Analysis / The 2021 Booker shortlist tunes in to the worries of our age
Nadifa Mohamed is sole British writer to make Booker prize shortlist
Booker Prize 2021 shortlist unveiled as race for £50,000 prize hots up
22 September 2021
Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North is a montage of musings told through its protagonist’s cascade of stream-of-consciousness thoughts. Krishan, a young Sri Lankan man, grasps the insidiousness and enormity of the civil war that raged on for 30 years only in its aftermath, devoting himself to understanding the way the worst massacres had happened through mental timelines, trying to construct, through his act of imagination, a “kind of private shrine to the memory of all those anonymous lives” lost during the war. Arudpragasam does precisely the same through the novel, which is a eulogy for the thousands of Tamils who lost their lives during the last two years of the war; a eulogy, and not an elegy — the novel does not so much lament the dead as it commends them. The men and women killed during the war were not given dignified funerals, but Arudpragasam endeavours to offer them dignity in death by dwelling, towards the end of the novel, on the act of ritualised mourning.