In Sophie Mackintosh’s dystopian ‘Blue Ticket,’ a woman’s fate is determined by lottery

 

In Sophie Mackintosh’s 

dystopian ‘Blue Ticket,’ 

a woman’s fate is 

determined by lottery

Review by Wendy Smith

June 30, 2020 at 4:26 p.m. EDT

A controlling father imposed his warped definition of female nature on his daughters in Sophie Mackintosh’s first book, “The Water Cure,” longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018, and constraints on women’s behavior continue to be a theme in her new novel, “Blue Ticket.” This time, the restrictions are society-wide, in an unspecified nation where girls who have reached puberty draw tickets in a lottery to determine their future. The details about what this means emerge slowly in Mackintosh’s elliptical text, after 14-year-old Calla pulls a blue ticket from the machine.

Taste for the macabre ... Sophie Mackintosh Photograph: Antonio Olmos

Interview

Sophie Mackintosh: 'Suddenly I really wanted a baby - I resented that it felt outside my control'

Claire Armitstead

The acclaimed young author of The Water Cure talks about her latest dystopian novel, Blue Ticket, and how listening to music and speaking Welsh helps her writing

Claire Armitstead

Saturdad 15 September 2020

 

“Something has changed, but we don’t know what,” says Sophie Mackintosh. She’s explaining the scenario of her second novel, Blue Ticket, but she could just as easily be describing the situation in which we find ourselves. It’s days before the Covid-19 lockdown, and as we talk in the Guardian office a sense of impending doom swirls around us.

In Conversation / Avni Doshi & Sophie Mackintosh

 

Avni Doshi

In Conversation

Avni Doshi & Sophie Mackintosh

‘I do wonder to what extent writing about motherhood is actually writing about being mothered’.

Avni Doshi:

I want to start by telling you that Blue Ticket has been on my mind since I closed the book, in part because I’m pregnant with my second child at the moment, and I was struck by how the narrator inhabits her pregnant body. I have been there – I am there – bleeding gums and all. And I remember when we were together a few months ago, you said that you knew you wanted to have a child at some stage, that it was more a question of when. I was amazed – my own desire to be a mother was unclear to me even after I gave birth to my son.

The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh review – an extraordinary otherworldly debut

Cal Revely-Calder

Wed 23 May 2018

T

here is a house on an island, alone by the sea. Inside live three girls, Grace, Lia and Sky, with their parents Mother and King. Outside, beyond the sea and the horizon, there is a “toxin‑filled world”. To understand what toxins are, and indeed for their knowledge of everything else, the girls have always deferred to King. Their world is complete. And then, one day, he is gone.The title of Sophie Mackintosh’s extraordinary debut novel, The Water Cure, refers to one of the many immunising cruelties King has devised for the girls. They are sewn into “fainting sacks” and “drowning dresses”; they keep muslin pressed to their mouths like masks. Now, in his afterglow, Mother is a surviving queen consort. She honours tradition. One morning she orders a “love therapy” on the beach, in which Lia, on Sky’s behalf, is forced to kill a mouse and then a toad. The ritual sparks an electric charge between sisters, down pathways drawn by King.His legacy is the real toxin: a trauma that forces its victims to go on playing it out.

Sophie Mackintosh / Radical new voice in literary fiction secures publishing deal

Sophie Mackintosh

Radical new voice in literary fiction secures publishing deal

Graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme Sophie Mackintosh has secured a publishing deal with Hamish Hamilton for her debut novel The Water Curefollowing a seven-way auction.

The novel is said to reveal "the brutality of love and the price of survival in a hostile world", tells the story of three daughters raised in an isolated coastal compound, cut off from the world and its men. Their parents tell them they are safe here - until the day three men wash up on the shore, strange and vulnerable and infinitely dangerous.

‘I don’t believe in book snobbery’ … Sophie Mackintosh.
Photograph: Sophie Davidson

The first book interview

Sophie Mackintosh: 'Dystopian feminism might be a trend, but it’s also our lives'

The Water Cure’s author says she has not written a new Handmaid’s Tale, but it would be hard for any story centred on women’s lives not to be feminist

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Thu 24 May 2018

“T

he novel is set in the future but it could be now, it’s not a million miles away,” Sophie Mackintosh tells me, in her soft Welsh lilt, sitting in an east London cafe. “Sometimes you scroll through Twitter and there is a horrible story like the Belfast rape case. You see a lot of really upsetting stories. That can throw off your whole day. You get angry, and that can make you feel sick. So I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to imagine a world where you get ill from patriarchy.” She laughs, with irony.

Man Booker prize 2018 longlist includes graphic novel for the first time

Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina, which explores the disappearance of a young woman, ‘does just what good fiction should do’ – and will compete with Michael Ondaatje’s WarlighT

Alison Flood
Tue 24 Jul 2018 00.01 BSTLast modified on Tue 24 Jul 201816.38 BST

 
Nick Drnaso – the first graphic novelist ever to be nominated for the Man Booker prize. Photograph: Olivia Obineme for the Observer

A graphic novel about a vanished young woman and a thriller about a vanished mother have elbowed their way on to a giant-slaying Man Booker prize longlist that “capture[s] something about a world on the brink”.

Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina, the first graphic novel ever to reach the Booker longlist, explores the chilling effect of 24-hour news after a girl has disappeared. Judges picked it as a contender for the £50,000 prize ahead of titles from former winners including Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Peter Carey and Alan Hollinghurst, describing it as “oblique, subtle [and] minimal” and saying the “changing shape of fiction” meant it was only a matter of time before a graphic novel made the cut.

Esi Edugyan plunges into the 19th century, opening with watchful, 11-year-old George Washington Black cutting sugar cane and doing his best to survive on a Barbados plantation owned by sadistic Englishman Erasmus Wilde. One day ‘Wash’ is plucked from the fields to help Wilde’s scientist brother with his experimental airship The Cloud-cutter. Due to be published in August, this evocative, page-turning adventure sees ‘Wash’ travel from the Caribbean to the Arctic in search of freedom.

Photograph: Profile Books, Serpent’s Tail

“We all read it and were blown away by it,” said the judge and bestselling crime novelist Val McDermid. “The graphic novel has increasingly become front and centre in terms of storytelling [and] we felt [Sabrina] does just what good fiction should do.”

Also in the running for the UK’s most prestigious literary award is a thriller from the crime writer Belinda Bauer. Snap opens with a mother abandoning her three children in a broken-down car and plays out as they struggle to deal with her disappearance. The judges called it an “acute, stylish, intelligent novel about how we survive trauma”, which “undermines the tropes of its own genre and leaves us with something that lingers”.

Sophie Mackintosh takes the reader to a house on an island, where three girls live with their mother and King. But their world is upended when King vanishes and three men are washed up on the beach. Writing in the Guardian, Cal Revely-Calder said the novel is written ‘in the way that Sofia Coppola would shoot the end of the world: everything is luminous, precise, slow to the point of dread’.

Photograph: Penguin Random House, Hamish Hamilton

“I’d read it even before I knew I would be a Booker judge and it seemed to me to be an outstanding novel,” said McDermid. “My fellow judges read it and one said, ‘This transcends genre’, and someone else said, ‘This shows what genre can do at its best’ ... It is an extremely clever piece of storytelling with characters you care about, and that’s what we were looking for – something well written that engages with mind and heart.”

A longlist that stands out for its “willingness to take risks with form”, according to chair of judges Kwame Anthony Appiah, also features debuts from Sophie Mackintosh and Guy Gunaratne. Mackintosh’s The Water Cure “unpicks patriarchy at its core”, according to the panel, while Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City is “an inner city novel for our times”. The poet Robin Robertson mixes verse and prose in his first novel, The Long Take, while Daisy Johnson’s first novel, Everything Under, is enough to put the 27-year-old alongside Sally Rooney, picked for Normal People, as the youngest authors on this year’s list. Johnson and Rooney are “looking at the world from the perspective of their age and their books have a very different flavour”, McDermid explained, “but they’re there because they impressed us”.

 Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight has made this year’s Booker longlist. 

Only one former winner made this year’s Booker longlist: Michael Ondaatje, for Warlight, which opens in 1945 with London still reeling from the blitz. The other major name in the running for the Booker is the Pulitzer-winning novelist Richard Powers, selected for his novel The Overstory. With US writers having won the last two Man Booker prizes after the award was opened up to authors from outside the UK and Commonwealth – a decision that Julian Barnes described as “daft” earlier this month – naysayers will be celebrating the fact that just three US writers were longlisted this year: Powers, Drnaso and Rachel Kushner, chosen for The Mars Room. Called “terrifyingly authentic” by judges, The Mars Room follows the story of a woman beginning two consecutive life sentences, plus six years, at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility.

The Guardian first book award-winner Donal Ryan makes this list with his story of a Syrian refugee, a care worker and a crooked accountant, From a Low and Quiet Sea. Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black, the story of a slave who becomes the personal servant to an eccentric scientist, and Anna Burns’Milkman, a look at Ireland during the Troubles through the perspective of a young girl, complete a 13-strong longlist assembled from 171 submissions – the highest number of books ever entered for the prize.

Anna Burns pitches the reader into the heart of the Troubles in this story of a young woman pursued by a senior paramilitary figure. Writing in the Guardian, Claire Kilroy saluted the novel’s ‘digressive, batty narrative voice’ and its Beckettian ability to ‘trace the logical within the absurd’.

Photograph: Faber & Faber

“We tried to read blind as much as we could,” said McDermid. “We didn’t care where the writers came from or whether it was their first book or their 40th. I read most on my iPad so I really was reading blind, with no author bio or publisher information.”

Appiah said that he and his fellow judges had been struck by the way the novels on the longlist “disrupted the way we thought about things we knew about, and made us think about things we didn’t know about”.

Belinda Bauer won the CWA gold dagger in 2010 with Blacklands and the Theakston prize in 2014 with Rubbernecker. Her latest thriller returns to 1998 and is set in motion when Catherine disappears on the M5, leaving 11-year-old Jack in charge of his younger sisters.Writing in the Guardian, Laura Wilson called it ‘an intelligent mystery, written with razor-sharp observation and wry humour’.

Photograph: Penguin Random House, Bantam Press

“Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the times,” he said, “there were many dystopian fictions on our bookshelf – and many novels we found inspirational as well as disturbing. Some of those we have chosen for this longlist feel urgent and topical; others might have been admired and enjoyed in any year. All of these books – which take in slavery, ecology, missing persons, inner-city violence, young love, prisons, trauma, race – capture something about a world on the brink.”

Appiah is joined on the panel by McDermid, the critic Leo Robson, the feminist academic Jacqueline Rose and the artist and graphic novelist Leanne Shapton.

The shortlist for the Booker will be announced on 20 September, and the winner on 16 October.

THE GUARDIAN