Look out London, the ‘Mericans are a-coming

Is it the end of the Man Booker or a fresh start?

I first wrote this for Allison & Busby's blog page - see link above - but I wanted to post it here as well because it so nicely ties into some of the books I've been reading lately.

Often considered a rather staid and sensible prize compared to others of its ilk, the Man Booker Prize has a reputation as a defender of British and Commonwealth writing. Different to its fellow literary prizes, the criteria was simply that the novel be written in the English language by a member of the Commonwealth of Nations. Yet overshadowing this year’s shortlist is the latest news: that from 2014 America will be competing against Commonwealth entrants.

The award has brought worldwide acclaim to bookshelf names such as Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin 2000), Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day 1989), two-time winner Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall 2009 and Bring up the Bodies 2012) and even the divisive Salman Rushdie, who was relatively unknown before his novel Midnight’s Children won the award in 1981.

Thinking about it, therefore, it seems hardly a surprise that this years Man Booker Prize has both controversy and scepticism stalking alongside it.  

Although quibbles have arisen, such as the brevity of Colm Toibin’s one hundred and one paged novel, The Testament of Mary, which seems to rankle Will Gompertz. The focus lies on how many authors, from Melvyn Bragg to A.S. Byatt, feel that changing the rules of the Man Booker Prize, to make it a ‘truly international award’ as planned, directly undermines the writers it has historically supported.

Some, like A.S. Byatt fear that too many entrants will overwhelm judges and mean that hundreds of manuscripts and entrants will be passed over without due consideration; others believe that it’s a risk worth taking, a commercially rooted decision that will benefit the prestige and reception of the award and help them to compete against other international prizes. However, the most pressing concern remains that the American market cannot helpbut to dominate the long and short list simply because of the quantity of their entrants. This fear is only exacerbated by the shortlisted Lowlands by Jhumpa Lahiri, accused of being an American novel rather than Bengali, and for some, epitomising the way US literature will impugn the one-time bulwark of British and Commonwealth writers.

 So is this the end of the Man Booker, as Guardian blogger, Philip Hensher, puts it? Or is this a fresh start for the Prize who received incredible backlash when Mantel’s sequel to Wolf Hall won last year? Should we be wary of who might be nominated next year? Or should we be excited at the possibility of a wider intake? These are questions to keep in mind as the announcement for the 2013 winner approaches and also queries to think over when you next pluck a Man Booker long or shortlist from the shelf.

Je serai poète et toi poésie,
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Cult Fiction - Amity & Sorrow

"She didn’t know that preparing for the end of the world would make it that 

much more likely to come. " 

Amity & Sorrow is the most recent book to keep me up all night. 

Despite my cynical predisposition - did I really want to read a novel about 'God, sex and farming?' - something stopped me from putting it down. Every time I tried, I found myself twisting to pluck it from the shelf again and resume its journey. Because it is a journey. This debut novel from US playwright Peggy Riley, journeys across rural, middle America and dusts you off on a small rapeseed farm in Oklahoma. It quests through a young girl's coming of age and a sister's development as an individual. It plots the love of a mother for her children and her husband and herself. It is an odyssey of human emotion. A voyage through a family's life. 

It rapidly becomes more complicated then a single, wayfaring wife and her naive offspring.The novel explores a harrowing journey through emotional, spiritual and physical abuse and although Riley conveys this trauma, she never clarifies its exact nature, letting her audience interpret for themselves. Her unique style, which is probably the reason for her novel's nomination for the Guardian First Book Award as well as its peculiarities, manipulates this ambiguity. By using the often out-of-vogue present tense, Riley begins 'in the middle of things', in the heart of her characters' plight. Slowly their stories unravel, creating a constant, compelling tug that becomes a desperate rush towards the conclusion. 

 Riley weaves the plot together through moments of reflection set against the immediate present. With each flashback, another stitch in the fabric of this family's story reveals itself and elicits a little more sympathy for characters that initially seem foolish, spoilt and strange. The shadowy cloisters of their past wrestle with the beating sun of a modern, alien world, but slowly the reasons for why Amaranth has fled with her daughters, and why their car crash means they must rely on the generosity of a farmer, spins into darker, creepier territory. Looming over them is the threat of their father and his Messianic cult. 

Fear and love compel Riley's story. As one daughter waits 'for the end of the world' and the other ricochets between love for her mother and adoration of her sister, their mother struggles to release them from their shared history. For these characters, 'the world is coming apart at the seams' but they are bound together, bound by a 'thread sewing [them] down to [their father] and all' his fifty wives. The potential to escape only exists if they are willing to travel through fire, to burn, but who will brave the fire and who will survive it is left to the final, desperate conclusion. 

Whilst at times Riley's narrative style loses clarity, somehow it always regains its footing, upping the momentum as it does so. It is one of my favourite books of this year and I highly recommend it. 

Je serai poète et toi poésie,
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Boats against the current: Originality vs. Gatsby

Boats against the current: Originality vs. Gatsby

Google search Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Once you’ve scrolled passed IMBD and Amazon, the photos of a rather dashing Leo DiCaprio and the mighty Wikipedia, you’ll come to an area of the internet known and loved by many a student. Starting with Sparknotes, you have come to essay territory – prime ground for feckless scholars crawling home at 4am, planning to start their midterm assignments due the next day.

There are hundreds of books on the subject of The Great Gatsby, from A-Level editions to Sarah Fitzgerald’s new book, Careless People. There are study guides, synopses, online downloads and free essays. All of which are available from novelguides, scribd, antiessay, dreamessays, 123helpme and a thousand blogs determined that there’s something new to say about F. Scott and his most favoured novel.

But what if they’re wrong? Is it possible that everything about The Great Gatsby has already been said?

Early this morning I received an email informing me that a recent study at Harvard University concluded that when discussing or writing about the themes and symbols of the great American novel, there is little to nothing original left to say. In fact, it’s almost impossible to hand in an essay on either subject without being flagged for plagiarism because of the plethora of articles and essays now existing on those exact topics. No longer can essayists wax lyrical on how the glimmering, green light at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock transform into the whimsical symbol of the American Dream. Nor can they speculate freely on how Dr T.J Eckleburg and his fading gaze represent the death of Christian faith and a loss of moral certitude. It seems they might as well pluck an old article from the shelf and scratch out the words they dislike in order to create an almost new text to submit.

Ok… so maybe I’m rushing ahead of myself.

As it turned out, after reading about this study and raising the question of whether The Great Gatsby might finally be removed from curricula, I discovered that my source was the WishWashington Post. Not exactly The Washington Post as I mistakenly first thought.  And perhaps this means we need not fear that Fitzgerald’s classic will be soon be retiring or that every time you mention ‘West Egg’ and  the ‘Valley of Ashes’ you’ll be called up on charges of plagiarism.

But there is still a good question raised – how much can readers speculate before a novel is tired of interpretation? And where is the space for originality in an environment populated by readily available opinions on the exact same topics? I’m not sure that there’s one answer to this question – so I put it to you: what do you think?

Je serai poète et toi poésie, 
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The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones

 

THE TALE OF RAW HEAD & BLOODY BONES by JACK WOLF

A REVIEW

"What I did know, know for certain, was that I had wanted to cause Pain to Lady B. - I had wanted to heal her, too; but I had wanted to hear her Scream... We were Monsters, both of us; or perhaps fallen Angels"

What you need to know first about this book is not the synopsis or the ins-and-outs. No, you need to know that it took me two pots of Earl Grey to endure those ins-and-outs, and that only after a very bubbleful, relaxing, not-quite-scalding hot bath did I finally complete it. This book is horrific and bloody and terrifying. It is also addictive, beautiful and utterly unlike anything I've read before. 

The reason I first picked up this book was due to it's magnificent front cover. A sinister phantom astride his horse, the echo of a white owl sweeping between the forest's crooked fingers, the flashes of red coiling like blood in water: it fit the folktale-esq title whilst promising a story, both haunting and horrific. Like the desires affecting Tristan Hart, the novel's young protagonist, The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones was impossible to ignore.

Reading it was challenging. It's written in the first person but it's all in the style of the eighteenth century. Wolf, on being asked why he chose to do this, said that it was this decision to mimic the archaic, idiosyncratic grammar and style of Enlightenment writers that unleashed the character of Tristan Hart. However, it did mean that navigating the first few pages was a little like trying to read Shakespeare or Milton when you're out of practice. Initially, this threw me - I wasn't expecting it - but once you've conquered those first pages this use of language emphasises the story. It's easy to forget that Wolf is the author rather than Hart himself.

This is only exacerbated by the way the novel patterns fact and fiction. On one hand, we have Tristan, unreliable in the extreme, the epitome of a 'character' as his story is one of self-creation. He compiles his own narrative story, his social facard, by dwelling in a myriad of fictions. Beginning with his bucolic childhood full of faerie stories, fantasy eventually encompasses his narrative and blurs the distinction between reality and dreams. The uncanny cleverness of this disjunction between what is real to Tristan and what is true for other characters, is further emphasised by the way his life intertwines with the preeminent Enlightenment surgeon: Dr William Fielding. Fielding, a real doctor whose real history and clients populate Tristan's world, creates a startling counterpoint to the novel's psychological content. Without realising questions arise: how can anything be real or unreal, true or untrue? The novel demands that the darkest points of human nature are assessed: where sanity and insanity collide, whether pain and pleasure are exclusive, or how morality and sin intertwine.

For me, this created a yin-yang effect. Polarised are superstition and science, the worlds before and after the Enlightenment, the factual and the fictional, madness and genius. 

Throughout, I was struck by how similar his condition was to Jekyll and Hyde, whilst remaining startled and strained by the realisation of how different they were. His predilections conjured up fiendish spectres such as Jack the Ripper or le Sade, but also evoked memories of our own doctors, own families and friends. What goes on in the heads of those around us? How easily are we deceived? How simple is it to convince ourselves of false truths? 

Thus, an an idyllic moment in the Book Festival became strange. Uncanny. Unreal. As the Charlotte Square gardens filled with a rare shard of blue sky sunshine and the square hummed with visiting voices and rustled as the wind whispers down the tents... it was lovely. And set back from this sat the Writer's Retreat, a quiet space resting beneath colourful Chinese lanterns and flush green trees. And inside, Jack Wolf discussed his novel: how its unique, unsettling tale is both brutal and beautiful. I shivered and I listened. 

Admittedly, I didn't enjoy every moment. There were times when I couldn't keep reading it, had to put it down and pause, make sure my stomach was settled before I continued. Because even those moments of intense revulsion were quashed by curiousity and morbid fascination. Similarly, moments of the novel bewildered me - the whys and hows didn't always persuade me to believe in Hart's journey. But somehow, even that didn't deter me - perhaps because I enjoyed the literary aspects of an unreliable narrator musing on deeply philosophical conundrums. 

It is a book that both grips and reviles you. Worth a read - if you have a strong constitution. 

Je serai poète et toi poésie,
SCRIBBLER