The Booker Prize shortlist

The shortlist for the Booker Prize has been announced.

Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending is the new bookies favourite, followed by Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch; another from the 19th Century in The Sisters Brothers; one from the 1930′s in Half Blood Blues; the debut novel Pigeon English dealing with immigration in modern London that has the topical edge; and a Russian thriller, Snowdrops from Economist journalist AD Miller.

Early favourite Alan Hollingshurst misses out, as does my personal favourite Sebastian Barry’s On Canaan’s Side.  I had also read Derby Day, the review of which will be going up shortly, and that also failed to hit the six.

The Sense of an Ending; Julian Barnes (2011)

Early on in The Sense of an Ending, Tony Webster reflects as a youth on what literature is all about.  “Love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls.”

The last of these elements, as well as many others do not feature in this latest work from one of my favourite authors.  Many of the others do though, bound together by a gnawing sense of guilt and the suicide of a young man, once a  friend of our narrator.

The Sense of an Ending is a slight book, running to just over 150 pages.  I was looking forward to it but left it down at the end with  a sense of disappointment.  To me it falls some way short of some of Barnes’ other work.

It is the story of an ordinary life turned around towards its end by an act committed in youth that had huge impact on the lives of others.  Because our guide is the central character we see the story through his eyes, unfolding in way that is a surprise at the end, even to him.  There is much on philosophy, about the unintended consequence of actions half forgotten and to this extent, we are made to think, which is important to any good writing.

There are some memorable thoughts, “whether history is the lies of the victors or the self delusions of the defeated”

The problem for me lies not in the intellectual substance but in the characters.  Perhaps it is too simplistic but there is merit in having characters you can warm to and none of these really engages.  We know about Webster but only through his own eyes, and the others whose lives he has touched are not drawn with sufficient depth to make us feel we know them any better at the end than we did at the beginning.

It is a novella and perhaps the themes are just a little too big to squeeze within its confines.

The book is elegantly written.  It’s just a shame to me that it did not have more of the passion and verve expressed in those first lines expounding on what literature is all about.

On Canaan’s Side; Sebastian Barry (2011)

Lily Bere’s memoir of an Irish emigrant’s life in America begins with the question ‘What is the sound of an eight nine year old heart breaking?’  She could have asked the question many other times during the course of a life retold which has to bear more than even an unfair share of tragedy.

I have somehow never read Sebastian Barry before and finding him now is a real delight, such is the beauty of his writing and phrasing.

The story has many themes, depending on your frame of mind as a reader.  Loss, betrayal and companionship all feature, though the beginning and near end of Lily’s life are framed especially by the futility of war as seen through it’s human impact on those closest to her.

There are some wonderful passages, from the fear of arriving unknown in a big city to the day out at the funfair with Joe, and throughout the book there are phrases that will stand out for readers and encourage finding more of Mr Barry’s work.

The structure is based on Lily’s setting down the memoir of her life in the aftermath of her Grandson’s funeral.  This despite ‘hating pens and paper and all that fussiness’.  Her childhood in Ireland and her hasty departure to America are followed by violence seen and unseen which changes the course of her life.  The friendhip of her employers and co workers contrast with the disapointments heaped upon her by those to whom she is closest in marriage and blood.

There are flaws in the story but those can also be put down to flaws in the process of memory.  Looking back on Barry’s ability to carve out strories from within others he has also created a raft of characters lightly drawn here which could keep him busy with ‘pen and paper’ for a long time to come.

On Canaan’s Side is similar in setting to Colm Toibíns Brooklyn though painted on a bigger canvas.  It is a fine book, one that deserves it’s place on the Booker Prize longlist and which could go all the way.

 

Pigeon English; Stephen Kelman (2011)

Steven Kelman’s debut novel has been subject to a high level of excitement since before it even went to press.  In a story that will hearten all aspiring novelists his manuscript went from part of the pile of rejections to a major bidding war almost overnight.  Now it has been lon listed for the Booker Prize and the summer of hate that has erupted on British streets will also do nothing to diminish the appeal of it’s perspective on social tension in modern Britain.

The book was inspired by the Tottenham murder of Damilolo Taylor over ten years ago but has striking relevance to modern Britain as we have seen on the streets of Hackney, Tottenham, Croydon Manchester and elsewhere in 2011.

On it’s cover Pigeon English has a testimonial from Emma Donoghue, author of Room.  It is relevant in that the story is similarly narrated by a child, albeit one who is older, at age 11, and certainly more exposed to the strains of a modern multi-racial society.

Harrison Opoku has recently arrived from Ghana with his mother and sister.  They are housed on the ninth floor of a high rise estate and Harrison is caught up through school and friends in a bewildering mix of childish exuberance, innocence, casual and devastating violence.

The swings from playground games to gang warfare with real guns and back again are handled well by Kelman who has given a clear voice to the number of characters that carry the story through.  Harrison’s sister Lydia is older but hardly any wiser in her choice of friends and the pair are in contrast to their baby sister Agnes who remained in Ghana and, through phone calls paints a perhaps implausible picture of a better life than that which her siblings have come to.

There is an undercurrent of menace that swells and recedes thoughout, occasionally when least expected. Everything is seen through the eyes of the children.  Lydia is concerned with how she looks in her parrot outfit for dance class, Harri with whether Poppy Morgan will kiss him or just hold hands.  Both are affected by the murder of a local boy at the takeaway.

Harri and his friend Dean are attracted and terrified of the Dell Farm Crew that they think are responsible.  Their attempts to find evidence are a mix of CSI and Blue Peter but they are unaware how close they are to danger and there is a sense that you want to call out through the pages to them.

“I put all the sellotapes with the fingerprints on in my spcial hiding place with my alligator tooth.  I folded them up in paper so they don’t get no hairs or dirt on them.  My room is now my headquarters. Nobody’s allowed in without the password and I haven’t even told anybody what the password is.”

Pigeon English is a book that will stay with you.  It is a worthy contender for the Booker Prize and any copies that were stolen in the August riots will be far outnumbered by the additional sales those crazy events will have generated among people looking for some clue as to why the young rioters behaved as they did.

Buy Pigeon English from Amazon

Buy Pigeon English from Raven Books

Robopocalypse; Daniel H. Wilson (2011)

The title, the cover,and the premise of Robopocalypse scream for your attention.  It is little wonder that it will be coming to a cinema near you, directed by Steven Spielberg in two summers time.  That is of course if human kind survives that long.

The intriguing if not wholly original premise is that mankind has created machines to take all the drudgery and a lot of the inconvenience out of life.  What if they decided that we weren’t really worth serving at all and that life would be so much more pleasant without us?

This was of course highlighted at the dawn of the computer age by those who were behind the creation of artificial intelligence.  Anyone who has an iphone and sees the power of cloud computing will harbour thoughts that Robopocalypse may fall between the twin pillars and fiction and non fiction.

For the moment though it is fiction and while a good summer read, it is not a book that will be vieing for any major literary awards.  We get the ending as a prologue which is not great in what is basically an action thriller and we then get to see the story unfold through excerpts from a log kept by Archos or Rob as the big bad machine is variably known.  As the action unfolds it requires a suspension of belief that if the machines know everything then how come they are ultimately outsmarted.

It reads like the script for a blockbuster and there are some good passages of drama.  In the early middle stage of the book, after Zero hour,  it is reminiscent of I am Legend in terms of the lonely survivors making their way across a bleak landscape.  The fightback takes place across the US, Britain and Japan.  Some of the ways in which the robots adapt are ingenious as you would expect from an eminent robotics expert as Wilson is.  There are cowboys and indians in the mix as well as the obligatory kids and a couple of herd bitten but soft centred all American brothers.

All in all it does not quite live up to the hopes I had for it.  The characters do not really engage enough to care about them as one should in a book and knowing the ending does take away from any late dramatic flourish.  The theme that life is good, just not human life could have been played on more.  Diverting for a few days of the summer but be careful if you are reading on a kindle…

 

Born to Run; Christopher McDougall (2011)

Coming soon

Carte Blanche; Jeffrey Deaver (2011)

Jeffrey Deaver admits in the author notes that his history with James Bond goes back over 50 years. As a serial series writer he is clearly comfortable playing by the rules of convention with such an iconic character.  This is a book which one can imagine Ian Fleming looking kindly on.

The action swings from an ambush in Serbia, through his usual brushes with authority in London before taking flight to Dubai and eventually a landfill site in South Africa.

There are more twists than Chubby Checker on an ice rink and lots of short chapters to keep the cliffhanger moments coming thick and fast.  Some of their resolutions require more than a pinch of salt but if you don’t enter into the spirit of Bond then really you should have bought something else.  He has never hidden his houdini like ability to escape the clutches of death and there are plenty of additions to the canon here.

One area that may surprise is the possibility of James settling down with a kindred spirit, albeit one used to his lifestyle but Deaver never let’s romance get in the way for long of some menace in the shadows or the glint of a gun barrell.

The baddies in Carte Blanche operate on a global scale but some of their characteristics are perhaps a little too wierd to really see them as world dominators.  This is a decent summer read, not one to tax the weary brain too much but good fun nevertheless.  It will be fun seeing how much you remember of the original story if it comes to the big screen and I challenge you to have a picture of anyone other than Daniel Craig in the lead role.