The Man Booker Prize 2017 will be announced this evening (roughly 22:00 GMT, in my memory). Ever since the shortlist announcement I’ve felt that George Saunders is a shoo-in for Lincoln in the Bardo. I think he will win, and should. However, I’ve still only read four out of the six on the shortlist, so my predictions are not entirely based on personal knowledge of the books. I can’t say I’m hugely enthused about trying Auster or Hamid, but I’d be more likely to do so if either won.
Here, in what I predict is their descending order of likelihood to win, are the six shortlisted titles, with a pithy three words on why each one would take the prize:
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders – Something actually novel.
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid – Timely re: refugees.
Autumn by Ali Smith – Timely re: Brexit.
4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster – Great American Novel.
Elmet by Fiona Mozley – Gorgeous, talented debut.
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund – Haunting, underrated debut.
)
Daniel and Cathy Oliver – 14 and 15, respectively – live with their father, John Smythe, in a simple house he built with his own hands in a copse. They mostly eat whatever they can hunt. Daddy is a renowned pugilist not above beating people up when they owe his friends money. Feisty Cathy is bullied by boys at school; when teachers don’t believe her, she has no choice but to hit back. There’s a strong us-against-the-world ethos to the novel, but underneath that defensiveness there’s a sense of unease: Daniel, the narrator, isn’t a fighter like his father and sister. He’s a sensitive soul who’s happiest cooking and playing with his dogs.
)
“Why the long face? Did someone die? It’s only stand-up comedy!” Except that for the comedian himself, Dovaleh Greenstein, this swan song of a show in the Israeli town of Netanya devolves into the story of the most traumatic day of his life. Grossman has made what seems to me an unusual choice of narrator: Avishai Lazar, a widower and Supreme Court justice, and Dov’s acquaintance from adolescence – they were in the same military training camp. Dov has invited him here to bear witness, and by the end we know Avishai will produce a written account of the evening.
Following Cora on her fraught journey from her Georgia plantation through the Carolinas and Tennessee to Indiana is enjoyable enough, with the requisite atrocities like lynchings and rapes thrown in to make sure it’s not just a picaresque cat-and-mouse battle between her and Arnold Ridgeway, the villainous slavecatcher. But I’m surprised that such a case has been made for the uniqueness of this novel based on a simple tweak of the historical record: Whitehead imagines the Underground Railroad as an actual subterranean transport system. This makes less of a difference than you might expect; if anything, it renders the danger Cora faces more abstract. The same might be said for the anachronistic combination of enlightened and harsh societies she passes through: by telescoping out to show the range of threats African-Americans faced between the Civil War and the 1930s, the novel loses immediacy.
I read the first ~120 pages and skimmed the rest. Alderman imagines a parallel world in which young women realize they wield electrostatic power that can maim or kill. In an Arab Spring-type movement, they start to take back power from their oppressive societies. You’ll cheer as women caught up in sex trafficking fight back and take over. The movement is led by Allie, an abused child who starts by getting revenge on her foster father and then takes her message worldwide, becoming known as Mother Eve.
I’ll post a full write-up tomorrow, but for now I will just convey the news, to those who may not have heard yet, that the winner of this year’s Wellcome Book Prize is Mend the Living by Maylis de Kerangal. This was quite a shock to many of us in attendance. I hope it won’t sound ungracious if I say it was the collective least favorite of the shadow panel. But keep in mind that that’s relative: it was a strong set of six very different books, each worth reading.
