Man Booker prize 2015 – the shortlist
From smart New Yorkers to 70s Jamaican rastas, this year’s impressive contenders reflect the diversity of fiction in English
Sunday 11 October 2015
I
n Tristes Tropiques, Levi-Strauss describes meeting a tribe who don’t know what writing is. To assert his status, the tribe’s chief picks up one of the celebrated anthropologist’s pads and starts scribbling on it, to impress his subjects with his superiority.
Once upon a time, this might have been an apt metaphor for Booker’s judgely antics: tribal leaders affecting an expertise beyond their reach. This year, thankfully, we are not in head-hunting territory. The Booker jury has chosen some powerful finalists. Michael Wood, its chair, has said: “Frankly, they are pretty grim.” But never mind the mood. What’s remarkable here is the polyvalency of English prose in 2015, from the academy to the ghetto, taking in Jamaican patois, Nigerian English and the dialects of Sheffield, Baltimore and New York.
If fiction should be a mirror to our times, here are six books that reflect a world struggling to sustain a shared humanity, through family and friendship, despite gangster violence, self-harming and sibling murder. “What’s quite interesting,” says Professor Wood, “is trying to work out how one can have such pleasure in books with such terrible stuff.”
| Marlon James: ‘ambitious and loquacious’. Photograph: Jeffrey Skemp/PR |
Alphabetically, Booker’s first contender is Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld Publications £18.99, pp688), an ambitious and loquacious exploration of the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in December 1976. It also tells the story of 1970s Jamaica through a polyphonous chain of “voices” (ghosts, Rastas and gangstas), juxtaposing reggae with street violence. James takes risks that none of his rivals dare, and claims to have been inspired by Faulkner, though he may have forgotten that As I Lay Dying is barely 200 pages. But after the assault on Marley’s home, a brilliant, central sequence, this intoxicatingly prolix narrative loses its way in a tedious aftermath.
| Tom McCarthy: ‘a masterclass in brevity and wit’. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian |
By contrast, Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (Cape £16.99, pp174) offers a masterclass in brevity and wit. McCarthy, who was shortlisted in 2010 for his novel C, entertains his readers with a playful attitude to fiction. His show-off protagonist, U, a “corporate anthropologist”, is compiling an “unwritable” theory of everything for his bosses. He’s also conducting a loveless relationship with Madison, his online squeeze, who periodically pops up for a quickie. Satin Island only drops its experimental mask when the truth about Madison’s anomie is laid bare. By Malcolm Gladwell, out of Franz Kafka, this novel, with its references to “ichthyomancy” and Levi-Strauss (vide supra), is often infuriating, self-consciously brilliant and quite cold. Ten years ago, it might have been a frontrunner. Now, it’s the lone voice of formal experimentation on the list.
Another outlier is Chigozie Obioma’s The Fisherman (Pushkin Press £14.99, pp301). When a stern, oppressive father leaves the family home, his four sons decide to go fishing in the local river, where they meet Abulu, the town “madman”, said to have the power of prophecy. The boys’ carefree escape turns tragic when Abulu predicts that the eldest, Ikenna, will be killed by one of his brothers, “a fisherman”. We watch Ikenna’s physical disintegration, and the growth of terrible suspicion within the family. Ikenna’s descent into hell is matched by his brothers’ assertions that they could never hurt him. Now read on. Obioma, the heir to Chinua Achebe, is a good writer whose work has a deeply felt authenticity, combined with old-fashioned storytelling – gifts that might recommend this novel to a deadlocked jury.
From the UK, Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways (Picador £14.99, pp468), might be subtitled “a passage from India”, describing the journey to Britain of four Indians (three men, and Narinder) in search of a better future. It’s a fine, graceful novel written with deep humanity and insight in a voice that marries the literary traditions of both societies.
At 73, Anne Tyler has a lifetime of achievement behind her, which is a problem. A Spool of Blue Thread (Chatto £18.99, pp357), about the secrets in the dysfunctional Whitshank family, hardly equals her finest (Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, for example), but it’s superbly accomplished, perceptive and funny, tugged forward by suspended revelations to its hurricane climax.
Nothing, however, could match the transgressions of Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (Picador £16.99, pp720), a book so armoured with acclaim that an unfettered reading is almost impossible. Like several of these novels, it’s about a group – four young graduates in New York. Slowly, a familiar scenario becomes troubled, then dark, more disturbing, and, finally, horrifying, as the truth about Jude, the central character, is painfully exposed. A psycho-sexual thriller, A Little Life is really a middlebrow gothic sensation, a commercial read for our times, but deficient in almost all the qualities that make lasting fiction.
Yanagihara is the favourite, but up against some tough competition among whom, on my reading, there is no obvious winner. The Booker’s secret is that it’s a shape-shifter, whose literary criteria change with each jury. This year the finalists represent competing versions of what we might want a contemporary novel to achieve, and Michael Wood will possibly find himself chairing an informal seminar on the nature and objectives of literary fiction today. From that debate, there is no foregone conclusion. My guess is that A Little Life will not prevail. The outcome will reflect the internal group dynamic.