Troubles is the first in JG Farrell’s (above) trilogy on the British empire, which also includes The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip. Photograph: Jane Bown

Found: JG Farrell a worthy winner for the Lost Booker

Troubles, the first book in Liverpool-born author's Empire trilogy, triumphs in readers' vote

Alison Flood
Wed 19 May 2010

Winning the Booker prize almost 40 years ago for The Siege of Krishnapur, JG Farrell used his acceptance speech to denounce capitalism, specifically in the form of the prize's sugar-trade sponsors. The late author would no doubt have been delighted to be given a similar platform today after his novel Troubles was chosen by the reading public as winner of the Lost Booker award.

Nina Bawden / The Birds on the Trees / Review

Nina Bawden

The Birds on the Trees

APRIL 14, 2010

I took this photograph of Nina Bawden’s copy of the first edition of her novel “The Birds on the Trees”, sitting on the green velvet armchair in her quiet study at the back of the old terrace where she lives next to the canal in Islington. Several weeks ago, I wrote a pen portrait of Nina Bawden to celebrate her nomination for The Lost Booker Prize of 1970 and now I am delighted to report that she has been shortlisted for the award, which will be decided by an online public vote closing at the end of this month.

Everything Under by Daisy Johnson review – a stunning debut novel

Longlisted for the Man Booker prize, this complex story about a troubled mother-daughter relationship creates a strange new mythology

Jeef VanderMeer
Thu 26 Jul 2018

M

y introduction to Daisy Johnson was the instant classic Fen, a bold, take-no-prisoners collection situated somewhere between Angela Carter and Deborah Levy. The muscular style and blunt poetry of its stories about women often forced to contend with difficult men used the fantastical in brilliantly physical ways. Johnson’s first novel, longlisted for the Man Booker prize, builds on that achievement by blending a deep understanding of character and storytelling sophistication to examine a troubled mother-daughter relationship. The result reminds me of Iris Murdoch – that uncompromising interiority of character – and more recent works such as Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond.

Lost Man Booker Prize / The Drive's Set by Muriel Spark

LOST MAN BOOKER PRIZE

Looking back at the Lost Booker: The Drive's Seat by Muriel Spark

With its excruciating heroine, bleak mood and unconvincing plot, Muriel Spark's unlovable The Driver's Seat could struggle to win the author new fans

Sam Jordison
Thu 13 May 2010

Muriel Spark was once commonly mentioned in the same breath as Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene – thanks in part to her Romantic Catholicism (as she termed it), but mainly due to her precocious talent. Recently, however, her star has waned. When Martin Stannard released his biography of the writer last year, it was widely mooted that she was due a revival. But not much seems to have happened since then – and while at first glance it might seem that the arrival of The Driver's Seat on the Lost Booker prize shortlist should help the cause, the book isn't likely to win her any new fans. It isn't one to love.

Lost Man Booker Prize / The Vivisector by Patrick White

LOST MAN BOOKER PRIZE

Looking back at the Lost Booker: The Vivisector by Patrick White

It's ugly, loaded with implausible love affairs and often plays out in the toilet, but Patrick White's depiction of the life of fictional Australian artist Hurtle Duffield does credit to the Lost Booker shortlist


Sam Jordison
Thu 18 May 2010

It is a good general rule that any novel which discusses "urgent matters of the spirit" should be treated with caution. Patrick White's The Vivisector does so at length, "in a chaste slit of a room overlooking the luminous sea". It is not for the faint-hearted.

Lost Man Booker Prize / The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard

LOST MEN BOOKER PRIZE

Looking back at the Lost Booker: The Bay on Noon by Shirley Hazzard

It's hard to know why The Bay of Noon found its way on to the shortlist. She may have written some great books, but this isn't one of them


Sam Jones
Friday 23 April 2010

It's always hard to prove that judges of a literary competition have picked a book because of the reputation of its author rather than its intrinsic worth – but easy to suspect. If I mention Ian McEwan and Amsterdam, I'm sure you'll know what I mean.

It's hard to avoid such speculation with regard to the inclusion of The Bay Of Noon on the Lost Booker shortlist too. Following on from The Transit of Venus and The Great Fire (both winners of several awards, if not the Booker itself), Shirley Hazzard is a writer many take very seriously indeed ("one of the greatest working in English today," according to a quote from Michael Cunningham on the cover of my copy of The Bay Of Noon). And that's the only reason I can imagine a book as inconsequential as this one could have ended up on the shortlist when far better novels haven't.

Set in Naples not long after the end of the second world war, the novel describes the friendship and tangled loves of an Englishwoman called Jenny and two native Neapolitans Gioconda and Gianni. Jenny has been brought to Naples to work in a "big NATO establishment" where she is to do translation and clerical work along with a number of other English girls: "Angelas and Hilarys and Rosemarys who had wanted to get away from Reading or Ruislip or Holland Park… tender, uncherished strokes of pastel."

The trouble is – as Claire Tomalin pointed out in a sharp Observer review back in 1970 – that Jenny is little more than a stroke of pastel herself. Except when she manages to catch jaundice and turn yellow late on in the book, she is singularly colourless. She informs us that she moved to Italy in order to escape an incestuous passion for her brother – but relates it with all the excitement of someone describing a head cold. In Naples meanwhile, she lives vicariously through her friend Giaconda – but we get very little sense of what that means, since Giaconda is herself so thinly sketched out. She has long hair. She lives in an interesting house in a messy bit of Naples. She once wrote a book. Her dad was a lefty. She stays with Gianni even though he's a bully, a womaniser and a bit of a bore. I couldn't tell you much more as there are so few real insights into her personality. Like every other person in the book, you get the impression that if you poked through her papier maché exterior, you'd get nothing but air. Which might be forgivable if she did anything of interest, but aside from a few good bits of back-story about the war there's little more in here than navel gazing and singularly sexless bed-hopping.

There is one character, at least, that does have real life – the city of Naples. The passion that is so lacking in the love stories shines through when Hazzard describes the heat, the warrens of streets, the poverty, the beauty and the strikes among the refuse collectors (that appear to have been as much a problem 60 years ago as they are today). So too does the author's talent. She can trot out nice lines about the long line of time running through this ancient city: "The question 'What is it?' took on, here, an aspect of impertinence; one might only learn what it had successively been." And even better ones about its peculiar charms: "The tourist who comes and sees this shambles, has his camera swiped, is swindled by the taxi drivers and persecuted by old codgers flogging cameos, how can he know all that is just, so to speak, a show of civilities? – the surface pleasantries of a reality which is infinitely worse, unanswerably better?"

But clever as such descriptions are, and although the Naples nostalgia may be heady, they hardly make for a substantial novel. This remains a book that is only really of interest to those keen to track Hazzard's development as a writer. It doesn't deserve to win.

THE GUARDIAN

Lost Man Booker Prize / Troubles by JG Farrell / Review by Sam Jordison

LOST MAN BOOKER PRIZE

Looking back at the Lost Booker: Troubles by JG Farrell

The Lost Booker prize has brought Troubles, JG Farrell's great novel on crumbling empire, back into the spotlight - and not before time

"There's no avoiding it. JG Farrell was a genius."

Sam Jordison

Thu 15 Apr 2010

Given that JG Farrell denounced the Booker organisation when they gave him the prize for The Siege Of Krishnapur in 1973, it would be interesting to hear what he'd have to say about the inclusion of Troubles on the Lost Booker shortlist. Alas, we'll never know. But it is at least safe to say that in the last few years his posthumous fame has received a real boost, thanks to Booker. And for that, the organisation should be praised.

John Banville / JG Farrell / Troubles

Troubles by JG Farrell

Introduction by John Banville

INTRODUCTION IN DEREK MAHON’S great poem A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, a pair of travelers find themselves “Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel, / Among the bathtubs and the washbasins”; forcing open a long-locked door, they come upon a host of mushrooms crowding in the darkness. They have been there, the poet imagines, for decades, waiting for the blessed light to break in upon their fetid, liminal world: 

“Save us, save us,” they seem to say, 

“Let not the god abandon us 

Who have come so far in darkness and in pain. 

We too had our lives to live . . .” 

Lost Man Booker Prize / JG Farrell / Troubles

LOST MAN BOOKER PRIZE

TROUBLES

by J.G. Farrell

Introduction by John Banville

1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiancée is strangely altered and her family’s fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline. The hotel’s hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar and the upper stories; bamboo shoots threaten the foundations; and piglets frolic in the squash court. Meanwhile, the Major is captivated by the beautiful and bitter Sarah Devlin. As housekeeping disasters force him from room to room, outside the order of the British Empire also totters: there is unrest in the East, and in Ireland itself the mounting violence of “the troubles.”

Fiona Mozley’s Elmet possesses a rich and unfussy lyricism

Elmet by Fiona Mozley review – the wild card on the Man Booker longlist

This dark debut about a family living on the outskirts of society is an impressive slice of contemporary noir steeped in Yorkshire legend

Mark Blaclock
Wed 9 Aug 2017

F

iona Mozley’s Man Booker-longlisted debut is an elemental, contemporary rural noir steeped in the literature and legend of the Yorkshire landscape and its medieval history. Doncaster is the nearest orienting location, the geographic heart of the ancient kingdom from which the novel takes its name and on which Ted Hughesbased the Remains of Elmet cycle of poems. Robyn Hode and his people’s uprising nourish the narrative. As Mozley’s narrator Daniel has it: “The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives.”

Daniel and his sister Cathy live in a house they and their Daddy have built with their bare hands near the main East Coast rail line. Daddy’s name is John, but for Daniel and Cathy he is only ever Daddy. The contrast between this gentlest of paternal diminutives and the man himself – a bare-knuckle boxer of epic stature – casts into sharp relief the primal tenderness binding the three when the children wash and cut their father’s hair or share with him roll-ups and cider. Outsiders take a harsher view: “Others saw reciprocity and debts, imagined threats founded in nothing more than his physical presence.” That presence is excessive: compared with the bailiffs and fighters he comes up against, “Daddy was gargantuan. Each of his arms was as thick as two of theirs. His fists were near the size of their heads. Each of them could have sat curled up inside his ribcage like a foetus.”

Daddy’s “old-time morality” is essentially pre-Norman. He has no truck with documents or deeds, and has built his home on land he does not own. He makes sure to hunt humanely: the family shoot game with bow and arrow. Daddy has killed men, and speaks honestly with his children about this. His body, his strength and his wits are his truest possessions. He is direct in his dealings with others but the suspicion with which he is treated as a result has placed him outside society: “He wanted to strengthen us against the dark things in the world. The more we knew of it, the better we would be prepared. And yet there was nothing of the world in our lives, only stories of it.” This outsider status sets the family against venal landowners and employers and their cowardly lackeys, centred around the vulpine Price family who will prove their nemesis. The revelation of an occult shared history arcs the narrative towards tragedy.

Elmet possesses a rich and unfussy lyricism. Simple, homely food – baked potatoes and cups of tea – are described in such a way as to provoke longing. Dialect is put on the page with a deft touch: the way in which Yorkshire speech swallows the ends of words is most apparent in negative verb contractions, so we have “doendt” for doesn’t and “wandt” for wasn’t. Otherwise, the terms are unobtrusive: we are familiar with things going “tits up” and the occasional “wrong’un”. Above all, nature – flora, fauna, muck, blood and mineral – is lovingly described and allowed its head, whichever way that head turns. Daniel, who wears his hair and nails long and his T-shirts midriff-short, is seen by Daddy as a strange kind of boy because he enjoys domestic chores. Cathy, an electric and vengeful revenant of the Brontëverse, says to her brother: “I’m angry all time, Danny. Aren’t you?”

If there are minor deviations from an enveloping inevitability of tone and plot they come when the politics of gender or class are explicitly voiced through characters in whom they are already implicit. The obverse of this is that wickedness can be left slightly undersketched. The most potent sections of the narrative, such as a scene in which collective resistance is inspired at a gathering round a bonfire, free characters from the burden of didacticism.

Elmet belongs to a strain of northern British gothic that mirrors the variety that has long held sway in the southern states of the US. The gothic has always returned to us what we repress, whether that be monks hiding in priest holes or bodies buried in swamps. Those who have been socio-economically repressed – fighting men, former squaddies, Travellers – resurge in this rich, fabular novel, as does something more radical and doomed: a pre-capitalist morality. The embedding of such myths in the language and landscape of Hughes, dragged down from the moorland and into the woods, makes for a scarred, black gem.

• Mark Blacklock’s I’m Jack is published by Granta.

Elmet is published by Hodder & Stoughton. 

THE GUARDIAN

Man Booker prize 2017 longlist led by Arundhati Roy's return to fiction

Fiona Mozley / I wrote a novel on my commute — now it might win the Booker Prize

Elmet by Fiona Mozley review / The wild card on the Man Booker longlist

'I already feel like I've won' / Fiona Mozley, the new face on the Booker longlist

The 2017 Man Booker Shortlist Is Heavy on Americans and Debut Novelists
Surprised by the Booker shortlist? Don't judge the books, study the judges
My writing day / Fiona Mozley / I’m on the Man Booker shortlist and top of my fantasy football leagueWhat makes a Man Booker novel? / Fiona Mozley on Elmet
2017 Man Booker Prize shortlist / The best and worst lines
Review / 'Elmet,' by Fiona Mozle

JG Farrell's Lost Man Booker prize for Troubles / A literary resurrection

JG Farrell's Lost Man Booker prize for Troubles – a literary resurrection

Winning the Lost Man Booker prize is a deserved reward for an author whose reputation is still growing 30 years after his death

Claire Armitstead
Thu 20 May 2010

I

n the post-Warhol world, where any wannabe can grab 15 minutes of literary fame, it's a rare writer indeed whose reputation is still growing 30 years after his death. All the more reason to raise a glass to JG Farrell, the curmudgeonly Irish Liverpudlian whose posterity began in earnest when his novel The Siege of Krishnapur became the word-of-mouth discovery of the Booker of Bookers in 2008.

News that Troubles – the precursor to The Siege of Krishnapur in Farrell's Empire trilogy – has secured the public vote to win the Lost Booker will not come as a surprise to any who read their way through all the shortlisted novels. But to say that Farrell is a predictable winner is to undervalue his extraordinary resurrection and what it says about readers' continuing ability to recognise a great book when they see one. Troubles is a work of characteristic depth and humour, which views the decline of the British empire through the prism of a decaying seaside hotel – pointedly named the Majestic – in Wexford.

Farrell's gift was the ability to immerse himself so thoroughly in his worlds, whether early 20th-century Ireland or mid-19th century India, that he never seems to preach as he tackles the big issues of race, culture and class. His drowning at 44 came when his star was at its height, after decades toiling away in obscurity. It is wonderful that his writing is winning new admirers.

THE GUARDIAN

Lost Man Booker Prize / Birds on the Trees by Nina Bawden

LOST MAN BOOKER PRIZE

Looking back at the Lost Booker: Birds on the Trees by Nina Bawden

My first look at the contenders for the Lost Booker prize examines a classic 'Hampstead novel', Birds on the Trees

Sam Jordison

Friday 9 April 2010

Six books have now been selected for the public vote in the Lost Booker prize (a one-off award for books published in 1970 that didn't get a chance to win first time around thanks to a shift in date qualification criteria). Thanks to the interest shown here – and even though I'm bitterly disappointed that Bomber didn't make it through – I'm going to blog about each of the books over the next few weeks. I'll go though them in alphabetical order (according to the author's surname); since time is short, let's plunge right in with Nina Bawden's Birds on the Trees.

In an article about the selection of the shortlist, one of the judges, Rachel Cooke, described Bawden's book as "a story about a middle-class family in crisis, which is so good, and so true, it reminds one why the words 'Hampstead novel' used not to be a term of abuse."

Why "Hampstead novel" should be a term for abuse (if indeed it is), and why the British are so wary of writers who describe their own milieu, are questions for another blog. The significant thing about this book isn't that the protagonists are a family of comfortably-off intellectuals; it's the terrible pain they go through when their eldest son Toby succumbs to mental illness.

Wishful thinker? ... Nina Bawden in 2003. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

But I can't help wondering how this novel would be received if it had been written now, instead of in 1970. Would there be a negative reaction to its being so unashamedly middle class in setting and attitude? Would it be condemned as eventless, silver-spoon literature, as so many other Hampstead novels have been? Possibly. It's interesting to speculate, even if such speculation is necessarily idle.

I've also been curious to read contemporary reviews from critics not yet worn down by a decade of Iris Murdoch's flowery-talking friends and Margaret Drabble's domestic drama. None that I have come across even mention the setting – which is probably healthy. That's not to say, however, that the reviewers in 1970 were always kinder than today. Writing in the Observer, Claire Tomalin, for instance, praised "Miss Bawden" for displaying "her usual intelligence and originality in examining the changing and repeating patterns in family experience", but called The Birds on the Trees "very much a thesis novel", condemned the "appalling easy sentimentality" of the conclusion and complained that "novelists should guard against the practice of making the chief character in the book a novelist too."

It never struck me that this was "a thesis novel": it seemed too raw and emotional for that. But I have sympathy for Tomalin's other criticisms. The ending did seem overly optimistic in the face of what had gone before, and the fact that Toby's mother was a novelist also jarred. I'd add the criticism that it seems highly unlikely Toby's mental decline could be blamed on "drugs", and that once free from "drugs" he might make a recovery.

Hindsight, however, makes these things comprehensible – and adds considerable poignancy to the reading experience. Bawden's family found themselves in a very similar situation to the one in the novel (right down, it seems, to small details, such as one daughter thinking her brother had gone into hospital to have his appendix out when actually he was undergoing ECT). How could she avoid making one of her characters a novelist when so much of the story is about herself? Given the eventual tragedy that befell her son (who remained ill and finally killed himself), blaming it all on drugs and providing an optimistic ending begins to sound more like wishful thinking than a lack of realism.

Whether all that makes it a better novel is a moot point. I suppose it depends on how much you believe in the importance of the author and how much knowledge of their biography should affect a reading experience. My feeling is that although The Birds on the Trees is admirable, it probably shouldn't win a fiction prize. But I would also say that if you do read The Birds on the Trees, you won't regret doing so.

THE GUARDIAN

Lost Booker prize shortlist overlooks Iris Murdoch but plumps for Muriel Spark

Acclaimed Scottish author, who never won the Booker prize during her lifetime, has been shortlisted for a one-off award intended to honour the books which fell through the net in 1970

Allison Flood

25 Mar 2010

Muriel Spark missed out on the first ever Booker prize in 1969 to PH Newby, and then again in 1981 to Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. Today, four years after she died, one of the grand dames of British literature has been shortlisted for the third time, with her novel The Driver's Seat one of six titles in the running for the Lost Man Booker prize.