Book Review 099 / Man Booker Prize 1999 / Disgrace by JM Coetzee

MAN BOOKER PRIZE

BOOKER CLUB: Disgrace

Looking back at the Booker: JM Coetzee

People will have you believe it's a masterpiece, but I found Disgrace didactic, thinly characterised and melodramatic

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 99 / Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1999)

Sam Jordison

Tue 24 Jun 2008

The book that won JM Coetzee his second Booker prize is, according to Time magazine: "A subtly brilliant commentary on the nature and balance of power in his homeland...Disgrace is a mini-opera without music by a writer at the top of his form." OK - if you think about it too hard, that last sentence doesn't make all that much sense, but you know what they're getting at. And hell, it's Time magazine! I could list any number of similar eulogies from similarly august publications. There's also the small matter of the Nobel prize for literature Coetzee received in 2003, not to mention the Booker. Disgrace is a book that most cultural arbiters want us to take extremely seriously.

Book Review 100 / Man Booker Prize 2001 / True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

MAN BOOKER PRIZE  2001

Booker club: True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

Remaking Ned

Robert Edric salutes an outlaw imagination in Peter Carey's new book, True History of the Kelly Gang

The best novels in English / Readers' alternative

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 100 / True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey (2000)

True History of the Kelly Gang
Peter Carey
349pp, Faber

Robert Edric

Saturday 6 January 2001

Pushed centre stage with neither a definite nor an indefinite article for moral or theatrical support, True History of the Kelly Gang signals the first of its many deceits. Peter Carey's skills, passions and obsessions are all fully on display in this long-awaited take on colonial Australia's most enduring myth. Ned Kelly, cattle thief, bank robber and folk hero, was hanged at the age of 25 in Melbourne jail in 1880. Carey tells his story in the first person, in a narrative - recalling Ondaatje's Billy the Kid, Hanson's Jesse James and perhaps even Burroughs's Dutch Schultz - that his publishers refer to as a dazzling act of ventriloquism.

Real Life by Brandon Taylor review / Violent legacy of the past

 

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Real Life by Brandon Taylor review – violent legacy of the past

This Booker-longlisted snapshot of the life of a queer black postgraduate forcefully tackles the effects of racism and abuse

Michael Donkor
Fri 21 Aug 2020 09.00 BST

W

allace, the queer black biochemistry postgraduate at the centre of US author Brandon Taylor’s Booker-longlisted debut, often seeks out solitude. On the Friday evening on which Real Life begins, Wallace abandons his carousing colleagues and the bars of their midwestern university for the tranquility of a local lake. He dangles his feet in the ripples. He enjoys the bracing freshness. In this formally and conceptually testing book, however, such moments of repose are never without threat. Wallace soon reflects that “there was something slick in the water, something apart from the water itself, like a loose second skin swilling under the surface”.

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi review / Electrifyingly truthful

 

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

BOOK OF THE DAY

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi review – electrifyingly truthful

When does self-determination become selfishness? This intelligent Booker-shortlisted debut examines the legacy of a toxic mother

Shahidha Bari
Sat 26 Sep 2020 07.30 BST

I

n the 1970s the British paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott described a kind of parenting that need not be all-consuming and self-sacrificing, but which could instead be simply “good enough”. Rather than rushing to feed the child immediately, the “good enough” mother allows an infant to cry a little, teaching them about the reality of frustration and expectation. But what can you learn from a bad mother?

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi / An extract

 

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Burnt Sugar

by Avni Doshi

An extract

I would be lying if I said my mother’s misery has never given me pleasure.

I suffered at her hands as a child, and any pain she subsequently endured appeared to me to be a kind of redemption – a rebalancing of the universe, where the rational order of cause and effect aligned.

But now, I can’t even the tally between us.

‘The New Wilderness’ / Humanity returns to nature in Diane Cook’s timely ecological tale

 

Diane Cook

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

‘The New Wilderness’: Humanity returns to nature in Diane Cook’s timely ecological tale

Eliot Schrefer
AUGUST 9, 2020

Been to a national park recently? There’s a feeling when, trees at your back and songbirds above, human stresses (like pandemics) seem to fall away. In the United States, whose limited wild spaces are increasingly under threat from pollution and overcrowding, access to wild calmness is becoming a scarce resource. Diane Cook’s inspired debut novel “The New Wilderness” (Harper, 416 pp., ★★★★ out of four) imagines a future in which the wilderness itself has become invite-only.

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook review / A dazzling debut

 

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

The New Wilderness by Diane Cook review – a dazzling debut

A community of strangers attempt to live in a natural world made inhospitable by the climate crisis in this tale of survival and strife

Téa Obreht
Fri 4 Sep 2020 07.30 BST

I

n The New Wilderness, Diane Cook’s Booker prize-longlisted debut novel, the end isn’t so much “nigh” as “come and gone”. The cataclysm of civilisation has overwhelmed all but a single natural preserve called the Wilderness State, home to the last remnants of North American wildlife, and a small band of nomads called the Community. We venture into this inhospitable world in the varyingly close and distant third-person company of Bea, a young mother who has made the impossible and inadvisable decision to join an experiment in the Wilderness State in order to save her little daughter, Agnes, from the wasted City, whose poisoned air has been killing her since the day she was born. One of 20 initial volunteers, Bea is part of an experiment allegedly intended to determine whether humans can exist in nature without destroying it. The Community, of which she is a reluctant and pragmatically sceptical member, is tethered to meaning by a set of precious implements – the Cast Iron, the Book Bag, and most importantly the Manual that spells out the rules of their existence, over which the Rangers, to whose whims the experiment and its participants are subject, hold sway.

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart review / Lithe, revelatory debut

 

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart review – lithe, revelatory debut

This heart-rending novel set in 1980s Glasgow is deservedly on the Booker longlist and may even give Mantel a run for her money

Alex Preston

Sunday 9 August 2020

O

ne of several surprises in a tendentious Booker longlist was the number of debut authors selected – eight of the 13 novels are by first-timers, the largest share in the 51-year history of the prize. It has also raised hackles that nine of the books are by Americans. Douglas Stuart, author of the longlisted debut Shuggie Bain, may hold an American passport, but his novel is resolutely, wonderfully Scottish at heart. I first read the book as part of the selection process for the Observer’s annual January lookahead to the best first novels of the year. It sang then and returning to it now has been a delight. Rarely does a debut novel establish its world with such sure-footedness, and Stuart’s prose is lithe, lyrical and full of revelatory descriptive insights. This is a memorable book about family, violence and sexuality, and could even give Dame Hilary a run for her money when it comes to the Booker’s final knockings in October.

Man Booker Prize 1983 / Life and Times de Michael K by JM Coetzee

MAN BOOKER PRIZE 1983

Booker club: Life and Times of Michael K

Sam Jordison
Tue 16 Jun 2009

JM Coetzee's first Booker winner about passive resistance in South Africa is elegantly crafted, but its protagonist is more clumsy plot device than character – I'm surprised it won

Thanks to the brief interruption of last year's Best of Booker Prize, the chronology of this trawl through past Booker winners has been warped. I reviewed JM Coetzee's second Booker winner, 1999's Disgrace before getting to this, his first, 1983's Life and Times of Michael K.

The reaction to that Disgrace blog made me nervous about this one. Especially since my negative opinions moved Canada's finest blogger, bookninja, to request that his followers kill me by slipping extra-strength ex-lax into my coffee. But even without that, criticising Coetzee is a dangerous game. He is a Nobel-winning sacred cow of contemporary literature, and any attempts to slaughter him must be made in the face of received and popular opinion.

At first, I thought I was going to escape such conflict. Like Disgrace, Life and Times of Michael K makes a good first impression. And who wouldn't be intrigued by a novel inspired by the moral rebellion of a giant panda?

JM Coetzee
Photograph: TIZIANA FABI

This animal, according to Coetzee, ate only young bamboo shoots when free and so refused all other food when captured. It died as a result. The titular Michael K, a borderline simpleton, "not right in the head" and burdened with a cleft lip, enacts a similar biological revolt.

Michael's journey to this ultimate form of passive resistance is well told. We first meet him in Cape Town, where things seem relatively normal – until in discomfitingly casual tones, Coetzee describes a jeep knocking a youth off a road, a crowd gathering, curfew sirens ignored, a man firing a revolver from a nearby building and the arrival of the military. Things are very wrong in this alternate South Africa.

Soon, Michael K decides he cannot stay where he is, especially since his sick mother is hankering for her rural birthplace. So he straps her to a makeshift trolley and heads for the hills. She dies on the way, but he continues with her ashes, to an abandoned farm where he begins to cut his remaining ties with the world; hiding himself away, in a self-made dugout, living off little more than water, light, a few gathered bugs and a crop of pumpkins.

Every so often Michael's quiet existence is disrupted by the war he feels he has no part in. He finds himself in and out of prison camps, forced to work, and to answer questions he does not understand. So he defies his captors by rejecting the food they give him.

All of this is told in fewer than 200 pages. But if it's a thin book, that's not because Coetzee doesn't have a lot to say, or doesn't paint a vivid picture. It's just that his prose is as lean and spare as Michael after months of bugs, pumpkins and sunlight. At its best his writing moves like a cracking whip.

But in spite of such pleasures, I have serious doubts. My main concern is Michael K himself. He's more of a plot device than a real man, and we are constantly reminded how simple Michael is, and how little he understands . Yet he is able frequently to outwit those who would capture him, to work irrigation systems and grow crops, build shelters and – most jarringly – speak eloquently and ask endless searching questions.

The way in which this "simple" man so often voices the central concerns of the book soon stops feeling uncanny and starts to feel clumsy. Perhaps it's intentional; perhaps Coetzee is making a point about how society disregards those who don't follow its absurd logic. But it's hard not to be cynical about such an obscure possibility when so much else in the book is so laboriously spelled out. Coetzee's habit of highlighting his didactic points, as if in red ink and underlined three times, aren't as pronounced as they are in Disgrace, but he still does it too often.

Michael K, for instance, is prone to reader-prodding reflections such as: "Is this my education? … Am I at last learning about life here in a camp?" While the doctor even ferments a desire to tell Michael that his stay in the camp was merely an allegory, and then expound several of the themes, ideas and potential meanings in the book, in case the reader missed them. Who needs York Notes?

Coetzee's lack of faith in his reader's ability to trace his meaning without such interjections becomes almost insulting. He also has an irritating fondness for gnomic utterances almost as annoying as the garden decorations themselves:

"Why does it matter where they are taking us?" he says. "There are only two places, up the line and down the line. That is the nature of trains."

Sounds good. Means nothing. Less than nothing if you consider the uses the Nazis had for their trains.

These are serious annoyances. Especially when so much of the book is so elegantly crafted. I was left with the feeling that this was a deeply flawed book. Much better than Disgrace, but not one I would be inclined to give a prize. Especially in a competition against Graham Swift's Waterland.

THE GUARDIAN

Man Booker Prize 2000 / The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood

MAN  BOOKER PRIZE 2000

Booker club: The Blind Assassin

Where women grow on trees

Margaret Atwood creates a world with a strange take on nature - and maths - in The Blind Assassin

Adam Mars-Jones
Sunday 17 September 200

The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood
Bloomsbury , pp 525

Margaret Atwood new novel is made up of three strands. There are the memoirs of Iris Chase, tracing her progress from prosperous beginnings, daughter of a button factory owner, through a loveless marriage to a plutocrat to a solitary and brooding old age.

Man Booker Prize 1989 / The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

MAN BOOKER PRIZE 1989

Booker club: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Poignant, subtly plotted and with the perfect unreliable narrator, Kazuo Ishiguro's novel about a repressed servant deserved to rise above the clamour surrounding the shortlist in the year of his Booker triumph

Kazuo Ishiguro / How I wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks

Sam Jordison
Friday 26 November 2010

In 1989, most of the press coverage of the Booker prize related to the fact that Martin Amis had yet again failed to win. A supposedly "furious" row had broken out among the judges, provoked by an "outraged feminist faction" and their dislike of his novel London Fields – and Amis missed his chance. That all seems beside the point now. Whatever you may think about Amis's exclusion (he didn't even make the shortlist), there's less arguing about the winner. The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is a good one.

Man Booker Prize 1998 / Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

MAN BOOKER PRIZE 1998

Booker club: Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Characters without personality, comedy without mirth – how McEwan's worst novel won the Booker is a deep mystery

Sam Jordison
Tue 6 Dec 2011

B

ecause Booker prize deliberations go on behind closed doors, we'll never really know what led the judging panel to Ian McEwan's Amsterdam. Naturally, that makes it all the more tempting and intriguing to speculate. What discussions were there? What compromises were made? Who stuck the knife into poor old Beryl Bainbridge? Were there displays of taste and erudition from Douglas Hurd and Nigella Lawson? How was the case made for Amsterdam? Were there compromises, or just a fuzzy consensus? Did anyone dissent? Did anyone actually try to suggest that this isn't a very good book?

On the latter question, we must assume that the answer was "no" – or that the person making the case against the book was roundly ignored. As I shall now attempt to show, a point-by-point debunk of the novel can be carried out in around five minutes – even less time than it takes to read the thing.

1) It's preposterous.

If you're squeamish about spoilers, look away now, because the simplest way of demonstrating Amsterdam's deficiencies is to lay out its story and denouement. Things are set in motion when Vernon and Clive, two old friends, agree that, should one of them enter into the kind of mental decline they have just witnessed in their former lover, Molly, the other will assist in his euthanasia. The plot thickens when the two friends argue over two questions of morality. The first question concerns newspaper editor Vernon's decision to publish a series of pictures the now-dead Molly took of the current foreign secretary in drag. The second, Vernon's failure to tell the police about the fact he witnessed an attempted rape while he was walking in the Lake District, because he was too engrossed in writing a symphony for the new millennium. The plot then curdles when Clive discovers he is about to lose his faculties and the two agree to meet in Amsterdam, but hate each other so much they murder each other with champagne laced with the poison they have procured from a euthanasia program.

I'm guessing that I don't have to say much more than that.

2) It farts and belches.

While the broad outline above speaks for itself, it's worth also noting that there are many other, smaller, instances of absurdity in the novel – upon which the plot is completely reliant. For instance, Vernon comes a cropper because he holds off publishing the above-mentioned series of pictures for several weeks while steadily building interest about them in his paper. Has a newspaper ever said "We have some mind-blowing pictures. So, watch out! We're going to print them in two weeks' time"? Am I alone in finding that ridiculous?

Even if I'm wrong on that score, there are plenty of other complaints to make about a plot that moves forward with all the subtlety and grace of an England rugby scrum. There is bus-heavy foreshadowing of the euthanasia strand, for instance – an arrangement that points to doom with flashing red arrows. There are also characters dumped into strategic positions throughout the book – and who have no life beyond their role in the plot. On page 105, we meet an employee at Vernon's paper called Frank Dibben and are immediately told he is known as Cassius "for his lean and hungry look". Dibben whispers blandishments to Vernon, pretends to be on his side and with crushing inevitability is sitting in his editorial chair by page 130. He is there simply to serve a plot twist – although twist is perhaps the wrong word for such an unsurprising outcome.

Ian McEwan celebrates his victory at the 1998 Booker prize. Photograph by Toby Melville

3) The characters have no character.

Dibben is not really a concern when it comes to characterisation. McEwan makes no attempt to fill him in – but why would he when he comes and goes so quickly? The trouble is that everyone else is equally spectral. There is nothing to grasp in any of them. McEwan himself describes Vernon as a "a man without edges … a man who did not fully exist" and all that needs to be said is he does little to disabuse us of the notion. Clive, meanwhile, is offered to us simply as a composer with a mind dedicated only to the perfection of his art – to the extent that he can witness a rape and do nothing about it, as he'd rather be jotting down musical notes.

All of that would be fine, if rather unsatisfying, if McEwan didn't also want to suggest that they have a complicated emotional life. It's bewildering to see these ciphers suddenly bursting into emotional arguments with each other, bellowing about principles and hanging up the phone with soap-operatic violence. It's also strange to see such empty vessels pouring out for the lost Molly and gorging on revenge. McEwan expects them to eat when they have no stomachs.

4) There is nightmarish writing.

I would hesitate to say that McEwan's prose is ever truly bad. Sentence by sentence he is a fine craftsman. Even in a book as awful as Amsterdam there are moments of pleasure, such as the following description of a crowd at a funeral:

"So many faces Clive had not seen by daylight, and looking terrible, like cadavers jerked upright to welcome the newly dead. Invigorated by this jolt of misanthropy, he moved sleekly through the din, ignored his name when it was called, withdrew his elbow when it was plucked and kept on going towards where George stood talking to two women and a shrivelled old cove with a fedora and stick."

There's a beguiling unforced rhythm to the prose and it isn't just the fact that this book is so slight that makes it easy to finish in one brief sitting. But even so … As well as all those histrionic arguments, there are many embarrassing sequences. Vernon's lost editorship, for instance, is revealed in a one page chapter where McEwan suddenly starts talking about "the editor" where previously he has named Vernon, yet still expects the last sentence where "the editor" is replaced by "Frank" to come as a surprise. Worse still is Clive's death, supposedly the climax of the book, which is rendered ridiculous when it is described from within a dream-sequence in which Clive starts talking to the long-dead Molly. And even worse than that is the fact that this dreadful chapter is followed by one in which Vernon does the exact same thing.

5) It isn't funny.

The slightness of characterisation, the over-the-top prose, the obtrusiveness of the plotting and the idiocy of the premise might be more easy to forgive as sacrifices made in the service of comedy. Ian McEwan himself suggested in a fascinating Paris Review interview that the book has a "rather improbable comic plot" and grew out of a "long-running joke". The trouble is, that there are no laughs. The sly winking tone is irritating rather than amusing, the satire is too daft ever to hit home, and it's too easy to see the jokes coming.

The only really laughable thing is the fact that Amsterdam won the Booker Prize when it so clearly didn't deserve it, but that too leaves a sour taste. In his Paris Review interview McEwan noted: "[Amsterdam's] (as opposed to my) misfortune was to win the Booker Prize, at which point some people began to dismiss it." That's true to an extent, but I'd say it's been his misfortune too. There's an argument that the attention he received from Amsterdam paved the way for Atonement's well-deserved conquest of the world a short while later, but it's hard not to feel the award has done McEwan's reputation lasting damage. The fact that it won the Booker will make many people (and more and more of them in the future) assume that Amsterdam must be McEwan's best work, when it is far from it. And if Amsterdam were the only book of his I'd read, I'd never read want to read another – and so miss out on one of our best contemporary novelists. It's small wonder that he has become the target of so much online sniping – there must be thousands of people out there who've read only this one McEwan novel, seen it garlanded with awards, and assumed that he and the British literary establishment are locked in a conspiracy to feed us trash. It is a sad moment in the illustrious histories of the novelist and of the Booker prize.

THE GUARDIAN

Man Booker Prize 2007 / The Gathering by Anne Enright

MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2007

Booker club: The Gathering by Anne Enright

This novel ticked most of the Irish cliches on my list ... yet it is nuanced, hilarious, and not to be underestimated.

Sam Jordison
Tue 4 Sep 2007

Ireland, it is widely and rightly acknowledged, punches far above its weightwhen it comes to literary output. No lover of books can look on the island with anything other than affection and gratitude for the way its native sons and daughters have enriched and transformed the written word. All the same, there is one sub-genre of uniquely Irish literature that I could happily do without: the Catholic childhood misery memoir.

Sure I found Angela's Ashes touching, but as soon as Frank McCourt's brother got in on the act, not to mention all the subsequent McAuthors eager to sell their history to the kind of Americans who like to think they have Celtic blood, I found I'd had more than enough of big families, bad parents, worse nuns and dipsomaniac uncles with the gift of the gab ...

... All of which is a long way of explaining why I approached Anne Enright's story of a big Dublin family and its murky past with considerable cynicism. No matter that The Gathering is a work of fiction and that Enright has a reputation as one of the most talented writers in Ireland today. I still expected to have heard it all before.

So great was my prejudice, and so bad my mood after three hours of housework drudgery when I came to the book late on Friday night, that as a spiteful little experiment I gathered up my big bag of Irish-childhood cliches and wrote down the first ones that popped out. As I read through I marked down where they initially occur in the book.

Anne Enright_Illustration by Alan Vest

Here's the list:

Drunken father, who veers between maudlin sentimentality and maudlin violence. (Doesn't appear) Humorous uncle - also drunk, but good for the craic and a great source of slightly ribald jokes. (Doesn't appear, but there is a brother Liam who neatly fits this description) Harried mother, living harried life in an old-fashioned kitchen. (Page 3) Too many children. (Page 7) One of these children is sexually abused. (Page 143) One of these children dies too young. (Page 8 ... More turn out to have died on page 10) A grandparent, close to death. (Page 17) A frightening, violent priest. (Page 50) A schoolteacher given over to corporal punishment. (Doesn't appear) A schoolteacher who instils a love of books in the author. (Doesn't appear) Rain. (Page 26) Brown tea. (Page 4) More rain. (Page 60) More tea. (Page 7)

So, by page 50 nearly two-thirds of my predictions had been proved correct. At that stage, however, I wasn't feeling vindicated, so much as ridiculous. Yes, plenty of the book exists on the wrong side of cliche, but my list was unfair. First, because you can't seriously write a book about Ireland and not mention tea. Second, because Enright is perfectly aware that stories of big Irish families always follow the same pattern and is not afraid to make a virtue of this fact: "There is always a drunk. There is always someone who has been interfered with, as a child," her narrator tells us with simple clarity. Third, I'd underestimated Enright - and then some. The Gathering is far more than a story of childhood dolours and the glamourised poverty of olde Ireland.

The majority of the book - or the majority of the thinking in the book - actually takes place in the present, as Veronica Hegarty struggles to come to terms with the fact that her brother Liam has filled his pockets with stones and walked out to his death in the sea. The event shocks her into reminiscence about the past - and even into inventing colourful scenarios about her relatives when she does not know what actually happened to them. It also leads her to a frank assessment of her current life. Instead of maudlin sentimentality, there is a nuanced explanation of the way the past affects the present. Similarly, the exploration of childhood is accompanied by smart insight into what it means to be a wife and mother - and how such a woman is to fit into a new, economically dynamic Ireland, very different from the Guinness-stained sepia of the misery memoir.

The words come packed into short, robust sentences full of allusion and imagery. Sometimes, they don't work quite as Enright might wish. At one point we are told, for instance, that sunlight is "sexual". Unless I'm really missing something, that's a pretty daft thing to say. More often, however, the writing is effective. Veronica says of her parents' capacity to rut and produce offspring: "They were helpless to it, and bred as naturally as they might shit." Or, how's this for an aphorism: "A drinker does not exist. Whatever they say, it is just the drink talking"?

But the thing that most won me over was that even though The Gathering is a serious book (as AL Kennedy eloquently put it, "a genuine attempt to stare down both love and death") it can be absolutely hilarious. And not "look-at-my-drunken-uncle-funny", either. Enright's wit is dry, sardonic, sometimes even cruel - and all the better as a result.

"Are they good children?" Veronica asks of her own offspring. "In the main. Though Emily is a bit of a cat and cats, I always think, only jump into your lap to check if you are cold enough, yet, to eat." Who couldn't like a book with such observations?

Eventually, I found the conclusion disappointing. I was unconvinced by the insistence that childhood events inescapably determine our adult present, and wondered if Veronica's intentions for the future weren't something of a cop out.

But the book is still a credit to this year's longlist.

THE GUARDIAN