Australian author Charlotte Wood makes the strongest Booker Prize shortlist in years
Stone Yard Devotional is among the six impressive nominees up for the UK’s biggest literary prize.
When I saw the Booker prize shortlist - the strongest in years, for my money - I almost didn’t notice the most obvious theme. Five out of the six authors who have made the cut are women. So commonplace has it become for females to dominate prize lists, I momentarily overlooked this historical shift. This is the largest number in Booker’s 55-year history.
And yet there’s nothing about this that feels forced or unnatural. The six shortlisted books are extremely varied in subject matter, perspective and narrative techniques. There’s only one British writer on the list - Samantha Harvey for Orbital - but it’s not as if the Americans rule as they did on the longlist and have done since the prize was opened up to them in 2014. This year, there’s a Canadian, an Australian and, for the first time, a Dutch writer, Yael van der Wouden. And there is something pleasingly anti-parochial in the fact that the one British writer here has written the most un-British of books: Orbital takes place over 24 hours on the International Space Station, 250 miles from Earth.
Hopefully the novels themselves will grab the attention as opposed to any meta-debates we could have about representation. They range from an unconventional espionage novel to a reimagining of a great American classic. As it happens, I’ve already bought several of them for friends.
One common thread is memorable narrators. Percival Everett’s brutally funny James reworks Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn by telling it in the voice of the apparently sweet-natured slave, Jim. The first line begins “Those little bastards” referring to Huck and Tom Sawyer, two of the best-loved characters in American literature. Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake is narrated by a supremely unreliable female spy-for-hire - a hard-drinking, hard-shagging agent who infiltrates a commune of environmental activists in southwest France. Then there’s The Safekeep by the trilingual Van der Wouden - at 37, the youngest writer on the list. A twisted gay love story about obsession and the hidden legacy of the Second World War, it’s told mostly from the close third-person perspective of Isabel, an antisocial young woman living alone in her deceased mother’s house in the countryside. But then it switches to the diary of her brother’s girlfriend, with whom Isabel has become infatuated.
It’s a shame that one of the most enthralling first-person novels from the longlist, Hisham Matar’s My Friends, didn’t persuade the judges. Also overlooked was Richard Powers, whose novel Playground, about technology, life underwater and the climate crisis, was one of the most ambitious on the longlist.
Yet concern for the natural world is a common theme. Creation Lake focuses on environmental activists; Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional is told from the perspective of a woman who has ditched an environmental NGO for a nunnery; Orbital has astronauts contemplating the Earth’s splendour from above.
Which book will prevail? Everett’s audacious James would be my pick, although I wouldn’t be surprised if Orbital stole a march. Both are fresh and thrilling undertakings that attempt something bold and original.
The judges have come up with an impressive list - they have a tough job ahead of them.
James by Percival Everett
This outstanding reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is told from the perspective of the seemingly placid slave, Jim, who we discover is only pretending to be superstitious and illiterate so that his white masters aren’t threatened by him. In private he and his fellow slaves drop all the “correct incorrect” dialect - the “lordy lords” and “suhs” and “yeowzas” - and speak like educated white folk. The ways in which Everett, 67, subverts and enlarges Twain’s classic are clever and exciting. He conveys in the most compelling voice the absolute stupidity of slavery. Two years ago, the author of more than 30 books missed out on the Booker after he was shortlisted for The Trees. This feels like his year. (Mantle)
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
The 49-year-old British author navigates outer space in her fifth novel. Orbital follows a team of six astronauts (four men, two women) crammed into the International Space Station who are always “four inches of titanium away from death”. It’s a book that’s full of awe and reverence for the Earth below as the team circle at 17,500 miles per hour, 16 times each day. They experience sunrise every 90 minutes ("the sun up-down up-down like a mechanical toy"), which explodes all sense of time. Reviewing the novel in The Sunday Times, our critic said: “The strength of this book lies in Harvey’s stunning and rhythmic descriptions of this constantly unravelling world.” (Jonathan Cape)
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
Kushner, a 55-year-old Los Angeles-based author, who was shortlisted for the Booker in 2018, is one of the few women referred to as a “great American novelist”. Critics and fellow big hitters such as Jonathan Franzen, Colm Toibin and Bret Easton Ellis all rave about the way her novels engage with big intellectual ideas. Creation Lake is an unconventional espionage thriller narrated by a macho female spy. Sadie Smith is hired by a shadowy employer to disrupt a group of French eco-activists who are being led by a guru who lives in a cave and believes in primitivism. It’s witty, unpredictable and, despite a few longueurs, it keeps you in suspense until the very final pages. (Jonathan Cape)
Held by Anne Michaels
The Canadian novelist and poet, 66, became a literary sensation in the late Nineties for her Holocaust novel, Fugitive Pieces, which won the Women’s Prize and became one of those books everyone seemed to own. Held revisits similar themes of war, history, memory and trauma. It begins on a French battlefield in 1917 and spans a century, reaching into the near future. Our reviewer was underwhelmed by Michaels’ time-travelling novel-in-stories: “An amalgam of aphorisms in a fragmented format, Held fails to form a solid enough container to hold the reader.” However, the Booker judges praised the book’s “poetic intensity”. (Bloomsbury)
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
The only debut on the list - and the first novel by a Dutch writer to be shortlisted - is a tale of erotic obsession and revenge that also explores the legacy of the Holocaust. It’s set in the early Sixties in an isolated house in the Netherlands, where a reclusive young woman is safeguarding her inheritance. Her life is shattered when her brother’s girlfriend comes to stay and she starts to feel aroused. The story, which has the pacing of a thriller, harks back to the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and asks tough questions about Dutch history. (Viking)
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
I’m pleased but surprised that this austere, enigmatic story about nuns and climate extinction made the shortlist. The Australian author, 59, wrote her seventh novel during a period of serious illness and existential uncertainty and that seeps into this spare, diary-like account of an atheist who has abandoned her husband and job in an environmental NGO to live in a nunnery in New South Wales. Then a woman from her school days, now a celebrity nun, reappears to disturb the fragile equilibrium of this enclosed community. Hot on her heels comes a plague of mice. A quietly powerful story about a woman struggling to make sense of the world and her place within it. (Sceptre)
The Times
