The Dylan Thomas Prize 2018 Shortlist

This year is the 10th anniversary for The Swansea University International Dylan Thomas Prize. It’s interesting how this book prize is open to writers from anywhere in the world writing in English who are aged 39 years or younger. Revered poet Dylan Thomas died when he was only 39 years old which is why this prize is intended to encourage young writers.

Last year’s winner was Fiona McFarlane for her book of short stories “The High Place”. I haven’t got to reading that yet, but I’m glad to see I’ve read all but one of the books that have been shortlisted for this year’s prize! It’s a very strong list (with the exception of Gwendoline Riley whose frequent shortlisting for various book prizes bewilders me. But, given how much this book has been lauded, it's probably me and not the novel, right?) However, I’m thrilled to see Carmen Maria Machado on the list whose extraordinarily inventive short stories I enjoyed reading so much recently. Also, it’s nice to see debut author Gabriel Tallent getting some recognition because “My Absolute Darling” is such a striking novel. The only poetry on the list is by Kayo Chingonyi whose writing so powerfully explores a dual sense of national identity. A prize of £30,000 will awarded to one of these six authors on May 10th.

I’m hoping to go see all of the shortlisted authors at an event which will be held at the British Library on May 8th – tickets are here if you’re interested.

Click on the below titles to see my full reviews of the books I’ve read. I’m hoping to get to reading Emily Ruskovich’s debut novel which I’ve heard such good things about.

Have you read any of these books and which one would you pick to win?

Kumukanda by Kayo Chingonyi
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
First Love by Gwendoline Riley
Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
Idaho by Emily Ruskovich
My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent

The Parentations by Kate Mayfield

There's something so pleasurable about getting fully immersed in a big epic novel and Kate Mayfield's new “The Parentations” had me wrapped up in its story for days. It skilfully delves into fascinating pockets of history while building a story about the tense relationship between a group of characters who have gained a kind of immortality. While there is a fantasy element to the story of a life-sustaining liquid drawn from the tectonic cracks of Iceland's lunar-like landscape, the novel is also infused with dark gothic overtones involving a pair of reclusive wealthy sisters whose lives have been beset by tragedy, a manipulative woman who learns the art of hypnotism & mesmerism and a red-haired artistic boy subjected to torturous experiments. But other sections of the book have a Dickensian feel with a superstitious girl named Willa taken from a gloomy orphanage and a depiction of the notoriously brutal Millbank prison in London. As the story progresses over the centuries it also shows London's transformations through seasons, wars, a fluctuating economy and redevelopments. All this is wrapped in an overarching tale about a boy's heartrending separation from his mother to keep him safe and protect an ancient secret for evading death.

Mayfield has a skilful way of engaging with the politics of different ages through the personal stories of her characters. Beginning in Iceland, a ground-breaking secret about a wondrous elixir becomes the point a conflict between a group of Icelandic farmers and a wealthy Danish family intent on stealing this secret for themselves. Iceland was still under Danish rule at this time and the story of this struggle in some ways mirrors the lengths of time it takes for a nation to achieve full independence from a foreign monarchy's rule. Then there are the sisters Verity and Constance whose privileged Catholic family were forced to hide their beliefs in times after the English Reformation. It's interesting how the faith and degree of piety of each sister transforms over the ages of their extended lives. There's also the story of Jonesy, a Chinese boy taken on as an apprentice after he was won through gambling. Jonesy's homosexuality leads him to engage in different furtive encounters while England still criminalized same sex acts. His story powerfully portrays the desolate state of mind a gay man must have felt when being continuously persecuted for his impulse to love.

I also felt strongly compelled by the character of Clovis who grew up in the most humble of circumstances in rural Iceland. Her method for escaping such a dire, humble life is to take advantage of every situation she can and shore up power to ferociously protect herself. While she's rightly portrayed as a villain it's also interesting how her story shows the way an individual's survivalist instinct can ultimately lead to a particularly somber kind of isolation. It's fascinating how this novel can explore a different kind of character development as its protagonists lives are stretched out over centuries rather than decades. In some ways the characters change and develop in radical ways, but also retain essential elements of their personalities and belief systems. At times this challenging method of narrative doesn't feel like it can fully explore all the challenges such a situation would produce. Some dramatic situations feel a bit rushed and too reliant upon coincidence. But, on the whole, Mayfield maintains an admirable control of the characters' evolution in sync with the long stretch of time that the novel covers and the story is consistently engrossing. “The Parentations” builds a wondrous panoramic view of history and disparate groups of people united like a family over centuries.

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

This novel made me feel nostalgic. Set at Harvard in the mid-to-late 1990s Elif Batuman’s “The Idiot” follows a freshman named Selin as she navigates the uncertain territory of college life, young love and finding a direction in life. I went to college at this exact same time in Boston (at a much smaller, non-ivy league school) and shared many of Selin’s experiences of starting to use email for the first time and riding on the T or the MBTA subway around the city. Selin comes from a privileged Turkish background and vaguely wants to be a writer (although when her first short story is published she finds no joy in it and even feels embarrassed.) She studies literature and languages: Russian, in particular. A large portion of this novel is taken up with the intricacies of campus living and then follows Selin to Hungary where she attempts to teach English in small villages. It’s plot is somewhat aimless – just as Selin’s life is somewhat aimless as she grapples to find meaning and purpose. This is the kind of book that is bound to frustrate and bore some readers (I definitely felt this way through some parts), but it also has a bewitching sense of humour and an endearingly oddball sensibility.

Something I really enjoyed in the first section of this novel were periodic exercises in Selin’s Russian class that involved learning the language through ‘The Story of Nina’. This is the journey of a fictional character named Nina who seeks to find a man that she loves who has moved away to work. There’s a special kind of absurdity in exercise books about characters acting out situations for the benefit of demonstrating grammar and phrases for students of language. They state things in non-realistic and obvious ways. This was the basis for Eugene Ionesco’s classic absurdist play ‘The Bald Soprano’ where two English couples out of a ‘learn English textbook’ The Smiths and The Martins converse in a way that is increasingly bombastic and fragmented. Selin feels an odd connection with Nina’s ongoing saga: “Of everything I had read that semester, ‘The Story of Nina’ had somehow spoken to me the most directly, and had promised to reveal something about the mysterious relationship between language and the world.” It shows how Selin isn’t just seeking an academic career, but longs to better understand an individual’s relationship to their experiences and how those experiences are coded in language.

Selin also tests the interplay between language and life in a relationship she develops with fellow-student Ivan. Although they know each other in reality, they form a different kind of intimacy through email exchanges. It’s somewhat ironic that Selin wryly comments that heroines in great Russian novels and even ‘The Story of Nina’ are about heroines who primarily obsess over a man. Yet, that’s exactly what Selin does as well. But this is only natural in someone who has just gone to university, hasn’t had sex and becomes preoccupied with the idea of romance. It’s her draw towards Ivan which compels her to travel to Hungary to teach in a programme that Ivan is connected to. This estrangement intensifies the displacement Selin already feels in her new adult life. She describes how “being alive felt like some incredibly long card game where you didn’t know if the point was to get cards or lose them, or what you had to do to get cards or lose them.”

Selin states that "I finally identified with a painting in the Picasso Museum. Titled 'Le Buffet de Vauvenargues'"

Batuman has a knack for describing the awkward transition into adulthood with unerring accuracy. For instance, as we grow older we develop a very different feeling for the passage of time. Selin describes at one point how “I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time – the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.” This reflects how as adults we start to become much more aware of the transitory nature of large life events and how the deadness of time in between can be compounded by an increasing awareness of our own mortality. 

The kinds of pleasures and insights found in “The Idiot” feel like they would vary depending on where the reader is in life and also someone’s reading mood. I’ve heard responses from students who have identified so strongly with this novel and consequently loved it. Academic life is curiously removed from reality which causes a sense of crisis in some students who might suddenly realise like Selin that “I really didn’t know how to do anything real. I didn’t know how to move to a new city, or have sex, or have a real job, or make someone fall in love with me, or do any kind of study that wasn’t just a self-improvement project.” While this novel gave me a lot of nostalgic twinges, many of the student experiences are far removed from my reality so I couldn’t help feeling impatient with long passages obsessing over the dynamics of social groups or the tedium of waiting for the cafeteria to open. At times I enjoyed sinking into the meandering feeling of it and the dry humour of Selin’s observations, but, as it’s such a long novel, it often felt like it indulged in these experiences too much.

Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli

This short and powerful nonfiction piece by Valeria Luiselli is such a poignantly constructed insight into the immigration crisis/debate in America now. Luiselli relates her experiences working as a volunteer interviewing thousands of children from Central America who have been smuggled into the United States and are seeking residency/citizenship. She asks them questions from an intake questionnaire created by immigration lawyers that will play a large part in determining if the children will be granted status to remain or face deportation. Going through the questions one at a time she explains the way the immigration system is designed to keep as many people out as possible without accounting for these children’s vulnerable situation or America’s role in the creation of this crisis. At the same time, she relates her personal experiences as a Mexican immigrant whose own ability to work was restricted because of a delay with her visa. It’s an achingly personal book that makes a strong political statement. It skilfully asserts something that shouldn’t need to be stated, but which we need to be reminded of in a political climate that overwhelmingly seeks to vilify immigrants: that these are children who have suffered through hell and that by treating them as criminals we are only adding to their trauma.

Luiselli’s justified anger and frustration about the situation these children find themselves in is palpable throughout the book. As a volunteer whose main job is to translate the children’s answers and who can do nothing to assist or change the outcome of their cases she feels that “It was like watching a child crossing a busy avenue, about to be run down by any of the many speeding cars and trucks”. It’s striking how government policies don’t seem to recognize the human faces that Luiselli meets, but implements decisions based on strategic ways of restricting vulnerable children’s ability to fairly state their case and strip them of their humanity. In fact, it was shocking to learn how the Obama administration worked with the Mexican president to implement immigration policies in Mexico to more effectively prevent immigrants from other Central American countries from getting to the US in the first place. Given the current president’s stance on immigration from Central America it’s terrifying to think how even greater walls are being created to keep out children who face continuous abuse, slavery or death in their own communities.

People in the US are made to feel that these problems belong to the Central American countries, but the issues of drug wars, arms trade and gang violence are intimately tied with US history and its policies. Luiselli reminds us how “No one suggests that the causes are deeply embedded in our shared hemispheric history and are therefore not some distant problem in a foreign country that no one can locate on a map, but in fact a transnational problem that includes the United States – not a distant observer or passive victim that must now deal with thousands of unwanted children arriving at the southern border, but rather as an active historical participant in the circumstances that generated that problem.”

Threaded throughout this book is the request from Luiselli’s daughter to know how the stories of these immigrant children end. Of course, all of their stories are just beginning so in response she says “Sometimes I make up an ending, a happy one. But most of the time I just say: I don’t know how it ends yet.” I greatly admire the clear-sighted observations found in this book and its tremendous heart. 

Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

It’s so interesting reading Mary Shelley’s hugely influential novel “Frankenstein” after having so recently read Margaret Cavendish’s fantastically bizarre “The Blazing World” since both of these novels begin with a journey to the North Pole. I’ll need to read more about Shelley’s life and influences, but I assume having published her novel 152 years after Cavendish’s she must have been somewhat influenced by it – not just by the story’s action but the engagement she makes with scientific and philosophical ideas. Although, I have to say, Shelley’s novel is far more immediately engaging and readable for the incredibly gripping and sympathetic plot she created. While doctor Frankenstein’s infamous creation may have been reduced to an unreasonable monster in popular culture, in the novel he’s incredibly sensitive and articulate. It’s the fact that society sees Frankenstein’s creation as a monster that turns him into a monster rather than there being anything inherently evil about him. For this reason, I can see why this novel has really stood the test of time. As the ultimate tale of an outsider to society, it has a universal resonance and its meaning is still powerful today – for instance, Guillermo del Toro credited and thanked Mary Shelley when he won best director at this year’s BAFTAs for his film ‘The Shape of Water’.

I was encouraged to finally read this novel because of my involvement in curating the “Rediscover the Classics” project for the company JellyBooks. I talk more about this project and how you can join in with it in this video. It gives a great excuse for finally getting around to reading some much-lauded books. It feels especially poignant reading “Frankenstein” this year because it’s been exactly 200 years since it was first published. That a novel written so long ago can still feel so fresh and relevant is astounding. It’s no wonder that this book makes such a great choice for classrooms because young people can naturally relate to and understand the intense feelings it expresses of being an outsider – and the language it uses is very easy to read. There are so many moral and social issues raised in the plot that can be considered from different angles. It considers notions such as ambition, artificial intelligence, community, education, revenge, righteousness and many more.

It’s interesting how Shelley frames her story within the correspondence between a captain named Robert Walton with his sister Margaret. By beginning and ending the novel with his perspective it’s like she keeps this dramatic tale at arm’s length and invites the reader to consider how they would react if they came across a monstrous giant being chased through the arctic by his tortured and resentful creator. It’s also interesting how Robert insists how lonely he has become in his journey towards the North Pole in his quest to achieve some success and fame. This parallels with Frankenstein’s creation who expresses such an achingly intense feeling of loneliness in being rejected by anyone he encounters because they are repulsed by his hideousness. Frankenstein’s drive to achieve scientific recognition led to him creating an independent being that he quickly discarded. It’s as if Shelley is stressing how important it is to maintain empathy when attempting to realize our ambitions because we can easily forget about other people’s feelings in our drive towards achieving success and furthering the progress of civilization.

A depiction of Frankenstein's creation in a film from 1910.

Something I found curious about the story is when Frankenstein’s creation describes his experiences living nearby a family that he observes over many months without revealing himself. It’s touching the way she describes his appreciation for this tight-knit family and the way that he learns the elements of language and society through observing them. He beautifully expresses the propulsive force of learning: “Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind when it has once seized on it like a lichen on the rock.” But he also interestingly describes learning about other cultures through their subjective understanding. When describing the colonization of North America and the slaughter of Native Americans he expresses how he “wept with Safie over the hapless fate of its original inhabitants.” But he also learns disdain for “the slothful Asiatics” which are so characterized because of a complicated sub-plot to do with their family involving slavery in Turkey. It seems curious how there is empathy for one nationality, but a sharp condemnation and stereotyping of another. Certainly the politics surrounding both these areas of the world understandably lead to such broad characterisations for this particular family. But I think this shows how the family's subjectivity induces them to make generalisations about people based on nationality. It adds to the novel’s broader message about not rejecting other people because of outward appearances. 

I didn’t expect “Frankenstein” to be such an emotional and heart breaking story. The isolation and misery of doctor Frankenstein’s creation is so powerfully depicted. It feels especially cruel that the creation is never given a name, but only referred to by the doctor as “the fiend” or “monster”. To deny someone a name feels like essentially depriving them of their own humanity. But the way the creation describes so vividly his feeling of longing, rejection, despair, anger and regret makes him one of the most dynamically realised humans I’ve ever read about. This is such a powerful book that I now feel eager to explore much more about Mary Shelley’s life and the many permutations of this narrative that have been created since this story’s inception 200 years ago.

The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish

Ever since I read Danielle Dutton’s novel “Margaret the First” which fictionalizes the life of Margaret Cavendish and Siri Hustvedt’s extraordinary novel about a misunderstood female artist “The Blazing World”, I’ve had a fascination with this pioneering writer of the 17th century and wanted to read her books. Earlier this year I attended a feminist book club meeting about Dutton’s novel and that reignited my interest in Cavendish. In the lead up to the announcement of this year’s longlist announcement for The Women’s Prize for Fiction, it seemed like a great time to explore this intrepid figure’s writing. “The Blazing World” was first published in 1666 and is often considered a forerunner to both science fiction and the utopian novel genres. It’s a totally bonkers story of a woman who is stolen away to the North Pole only to find herself in a strange bejewelled kingdom of which she becomes the supreme Empress. Here she consults with many different animal/insect people about philosophical, religious and scientific ideas. The second half of the book pulls off a meta-fictional trick where Cavendish (as the Duchess of Newcastle) enters the story herself to become the Empress’ scribe and close companion. It was impossible for me to read this novel without thinking of Dutton’s text which gives an impression of the real struggles Cavendish faced in her life as well as her eccentric personality.

I found the first half of the novel quite difficult to follow although I was entranced by the bizarre concepts and “chopt Logick” that it contained. The Empress is ruthlessly methodical in quizzing her anthropomorphic subjects who are the leaders in their field of study. It’s like she’s investigating the current trends in thought to either approve or reject them. Cavendish was privy to the debates and meetings of some of the most prominent minds of her era so it feels like in her novel she’s mulling over many new concepts and trying to connect disparate ideas. In her wilfulness the Empress demands that telescopes be destroyed because she calls them “false informers” and dissolves her society of Lice-men who are Geometricians because she finds “neither Truth nor Justice in their Profession.” It felt to me like her ruthless decision-making and domineering mentality were Cavendish’s reaction to being made to feel relatively voiceless amongst the egotistical learned men of her time. This could be a simplistic interpretation of her creative reaction and I don’t mean to undermine the seriousness of the ideas Cavendish works with in her novel.

Cavendish explores many fascinating concepts throughout the text concerning the natural world both at the macro level of astrology and the micro level where she seems to be striving to articulate a concept of subatomic physics. In one section she states “both by my own Contemplation, and the Observations which I have made by my rational & sensitive perception upon Nature, and her works, I find, that Nature is but one Infinite Self-moving Body, which by the vertue of its self-motion, is divided into Infinite parts, which parts being restless, undergo perpetual changes and transmutations by their infinite compositions and divisions.” It feels like she’s speaking here about the behaviour of matter and energy and gravitational forces. 

As the ultimate leader, the Empress also contemplates how people should be ruled. I found it interesting how she rejects the idea of ruling through tyranny because she recognises its short-term effectiveness: “for Fear, though it makes people obey, yet does it not last so long, nor is it so sure a means to keep them to their duties, as Love.” Not only does she absorb and sift through scientific and political ideas, but also references many different religions and sacred texts to play off from before the Empress decides to write her own religious text or Cabbala. The Empress hilariously wants to summons the spirits of some of the greatest minds in philosophy and science such as Aristotle, Pythagoras, Plato, Galileo or Hobbes, but it’s decided that they would be too “self-conceited” to agree to be her scribe. So instead she summons Cavendish herself. Neither are content to simply reside within this fantastical world so they create worlds within this world to travel to and the Empress appoints a “Spirit to be Vice-Roy of her body in the absence of her soul.”

In the novel there’s a frequent insistence upon the formation of one’s own imaginative world as a means of escape in a way that makes me feel Cavendish must have felt either bored or suffocated by the actual life she was trapped within. It felt as if the Empress’ freedom and vast riches played off from the fact Cavendish’s much older husband experienced varying amounts of financial and political trouble throughout their marriage. Dutton’s novel also suggests how Cavendish had such a restless spirit, boundless level of creativity and a monumental ego that she often felt discontent with the limitations of her reality. She also craved fame and sought it out by dressing outlandishly and self-publishing many books. Cavendish’s taste for fashion and cultivating a distinct image are reflected in the novel as well when the Empress daringly seeks to make a flashy garment made from “star-stone”. I think it’s safe to assume that if Cavendish were alive today she’d be a habitual social media user and would take countless selfies. Everything about her unique and multi-faceted personality suggests that she was someone who struggled with the many limitations of her time. 

“The Blazing World” is such an intriguing oddity that I found it a totally absorbing and bewildering read. 

Three Things About Elsie by Joanna Cannon

There a special delight in having read an author’s debut novel when it first came out, then reading her follow up novel and discovering common themes and patterns which occur in fascinating variations in both books. A wonderful quality of Cannon’s writing is to create a complex picture of a community in how these networks of people both support each other and can help relieve feelings of isolation/loneliness. She describes how “There is a special kind of silence when you live alone. It hangs around, waiting for you to find it. You try to cover it up with all sorts of other noises, but it’s always there, at the end of everything else, expecting you.” But her stories show how neighbours and friends can assuage these difficult feelings.

Cannon’s debut novel “The Trouble with Goats and Sheep” portrayed a neighbourhood with an absence at its centre. A woman goes missing and two intrepid girls are determined to discover what happened to her. Conversely, in her new novel “Three Things About Elsie” the story centres around an assisted living apartment complex where a new resident arrives, but he might not be who he claims to be. Florence is convinced he’s someone from her past and she sets about trying to uncover the truth about his identity with her lifelong friend Elsie. Cannon’s sensitive narrative shows the large impact that small gestures of goodwill can have, the intricate complexities and labyrinthine nature of memory and the story is thickly drizzled with a warm coating of nostalgia.

In a way, this novel feels like the most wonderful kind of old lady drag act. I frequently find myself watching The Golden Girls and wishing I could inhabit these characters or wishing I could sit at a window staring out at a landscape while saying in a melancholy voice “It all happened so long ago…” There’s an attraction to being at a point in your life where you can remain comfortably entrenched in your belief systems and feel free to say whatever you want and not give a fig what anyone thinks. That’s not to trivialize the pitfalls and hardships which come with aging and Cannon certainly honours this struggle. There are many solemn observations about the pains of growing old: “it’s only when you get old that you realise whichever direction you choose to face, you find yourself confronted with a landscape filled up with loss.” But Florence also exhibits the wry sense of humour and stubbornness of a wizened character who many people would revel in watching and enjoy imagining themselves as. It’s a thorough delight reading about her quirky point of view. There’s also a tinge of sadness in reading about her later years as her grasp on the past and her present mind is gradually slipping away. 

As with many stories that have a central mystery, this novel comes with a big twist. I could guess fairly early on what the main twist would be, but I don’t think that’s a mistake of the narrative because it only adds to the pensive mood of Florence’s condition. The chapters alternate between unravelling the suspicious aura surrounding new arrival Gabriel and counting the hours of a day when Florence has fallen down and can’t get back up. Cannon poignantly uses these two strands of the story as a way of describing the plasticity of memory and how Florence has come to reform the past in her mind: “It’s the greatest advantage of reminiscing. The past can be exactly how you wanted it to be the first time around.” The real mystery of this novel is how Florence has come to fool herself and alter her memories to suit what she needs to believe. It builds to a touching conclusion and I admire how Cannon is able to fill her stories with so many pithy observations about the human condition as well as a lot of heart.

The Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist

I’ve said it before, but it really does feel like the first holiday of a year when the longlist for The Women’s Prize for Fiction gets announced. It’s one of my favourite book prizes and I love reading/discussing/debating all the titles this award honours. It’s particularly exciting that the prize this year is known under it’s new title The Women’s Prize for Fiction (formerly the Baileys Prize.) Some weeks ago I made a video with my friend Anna about what books we’d like to see on the longlist for the prize. Between us we guessed 9 of the 16. You can watch me discuss my reaction to this year’s longlist here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-DCtqkk_78&t=27s

After I finish reading Joanna Cannon’s novel I’ll have six more on the list to read. I’ll be meeting with Naomi from TheWritesofWomen and other members of our Shadow Group to discuss the longlist and pick our own fan favourite shortlist/winner for the prize. So there’s a lot of fun discussion to come! Let me know in the comments what books from the longlist you’re eager to read or what you’d like to see win. The official shortlist will be announced on April 23rd and the winner will be announced on June 6th.

A lot of people will bemoan the fact Ali Smith’s “Winter” isn’t included on this list and its absence is a great shame. I have no special inside knowledge or insight into the judging process, but I’d just point out that we don’t know if the novel was even submitted for the prize. Novels that are eligible aren’t always put forward for a prize and there can be any number of reasons for this. That’s just part of the mysterious alchemy of book prizes!

For the books that I’ve already read and reviewed you can click on the titles below to see my full thoughts.

H(A)PPY by Nicola Barker
Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
Sight by Jessie Greengrass
When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy
Elmet by Fiona Mozley
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
See What I Have Done by Sarah Schmidt
A Boy in Winter by Rachel Seiffert
Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Three Things About Elsie by Joanna Cannon
Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig
The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gower
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal

The Windham-Campbell Prizes 2018 Recipients

The Windham-Campbell Prize has been going for five years now and their list of eight recipients for this year’s prize have just been announced. It’s one of the richest book awards in the world as each winner of the prize is awarded $165,000 – a considerable amount that grants authors the freedom to write whatever they please. You can watch me discussing this book award and this year's winners here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP-P97xLolI&t=191s. Some of the past recipients whose books I’ve enjoyed include Jerry Pinto, CE Morgan, Tarell Alvin McCraney and Nadeem Aslam.

This year’s winners include Lucas Hnath, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Bakewell, John Keene, Lorna Goodison and Cathy Park Hong. And I’m particularly happy to see Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi has won the prize as I read and admired her novel "Kintu" so recently. Also, Olivia Laing who is a wonderful cultural critic and nonfiction writer. Her book “The Lonely City” was one of my favourite books from 2016. So I’ll be really eager to discover the writing of these other winning authors.

If you could give a living author $165,000 to write whatever they please, who would you award it to? It’s a fun question to contemplate – like imagining what you’d do if you won the lottery, but instead it’s money you can grant to a favourite writer. An author I’d certainly like to endow with such financial freedom would be Garth Greenwell as he’s such an ingenious writer with such promise.

The Book of Joan by Lidia Yuknavitch

I think some of the greatest feminist dystopian fiction includes Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”, Angela Carter’s “The Passion of New Eve”, Sandra Newman’s "The Country of Ice Cream Star" and Naomi Alderman’s “The Power”. They don’t just speculate about terrifying ways that humanity can go wrong for women, but also powerfully comment upon the continued subjugation of women today. Lidia Yuknavitch has created an utterly original and wildly imaginative take on this narrative in her new novel “The Book of Joan”. This novel takes readers to the near-future 2049 when a series of cataclysmic events have reduced our planet to a “dirt ball” around which orbits a slipshod repurposed satellite. Upon this resides the mutant elite of humankind who survive on the scarce resources they can suck out of the decimated planet Earth. This will most certainly be the end of the human race as these mutants’ genitals have dropped off or sealed up and people’s skin has turned so (ugly) white they are nearly transparent. They are led by a powerful former self-help guru Jean de Men who organizes trials and executions of “offending” citizens as entertainment. But there is a resistance to this tyranny in the form of a strike branding artist Christine who tattoos poetry on the grafted skin covering her body. She mythologizes the story of Joan who created chaos across the planet and was ritually burned like her 15th century French-warrior namesake. The ensuing conflict is not only a mesmerizing and grisly adventure but makes striking observations about gender, genetics and the meaning of story-telling.

So I couldn’t help thinking that Yuknavitch was speaking directly about today when Christine comments: “We are what happens when the seemingly unthinkable celebrity rises to power. Our existence makes my eyes hurt.” It’s difficult not to read this as a reference to the current American president. It’s interesting how she engages with the way that popularity and power intermingle and the compromises and resolutions such a leader must make to either maintain their image as a beloved celebrity or flagrantly abuse their power to ensure the general population falls into line. This is shown differently in both of the figures of Jean de Men and Joan. Notably, she does so not just in these characters’ actions but in the way their bodies are radically transformed and mutate as they utilize previously untapped elements from both nature and technology.

It’s difficult in dystopian fiction to maintain a balance between explaining the conditions of an imagined future reality and developing characters that readers can really connect with. There were sections of this novel which flew over my head. Yuknavitch ambitiously builds this distorted future by playing upon many elements of philosophy and science such as subatomic physics. She also hints at bands of rebels and subservient robots. To fully flesh out this future would have taken thousands of pages, yet there could have been ways to briefly round out her fantastical reality to help me fully picture it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t always clearly see it so parts of the novel felt too chaotic to me. But she makes up for it with some fantastic characters whose very bodies carry the scars of what they’ve gone through. There is Christine’s gay friend Trinculo who affectionately and relentlessly spouts antiquated bawdy insults at her. There’s also the love affair between Joan and Leone who is a Vietnamese-French girl that fights alongside her in battles across the world.

One of the most striking things in this novel is the way that poetry and verse becomes an adornment that symbolizes privilege. Christine emphasizes that tattooing text is an art and since their group of mutant beings keep grafting on layers of skin it’s like parchment which they carry with them everywhere. She emphatically holds onto the importance of storytelling because “To have a story was to have a self.” The difficulty with real historical tales like that of Joan of Arc is that her story can be shaped into whatever its tellers need it to be. She could be portrayed as a saint or a heretic. Yuknavitch poses the question “What if, for once in history, a woman’s story could be untethered from what we need it to be in order to feel better about ourselves?” In the character of Joan she creates a woman that untethers herself from the script which is assigned to her and becomes fiercely individual – someone that can only be defined by what she loves. 

Felix Culpa by Jeremy Gavron

Part of me was so drawn to reading “Felix Culpa” simply for the sheer audacity of its creation and out of a curiosity to see how it would work. This is a novel that’s composed almost entirely from the lines of other works of fiction by (approximately) eighty authors as varied as Italo Calvino, Willa Cather, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack Kerouac, Cormac McCarthy and Mary Shelley. In poetry this is known as a cento where different verses or passages from multiple authors are composed into a new order. Jeremy Gavron forms in this fictional collage experiment a story about a young man named Felix who mysteriously died after he was arrested in a botched robbery. The narrator is a writer/teacher at the prison where Felix was incarcerated and he embarks on a mission to discover more about Felix’s life and what happened to him. Amidst his travels to interview people Felix encountered he slides into his own epistemological crisis and radically alters his life. It’s a moving tale in itself, but through the very nature of its innovative construction it also poses fascinating questions about the meaning of narrative and the way in which readers connect with fiction.

I think one of the greatest works of art produced thus far in the 21st century is Christian Marclay’s video art installation ‘The Clock’. This is a looped 24-hour video montage that takes scenes from hundreds of films and television shows featuring clocks that are synchronized to show in real time. In doing so, these pieces of disparate video footage link up in a mesmerising way and meaningfully comment upon the way we are all caught in the flow of time. It’s interesting how when we’re confronted with a series of fictional works that are artfully mixed together we begin to imaginatively form narratives in our heads. As I was reading “Felix Culpa” I became aware that I was filling out scenes or adding details to characters based only on a few suggestive phrases that Gavron has paired. Of course, this is what we do all the time when reading fiction. But, somehow, because I was aware that this narrative was a construct of preformed sentences, I had a greater self-consciousness about the active role I play as a co-creator of the fiction that I’m reading.

Some sources used for the text of Felix Culpa

In the course of reading this novel I also became more aware of the playful ambiguity of language and the plasticity of sentence construction. Lines or phrases that mean something in one context can come to mean something entirely different in another. Again, this is something fiction does all the time and part of its great beauty is how it can mean many things all at once. In this novel lines are spaced out with gaps in between them to demarcate how they’ve been taken from different sources. This also has the effect of highlighting passages and the reader must take an infinitesimally small pause in going from one line to another. This is something that’s often done in poetry, but in this book lines consciously flow together to form a cohesive narrative. So a line like “Time comes to leave” stands on its own. This has a meaning within the story where it’s time for a character to depart to go somewhere else. However, staring at this line on its own it also takes on connotations of how time is fleeting, that a moment only arrives to depart. But, in reading these lines on their own, I also often felt curious about how this line might have been used in its original story.

What’s impressive about “Felix Culpa” is that this elaborate self-conscious assembly of hypertext doesn’t detract from the pleasure of the story Gavron forms himself. I felt totally emotionally drawn into this tale and sympathised with Felix’s struggles in life as the narrator uncovers piece after piece about the journey that led to Felix’s untimely death. This character is formed more through an outline than through direct descriptions of Felix himself, yet the reader is still keyed into the ambiguities of Felix’s heart and mind. I grew to feel a sense of loneliness in Felix where his circumstances led him to make poor choices and end up in isolation. I haven’t felt this way about a character since reading about the nearly silent figure of Stevie at the centre of Rachel Seiffert’s brilliant novel “The Walk Home”. Felix’s struggle is something that the narrator of the novel also connects with and his obsession with Felix’s plight says something significant about the unspoken crisis in the narrator’s own life. This novel is a richly rewarding work of art.

The Word for Woman is Wilderness by Abi Andrews

Sometimes it can be so difficult to separate my emotional response to a book compared to my critical response. I don't think I necessarily have to which is one of the great things about a book blog! But reading Abi Andrews' debut novel “The Word for Woman is Wilderness” I was even more aware of this dilemma because it's inspired by and about subjects I'm really interested in and sympathetic towards. It's narrated from the perspective of nineteen year old Erin who has a passionate interest in the writing of Thoreau and the life of Christopher McCandless whose tragic journey led to his accidental death in the Alaskan wilderness. This was chronicled in Jon Krakauer's nonfiction book “Into the Wild” and a film with the same name directed by Sean Penn. Erin observes how the famous instances of individuals pioneering into the wilderness to establish a distance from the society whose values they question have all been directed through a men's perspectives. Certainly the experience and perspective of a woman who sets out on such a journey would be very different. So (against her parents' wishes) she ventures out from her home in England to the Alaskan wilderness and chronicles her journey on video with the plan to edit it into a documentary. She states: “if running into the wild is so often a wounded retreat from societal constraints and oppressions, then shouldn’t anyone but straight white men be doing it more?” Erin charts the mental and physical struggles she faces on her way while also contemplating both the dynamic distinctions and commonalities between the journey of mankind vs womankind.

The novel is evenly broken up into two sections: Erin's journey through the Arctic circle and hitchhiking across Canada to arrive in Alaska and her time inhabiting a remote cabin in the unpopulated wilderness. But throughout she makes references and draws in concepts from an enormous amount of sources: everything from quantum mechanics to Cartesian philosophy to the history of the Cold War space race to David Attenborough documentaries to the novels of Jack London. Such a dizzying array of topics is impressive and fascinating. It leads her to propose enticing new connections and pose deeply-thoughtful questions. But it has the effect of feeling like you've sat up all night with a fellow university student who is excitedly talking through everything they've been reading about. It can get a bit overwhelming at points and detract from the through line of the narrator's journey. Along the way Erin encounters several fascinating characters from an Icelandic woman she meets on a ship to a Native American who aides her after meeting a nasty trucker to a misogynistic interloper in Alaska. It felt like if Andrews had spent longer developing scenes with these characters and rounding out their personalities the novel would have felt more like a story than a collection of interesting concepts.

Frequent references are made to author and conservationist Rachel Carson

Erin's determined will to enter the wilderness leads the story. There are some beautifully poetic observations about our subjective experience of landscapes and the environment. When viewing the barren icy terrain of Greenland she states “It feels like trespassing to be alive in a place that is not dead but is inexistence, negation of potentiality. Anything alive is only ever passing through.” Then, at another point she remarks how “The tundra is always in soliloquy. Mostly it whistles and sings, but now and then the wind will die down suddenly and in the utter silence and still it feels like you are on stage. As though you did not know there were curtains until they just suddenly opened. Then the cacophony of noise again like applause.” There are also some great comic moments where she makes wry observations about the nature of travel like trying to understand the native language of a country you've entered through travel books: “I enjoy the narratives of phrase books. They always seem to follow a haphazard protagonist who is forever getting lost and bothering the emergency services.”

Of course, it's Erin's inner journey which is the real focus on this novel. She comments how “An esoteric landscape does not help a person to find their way if they are lost; you could walk from the centre of here and never find your way again.” It's necessary for her to physically travel in order to arrive at a new place of understanding and radically reform her sense of self. It's also necessary that it's a journey she makes alone: “It is not a casting out with purpose but a getting lost. It is the difference between solitude and loneliness.” It's touching how her time in Alaska leads her to reflect much more strongly about her own upbringing and the machinations of her psychology. She's aware of how much she's internalized stories of explorers as being strictly male enterprises because almost all the literature about it is written by men. She catches herself “Positioning myself as male again; my masculine counterpart who lives in my brain, appending a fraud penis so I can traverse Scott’s Antarctica in my imagination.” The fact of her journey makes a powerful statement that women also enter (both the spatial and inner) Wilderness. So, while I think it's sometimes too erratic, this novel was a great pleasure for me to read and it's also a flag that needed to be planted because Abi Andrews is marking new terrain.

Peach by Emma Glass

Sometimes reading quotes by authors I admire on the jackets of new books can very accurately indicate the experience I’m about to have. In this case, Emma Glass’ debut “Peach” comes festooned with a string of quotes by prominent authors from George Saunders who calls this a “dark poetic myth” to Laline Paull who describes how this book “shares literary DNA with Gertrude Stein, Herbert Selby Jr and Eimear McBride.” These get at the unusual quality of Glass’ writing, but this book’s radical style and approach to characters is wholly unique. It’s at once cartoonish and deadly serious. The story opens with Peach who has experienced a massive trauma and follows her in the proceeding days as she attempts to return to a state of normalcy. In doing so, Glass uses some shockingly innovative methods for getting at painful emotions and actions that can’t be described in a straightforward way.

The syncopation of Peach’s train of thought leads to a lot of word play and double meaning. When she feels her stomach growing she wonders “How big will I be before I burst? Cells linking, holding hands, making chains, chains winding, chains winding around my core. Spores sporing, pouring.” These emotive passages get at the uncommon way her imagination fuses with reality. Yet there are other moments which are straightforward and direct in expressing Peach’s reaction to her trauma. She describes how “I don't want to be a victim. One of those victims. Oh this awful thing happened to me when I was young. He stole a piece of me (said in a raspy, broken voice)”. It’s heartbreakingly tragic how throughout the story this self-consciousness prevents her from confiding in the characters closest to her especially when her violent encounter means that she’s trapped in a nightmarish present “I see his sadistic shadow now. I will always see it. Ingrained.” But her method of battling through this is extraordinary. It’s at once grotesque and hilarious and sad in a way I found utterly mesmerizing.

Just as the language in Peach’s thought process is slightly displaced, reality is also warped so that characters are at once human and embody the physical traits of their character name. Peach’s boyfriend Green is described as “shaking little leaves” when he laughs and his mouth is “mossy-soft.” Her infant sibling who is viewed as a jelly baby sweet is powdered by their parents with sugar. In a semi-comic scene in Mr Custard’s class the teacher must be formed from “yellow goop” into “Bits of arms, bits of legs, bits of bones but not really bones. Blobs” before a lesson on anatomy can continue. While this writing method might sound charmingly playful, it is also excruciatingly sinister when it comes to conveying the smell and appearance of Peach’s nemesis who stalks her. Glass’ absurdist technique of writing about characters is such an effective and new way of describing lost innocence.

Reading “Peach” is a highly unusual visceral experience whose subtleties I suspect can only be felt over time as the tendrils of this daring and imaginative narrative worm into the reader’s subconscious. Be prepared.

Sight by Jessie Greengrass

The prospect of having children can be exciting, but also terrifying. Luckily, it's something I've never strongly desired so I'm satisfied in the role of uncle, godfather and sometimes babysitter to friends' children. However, some reasons I'd be frightened of having children (beyond a total ignorance of how to care for them) is a dread of making some irreparable mistake and also the inability of protecting them from experiencing pain at some point. Jessie Greengrass describes this as “the overwhelming fear of fucking up that having children brings, the awareness of the impossibility of not causing hurt like falling into endless water”. Her debut novel “Sight” is a reflection on the process of having children and why her narrator is particularly self conscious about the continuation of her lineage. But, more than that, it's a remarkably poignant meditation on the internal and external levels of our mental and physical reality. The narrator is a young woman who cared for her mother during her terminal illness and now faces the prospect of becoming a mother herself. She sifts through her personal past and considers the lives of disparate individuals such as Sigmund & (his daughter) Anna Freud, Wilhelm Röntgen (the first man who produced and published scientific studies of X-rays) and scientist/surgeon John Hunter. In doing so, she embarks on a journey into how she might allow her child to see the multiple layers of life and thus pass on an abiding sense of happiness.

As demonstrated in her superb short story collection “An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It”, Greengrass has a particular creative talent for not only plucking out and creatively reimagining unusual stories from history, but finding a wondrous pertinence in them. It's fascinating when talented writers can pair distinct elements of fiction and nonfiction to create a story which is still deeply emotional. Ali Smith also accomplished this in her novel “Artful” where she essentially took a series of her lectures and threaded them together around the story of a narrator who is grieving for (her or his – the narrator's gender is never specified) lost lover. It still worked as a piece of fiction for me because I felt drawn into the journey this narrator took towards a new understanding through intensely contemplating these different subjects. Greengrass similarly pairs her narrator's struggle with accepting the identity of motherhood by considering the multiple innovative methods particular historical figures took in seeing one's self: whether that be the bones of our bodies, the internal workings of a woman's womb or a method of understanding the unconscious mind.

Sometimes it's not what these figures found which the narrator identifies with, but their process. For instance, she speculates “if we could understand these moments and the weeks that followed them when Röntgen, alone, placed object after object in front of his machine and saw them all transformed, then we too might know what it is to have the hidden made manifest: the components of ourselves, the world, the space between.” In her connection with the challenges and moments of revelation these individuals experienced over a century ago their scientific practices act as touchstones and channels towards the narrator's own working towards a cohesive sense of being.

The sections where Greengrass recounts Freud's professional/familial relationship with his daughter Anna take on a very personal feel for the narrator. Her grandmother, who referred to herself as Doctor K, was a psychoanalyst so her ideas were directly inherited from Freud and influenced the icy grandmother-grandaughter interactions at her Hampstead Heath home. This challenging relationship combined with her mother's terminal illness heavily colour the narrator's complicated distress over the prospect of motherhood. They make her yearn for that clarity of vision which can be passed on, but she also acknowledges with caution that “the price of sight is wonder’s diminishment.”

X-ray of Bertha Rontgen's hand

One lovely moment in the book which will no doubt be highly relatable to avid readers/introverts is the default compulsion the narrator feels to read. At one point she states “I read not with any particular object in mind, nor really with the intention of retaining any information about the subjects that I chose but rather because the act of reading was a habit, and because it was soothing and, perhaps, from a lifetime's inculcated faith in the explanatory power of books, the half-held belief that somewhere in those hectares upon hectares of printed pages I might find that fact which would make sense of my growing unhappiness, allowing me to peel back the obscurant layers of myself and lay bare at last the solid structure underneath.” Part of the joy of this novel is in its inherent belief in the power that reading has to connect us to the past and ideas when we're grappling with life's challenges – even when we only turn to books in a disconsolate and disordered way.

The way that Greengrass combines disparate elements from the past with her narrator's dilemmas is done with such fluidity that it reads with stunning ease. Like Virginia Woolf's writing it's often poetic and philosophical at the same time making statements such as “what are we if not a totality of days, a sum of interactions; and a glimpse of what is underneath the surface, the skeleton on which the outer face is hung, cannot undo the knowledge of skin but only give it context, the way it rises and falls, its puckering, its flaws.” This novel seeks to account for the unruly fluctuations of emotions and disparate elements which make up our existence. As a deeply introspective work of fiction it won't appeal to everyone because its drama is primarily in how it marks the subtleties of transitions in life (from child to adult, from daughter to mother.) But it does so in such a captivating and meaningful way that sensitive readers will find “Sight” utterly gripping and profound.

In this video I predict why I think "Sight" will win the Booker Prize in 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbwWlqMJqaA

The Sealwoman’s Gift by Sally Magnusson

There’s something so wonderful about being wholly drawn into a richly imagined historical novel that both illuminates a somewhat forgotten or not-widely-known period of history and gives voice to people who are only glancingly referred to in the history books. Sally Magnusson does all this in her debut novel “The Sealwoman’s Gift” which recounts the abduction of over four hundred Icelandic citizens from their homes in the year 1627 by pirates from Morocco and Algeria. These prisoners were sold into slavery and a ransom for their release wasn’t obtained until several years later – by which point many of those abducted had either died, been irretrievably lost or converted/integrated into life along the Barbary Coast. Copies still exist of a famous account of these abductions written by a Reverend who was captured himself, but Magnusson focuses her novel more on the journey and inner-struggles of his wife Ásta. It’s noted how “others may have written their own accounts of captivity. Men, of course. Does it matter that nobody will know how it was to be a woman?” In doing so, this novel brilliantly engages with many of the heartrending conflicts a woman in Ásta’s position must have faced while also powerfully illuminating the cultural importance of storytelling and the complicated dynamics of love.

A number of years ago I visited Iceland and took a road trip around the country. It’s such a bizarre alien-like landscape with its flat volcanic-soil and coastal shores dotted with black & white puffins and their colourful beaks. I admired how the stark beauty and bleakness of this striking environment is powerfully evoked in this novel. But the author also brings to life the culture and daily life of its people from the production of Skyr (a yogurt-like foodstuff traditionally made from sheep’s milk) to the use of puffin bones to keep the kitchen fires going or the frequent retelling of Icelandic Sagas which are such a rich part of the country’s oral tradition. I also got such a strong sense of how the country basically operates as one small hardworking community. As Magnusson notes, it’s easy to empathize with how the kidnapping of over 400 citizens back in the 1600s would deeply traumatize the entirety of this sparsely-populated country. The story also conveys what an enormous culture shock it’d be for these very isolated Christian people who were abducted to suddenly be engulfed in the brightly-coloured multi-national predominantly-Muslim community of Algiers.

I’ve always been fascinated by the psychological implications of a diaspora, especially when people are forcibly removed from their native homeland or are forced to leave because of severe problems in their birth country. The real heart of this novel lies in Ásta’s dilemma as she’s suddenly left on her own in Algiers with a daughter and an infant son. Her rambunctious husband Ólafur is swiftly used as a negotiator between the Ottoman Empire that was seeking ransom for these slaves and the king of Denmark (because Iceland was under Danish rule). Throughout the many years of their separation Ásta is torn between maintaining her faith in their rescue and building a new life in this foreign land. This includes conflicted feelings about religion, loyalty to family and maintaining her own sense of cultural identity. There comes a point when the workings of time create a certain psychological distance from her homeland. Her existence beforehand becomes idealized and nostalgia takes on a life of its own: “memory is like that, always so eager to aid you in missing what you can no longer have and forgetting the rest.” Magnusson writes poignantly about how story-telling is a means of psychological escape from the horrors of reality as well as a way of maintaining a connection with one’s own culture and personal genealogical history.

Barbary corsairs

The author also weaves into her story two somewhat fantastical elements and characters who tread the border between myth and reality. One is an eccentric old woman who has visions and believes herself to be a seal that has lost its skin and is consequently stranded on land in the shape of a woman. Another is an elf from the legends Ásta heard in her youth. At first I thought this later character was merely an eccentric quirk within the story or simply a fanciful notion within Ásta’s imagination, but his inclusion comes to powerfully represent her character’s inner conflict, her stymied desires and a representation of her own “otherness” as someone that doesn’t necessarily fit anywhere. These characters also show the way that our daily lives are composed of both the hard fact of reality and our subjective experience of the world.

As I neared the end of reading this tale it became something much more for me than simply a vividly-imagined historical novel, but a personally touching meditation on the choices we’re forced to make in life. Over the years we’re inevitably presented with crossroads where we must choose to take one path or another and it’s difficult not to be consumed with grief for the potential joys we’ve had to sacrifice in making these hard decisions. But Magnusson writes how “we cannot live in two worlds. And in lamenting too long what belongs in the other we bring upon ourselves and others only destruction.” In dramatically bringing to life Ásta’s story she sympathetically presents a fully rounded understanding of this turmoil and the importance of fostering the lives we’ve chosen. “The Sealwoman’s Gift” also powerfully shows the numerous and complicated repercussions of how the evil industry of slavery caused rifts in communities which have never been and can never be repaired.