Booker: Peter Carey’s Amnesia may be Australia’s best chance

Snubbed on the Australian prize circuit, Peter Carey’s Amnesia is worthy of serious Booker consideration.

Is Peter Carey being marked against his own backlist, and found wanting? Picture: Ella Pellegrini

The longlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize will be announced in London on Wednesday. It is the second year the £50,000 ($106,000) prize has been open to authors from any country, provided they write in English and are published in Britain.

When that change was announced there was a lot of falling sky commentary about an American invasion. Time will tell, but the inaugural “global Booker” landed a fair way from New York: in the hands of Tasmanian Richard Flanagan for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Can Australia go back-to-back? The best chance for that probably lies with an author with whom we seem to have developed an uneasy relationship: Peter Carey.

Carey’s novel Amnesia, an Edward Snowden-meets-the-Dismissal saga of power, corruption and personal responsibility, is a must-consider for the Booker judges because the author is a previous winner. Indeed Carey is one of only three dual Booker winners, for Oscar and Lucinda in 1988 and True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001. The others are Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), and Adelaide-based JM Coetzee for Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and Disgrace (1999), both published when he was still in his native South Africa. Carey came close to becoming the first triple Booker winner in 2010 when Parrot and Olivier in America was runner-up to Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question.

I have been disappointed by the snubbing of Amnesia on the local prize circuit. That the novel, Carey’s most determinedly Australian work since the Ern Malley-inspired My Life as a Fake in 2003, didn’t make the longlist for this year’s Miles Franklin beggars belief. I don’t think it is his best novel, but his not-best novels still hold their own in any company. Indeed I suspect this “not best” thinking is part of the reason Carey’s recent books have not fared well in local literary awards. (There’s also his long expatriatism and the fact he annoys people.) I have the strong impression Carey is being marked against his own backlist, and found wanting. So when a novel such as Amnesia is published, the reaction is, “It’s no Illywhacker!” It isn’t, but — does this need to be pointed out? — Illywhacker wasn’t in contention for this year’s Miles Franklin. A bunch of other Australian novels were, andthat Amnesia was not considered among the top dozen of them is something on which opinions will differ.

So, which 13 novels will be on the Booker longlist? Australia’s other hope might be Steve Toltz for Quicksand, the follow-up to his Booker shortlisted 2008 debut A Fraction of the Whole. We’d also claim Dutch-born, Scotland-based Michel Faber (The Book of Strange New Things), given he lived here for 26 years, going to school and university in Melbourne. As for the Americans, the most tantalising prospect is Harper Lee and Go Set A Watchman. Given the Booker’s eye for a headline, I wouldn’t rule it out. And imagine the fun headline writers will have if Lee’s compatriot Atticus Lish is there for Preparation for the Next Life. It’s hard to assess the chances of Jonathan Franzen’s Purity and Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights as neither book is out yet. My top prediction from the US is Hanya Yanagihara for A Little Life. Marilynne Robinson’s Lila looks a likely contender. Canada’s Emily St John Mandel (Station Eleven) is a tip for the long-shot backers. The longlist usually includes a few debuts and a writer or two from the old empire. Nigeria’s Chigozie Obioma (The Fishermen) covers both.

Of the “home” team, I would bet on two previous winners, Kazuo Ishiguro and Anne Enright, being longlisted for The Buried Giant and The Green Road respectively. Three-time shortlistee Colm Toibin (Nora Webster) must be a show again, while Sarah Hall (The Wolf Border) or Kate Atkinson (A God in Ruins) would not surprise. I’ve love to see Andrew O’Hagan recognised for The Illuminations.