2010 Man Booker Prize: Six of the best

Review's critics assess the novels shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, to be announced this week

Man Booker Prize 2010 short-listed books: Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America, Emma Donoghue's Room, Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room, Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question, Andrea Levy's The Long Song, and Tom McCarthy's C.

Review's critics assess the novels shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize, to be announced this week

BEFORE he became the great white hope of contemporary fiction and favourite to win this year's Man Booker Prize, Tom McCarthy was something of an insurgent. In his role as "general secretary" of a group of theory-centric creative types called the International Society of Necronauts, McCarthy launched a manifesto in 2007 attacking many of the lingering assumptions that underpin Western art -- from the existence of God to the unified nature of the self -- and declared its members to be "poets of the antipodes of poetry, artists of art's polar opposite, its Antarctica".

The ISN manifesto was jokingly serious: a witty and unashamed pastiche of second-hand ideas intended to reinforce the notion there is nothing new under the sun. All our literary efforts, suggested McCarthy, are documents of disappointment, texts recording our failure to transcend the world into which we are thrown. An authentic literature is one that admits how inauthentic we are, as creators and individuals. Its subjects should be passive, unheroic; and the stories it tells (that is, repeats) should offer comic acknowledgement of our predicament instead of tragic affirmation of our despair.

McCarthy's novels are like the droll and off-handedly elegant gestures in a conceptual artist's exhibition for which the manifesto serves as catalogue essay; they are artefacts made from pure intellect and philosophical guile. If McCarthy's first novel, Remainder, was a reboot of Alain Robbe-Grillet's nouveau-roman, eschewing character, plot and realism as false constructs of a defunct middle-class ideology, then C is Last Year in Marienbad (1961): the same coolly obscure geometric dance, this time in glorious wide-screen with costumes by Chanel. C stands for Serge Carrefax, a young Englishman whose life the novel traces from early childhood in the 1890s to its premature end in his mid-20s. The gifted son of a gentleman inventor, Serge is also scion of a Huguenot clan whose silk-weaving traditions have survived their long exile. Serge records the symbolically loaded grounds of his family seat with cartographic care. Between the threads and looms of his mother's silkworm farming enterprise, the early radios and transmitters accumulated by his father and the family crypt where Serge's even more brilliant sister, who commits suicide, is eventually interred, we identify a series of subjects, objects and themes that will return and ramify throughout the narrative: a web of symbolic interrelations that replaces other, traditional fictional elements.

McCarthy's achievement here is to reinvigorate a historical milieu using a wholly contemporary sensibility; he describes an antique modernity whose cutting-edge Edwardian technology is built from copper wire and polished brass. But like Serge, a teenage radio obsessive, the author forfeits too much in indulging his preoccupations. While there is a galvanising intellect at work here, drawing lines between archaic notions of fate and emerging communications technology, electricity and human essence, death and cryptography, the rest of the narrative proceeds like a cautious chess player's opening game: impeccable, but dreary to watch. The novel briefly comes to life when Serge, sent off to World War I, experiences the ecstasy of flight in his role as an aerial observer who sets co-ordinates for artillery firing from behind the trenches. High on cocaine and morphine, Serge relishes the experience of conflict but in aesthetic terms only; he reduces cataclysmic events to the brightly coloured grids of ordnance residue and exhaust fumes that fill the sky.

This is mildly transgressive stuff, a milk-and-water version of the radical celebrations of machinery and conflict set out by the Italian futurist Marinetti and by Ernst Junger, a decorated German soldier whose marshal mysticism Hitler admired. But its energy hardly outlasts the conflict, and the novel limps to a close in 1920s Egypt, where Serge has been sent by his godfather, a Whitehall mandarin, to gather intelligence on the colonial situation there.

McCarthy proves a master of dialogue who can find the poetic in the most unlikely places; his prose has the speed and sleek lines of the cars Serge drives. So it is a shame these virtues are deformed to prove that he is too clever and aristocratic a writer to indulge our middlebrow aesthetic demands for depth of character or narrative purpose.

In this he follows Vladimir Nabokov, another author who tended to lord it over his creations. Despite the complexity with which the Russian encoded his stories, however, he always flirted with the possibility of transcendence, of some other dimension in which the cruelty and meaninglessness of our own was absent. McCarthy has built a hundred doors into the novelistic structure of C, but all of them open on to bare brick wall.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian's chief literary critic.

What our reviewers said about the other shortlisted novels:

Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America:
The achievement of Parrot and Olivier in America lies not in the complex ironies of its exploration of American democracy or even in its oddly affecting depiction of the bond that develops between Parrot and Olivier. It lies in the mingling of hope and pain, loss and rebirth, that is captured in the book's wonderfully ambivalent final lines, lines that sing with passion and fury of all that is flawed and all that is wonderful about Carey's adoptive home.
James Bradley

* * *

Emma Donoghue's Room:
The legitimacy and integrity of a book like this depends on its intention, and this is no Uncle Tom's Cabin. Neither is it "pure fiction", fatally flawed as it is by its context and provenance. Simultaneously denying, appropriating and manipulating other people's lives and truths not only raises questions about taste and ethics but compromises a narrative.
Kathy Hunt

* * *

Andrea Levy's The Long Song:
Her story proceeds at a cracking pace, the often terrible details made tolerable by two things: the fact you know July survives and even flourishes, and the jaunty, often hilarious manner in which she recounts scenes that describe to us how despicable human beings can be. There is no Gone with the Wind whitewashing of the immoral attitudes and behaviours of the plantation owners.
Rosemary Sorensen

* * *

Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room:
The book, which takes its title from William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, is published as a novel but it may just as usefully be viewed as travel writing, or at least as a series of meditations on the meaning of travel . . . All three [stories] end on a note of tragedy, yet there is a haunting melancholy about Galgut's writing and a beautiful lyricism to his understated sentences that is difficult to resist.
Liam Davison