83934/original/image-20150604-11723-1ikvjjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1234&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83934/original/image-20150604-11723-1ikvjjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1234&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83934/original/image-20150604-11723-1ikvjjp.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1234&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Penguin</span></span>
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<p>Historical fiction also falls within the Venn diagram of literary fiction. (Historical novels have been awarded the Man Booker prize for the past three years.) It’s also fertile ground for experimentation – as demonstrated by the Goldsmiths prize for experimental fiction. The inaugural 2013 shortlist included historical novels by Jim Crace (<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/16/harvest-jim-crace-review">Harvest</a>); Philip Terry (<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/28/tapestry-philip-terry-review">tapestry</a>) and David Peace (<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/aug/08/red-dead-david-peace-review">Red or Dead</a>), while in 2014 Paul Kingsnorth was shortlisted for his first novel <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/02/the-wake-paul-kingsnorth-review-literary-triumph">The Wake</a>, which is set in 11th century Lincolnshire and has its own invented language.</p>
<p>How to be Both is a meditation on the passing and layering of time, and the way in which experience is lost or preserved in our consciousness or in the (perhaps misleading) artefacts we leave behind. Smith suggests in the novel that history is an energy rather than an accumulation of facts: “That shout, that upward spring.”
Novels like this are asking questions about history, but also about the nature of reality itself. How do we interpret external information, the partiality of human perception and the ability of language to engage with what is felt and lost in the passing moment?</p>
<h2>Interrogating history</h2>
<p>Smith, Mantel et al are part of a tradition in experimentation in historical fiction that goes back to William Godwin and Walter Scott. In 1797, Godwin suggested that history is “other” and that even contemporary human experience is so inchoate that all attempts at clarification must fail. He was convinced that the deliberate artifice gave a “truer” account of lived experience than attempts to capture solid facts.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/83935/original/image-20150604-11710-164qeej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/83935/original/image-20150604-11710-164qeej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=876&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83935/original/image-20150604-11710-164qeej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=876&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83935/original/image-20150604-11710-164qeej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=876&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83935/original/image-20150604-11710-164qeej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1100&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83935/original/image-20150604-11710-164qeej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1100&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/83935/original/image-20150604-11710-164qeej.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1100&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Virginia Woolf in 1927.</span>
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<p>Scott’s Waverley – published in 1814 – is playfully self-referential and pokes fun at received versions of history. Edward Waverley, its naïve and misguided protagonist, owes much to <a href="https://theconversation.com/probing-cervantess-pages-offers-more-than-his-bones-ever-will-26128">Cervantes</a>’ ageing buffoon Don Quixote. Both Cervantes and Scott had a sophisticated take on myth and chivalric romance.</p>
<p>Just over a century later, Virginia Woolf staked her claim for women’s place in experimental historical fiction. The eponymous protagonist of <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2013/02/shape-shifter-joyous-transgressions-virginia-woolf%E2%80%99s-orlando">Orlando</a> strides through the centuries unfettered by age or sex, and is a forerunner of Jeanette Winterson’s Villanelle in <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=znFNkb6T2L0C">The Passion</a> – and indeed Ali Smith’s Francesco del Cossa in How to be Both. Woolf mixed vividly deployed research about 16th and 17th-century England, her obsession with Vita Sackville-West and her experiments with the rendering of thoughts and consciousness to surreal effect. </p>
<p>History is not a finite resource. It is looming behind us: growing and morphing and consuming the space age and glasnost and Blairism; Britpop and 9/11 and the Arab Spring. The future experimental historical novel might attempt to encompass the millions of Facebook-users in 2015; the looking-glass world of celebrity and structured reality; YouTube executions and Islamic State. It may be digital; it may be post-digital; it may be unmediated by elites; it may be atomised or seek to give the impression of being atomised.</p>
<p>No doubt there will always be a market for tales of romance and derring-do and the cosy pleasures of heritage fiction. But the necessity for experimentation in this genre is the one certainty we have. The past is “other” and the future is unknown: historical fiction will need new modes of falsification to address this.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/42830/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sally O'Reilly does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The runaway success of Ali Smith’s How to be Both signals a new and original approach to 21st-century historical fiction.
Sally O'Reilly, Lecturer in Creative Writing, The Open University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.