When it comes to the Booker, winning isn’t the only prize

Peter Carey, a two-time winner of the Booker Prize, always refers to literary prizes as a “crapshoot”. Sadly for Charlotte Wood, who was hoping to become the first Australian woman author to win the coveted and influential prize for fiction written in English, the roll of the dice in this year’s Booker fell in favour of English novelist Samantha Harvey.

Harvey’s slim novel Orbital, which is set on the International Space Station and brings us the voices of six astronauts as they circle Earth 16 times and contemplate its beauty and the precarity of human life on it, pipped the overwhelming favourite, Percival Everett’s James, a reimagination of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Huck’s runaway slave companion, Jim.

Charlotte Wood arrives at the Booker ceremony in London on Tuesday.Credit: AP

Wood was shortlisted for her acclaimed novel Stone Yard Devotional, the story of a grieving woman who turns her back on the trappings of city life and marriage to live in anticipated tranquillity with a group of nuns on the Monaro plain. But there she endures a mouse plague, the disturbing return of the bones of a nun who had been killed overseas, and the re-emergence of a troubling figure from her past.

Wood told the Booker organisers that she wanted nothing trivial or insincere in her book. “I wanted to try to master what Saul Bellow called ‘stillness in the midst of chaos’, risking a tonal restraint and depth that I hope, at the same time, shimmers with energy”.

As Helen Elliott wrote in her review for this masthead: “In the contemporary world this kind of stillness feels radical. Illicit. And here is the heartbeat of this magnificent, radical novel. A woman, unnamed, active, dedicated to saving the world through the right causes, is considering leaving it … Stone Yard Devotional is daring because it looks at the obscure and therefore the difficult in the contemporary world. Difficult and obscure, but also something that commonly underpins everything we do. In a plainer world, this was called the search for meaning when the concept called God is largely absent – now probably more absent than it has ever been.”

Wood’s work includes novels The Submerged Cathedral, Animal People, The Weekend, The Natural Way of Things and The Children. She is also a perceptive writer about writing. In her series of interviews in The Writer’s Room she talks to authors including Amanda Lohrey, Lloyd Jones and Christos Tsiolkas about their art and craft, and she has written beautifully and wittily about food and cooking in Love & Hunger.

Stone Yard Devotional is personal, informed by Wood’s diagnosis with breast cancer and her lingering feelings about the death of her mother years earlier. At one point the narrator reflects on her mother, writing: “I never knew anyone else who had her reverence for the earth itself”.

It’s a line that chimes with Harvey’s remarks on receiving the award. She said that looking at the Earth from space was “a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realising for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself. What we do to the Earth we do to ourselves and what we do to life on Earth – human and other – we do to ourselves.”

She dedicated her win to “everybody who does speak for the Earth and not against the Earth, for and not against the dignity of other humans, other life and all the people who speak for and call for and work for peace”.

Wood may not have followed Australians Tom Keneally, Carey, Richard Flanagan, D.B.C. Pierre and Sydney-raised Aravind Adiga by winning the Booker, but being longlisted and then shortlisted still brings significant benefits in terms of sales.

Shortlisted authors (from left) Yael van der Wouden, Rachel Kushner, Anne Michaels, with Queen Camilla, Charlotte Wood, Percival Everett and Samantha Harvey during a reception for The Booker Prize Foundation at Clarence House.Credit: Getty Images

Her publisher says that since winning the Stella Prize in 2016 for The Natural Way of Things, her blistering feminist critique of the patriarchy, “Charlotte’s books have been bestsellers – and Stone Yard Devotional is no exception. Since being longlisted for the Booker Prize, sales have increased by over 30 per cent. We have to date sold over 40,000 copies of this beautiful book.”

According to The Bookseller, which covers the British book industry, Stone Yard Devotional had sold only 4000 copies in Britain up to the end of last week. But, “the Booker has given her a massive bump. The novel has earned 60 per cent of its volume sales in the shortlist period, 84 per cent since being longlisted.”

Madeleine St John was the first Australian woman writer to be shortlisted for the Booker, in 1997 for The Essence of the Thing. The last Australian woman was Kate Grenville for The Secret River in 2006. On that same shortlist was sometime Melbourne resident M.J. Hyland for Carry Me Down.

Grenville said that being shortlisted had given her a feeling that her novel could reach readers who wouldn’t know about it otherwise, and a real sense of the book selling.

Samantha Harvey poses with the trophy after winning the Booker Prize.Credit: AP

“It would have been wonderful to win, but the shortlist was just as good,” she said. “I feel I had the glory and the affirmation that mine was an important book. Yes, it would have been wonderful to win, but oh my god, the next year of my life wouldn’t have been my own. I wouldn’t have been able to write my next book.”

Charlotte Wood can take some consolation and compensation from similar deserved glory and affirmation.

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