Booker Bonanza 2021

It’s Booker-prize season again! I am always so excited to see the longlist and get my hands on these books for a fascinating tour of contemporary fiction. This year, the judges remarked that all of the novels shared ‘a really distinctive voice’, and promised something for every reader. To be eligible, the novel must be published between 1st October 2020 and September 30th 2021. The work must be published in the UK or Ireland, and must be originally written in English. Some of my favorite books of last year came from the longlist, so I’m always eager to give it a try and weigh in on the discussion. It’s a delight to read such a range of top-quality literary fiction, and it gives me great hope that the novel is far from dead – indeed, it’s flourishing!

Previous Booker-winner and Noble-winner winner Kazuko Ishiguro is the greatest heavyweight on the list, with his fascinating tale of AI Artificial Friend Klara, in ‘Klara and the Sun’. Klara tries to make sense of the oddities of human behavior in a novel that gently unfolds to reveal a horrifying vision of the future. Also exploring the ethics and big questions of technology is Patricia Lockwood’s Women’s Prize Shortlisted ‘No One Is Talking About This’, perhaps the most experimental novel on the Longlist. The reader must try and assemble meaning from a series of tweet-like vignettes that muse on the strange phenomena of life on the internet. Whilst I found the first half occasionally funny and often confusing, I was blown away by the emotional heft of the second half, which in its short snapshots of the limited time of a new born baby seems to reverberate with the preciousness of life.

Rachel Cusk’s ‘Second Place’ and Karen Jenning’s ‘An Island’ both explore themes of isolation, and the perils and necessities of connecting with others. I found ‘Second Place’ a strange book, with a painful self-analysis and often bewildering behavior from both the protagonist and those around her, but after hearing Freshly Read Books Booktuber Sarah’s review, I appreciated her perspective that this book was better understood as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy; if we think we are lonely and invisible, we become that way (For the full review, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBBUPPfsBOU .) It is an interesting portrayal of how own thoughts can keep us prisoner – as well as a warning that artists can make terrible house guests. Jenning’s ‘An Island’, a tale of a man who survives a brutal colonialist regime to live alone on an island, is the most surprising pick on the list, coming from a relatively unknown South African novelist from small press Holland House books. I enjoyed the novel as a compact exploration of trauma and the tension between safety and connection, and hope its place on the longlist will encourage more readers to give it a go.

Mary Lawson’s ‘A Town Called Solace’ is another examination of community, telling three interlinked stories of characters struggling to find hope. Eight year-old Clara’s sister has just disappeared, and she hopes that by standing watch by the window she will finally find the secret message Rose promised to send her. She is confused when a strange man moves in next door to her neighbor’s house – after all, Mrs. Orchard promised she would soon be back from the hospital. Realizing she is dying, Elizabeth writes to her dead husband about the past she can’t forget. Although a quieter book than some of the others on the list, I found this compact tale both moving and funny.

So far, out of the books I’ve read, it’s hard to choose a favorite between Francis Spufford’s ‘Light Perpetual’ and Maggie Shipstead’s ‘Great Circle’. ‘Light Perpetual’ is a dazzling imagining of how five young Londoners’ lives might have turned out if they had not died in a WW2 bombing. The novel is impressive in scope and thematic content, a cacophony of voices and operatic in its orchestration of the highs and lows of five very different lives. Told through fifteen-year jumps in time, the novel is like a playlist of the 20th century, taking us from the clattering of the printing press of post-war Britain to the acoustic guitar of the late 70s L.A. music scene back to the melodious sermon of a Gospel church, as the characters are happy and unhappy and struggle to make sense of the events that make up their lives. At each point in their stories, all of their characters struggle to cope with the bewildering contingency of their own lives: why, they ask, did things happen this way? Why did they turn out one way and not another? Whilst the characters yearn for things that might have been, the narrator and reader sees the precariousness of any life existing at all.

‘Great Circle’ is another example of excellent innovative historical fiction. Although I was uninspired by the descriptions I’d heard of the book, as a historical novel exploring the journey of a female aviator trying and failing to fly around the world, I was awed at the compelling cast of characters, each with their own unique and complex characterization and voice. I also enjoyed Shipstead’s exploration of the fraught nature of attempting to represent the past, through the second narration of a young actress who plays the mysterious aviator who is presumed to have died years ago.

I’m currently reading ‘A Passage North’, a meandering meditation on topics ranging from our moral responsibility to others to staring contests with strangers on trains, as the main character travels back to his homeland of Sri Lanka to attend the funeral of his grandmother’s care-giver. Whilst this short novel explored complex themes and has touching moments, I found it too meandering and clotted with unnecessary tangents. While some passages wrestled with fascinating questions, others seemed overindulgent and unnecessary. Still, it’s worth a read to learn more about Sri Lankan history and politics, for an insightful exploration of the effects of trauma, and for some of the protagonists more nuanced musing. I also found the second half of the book more character-focused and much more compelling than the first.

I have saved the books I’m most excited for last, and I have high expectations for ‘China Room’, ‘The Fortune Man’, ‘The Promise’, and ‘The Sweetness of Water’. ‘The Fortune Man’ explores the story of a black man accused and ultimately hanged for a crime he didn’t commit in 1950s Wales. ‘China Room’ tells the story of a 16-year old girl in 1920s Punjab who is married, along with two other girls, to a man she’s never met. He is one of three brothers – she can only guess at which one. Like ‘A Passage North’, ‘China Room’s’ other interlocking story is that of a man going home, trying to find answers in the past.

‘The Sweetness of Water’ tells the story of four men in the American Civil War; two formerly enslaved men and two Confederate soldiers who must keep their love a secret. I’m so excited to dive into some rich historical fiction that doesn’t favor historical detail at the expense of emotional heft and complex characterization.

I also love a good family saga, and ‘The Promise’, in an interesting twist on the genre, tells the story through a series of funerals. When his wife dies, husband Maine promises her he will give the family’s black maid the deed to the annexe where she lives. Of course, he doesn’t keep this promise. This novel promises a lot of drama and disaster, and fascinating family dynamics.

We’ll have to wait until September 21st to read Richard Power’s Bewilderment, the story of an astrobiologist who struggles to know how to protect his son in an unsettling near future of climate disaster and political tension. I was awestruck and mesmerized by Power’s previous novel, ‘The Overstory’, a masterful work which interlocked stories the way plants interlock their roots. I have high hopes that this novel will be an other-worldly experience of gorgeous prose that awes at both nature and the power of human relationships.

Overall, I am really excited to get stuck into this year’s list. Although I’ve heard criticisms that there is too much historical fiction on the list, I was delighted by the wide-ranging variety of times and places, and would also counter that, as well as looking back at the past, the list also offers titles that consider both the complexities of our modern world (‘No One Is Talking About This’) and look towards the future (‘Klara and the Sun’, ‘Bewilderment’). I would agree with the judges’ claims that there is something for everyone, whether you’re looking for an introspective character study of a woman struggling to find herself (‘Second Place’) or a sweeping span of five different lives (‘Light Perpetual’); whether you’re looking for fantastically executed sweeping historical fiction (‘Great Circle’) or an experimental experience (‘No One Is Talking About This

), whether you’re looking for a small town community (‘A Town Called Solace’) or a man alone on an island (‘The Island’), there is something for you. However, on reflection I do accept the point made by Rainer from Rainierbooks (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUQlxosYLuI&t=1279s) that the list was disappointing in its lack of authors outside of the ‘rich UK and US’, particularly from India, or any black authors from Africa. He makes the point that there have been wonderful books from black authors living in Africa, and in India, and these are noticeably absent from the list.

So far I have enjoyed reading all the novels I’ve got to so far. Although I definitely did not love all of them, I thought they were a valuable reading experience, posing questions because of the perplexing psychological conundrum they proposed (‘Second Place’) and because of the insight into a different country’s history that I knew little about (‘A Passage North’.) I am most excited to read ‘Bewilderment’, but as I’ll have to wait for that, I will be looking forward to tucking into some top-notch historical fiction (‘China Room’, ‘The Fortune Man’) in the meantime.