A Look at the Booker Prize for Literature

                            

                                                              A Look at the Booker Prize for Literature  

I recently noted that Anne Michaels had been shortlisted for this year’s Booker prize for her novel Held (2023). I had read her earlier novel, Fugitive Pieces (1996), about the displacement of children during World War Two, some years ago and I had included discussion of it in a course I was teaching about Canadian Literature for The Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). Held, published many years later and which I received as a Christmas present, is a very different book: it is an account of the development of the generations within a family, who are dealing with events from the early twentieth to the twenty-first century.

 

I have some history with the Booker prize. When I began teaching literature to a WEA group in the 2000s, I needed some guidance in making a choice of novels that we could read together. These WEA classes had a remarkable feature in that the students were equal participants in learning with the tutor, so they would also have a say in the choice of the material that was studied. For instance, a useful suggestion from one of my classes about looking at the subject of money in literature led to the reading of a range of stories from Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton and Alexander Tolstoy, to modern works by Michael Bracewell and Deborah Moggach. This turned into a twelve-week course which I called A Matter of Money. 

 

Another suggestion, that we should use Booker prize winning novels as a basis for making our choices, came from a group of students meeting in Ivinghoe, Bucks. And so, after some research, I read with this class the novel, Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald which had won the Booker in 1979. For the opening session I sketched on a flip chart pictures of the boats on Battersea Reach where the novel is set, accompanied by the names of the boats and the names of the characters who lived on them: on Grace there is Nenna and her two children, on Lord Jim is Richard and on Maurice is Maurice. Fitzgerald’s tale is a kind of Cinderella story where Nenna, the main character, flees from a marriage where she has met rejection, but survives with the help of characters on the other boats. The personalities of her two children Tilda and Martha are rendered brilliantly by the author. This course, Notable Novels of the 70s and 80s, which included other Booker winners, Cats Eye by Margaret Atwood and Saville by David Story, was a great success.

 

I went on to develop a fascination with Penelope Fitzgerald and her life and work. This involved a trip to listen to Hermione Lee speaking at Buxton, Derbyshire, about her biography of the author, A Life… (2013), and my subsequent teaching of four of her novels to the same class. These were the four considered by Lee to be her masterpieces – Innocence (1986), The Beginning of Spring (1988), The Gate of Angels (1990) and The Blue Flower (1995). My own favourite is The Blue Flower which I would rate among my own great reading experiences.

 

Other suggestions came for books that had been shortlisted rather than been outright winners of the Booker prize. Unless, which was Carol Shields’s final novel, was nominated in 2002 and this too became a favourite of mine. It concerns the life of Reta, a writer, whose daughter, Norah, has dropped out of university to live on the streets of Toronto with a sign reading “Goodness” fastened to her chest. It is worth reading the novel to find out why she has done this, but the overriding theme is that the lives of women and their literature are dealt with as ‘trivial’ by the literary establishment. It became one of novels that I used in the Canadian Literature course mentioned above.

 

Since retiring from the WEA I have followed the Booker prize on a more personal level. In 2022 I decided to read all six nominations to see whether I agreed with the judges. This was a challenge, but I managed to borrow the six shortlisted books from the local library and had read them all, except for Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker, before the eventual result. In the event I found that I preferred both Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These and, Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo, to the eventual winner. This was The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Shehan Karunatilaka and, although viewed by many as a successful satire concerning the terrible civil wars that affected Sri Lanka in the 80s, the ‘magical realism’ style of Karunatilaka didn’t work for me as a reader. I had found that the satirical style of Glory, where the author uses characters based on animals to criticise the forty-year rule of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, suited me better.

 

This year for the first time in its 55-year history the Booker prize shortlist contains five novels written by women and only one man. Last year was the year of the three Pauls - Paul Murray, Paul Harding and the winner, Paul Lynch for Prophet Song. In a recent editorial piece, The Guardian says that judges have based this year’s list on literary excellence rather than box ticking and this suggests a criticism of last year’s shortlist. I personally didn’t enjoy last year’s winner, finding that for me the author didn’t really get into the mind of the main character, Eilish, mother of four children and separated from her husband by his imprisonment during earlier events in the story. I much preferred the characterisation of Agnes in Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, Booker winner in 2020, a novel about a boy and his mother struggling against poverty and alcoholism in the Glasgow of the 80s. 

 

The Guardian editorial goes on to say that this year’s novels cover a wide range of themes and that Anne Michael’s Held is ‘genre defying’. I have in addition read recently a very positive review of the book by Jackie Law which first appeared on Bookmunch, and which praised the 'lyrical prose' in the novel. This reviewer also says that she enjoyed the reading 'simply for the art in the language' and I was reminded of the fact that the author is also a prolific poet.

I don’t expect that I will have time to read the work of the other Booker nominees before the judges’ decision is revealed on November 12^th, but I am hoping that Held, which is Anne Michaels's third novel, will be successful.

 

References: 

The Guardian Editorial, Booker prize Saturday 21^stSeptember, 2024

neverimitate by Jackie Law on 19th September, 2024