One to Watch: THE MELODY by Jim Crace

Way back in 2013, I interviewed Jim Crace on the publication of HARVEST, which was later shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and which Jim had decided would be his final book. To wit:

“I’m still young, I’m still fit, and I’ve got things to do. And I don’t want to spend any more time on my own in front of a blank screen, getting anxious. I’ve been that soldier, I’ve littered the bookshops with enough corpses. So there’s nothing for anyone to feel sorry about. I’m going to have a ball.”

  But lo! He’s back! Littering bookshops with more corpses! Huzzah! To wit:

Alfred Busi, famed in his town for his music and songs, is mourning the recent death of his wife and quietly living out his days in the large villa he has always called home. Then one night Busi is attacked by a creature he disturbs as it raids the contents of his larder. Busi is convinced that what assaulted him was no animal, but a child, ‘innocent and wild’, and his words fan the flames of old rumour – of an ancient race of people living in the bosk surrounding the town – and new controversy: the town’s paupers, the feral wastrels at its edges, must be dealt with. Once and for all.
  Lyrical and warm, intimate and epic, The Melody by Jim Crace tracks the few days that will see Busi and the town he loves altered irrevocably. This is a story about grief and ageing, about reputation and the loss of it, about love and music and the peculiar way myth seeps into real life. And it is a political novel too – a rallying cry to protect those we persecute.

  For more on Jim Crace, clickety-click here …

Review: DID YOU EVER HAVE A FAMILY by Bill Clegg

Longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize and National Book Awards, Bill Clegg’s Did You Ever Have A Family (Jonathan Cape) is a moving meditation on grief and mourning. Set in the small town of Wells, Connecticut, a town in economic decline which serves as a weekend and holiday destination for New Yorkers, the story opens with 16-year-old Silas waking to the sound of sirens, and discovering that smoke is rising into the sky from a house not far from his own home.
  Clegg employs a number of characters to tell his story, and the perspective quickly switches to that of June, a native New Yorker who has just decided to leave Wells. It is now some weeks after the fire observed by Silas; we learn that the fire was the result of a gas leak in June’s house, where the wedding of her daughter Lolly and Lolly’s fiancé Will was due to take place. June is the only survivor of the blaze, which also killed her boyfriend, Luke. Numbed by the horror of her loss, June leaves Wells forever, not particularly caring where she drives.
  The perspective switches again, as Clegg continues to assemble the pieces of his mosaic-style narrative. We meet Lydia, Luke’s mother; Kelly, who runs the Moonstone Motel in Washington State, where June eventually fetches up; Cissy, the cleaner at the Moonstone who takes June under her wing; Dale, the father of Will; and Silas, who has guilty secrets he is desperate to confess.
  It’s a slow-burning tale initially, as the reader waits for the various pieces of the mosaic to fit and a pattern to emerge, but the patient reader will be richly rewarded. Clegg’s style allows for a number of ways of looking at the same central issue – the mystery of what caused the tragic fire – and also allows the story to move back and forth in time, so that at times we are observing people in the days, years and sometimes decades prior to the tragedy, while at other times we are exploring the consequences of the fire and the deaths, and learning how people are living with their loss and grief.
  It’s not quite as straightforward as Clegg simply slotting various pieces of story ‘jigsaw’ into place, however. As the story continues, the perspectives and personal stories begin to overlap in places, as accounts reinforce and sometimes contradict and occlude one another, which adds more dimensions to the individual stories and gives a greater depth and poignancy to the tale as a whole.
  In a quietly ambitious novel, Clegg weaves fascinating themes of impermanence (motels provide a recurring motif) and fractured families into his story, although the novel is at its most powerful when Clegg address the central issue of grief and death, and particularly in terms of that most devastating of losses, when a parent loses a child (June, Lydia and Dale have all lost children to the fire). “We’ve learned that grief can sometimes get loud,” observes Dale at one point of his changing relationship with his wife, “and when it does, we try not to speak over it.”
  It’s a haunting, affecting story of tragedy in a minor key, a restrained and dignified excavation of the deepest emotions that never veers into the realms of the sentimental. The final perspective in the novel is provided by Cissy, when she realises that June and Lydia have found a kind of solace in one another. “Rough as life can be,” Cissy says, “I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part … Someone down the line might need to know you got through it.”

This review was first published in the Irish Examiner

Three Colours: Blue

The concluding act in Eoin McNamee’s ‘Blue Trilogy’, following on from THE BLUE TANGO (2001) and ORCHID BLUE (2010), BLUE IS THE NIGHT (Faber & Faber) arrives in mid-March. To wit:

1949. Lance Curran is set to prosecute a young man for a brutal murder, in the ‘Robert the Painter’ case, one which threatens to tear society apart. In the searing July heat, corruption and justice vie as Harry Ferguson, Judge Curran’s fixer, contemplates the souls of men adrift, and his own fall from grace with the beautiful and wilful Patricia. Within three years, Curran will be a judge, his nineteen year old daughter dead at the hands of a still unknown murderer, and his wife Doris condemned to an asylum for the rest of her days.
  In BLUE IS THE NIGHT, it is Doris who finally emerges from the fog of deceit and blame to cast new light into the murder of her daughter, as McNamee once again explores and dramatizes a notorious and nefarious case.

  THE BLUE TANGO was longlisted for the Booker Prize, of course, and David Peace describes BLUE IS THE NIGHT as ‘A genuine, original masterpiece.’ If it’s not one of the highlights of 2014, I’ll very surprised indeed.

Crace Notes

The Booker Prize winner will be announced tomorrow, October 15th, which is as good an excuse as any to run this interview I conducted with Jim Crace (right) way back at the start of the year. Crace has been shortlisted for HARVEST, of course, which he says will be his last book.
  And so to the interview:

Jim Crace is a Titan of the modern English novel. From Continent (1986) and The Gift of Stones (1988) on to Quarantine (1997) and The Pesthouse (2007), he has won a slew of literary prizes without ever losing his popular touch. Hailed as the natural heir to William Golding, he has just published his latest novel, Harvest, to universal acclaim.
  When we meet at Dublin’s Brooks Hotel, he suggests that there is ‘a certain icy distance’ to his novels, this on the basis that he is not an autobiographical writer, but in person he is warm and friendly. For a publishing veteran, he is also charmingly direct about the appeal of being a novelist.
  “It’s such fun writing books,” he says. “And it’s a tremendous opportunity to be working in a form that is both mischievous and wise at the same time. I don’t want to sound New Age-y about it, but narrative knows a lot. Fiction has been around for thousands of years and it’s got all sorts of moves. As a writer, you shouldn’t resist them – you should listen out for them, because you can bet it’ll come up with better things than you can come up with.”
  Crace, to be fair, has come up with his fair share. He invented a whole new landmass for his debut, Continent, which won three prizes straight out of the gate.
  “I genuinely was naïve. When I brought out Continent, I thought the best that would happen was that my mum would like it, even if she didn’t read it, and that my cousins would buy it. And then, within about three weeks, it won three of the main prizes – the Guardian prize, the David Higham prize and the Whitbread.” He grins. “And I thought this was the most natural thing in the world.”
  He very modestly credits luck with the best part of his success. “I was lucky in that my natural voice, my ‘singing’ voice as a writer, was a rare one. That’s not to boast about it – it just had this unusual tone. There were plenty of writers around who were just as good as me that didn’t do as well as me, because they were writing conventional books brilliantly, but there were plenty of them around. I was writing books that might have been okay, but they were of their own kind.”
  Perversely, Crace seems much happier talking about the failings in his writing.
  “I’ve always felt a little bit embarrassed that my books aren’t more autobiographical,” he says. “The reason they’re not, of course, is that I don’t have an autobiographical life. I’ve had a long marriage, a happy childhood, no ill-health, and literature doesn’t like any of those things. Happiness writes white, to use that phrase. But I’ve always felt that somehow or another that this was a failing.”
  If it is a failing, it’s of the Samuel Beckett variety, where the writer is urged to fail, fail again, fail better. Time and again Crace has offered us stories in which individuals rise to the challenge of adapting to periods of great change.

  Harvest, narrated by one Walter Thirsk, is a story about how mediaeval English villagers react when their ancient commonage is threatened by the enclosures that represent the future of agriculture. It’s a story that’s ‘knitted into the fabric of English and Irish history’, he says, although it’s not without contemporary resonance. Witness the soya farmers, for example, thrown off their land to make way for cattle in South America.
  “There’s this idea,” he says of his abiding theme, “that everything new worth having is paid for by the loss of something old worth keeping. There’s a lovely balance there, and of course, fiction likes that. So it suits me to set novels at a time of change, when things will be gained and things will be lost. The reason I’m interested in that is not because I know the answer, but because I want to find out what it is. So maybe with this book, or maybe with all the books – Pesthouse, Gift of Stones, Signals of Distress, Harvest – something new is on the scene which destroys the old ways of life. But people are always breasting the future at the end of the books, going out into the new world, of which they are fearful and hopeful. So I hope that at the end of this book, we feel fearful for the future of Walter Thirsk, but we also feel hopeful for him.”
  Unusually, Harvest – as the title suggests – has a pastoral setting. It contrasts sharply with the bleak Stone Age setting of The Gift of Stones, the Judean desert of Quarantine or the post-apocalyptic nightmare of Pesthouse.
  It’s a deceptively idyllic setting, however. No sooner has Crace sketched in Harvest’s lush fields and forests than he reveals the village’s hidden cruelties, its latent paganism. “We do, though, have our wooden cross,” Walter Thirsk tells us, “our neglected pillory, standing at the unbuilt gateway of our unbuilt church.”
  The punishments inflicted on the unwary outsiders who wander into the village set in train a series of events that essentially mimic the fall of Eden, as the innocent Walter and his neighbours witness corruption, betrayal and eventually murder.
  Beautifully detailed, the writing doubles as a paean to the natural world, as Crace precisely outlines a rural peasantry’s paradise lost.
  The quality of the prose is of the standard we have come to expect from one of the contemporary masters of the English language, but what makes Harvest astonishing is that he wrote it in less than six months. The previous book, his first attempt at a ‘personal, autobiographical’ book, fell apart when he realised the voice was wrong. “I was a baritone trying to sing soprano,” he says ruefully.
  With only six months to deliver a book which he had already been paid for, and with the advance long spent, Crace found inspiration in a train journey to London. Travelling through ridge-and-furrow fields of middle England had him wondering about the history of their commonage; when he visited the Tate Britain the following day, the first painting he saw was of an East Anglian ‘enclosure’.
  “And there it was – I’d got the novel. People are saying, ‘Well, it’s been three years since his last book, we can see he’s worked hard on it.’ That’s crap. It just fell onto the page.
  “Sometimes you do a bit of writing,” he continues, “and right from the word go until almost the finish it’s like pushing a great chunk of granite up a hill. But at some point, that piece of granite will turn into a helium-filled balloon. Normally, with a book of mine, that moment of loss-of-weight happens halfway through, or towards the end. With this book it happened on the first page. That book became full of hot air,” he laughs, “very early on.”
  What gives Harvest’s elegiac tone an especially poignant air is that Crace has announced it will be his final novel.
  “I’ve had an unusual furrow to plough, and I’ve ploughed it until it doesn’t produce anything anymore,” he says. “I want to leave on a high, avoid bitterness, and I feel like I’ve written enough books already. Twelve is plenty for anybody. If you haven’t read all 12 of my books, there’s still some to read. If you’ve read all 12, read someone else.”
  But won’t he miss the writing that has sustained him creatively for the past three decades?
  “I’m still young, I’m still fit, and I’ve got things to do. And I don’t want to spend any more time on my own in front of a blank screen, getting anxious. I’ve been that soldier, I’ve littered the bookshops with enough corpses. So there’s nothing for anyone to feel sorry about. I’m going to have a ball.”

  Harvest by Jim Crace is published by Picador.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

The Hunger Games

Those of you being remorselessly gnawed by the economic downturn might find Ed O’Loughlin’s latest offering, ALL YOU CAN EAT, a little (koff) close to the bone – it’s a zombie novel that functions as a satire on / allegory for the world we live in now, at least here in Ireland. Quoth the blurb elves:

They have no remorse or loyalty. They’re insatiable. They don’t hear what you say to them while they’re eating you alive. And then there’s the flesh-eating zombies ...
  A dark and pulpy satire of our dog-eat-dog society by Booker-nominated author Ed O’Loughlin.

  Ed O’Loughlin’s debut novel, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and his second, TOP LOADER, was an anarchic comedy about a Middle East conflict set in the future.
  For ALL YOU CAN EAT, Ed is offering to sell off the naming rights of various characters. “With e-books, you can change names – and everything else – as you go along, even after they are published, which offers interesting formal opportunities,” says O’Loughlin. For more on what sounds like an intriguing e-publishing development, clickety-click here …

On The Triviality Of Perfect Writing

I had an interview with Conor Fitzgerald (right), the author of THE NAMESAKE, published in the Evening Herald over the weekend, which reminded me of how easy it can be to misinterpret a writer’s intentions.
  An Irishman living in Italy, Conor Fitzgerald sets his novels in Rome, with an American-born police detective, Alec Blume, for his protagonist.
  The quality of his prose is one the many reasons I enjoy Conor Fitzgerald’s books, and it’s understandable that Fitzgerald - son of the poet Seamus Deane, and a former translator of James Joyce’s work - might be more careful than most when it comes to crafting a sentence, given the layered intricacy of the ‘Irishman writes American-born character in Rome’ set-up. When I suggested as much, however, I got this response:

“I try not to be over-careful,” he says, “because I see danger in it. If you get to perfect writing of a sort, it becomes trivial. A good example is someone I like, and know, Julian Barnes.”
  Julian Barnes, of course, won the Booker Prize in 2011.
  “He writes exquisite sentences, one after the other after the other, and at the end ...” He tails off with a shrug. “And then, when you go back to your real classics, your Dickens or Dostoevsky, they’re a mess. Bad sentences and careless plotting and dubious characters and improbable coincidences -- and that’s when you realise that the really, really great books are full of flaws, and the really perfect little ones are quite often forgettable. I mean, Ian McEwan -- all he can do is write sentences.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here.
  For a short review of THE NAMESAKE, clickety-click here.

“Wouldn’t It Be Nice To See A Work Of Pulp Win The Booker Prize?”

Erm, no. Allen Barra penned a mildly controversial piece for The Daily Beast earlier this week, suggesting that Benjamin Black, the alter-ego of John Banville (right), should win the Booker Prize. Herewith be the gist:

“One reason, I think, that critics are giddy over Black is that—let’s just say it—he’s more fun to read than Banville. (Well, some of Banville.) THE SEA is as exquisite as an Irish mist, but I won’t read DOCTOR COPERNICUS, KEPLER, and THE NEWTON LETTER again for all the whiskey in Quirke’s favourite pub. Another reason is that Benjamin Black’s territory is a new one for critics who regard themselves as “serious.” I suspect most of them have never dipped into the sordid but seductive world of Irish crime fiction—Patrick McGinley, for instance, or Ken Bruen, who is direct enough about his debt to Chandler to title a book DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS and whose detective, Jack Taylor, is so dissipated he makes Quirke seem like “a parfait genteel knight.” Banville might take it as an insult, though I think Black would not, that the Quirke novels are as good as anything produced by his contemporaries.
  “In 2006, when Banville accepted the Booker Prize for THE SEA—and, to be clear, if they had asked me, I would have voted for it—he made his famous statement, “It’s nice to see a work of art win the Booker Prize.” The egoism expressed in this statement bothers me not at all, but the deliberate tossing about of the phrase “work of art” makes me think that the man who used it was a pretentious prig who could do with a cheap thrill or two. Perhaps there is a difference between John Banville and Benjamin Black; if so, I think I prefer the latter. Black is Banville to be sure, and as Groucho said, outside of the improvement, you can’t tell the difference.
  “Wouldn’t it be nice to see a work of pulp win the Booker Prize?”

  A couple of things about all that:
  One, a work of pulp will never win the Booker Prize, because the Booker Prize isn’t awarded for pulp. It’s like suggesting that a pole-vaulter should win the gold medal for the javelin, because they’re both Olympic sports and involve running for a bit with a big stick and then letting go. The Booker Prize is what it is; I honestly don’t get this obsession some crime fiction writers and readers have with a crime novel winning it. To me it suggests an inferiority complex, that crime fiction will only be fully validated when it wins a literary prize. The truth is, if you want to win the Booker Prize, or be in with a chance of winning it, at least, then write the kind of book that tends to win the Booker Prize. And yes, I know that there’s great excitement about the fact that AD Miller’s SNOWDROPS has been shortlisted for this year’s Booker (along with Patrick DeWitt’s western SISTERS AND BROTHERS), and happy days for AD Miller if the book wins. Would it change the way people read and write crime fiction? Should it? Isn’t one of the attractions of crime fiction that it’s the half-breed outlaw of the publishing world? It is for me, at least. Do I want or need to see the kind of stories I like to write and read receive some kind of belated pat on the head as they pass through the gilded pillars into the whited sepulchre? Because - and it gives me no great pleasure to say this - literary fiction is on its knees. And not just in terms of sales - how often have we read the latest in an interminable series of ‘the novel is dead’ eulogies, in which some writer we’ve never heard of laments the fact that the literary novel has disappeared up its own fundament? The fact of the matter is, the literary novel is a vampire, a beautiful but dead shell which requires regular infusions of new blood in order to maintain the illusion of vitality, sucking up inspiration from the genres it purports to despise. Maybe crime fiction and AD Miller’s SNOWDROPS is just the latest victim, who knows. And really, who cares?
  Secondly, and as all Three Regular Readers will be aware, Ken Bruen has yet to write a book called DOWN THESE GREEN STREETS, although he did contribute a short story to the collection of essays, interviews and short fictions published by Liberties Press earlier this year.
  Thirdly, John Banville is as entitled to a sense of humour as anyone else, and his ‘It’s nice to see a work of art win the Booker Prize’ comment was as much mischief as it was any kind of qualitative judgement on previous winners.
  As to whether Benjamin Black is as good, or better, a writer than John Banville, well, that’s a matter of opinion, and mine is that Banville is the better writer by some distance. But one thing is certain: Benny Blanco don’t write no pulp, in either guise.

He’ll Be Having A Go At The Lilies Next

He pee’d off the literary crew when, on accepting the Booker Prize for THE SEA, he announced that it was ‘nice to see a work of art win for a change’. Then he got stuck into crime writing – allegedly. Yesterday, in a fine interview with Fiona McCann in the Irish Times, John Banville had a go at the webnauts. To wit:

Banville is full of opinions: on art, on sport, on working life, on the internet. “Most of the stuff that people churn out on the internet is rubbish. People should learn a little bit of reticence and not imagine that they have things to say.”

  Funnily enough, I read the interview on the Irish Times’ website, in which John Banville is, as Fiona McCann points out, ‘full of opinions’ …
  The interview, of course, was marking the publication of the latest Banville novel, THE INFINITIES, which I read a couple of weeks ago and thoroughly enjoyed. Told over the course of one day, as a family gathers about its dying pater familias, Adam Godley, the story is for the most part narrated by Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods – although, as Hermes points out, the gods being a rather protean lot, the first-person narrative duties do tend to switch about. The tale is a gently meandering one of mortal and immortal failings and foibles, and love stories, and minor infidelities, and quantum physics. The characters are fragmentary, deliberately so, as Hermes wafts in and out of their lives, with the story as a whole offering an incomplete mosaic of a family trapped in the amber of one day. The language, the prose style, is beautifully rendered, even if there are sentences and even whole paragraphs that billow like glass overblown – although it should be said that almost every line is shot through with sly and self-mocking humour. At the risk of displaying an unseemly lack of reticence, I’d say it’s Banville’s most engaging book for some time, an arched eyebrow of a comic novel that seems to appreciate its place in the grand scheme of things, which is, I think, because of its admittedly enjoyable angsty self-awareness, on the lower slopes of the empyrean rather than in the pantheon itself.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND by Ed O’Loughlin

To mark Ed O’Loughlin’s terrific achievement in being long-listed for the Booker Prize with his debut novel, NOT UNTRUE & NOT UNKIND, here’s purple prose-tinged excerpt from yours truly’s review from earlier this year:

‘Has anyone seen the other half of this baby?’ he asked. ‘We mustn’t count it twice.’
  It’s a moment to make even the most hardened reader of gory novels wince, but O’Loughlin is not in the business of sensationalism. Simmons bears witness to what seems at times a daily litany of tragedy, but does so in a clipped, understated fashion. The novel has been compared with the works of V.S. Naipaul and Graham Greene, but there’s a measure of Ernest Hemingway here too. The prose is muscular and delicate, the mark of a writer who knows his own strength and is sure of his aim. In the chaos of a jungle fire-fight, ambushed by the latest in an interminable series of half-naked rebel forces, Simmons observes a jeep make “a slow and sedate turn towards us, part-sheltered by the hulk of the armoured car … its indicator piously winking.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here.
  For a Q&A with the man, clickety-click here.

ANIMAL FARM II: This Time It’s Jewish!

I’ve never much liked Yann Martel (right), it has to be said. Not sure why. It’s certainly nothing to do with the allegations that he plagiarised whole chunks of THE LIFE OF PI. Possibly it’s the precious irrelevance of the floating zoo.
  It’s always nice to have your prejudices confirmed, isn’t it? Martel’s latest novel, the follow-up to the floating zoo story, is (koff) an allegory about the Holocaust for which he’s being paid three million dollars. Quoth the New York Times:

It relates the story of an encounter between a famous writer and a taxidermist who is writing a play that features dialogue between a donkey and a monkey, both imprinted on a shirt.
  “I’ve noticed over the years of reading books on the Holocaust and seeing movies that it’s always represented in the same way, which is historical or social realism,” Mr. Martel, 46, said in a telephone interview from his home in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. “I was thinking that it was interesting that you don’t have many imaginative takes on it like George Orwell’s ANIMAL FARM and its take on Stalinism.”

  Okay, but can I stop you right there squire? One: you’re no George Orwell. Two, the murder of six million-plus people in an industrialised death machine doesn’t need ‘imaginative takes’. Three, you don’t have a lot of ‘imaginative takes’ on Stalinism, do you? Four, what, if anything, is your ‘imaginative take’ on the Holocaust designed to achieve, exactly?
  Mind you, shallow bastard that I am, that’s not the most irritating aspect of the NYT’s report. Apparently Martel is being paid a cool three million dollars for the donkey-monkey classic. Is he happy?

  Mr. Martel also declined to discuss his advance, but said, “Frankly, with all the years it took to write this book, if you amortize it out, it’s not as much as one would like it to be.”

  Given that the floating zoo won the Booker seven years ago, we can presume the donkey-monkey opus took roughly eight years to write. Which works out at about roughly €370,000 per year, when you ‘amortize it out’.
  Now, I know the dollar has seen better days, but still – nearly four hundred grand a year to write some wankery allegorical bullshit, during a recession when people’s homes are being repossessed at an unprecedented rate, and the asshole still isn’t happy?
  If at some point in the far future you stop and look around and scratch your head and say, ‘Hey, whatever happened to literary fiction? Some of it was actually okay’, just remember the moron with the donkey-monkey dialogues who wasn’t happy with a three million dollar advance he wouldn’t be able to pay back in four lifetimes of trying.

The Public Wants What The Public Gets: A Booker Prize Jam

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but here’s a couple of snippets from items that have popped up in my inbox over the last day or so. First up, John Connolly (right) from the latest post to his rather excellent blog, the remit of which is to keep his readers abreast on the trials and tribulations of whatever novel he happens to be working on:

“I’m also trying to get a handle on what kind of book THE LOVERS is. In a recent interview, I said that each book I write seems to be a reaction to the one that preceded it, and I suppose that’s true of THE LOVERS. Where THE REAPERS was fast and linear, with a very straightforward narrative, THE LOVERS is more complex, more allusive. A lot of it concerns events that have happened in the past, and a large part of the second half is taken up with one character revealing, over the course of a single evening, the truth behind the death of Parker’s father. I want to see if I can retain the reader’s interest by juggling the desire to find out ‘what happens next’ with gradual revelations about what has gone before.”

  I’ve met John Connolly on a few occasions, and heard him speak publicly about books a couple of times. He is, as most of you know, a very fine stylist, a superb storyteller, and a best-seller to boot. And when John Connolly speaks about writing, the conversation tends to quickly narrow down to one thing: WHAT. THE. READER. WANTS.
  I don’t know if the following pair of snippets should be placed in direct contrast to Connolly’s approach, but both of them are just two examples of what seems to be a growing backlash against the Booker Prize. First, from Wednesday, author James Delingpole in The Telegraph:

“I reckon that, too often, what our literary prize panels confuse with proper writing is in fact just overwriting, and that the problem is exacerbated by a salon of smug, sanctimonious, mostly Left-leaning literary-tastemakers (and gullible book groups) who feel a novel isn’t “valid” unless it’s a) a bit hard to read, b) weighed down with purple prose or poetry, c) socially worthy (madness, disability, child abuse, etc.) and d) best of all, imbued with lashings of fashionable, Zadie-Smith-style, melting-pot ethnic exoticism.”

  Then, today, critic Boyd Tonkin in The Independent:

“Behind the storm-in-a-wineglass feuds that surround the Man Booker Prize, a true and even tragic sub-plot may be starting to unfold. To be mass-market blunt rather than literary-novel elliptical: is the British audience for ambitious fiction dying off, losing faith, or just drifting away? […] In the five weeks after the long-list announcement on 29 July, the 13 titles of the “Booker dozen” sold fewer than 14,000 UK copies; on average, barely 1,000 each. This is, frankly, pathetic.”

  Back at the end of July, the Bookseller published a list of the sales of the newly nominated novels:

1. The Enchantress of Florence 15,433
2. Child 44 8,278
3. Sea of Poppies 5,034
4. Netherland 4,023
5. The Clothes on Their Backs 3,592
6. The White Tiger 1,852
7. The Secret Scripture 1,568
8. A Case of Exploding Mangoes 1,000
9. The Northern Clemency 916
10. A Fraction of the Whole 392
11. The Lost Dog 363

  A week later, they were back with this update:

Whilst Salman Rushdie’s THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE (Cape) remains the overall sales leader with an increase in book sales of 56.5% since last week, Linda Grant’s THE CLOTHES ON THEIR BACKS (Virago) has seen the biggest proportional increase. From selling just 13 copies during the week ending 26th July, the book has gone on to sell 144 copies the following week.
  Another notable increase was for Tom Rob Smith’s CHILD 44 (Simon & Schuster), one of the most controversial choices on the longlist. Sales increased by 250% for the thriller that had already shifted over 8,000 copies prior to the longlist announcement.

  CHILD 44, of course, didn’t made the Booker shortlist announced this week. Neither did THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE or Joseph O’Neill’s NETHERLAND, previously the bookies’ favourites with Ladbrokes and William Hill respectively. Sebastian Barry is now the 2/1 favourite with THE SECRET SCRIPTURE.
  I can’t find any weekly sales figures for later than the week ending August 16, but in that week THE SECRET SCRIPTURE had sold less than THE LOST DOG, which had sold 127 copies that week.
  Erm, folks? Y’think the reading public is trying to tell you something?

Tied Up With A Black Velvet Brand

By email, yesterday:

“I see that John Banville [right] is on the Books 2008 program under his Benjamin Black name, but still not part of the crime fiction program. Don’t worry, I’m sticking with the crime fiction part, but that was nonetheless interesting to see. A snipe on Banville’s part at the genre that he has condescended to join?”

  Erm, probably. Although a straw-poll among the contributing Irish crime writers as to whether Black’s novels would render him worthy of inclusion might produce some interesting results. On the basis of THE LEMUR, I’d say yes.
  Meanwhile, if anyone can offer a phrase about crime fiction they’re heard more often in 2008 than, “That’s not surprising, since Benjamin Black is really John Banville, the Irish writer who won the 2005 Man Booker Prize …” (© Canada.com), we’d love to hear it.
  Do you think if Rob Smith wins the Booker he’ll adopt a pseudonym for writing literary fiction?

Nether Say Nether Again

Joseph O’Neill’s debut, NETHERLAND, has been attracting a lot of very positive comment, with one excitable reviewer suggesting that it’s already a Booker Prize contender. Naturally, being insatiable nosey-parkers, we had to take a gander, and we discovered that the blurb elves have been wibbling thusly:

In early 2006, Chuck Ramkissoon is found dead at the bottom of a New York canal. In London, a Dutch banker named Hans van den Broek hears the news, and remembers his unlikely friendship with Chuck and the off-kilter New York in which it flourished: the New York of 9/11, the power cut and the Iraq war. Those years were difficult for Hans - his English wife Rachel left with their son after the attack, as if that event revealed the cracks and silences in their marriage, and he spent two strange years in the Chelsea Hotel, passing stranger evenings with the eccentric residents. Lost in a country he’d regarded as his new home, Hans sought comfort in a most alien place - the thriving but almost invisible world of New York cricket, in which immigrants from Asia and the West Indies play a beautiful, mystifying game on the city’s most marginal parks. It was during these games that Hans befriended Chuck Ramkissoon, who dreamed of establishing the city’s first proper cricket field. Over the course of a summer, Hans grew to share Chuck’s dream and Chuck’s sense of American possibility - until he began to glimpse the darker meaning of his new friend’s activities and ambitions … NETHERLAND is a novel of belonging and not belonging, and the uneasy state in between. It is a novel of a marriage foundering and recuperating, and of the shallows and depths of male friendship. With it, Joseph O’Neill has taken the anxieties and uncertainties of our new century and fashioned a work of extraordinary beauty and brilliance.

Lovely. Not really Crime Always Pays material, thought we, but lovely nonetheless. But lo! Then we discovered Brian Lynch’s review in the Sunday Independent, the gist of which runs to-wittishly:

“We never discover the identity of the murderer – this is a whodunit without a who – but that is part of the purpose of the book: the political violence of our times, the personal unease that follows from it, but above all the constantly shifting and strange glamour of the world cannot be explained, only apprehended … Already, NETHERLAND has been compared to THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The comparison is apt, but add in something of the ironic intellect of John Banville and a good dash of the coarse energy of the early Saul Bellow and you will get a better idea of how rich this book is.”

Hmmmm … the Bellow / Banville / Fitzgerald references suggest a literary tome, but the murderer / whodunit element suggests crime fiction. So which is it? Or – yipes! – could it be one of those increasingly popular crossover ‘lit crime’ bukes which thrive on employing crime fiction tropes, the likes of which have been popping up here, here, here and here? Only time, that notoriously prevaricating doity rat, will tell …