So, a month ago I set myself to read six Booker Prize-shortlisted books from six different years. Having completed this task, I find that they fell into three distinct groups: good short books that won, overlong books with ships in, and rubbish from before the dawn of time.
We will deal with these in reverse. First, the rubbish: David Lodge. Oh my. Was this really what they had instead of good books in 1984? The winner that year was Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner, which is a good short book; also shortlisted was Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes, which I've read and I remember liking although I can hardly remember a thing about it. But evidently it was pretty thin once you got far below them, because Small World is just a rubbishy book, an unfunny comedy, the sort of book no literate person can read without thinking that they could have written it themselves if they'd thought it necessary.
Overlong books with ships in: Sea of Poppies, English Passengers, Parrot and Olivier in America. The first two of these are set mostly on ships and I do feel that I learned quite a lot about ships and who is on them and what they all do and what a schooner is; the trouble is that I feel that I was supposed to be learning that. All three of these books are dragging huge weights of research around with them, research which is unnecessary for two quite distinct reasons: first because putting in makes the book worse, and second because you could just make the stuff up if you needed it, it's a novel after all, not a documentary. I liked the Carey most, possibly because I read it first before long-ship-novel-unease had had time to set in. Carey is obviously a terrific technician but I do wonder whether he might write a better novel if he didn't seem to be looking for ones that you have to a be a terrific technician to write. Sure, two voices alternating, different versions of same events, rounded picture, great, well done, but is he concentrating more on the achievement than on the novel?
Amitav Ghosh is a terrific researcher, I guess, almost to the exclusion of other considerations. I'm willing to believe everything he tells me about life on the Ganges when the opium trade was at its height, but where's the novel? He approaches the multiple-narrator thing more softly, using a bunch of different third-person perspectives, but it is still somewhat naggingly obvious that he is doing a series of turns. The comedy, when it arrives, is all stock characters and stock situations, comedy by numbers - it never feels like something he actually finds funny, just something he thinks other people might. I actually enjoyed the book more than you think, but when I think about it now it's the negatives that spring to mind.
Matthew Kneale's English Passengers is my least favourite of the ship-books. His multiple narrators are a whole bunch of different first-person ones, some consciously written, like one character's journal and excerpts from another's book, some presented as if orally narrated after all the events had taken place, some of the smaller ones not really very well decided as to what they are. The whole thing doesn't move forward linearly in time, which along with it jumping about in place makes it rather difficult to follow in places because you don't quite know whether one character is about to meet another on this island or was there twenty years ago. Again there is a quantity of research being dragged like a dead horse around every corner in sight, this time Manx dialect, the early history of Tasmania, and fad racist theories of the mid-nineteenth century. All fine but WHY?
The two I liked most were the short ones. John Banville's The Sea was the winner in 2005 and I'm right down with that. It is a concentrated careful novel, containing no unnecessary ingredients, with only one main character. It mixes his mistily-remembered childhood holiday in a coastal town in Ireland with his return there many years later after his wife's death when he is trying once more to get a grip on life by looking back at where he first found he was getting that grip. The supporting cast are not overdone as they would have been in some books; the ones from the past are remembered with a mixture of clarity of impressions with fuzziness of details and composition, just as the memories of childhood are for most of us, and the ones from the present are not probed but hinted, seen from the viewpoint of an observer who is not interested in going far beneath the surface. If you like modern literary fiction and haven't read this book, then you should.
Last and shortest, Ian McEwan's Amsterdam. I've been unsure about McEwan - I didn't really feel I was getting Enduring Love or even quite Atonement, and On Chesil Beach seemed compact to the point of being slight, an extended short story. But this is definitely a short novel and I thought it was completely successful as such. Two main characters, two third-person perspectives, one movement; the book is unified like a play, and structured like a play, in five acts. It takes three hours to read and if you start it with three hours to spare then you can read it right through, like you'd watch a play. If you're going to dislike it then possibly you're going to do so because both of the characters are unsympathetic, not very nice people, which is true, but they are real enough and our time with them is short enough that it doesn't bother me like it sometimes would. Of course McEwan is sometimes an awkward writer, not bothering to cut out infelicities, leaving Tom Swifties in when they occur to him, generally not giving a damn about the actual writing, but then again that's a method that's worked for a lot of people, Iris Murdoch for example, John Irving, and we must acknowledge that it is a method he has chosen on purpose.
My winner is definitely The Sea. I anticipate having a chance fairly shortly to get hold of the 2010 shortlist in its entirety; come back then, and we'll do the whole thing again.
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