The first chapter must be a grabber—no long, slow build. Well, unless you can depend on the infamy of your name to make the jurors read the whole thing.

Right now books about middle class folks with middle class problems are not in vogue. You need to write books about dysfunctional families peopled with characters that would make Edith Sitwell proud.

Sentimental often makes the short list.

Don’t make it hard or experimental. Straight ahead narrative appears the most often.

Make sure the publisher packages and markets the book as a winner.

The perfect prize-list-making book is 218 pages, often. The other approach is the large sweeping BIG novel. Either political or generational. Cue the violins.

Have a good story about the book. How it was written, or researched. I was in Egypt and met a man from Vancouver who was a camel driver…

Historical fiction often works with juries. Or if you are after the Booker and can be sure a UK publisher will pick up your book, UK economics or social issues are worth considering.

Sex.

Find a research topic, a cause or an historical period that is either very popular and you have a new tact (Wolf Hall), or one that is unknown (Half Blood Blues). That being said, don’t pick something Canadian if you are after the Booker—historical Canadian stuff is hard to pitch to UK publishers. Think Politics and Marginalized groups.

Look at what Carey and Rushdie have done with national allegories. Try an ethnic allegory. Post-colonial exotic.

Use a young narrator. Very often first person.

Find something controversial or create a good scandal. Or better yet, if something falls into your lap, milk it. A good recent example was the decision of BC Ferries to ban Annabelle Lyon’s book from its bookstores because of a nude on the cover. Or Rohinton Mistry’s book being banned by the University of Mumbai.

Women buy most books. So, write for a female audience.

Have a map or genealogical tree.

I will repeat a section from my 1987 Booker report:

In a New Yorker review by Louis Menand of The Economy of Prestige, Menand also looks at The World Republic of Letters by Pascale Casanova and concludes: “Between them, English and Casanova list the features of the world-literature prototype: a trauma-and-recovery story, with magic-realist elements, involving abuse and family dysfunction, that arrives at resolution by the invocation of spiritual or holistic verities. If you add in a high level of technical and intellectual sophistication, this is a pretty accurate generic description of a novel by Toni Morrison.”

Here’s one: write a multi-generational novel about coming to Canada as an indentured servant, and the long-term consequences. The elusive search for a Father, etc. It will make old white guys fashionable, and victims at the same time. And maybe result in the PM issuing an apology to survivors of indentured servants. See?

If you are a writer and have seriously considered any of my above comments, reconsider your career.

Jean’s more serious suggestions to writers

If you are short-listed or happen to win a prize, it is only as relevant as the organization behind the prize and the jury. I’ve said this before but let me elaborate on relevant to whom. Relevant to the writer. I’ve been having an ongoing discussion about this matter with regular reader and a writer, Michael Turner:

MT: What I am saying is, When I receive a prize, I cannot separate it from jurors who decided on it, as the prize is an extension of them, their conversation, and my place in it. At the same time I have been on juries where the ambition is not the works under consideration but the opportunity for some past or future quid pro quo. Recently I was on a CC grant jury where, as usual, we are asked to assess the works on their terms and the CC’s. Another juror and I did just that, while the third juror proceeded with 1-5-10 voting scheme, the kind designed at winning, not assessing. As her selections made no sense I Googled her name with her 10s and sure enough they were part of some mutual support group — not a TISH or a KSW but people who merely like each other.

JB: I think I’m beginning to see. Let’s use George Bowering as an example. If he won a prize and Robert Creeley was on the jury that would enhance the prize win for George. That’s what you are saying? If Robertson Davies had been on the jury, for George, it wouldn’t mean much.

MT: Yes, if Creeley was on and George was shortlisted/won. Ouch! if Creeley was on and George was not shortlisted/lost.

The criteria has expanded for winning these things awards. Back in the days when progressive Modernism’s only rival was the unexamined romantic tendency, Canadian juries were loaded with romantics. With multiculturalism — gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity — came a relativism that often deferred to the face of the award (the writer), as opposed to the book (the writing).

Linden McIntyre never would have won his Giller if not for an “international jury” simply because he is not considered someone Canadians have been made to recognize as part of the country’s literary culture, the pool from which shortlisted books are drawn. Linden’s background is journalism; he doesn’t know who bp Nichol is, nor is he interested in where this writer fits within the conversation that is modern Canadian Literature. Indeed, Linden is closer to sociology than literature (GeoBo, as you’ve noticed, produces a mild tick when the word sociology is spoken), and international jurors (as selected by the Giller Foundation) will always be more attracted to the sociology of Canada than its literature’s formal contribution to the international literary conversation.

I have heard it said that some authors have clauses in their contracts that prohibit their publishers from entering their books in competitions (Martin Amis, for example). As much as I respect an author’s decision to argue for this clause, I also recognize that a book “belongs” not only to its author but also to its publishing house, publishing being a complex of relations that involve a publisher, an editor, a designer, a product manager, sales and publicity people, etc. While I would prefer that my books are not entered into awards competitions, I would rather proceed as someone who acknowledges this complex of relations than as an author who, inadvertently or otherwise, upholds the romantic notion of the author as singular genius, rude individual, etc.

I am in full agreement with Michael—Prizes should be part of the larger conversation that is literature.

Prizes that are conferred should be for the merit of the work, not for the geographical location of the writer (oh, it’s time someone in Newfoundland won this prize), the gender of the writer (three women in a row, we should give it to a man this year), the ethnic background of the writer (this prize has never been given to someone of Japanese heritage), or the marginalized group that the book portrays. Such “wins” taint the prize and are demeaning to the writer.

*   *   *

Chaired by Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate, the 2010 judges are Rosie Blau, Literary Editor of the Financial Times; Deborah Bull, formerly a dancer, now Creative Director of the Royal Opera House as well as a writer and broadcaster; Tom Sutcliffe, journalist, broadcaster and author and Frances Wilson, biographer and critic.

Tom McCarthy—C   VPL

Jean’s Booker Club discusses C

Another messy night at the book club.

The blurb on the book jacket says, “Only a writer like Tom McCarthy could pull off a story with this effortless historical breadth, psychological insight, and post-modern originality.” Well, our group sure didn’t agree with this assertion. The novel is not post-modern, has little style or form, though McCarthy does have things to say. It seems a case of if you refer to certain things then you are post-modern, which isn’t the case.

Writing style was a big stumbling block. We pointed to examples of too much detail. We found some sections to be excruciatingly boring and tedious, and we did recognize that at times this technique is deliberate. Colin cited some other novels where the beginnings are a mess, but recover and end up packing a wallop. Not so C. This is indulgent 19th century novel style, too often clunking and disappointing. Where’s the editing, we wondered? Colin wondered if he was paid by the word.

The main character is Serge, whom we meet as a young man and whom we follow as he grows, joins the air force, becomes a drug addict, spends time in a German prison, delves into the occult and climaxes, literally, in a tomb in Egypt. Yup, heavy on the symbolism, folks. But this is not a novel about character. Characters are dropped or disappear from the narrative without concern or coherence.

One theme is the metaphorical parallels that exist, and how we connect, or don’t, to them. As Judith will note below, the insistence on this theme almost becomes a game. There are quadruple meanings for everything. And McCarthy is aware of what he is doing, and often points it out, several times, including all the “useless information” he supplies as if it had been lifted from a turgid encyclopedia:

“That fucking twit,” Macauley snorts. “Bombards us all the time with useless information. Not just him: every two-bit traveller, ‘adventurer,’ ‘novelist’ or general man of leisure who’s inherited more money than sense…ladies of leisure too: they’re just as bad… Sending us their ‘reports,’ briefing their friends on Fleet Street to extol their bravery and cunning to readers who aren’t any the wiser, then expecting knighthoods when they get home…Fantasists and frauds, the lot of them! The worst part of it is, they’re actually quite useful.”

I wonder if I should take that personally?

The ending of novel fired more heated debate. Colin argued that the end is not well achieved—it’s too transparent. Death is just another trip, nothing to be feared. We all agreed that the novel had some wonderful moments, that McCarthy does have something to say and pulled some nice stuff out of the research. But we couldn’t help but wonder whether the novel was on the short-list because a previous jury missed the much-acclaimed earlier novel Remainder, as well as McCarthy’s reputation as the General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society, “a semi-fictitious avant-garde network.”

Dennis said the novel was “ambitious as all hell” and gave it 6. Judith said that while reading she was thinking 4 but afterwards found it somehow more interesting despite its shape and arrogance and gave it 5. Colin, 5.5 for Carbon. Deb found it very annoying and voted a 4.5 as did GB. I gave it a 4, no juice and joy.

After meeting comments from Judith: I think Tom McCarthy discovered some things and thought he was the only one. In a YouTube interview he declares that writing isn’t about self-expression, as though all writers before him only squeezed out words like primary coloured evocations of house, sun, family—kindergarteners compared to him. He goes on about transmissions, the air is full of sounds, quotes from The Tempest, talks about the writer as (I’m remembering, not quoting) receiver and conduit, a romantic concept if I ever heard one. Isn’t that like saying, I will just sit here ready for the muse to come through, the muse as all sound, all visions, all sensations. The universal muse, I guess. He might as well call it God or All-in-One, but he can’t do that because oops, the audience he really wants to please (somewhere in the art world) wouldn’t like that and the audience or readers he wants to educate, aren’t that interested. He is full of half-digested half-truths, a mishmash of philosophical concepts and not so arcane knowledge.

Serge (of many possible references, is one to serger, the machine that overlocks seams?) realizes in his dying delirium that the message he has been waiting for is coming through him. He is the message. (Haven’t we heard that somewhere?) Is that McCarthy being ironic about self-expression or having a laugh? It seems to me he conflates self-expression (and the idea of self that he rejects) and transmission in one big All-Olympic-Opening-and-Closing-Ceremonies-of-All-Times grand penultimate scene. (Elizabeth Renzetti, writing in the Globe and Mail of her time in England, recently reminded Canadians that there’s no humour, only threat, in the British expression, “Are you having a laugh?”)

Oh for God’s sake (there’s that murkily conceived muse again), stop fighting the story, Tom, and get a good editor.

However, after I had finished reading C (and listening to parts of it on CD), I found the book a lot more fun to think about than to actually, painfully, plough through. Once you accept the book as a big game board puzzle you can while away a drive across the city sorting out all the clues and moves. I’d think, oh he’s incorporated the five elements (earth, down the tombs; air, up in the plane; fire, the spark set, the plane on fire; water, the Baths, the murky waters for the cure; ether, the messages that travel from here to there, etc.). Under, beside and above every phallic symbol or reference to penetration, infection, constipation, vapours, smoke, filth and incest lies another, barely disguised (and described three different ways each time). Now, even the three words “incest lies together,” unintentionally typed sequentially, evoke another game of meanings

McCarthy isn’t as interested in story, although he is telling one, as he is in the very British tradition of pageant, pantomime, ceremony—acting out while in disguise–where symbol is more important than plot, costume more important than character. To go back to the Olympic opening ceremony idea, imagine if Danny Boyle, instead of presenting his recent spectacle, had decided to describe it to us in minute detail so that, instead of a visual display, those of us sitting in the stadium or in front of our screens had to read the unedited, un-illustrated written version of 2012 Summer Games Opening Ceremonies Second by Second The Book.

Rather than “the horror, the horror,” our cry might be, “the ink, the ink….” (Get it, readers? Or should I hit you again?)

Question for McCarthy: Do you think this is the most effective use of the novel form? Question for his champions: If the philosophy or philosophies underpinning McCarthy’s novel are worth consideration, why was the communication of them in this novel not subjected to critical rigour? What is idea without language?

And by the way, McCarthy may be smarter than I am, but to quote the pronoun form he used repeatedly, he is not smarter than me.

And from Colin:

I keep thinking that he DID have an editor and that the editor tried to make a more conventional novel out of a maelstrom of whizzing and at times interesting connections. The result was a struggle between quantity and subtlety, with easy sensationalism winning out over an almost unmanageable but intriguing overarching conceit. I’d guess that the chapters were altered so that each had the same structure, with their conclusions telegraphed early in the chapter, and always in service of a possibly disturbing sexual act at the end. This is the type of chapter we seem to encounter in almost every novel that appears these days. (How’s that for an unsupportable statement? But novels have become like movies in this way.) Overall, and sadly, It was as if a governor had been bolted onto what might have been a fascinating, unruly and chaotic machine. In fact, the novel felt dumbed down, and, should I say, overexplained. Example:

Editor: What’s this?

McCarthy: The First World War.

Editor: What?

McCarthy: The First World War.

Editor: Sorry?

McCarthy: It was a vicious European war that occurred between 1914 and 1918 in which millions of men and women from all over the world were slaughtered and we still don’t really know why it started in the first place. It helped spark the Bolshevik revolution and led to a rise in Fascism that in turn…

Editor: OK, OK, but if we don’t know how it started, I mean, that’s weird, isn’t it? Perhaps it didn’t really happen. Are you sure?

McCarthy: Pretty sure….

Editor: Tom, you can’t expect your readers to swallow this sort of thing without an explanation. How many of our readers will even have heard of this…what did you call it…?

McCarthy: The First World War.

Editor: Wait, wait, it’s coming to me. Do you mean…is that like World War One?

McCarthy: You got it!

Editor: And it happened in Egypt?

I probably could have gone for more chaos.

Judith replies:

While your theory (and your amusing dialogue) makes sense, I’m not sure why any editor would think the tedious descriptions in the first section of the book –the doctor following path, wall, passageway, another wall, maze over there, trellis, doorway and on and on, for example, or so many quotes from The Faerie Queene–were necessary. These seem more like attempts to put the reader into the maze (hopelessly lost?) than explanations of what it all means.

By the way, if you want to get into an endless loop with Haydn, Google Addison’s line, “The spacious firmament on high.” But perhaps that doesn’t appeal.

As a compendium of amusing tidbits, C has its place.

Caul

Chute

Crash

Call

Were those section headings a starting place for the writer, or the afterthought of the editor?

Peter Carey—Parrot and Olivier VPL

I’ve now seen this type of novel so many times it merits its own Category: historical figure’s life expanded. It’s what Mantel did with Thomas Cromwell and what Carey has done before with Ned Kelly, though for my money less successfully with the life of Alexis de Tocqueville, the real man who is the basis of Olivier.

Carey is a terrific storyteller and writes with verve and distinctive voice. The novel is structured around the voices of the two main characters. Olivier, the spoiled brat aristocrat, tells one chapter. Parrot, the parentless artist, narrates the next chapter. And so on. Essentially it’s the story of their lives, how they meet and then go to the USA so that Olivier can do a survey of the penal system.

But the novel isn’t really about Olivier or Parrot. It’s about the contrast and conflict between the old world and the new, art and commerce, and privilege and servitude. Or how the mess that is now the USA was bred in the bones of its democratic birth—the “awful tyranny of the majority.”

Olivier gets off several good rants in the last chapter of the novel and there is some sense that the whole novel is only there to support those final rants:

In a democracy there is not that class with the leisure to acquire discernment and taste in all the arts. Without that class, art is produced to suit the tastes of the market, which is filled with its own doubt and self-importance and ignorance, its own ability to be tricked and titillated by every babule. If you are to make a business from catering to these people, the whole of your life will be spent in corrupting whatever public taste might struggle toward the light, tarnishing the virtues and confusing the manners of your country.

Olivier could be speaking about the Bookers!

I don’t think this novel is Carey at his best. It goes on too long. Many of the flashbacks to previous times in the lives of the characters are confusing. In many ways Carey has written a Dickensian novel with just as many unlikely coincidences.

Here’s Ursula k Le Guin’s review:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/30/peter-carey-parrot-olivier-america

Damon Galgut—In a Strange Room VPL

The cover blurb compares Galgut to Coetzee and the structure of the novel does seem to mimic Coetzee’s style in Summertime. The narrator is “I” the writer writing about the experience of Damon “he” the character.

I wander around and come back, then wander again. A large part of traveling consists purely in waiting, with all the attendant ennui and depression. Memories come back of other places he has waited in, departure halls of airports, bus-stations, lonely kerbsides in the heat, and in all of them there is an identical strain of melancholy summed up in a few transitory details.

Structured in three segments, the novel is in some ways a travel book. In each section—The Follower, The Lover and The Guardian—the narrator plays a different role with his fellow travellers. He is always unable to connect with others, to find a sense of place.

The writing is tight as the excerpt above shows. The style is flat, very fast and easy to read and there are no extraneous details. The reader puts together that Damon has a life, with some income and friends, but the narrator tells us nothing about these things. In some ways this novel reminded me of Figures in a Landscape from the 1969 Booker short list.

Somehow they have passed a point and gone from one world into another. In the old world they had their usual life, with its habits and friends, its places and choices, but now all that has been left behind. In this new life they have only each other and the selection of objects that they carry on their backs. Everything else, even the people they stop and speak to at the roadside, is passing by.

The themes are otherness, space, solitude and relationships but within the context of travel or what one reviewer calls the “social happenstance of travel” and the resulting “disjunctions of experience and memory.” That last section is “almost an unbearably convincing evocation of guilt, anger and powerlessness in the face of self-destructive behaviour.”

My Booker Book Club rebelled when I suggested we should take on this one, so we passed it by. That was a mistake. The book club would have had fun with this one.

Emma Donoghue—Room VPL

This novel was short listed and won the Writers’ Trust fiction prize, so received a lot of press in Canada. It also received a lot of media attention in the UK. First because the manuscript resulted in a bidding war and a huge advance. But the novel was also challenged about the content. In an interview with The Guardian Donoghue recalls the period as “quite painful. A lot of people made out I was writing this sinister, money-making book to exploit the grief of victims. I was thinking, it’s not like that, but no one will know until they read it.”

She is keen, too, to contextualise the link between her novel and the Fritzl case. “To say Room is based on the Fritzl case is too strong,” she says firmly. “I’d say it was triggered by it. The newspaper reports of Felix Fritzl [Elisabeth's son], aged five, emerging into a world he didn’t know about, put the idea into my head. That notion of the wide-eyed child emerging into the world like a Martian coming to Earth: it seized me.”

In the novel a 19-year-old woman has been kidnapped and held in a room (actually a sound-proof shed at the rear of a property) and raped almost daily. She conceives a child who dies at birth with the cord choking her to death. Then conceives and delivers a second child, a son she names Jack. The novel begins on Jack’s fifth birthday. Jack narrates the entire novel:

Today I’m five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I’m changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero. “Was I minus numbers?”

The first half of the novel details the daily routine of life in Room—meals, game, TV watching (Jack loves Dora the Explorer), exercise and excrement. At night Ma puts Jack to bed in Wardrobe before the arrival of Old Nick, their captor. There is a highly unlikely escape and the second half of the novel outlines the transition of the first three or four weeks of life on Outside.

Many readers and critics have praised the novel for the sustained voice, the life-affirming love of the mother for her son and Donoghue’s bravery for delving into such a topic.

I have no problem with the topic but I do have problems with the way the material was presented, and a number of other things in the novel. Some online readers concur:

Frankly I found myself irritated to the point of angry, while reading it, because of the way the author wrote the character of the boy, Jack. The kid knows what the word ‘stave’ means, gets the irony of a crayon called ‘mauvelous’, which is a take on marvelous, knows what ‘independant living’ is, uses the word breasts frequently, and is such a good speller he can spell and understand such words as f e c e s, but he can’t formulate a proper sentence?! He says things like, “why you can’t think with me in room”, and “what’s the tall of door?”, I mean c’mon the 5 year old is either bright or he isn’t, he can’t be both Emma Donoghue!

Another reader suggests that Room is the Uncle Tom’s Cabin for our time:

It took me a while to figure out why I have a problem with this book: it’s too cute. It seems paradoxical to say this about a novel which deals with such horrific subject matter. In a way, Room is a sort of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for our times. Rape, forcible confinement and child abuse have the same power to move us to disgust and outrage as slavery did for progressive minds in the 19th century. It’s therefore understandably difficult while reading to separate our moral feelings from our critical responses.

But there’s a basic weakness at the heart of this novel. As many reviewers have stated, this is a story of survival and the mutual love of a mother and her son. No problem with that. But it’s not survival in itself but rather the decisions and choices made to achieve that survival that supply the substance of a fully realized novel. When the central character is a five-year-old the possible development of that character through purposive action is severely limited. It’s the same problem Faulkner faced with Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. Like Faulkner, Donoghue tackles the problem head-on by exploiting the character’s limitations to the maximum. Her invention of a child-like language to express a child’s perceptions is without question original, ingenious and brilliantly carried out.

I accepted that interpretation for a while. But how can a child who is so sharp with language and so astute to its implications not be able to use the article “the”?

Other things that bothered me:

• Old Nick is a plot device, not a character.
• Jack goes from being an imaginative boy to a literalist.
• Jack has been watching TV but doesn’t know the word for rock or what one looks like. Likewise with rain.
• Ma is highly protective of Jack. But a few days after she finally finds freedom she attempts suicide. Not convincing.

Room reads like a creative writing assignment.

But my reaction moved from irritation to anger when I hit page 213. Ma has a brother Paul, now married and the father of a 3-year-old daughter named Bronwyn. My daughter who died in 2006 was named Bronwyn. As you might imagine, every time I see that name in print it triggers some response. What it underlined this time is the falseness of the novel, the contrived pain. Disneyesque.

And that would explain the preposterous ending of the novel. Jack persuades Ma that he must return to Room so the police take them. Everything seems smaller to Jack, less real. Ma pukes. And then it is time to leave and Jack goes through the routine:

Good-bye, Wall. Then I say it to the three other walls, then Good-bye, Floor. I pat Bed, Good-bye, Bed

And so on. Other than the lapse and Jack’s use of the article “the” this is a blatant rip off of Good-bye, Moon, one of the most-beloved bedtime stories of the twentieth century. Oh, and if you think I am overstating the cute, contrived and safe edge of this novel, check out the website:

http://www.roomthebook.com/

The book irritated me so much I thought I would ask someone else to read it and report, and Pauline Butling agreed to my request:

I had expected a more tragic finale for some reason so was somewhat relieved to find the hopeful ending, but also felt disappointed with it. The prospect of a rosy future seems unlikely. I also found myself skipping some of the last section: the details about Jack’s re-integration were less interesting than the details about the daily survival routine in the room, not because disaster is more interesting than success, just that the imaginative intensity of the first section was more compelling. Or maybe it was just that the voice was more convincing. Jack’s voice seemed more contrived and/or formulaic in the last part. Perhaps the diminished intensity toward the end is intentional—to show Jack’s life normalizing—but even if there’s a psychological reason for the shift, that doesn’t make it work artistically.

But for sure her characterization of Jack is superbly done in the first part. I was walking with our grandson on Sunday when he fell and scraped his knee. The blood alarmed him and he was convinced he couldn’t walk at all. Nothing that the promise of an ice cream cone couldn’t fix, but I was struck by the similarities to Jack in his intense focus on selected details. She gets an A+ for that.

And she gets more kudos for tackling such a difficult topic. The double-edged innocent I/eye of the child’s point of view works well for me—seeing through the lens of his “normal,” his pleasure in the daily activities, to the underlying horror. BUT despite all the kudos, I’m left feeling dissatisfied. Was it you or Judith who said they found it too “cute” in the end.  I can’t quite put my finger on what is missing. In any case, it’s one of the better reads from the Booker lists, if that’s any recommendation.

Andrea Levy—The Long Song VPL

Here’s a find. A first-person narration that is captivating, sly and funny.

Set in Jamaica around the time of the Baptist uprising—the Jamaican confrontation for freedom for slaves—the story is narrated by July. July is a mulatto, daughter of a slave who was bent over and used by the plantation overseer. The wife of the plantation owner dies, and his sister, recently come to the island from England, tries to take on the running of the plantation. As a young girl, July captures the eye of this sister and is taken away from her mother and into the Big House to become a lady’s maid.

July, now an old woman living with her son, tells the story of her young life. The story itself isn’t particularly new or remarkable. The power of the novel comes from the nuances about racism. I have some quibbles with the novel and here’s a review that nails my own concerns:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3VIS0PWXTL18K/ref=cm_cr_pr_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0755359402&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag=#wasThisHelpful

Howard Jacobson—The Finkler Question VPL Winner

This novel was not a popular winner with many readers. One snappy blogger called it “intellectual masturbation.”

The first chapter or so sparkled but I quickly found the prose to be plodding far too often. Yes, there is humour but there are also long passages of conversational debate that don’t stir and don’t convince.

The Finkler Question refers to all things Jewish including anti-Semite Jews and Jews who are embarrassed by their Jewishness.

The story (not that much actually happens) revolves around three main characters. Sam Finkler (Jew) and Julian Treslove (Goy) have been friends since school. They developed a special relationship with a teacher Libor Sevcik (Jew) who has had a glamourous career in Hollywood. Finkler and Libor are recently widowed. Treslove has two sons from brief relationships but has never married.

Treslove aspires to be a Jew, falls in love with the Jewess Hephzibah then goes about reading and immersing himself in Jewishness.

But there was a tendency to sudden gloom in him which worried her. And more than that a hunger for gloom, as though there wasn’t enough to satisfy him in his own person and he had come to suck out hers. Was that, at bottom, all that his Jewish thing was really about, she wondered, a search for some identity that came with more inwrought despondency than he could manufacture out of his own gene pool? Did he want the whole fucking Jewish catastrophe?

He wasn’t the first, of course. You could divide the world into those who wanted to kill Jews and those who wanted to be Jews. The bad times were simply those in which the former outnumbered the latter.

Oy, vey.

But then, “talking feverishly about the oppressiveness of being Jewish. Talking feverishly about being Jewish was being Jewish.”

The novel is about friendship, relationships, marriage, families, and the passage of time. But all of these things are tied to Jewishness. The book didn’t further my understanding of Jewish nationhood and the Israeli situation but I did notice the attitude toward the Holocaust: the Holocaust “has become a commodity that you trade.” Certainly for this Booker project there is a Category for Holocaust books.

After finishing the novel and having some time to reflect on it, I’m not sure if I’ve been had or not. For sure I don’t think this novel merited an international prize. If forced to pick from this short list I’d give it to Galgut. But go back and look at the jurors for 2010. Motion, I would suggest, is a self-serving careerist who is pleased as punch with his own ideas, more than he is with the dialogue of literature. Is that, too, the case with Jacobson? Or is The Finkler Question part of some larger and ongoing conversation that Jacobson has been having with his readers?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/sep/28/howard-jacobson-booker-novel

Impregnating a maid of honor might get a favored courtier a slap in the face. Marrying her without permission called for more serious punishment. The Queen had a proto-sexual relationship with her counselors, and indeed her whole country. Having wisely (for both her and England’s sake) decided to keep power to herself by not marrying, she regarded herself as married to England, and she accepted from the favorites among her peers, the powerful men who helped her govern, an elaborate, sexual dalliance, a series of courtly “affairs” that distracted her from her difficult, often boring, spouse. Early in her reign these affairs probably involved sex; it’s generally assumed that the Earl of Leicester, her Commander in Chief until his death in 1588, was a lover.

By Raleigh’s time the affairs were Platonic. In the poems her “lovers” wrote for her, and she liked poems, she was the moon goddess Cynthia, also known as Diana, the hunter. She was above them, though tangible, and chaste. In exchange for their worship and service, they received incredible gifts, mainly in the form of estates and commercial monopolies.

Part of the deal was that they had to beg permission to marry. On bended knees would be putting it mildly; they had to assume that position just to talk to her. And if they didn’t grovel, they were in trouble. Leicester made the mistake of secretly marrying the Queen’s cousin. He was locked up for a time though eventually returned to favor, and his wife was banished forever from court. Later the Earl of Essex, her cousin and Dameri’s godfather, also had married secretly, the widow of Sir Philip Sidney and daughter of Walsingham, who ran the Queen’s secret police. Again there was a dangerous explosion of anger. This one lasted only a couple of weeks, but it lodged permanent doubts in the Queen’s mind about Essex.

And now Walter, mere gentry really, not one of the great families at all but attractive and serviceable, having proven himself through six years of fighting, from ages 16 to 22, in the protestant cause in France, having come to her attention through that history and his good looks, his poetic ability and his wit, having endeared himself to her in the course of a dozen years of service and faux-courtship, and having being elevated to the nobility through the gift of a great estate, Sherborne, as well as other estates in Ireland, and of a monopoly of tin from the Cornish mines, had “jilted” her.

She was almost sixty and insecure about her charms. She was also at the time of Dameri’s birth insecure about her circle of advisors. Leicester and Walsingham were dead. William Cecil or Lord Burleigh, her top man, was too old to keep up with things. His son Robert was being trained to replace him but was still inexperienced and in conflict with Essex. Essex was erratic. Raleigh was the transition from her old advisors and her new, and he stood between the new ones as they battled for the Queen’s trust. The Queen was hurt, but she needed Walter.

Dameri, after unintentionally alerting the Queen to the dangerous game his father was playing, had no further part in his father’s life, since he lived for only a year.

At the time Dameri was born, Walter was in the West Country, putting together an expedition meant as a distraction to keep the Queen and her officials from taking seriously the rumors around Bess’s absence from court and to prevent any enquiries into his own erratic behavior. If things went well, he would be far away when the secret was out, giving the Queen time to cool off. And with luck he would return with something she really liked, Spanish treasure. Since it had been deducted from Spain’s treasury and added to England’s, it was worth twice face value.

The plan had gone well — for awhile. Walter’s brother Carew invested in one ship, the Queen two ships and £3,000, some wealthy London businessmen two ships, the Earl of Cumberland six ships, and Walter himself a ship and £10,000, most of which he’d borrowed. At the end of April Bess, having given birth to Dameri and squirreled him away at Sherborne, was back among the maids of honor. Walter set off on 6 May 1592.

But within a few days he received a royal order to return. He knew what it meant, but continued on a few days more, until they were off Spain at Cape Finesterre. His pretense for holding back was that he was training his second-in-command, Martin Frobisher. However, Frobisher was a seasoned admiral, veteran of three voyages in search of the Northwest Passage, Drake’s raid on Cartagena and the action against the Spanish Armada. He needed no training from Walter. He was back in Plymouth by mid May and on 31 May Robert Cecil took him into custody. Bess was picked up four days later.

The Queen didn’t blow up at Walter right away as she had with Leicester and Essex. She banned him from court and kept him confined at Durham House. And she actually in that time, on June 27, confirmed her earlier gift of Sherborne. It was a sign that she was more hurt than angry, and was open to an apology.

But Walter didn’t catch on, and the Queen couldn’t wait long without losing face, so by August both Walter and Bess were in the Tower of London. They didn’t stay there long. Ironically, it was the privateering venture that sprung them rather than any sign of contrition from Walter. While Frobisher was cruising off Spain distracting the Spanish patrols, his deputy Sir John Borough, waiting off the Azores, intercepted a Portugese ship, the Madre de Dios, that had left India and come around Africa on the way to Lisbon. He took it easily and found on board £500,000 worth of cargo. Not even Sir Francis Drake, England’s greatest privateer, had captured a richer treasure.

But the looting started right away, especially by Cumberland’s men who had first boarded the giant ship, and it got serious when the expedition landed at Dartmouth. Borough couldn’t control it. Cecil had to get Walter out of jail and take him to Dartmouth. When the sailors saw the man who had conscripted them, their real leader and the cause of their present happiness, they were overjoyed and rallied around him. Cecil gathered in what was left of the treasure, about £140,000 worth, and the Queen doled it out, taking Walter’s share after expenses (mainly his £10,000 loan), as a fine for his having married Bess. Then, at Christmas 1592, she released them from the Tower.

However, though she had punished Walter, she was not ready to have him back as the captain of her guard. It was banishment to Sherborne,

Sherborne Castle.

and the start of what seems to have been the happiest time of Walter’s life. He enjoyed being with his wife, managing his estate, hanging out with friends. Among these were the great playwright Christopher Marlowe and the mathematician Thomas Hariot, who had scooped Galileo in seeing sunspots and making a lunar map. Hariot also helped Walter design some of the great fighting ships of the navy, which Walter was instrumental in building up as a defense against Spain.

Life got even better when Wat was born, on 1 November 1593. Walter doted on him. He wrote a poem for him, and evidently sang it to him as he bounced him on his foot. It’s a comic song, identifying Wat as a “wag”— a young man who’s also a wit and a joker, which are two of the things that Wat turned out to be, and it predicts a bad end for the wag if he doesn’t stay away from the hangman’s bag, or noose:

Three things there be that prosper up apace
And flourish, whilst they grow asunder far,
But on a day, they meet all in one place,
And when they meet, they one another mar;
And they be these: the wood, the weed, the wag.
The wood is that that makes the gallows tree;
The weed is that which strings the hangman’s bag:
The wag, my pretty knave, betokens thee.
Mark well, dear boy, that these assemble not,
Green springs the tree, hemp grows, the wag is wild,
But when they meet, it makes the timber rot:
It frets the halter, and it chokes the child.
Then bless thee, and beware, and let us pray
We part not with thee at this meeting day.

Walter wrote some other great poems in those few domestic years at Sherborne. He was already known as a poet, his poems having for a time appeared in songbooks and miscellanies. One, “Farewell False Love,” was popular, having been set to music by William Byrd. People, among them probably the Queen, were amazed at the quality of the new poems, and also at the subject matter. It was usual for the Queen’s great men to write the occasional poem, but never really good ones like Walter’s. He was, with his friends Edmund Spenser and Christopher Marlowe, the great poet of the time before John Donne, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare.

His poems register his bitterness at how the Queen had treated him and how he had wasted his life at court. But he started a longer poem too at the time, only a part of which survives. It was about his relationship with Diana or “Cynthia,” the moon goddess, and it registers his growing awareness of the Queen’s perspective and what he might have done to her. He missed her. She was “the world,” the great alternate attraction to his beloved wife. She was the “action” that, for all the pleasures of domestic life, he badly missed.

Soon Walter was easing back into the Queen’s favor, entering into another few years of power until 1603, when she died. In 1595 she gave her approval to a voyage to Guiana, an exploration up the Orinoco River from Trinidad, at its mouth. Walter hoped to start an English settlement there, as he had (unsuccessfully) at Roanoke in Virginia. She didn’t, however, contribute any money or ships, and her letter of approval doesn’t refer to Walter in her old, glowing terms. She was still insecure about Walter and she never was much interested in colonies. She regarded her fighting men, like Walter, as full of what she called “vainglory,” always pushing her to fight the protestant cause in Europe, to drive Spain off the oceans, and to hoist the flag over places like Newfoundland, Virginia and Guiana. Didn’t they have enough trouble just hanging on to Ireland?

Which is where they went when they got too forward. There, they were sure to learn humility.

The object of Walter’s latest expedition was to find the fabled city of El Dorado and, more practically, to give the natives of the area some support in their fight against the Spanish. Raleigh went 500 miles up the Orinoco, made allies of the natives in his cause of founding a colony, heard their stories about the great city, and found some promising rocks that proved to be worthless. When he got home he published a book about it to convince his backers and the Queen, since he had no wealth to show for his efforts.

She wasn’t impressed. Where was the money? But Walter didn’t give up. He immersed Wat in stories about the Orinoco and planned his return, sending his lieutenant Lawrence Keymis back the following year. Keymis was a fellow of Balliol college and friend of Hariot’s who came to share in the intellectual life at Sherborne. Walter also started agitating the Privy Council to launch a body-blow attack on Spain. If he couldn’t acquire wealth for the Queen, he could contribute to her fight with Spain. He claimed to have heard rumors of another Spanish attempt to land troops in Ireland —a gambit that had been tried before with the idea that the Irish, being Catholic and oppressed by the English, would welcome the Spanish. It hadn’t worked; the Irish regarded the Spanish as foreigners and would-be colonizers. But the Spanish kept trying, and it was they who provided funding to Ireland’s great rebel the Earl of Tyrone. There were also rumors of another Armada.

The Privy Council went for his idea. Essex himself, and the Lord Admiral Charles Howard, agreed with Walter. The Cecils were persuaded. The Queen agreed. Also they all recognized Walter’s merits as a maritime commander and appointed him Rear Admiral with the task of marshalling the crews. The attack would be on Spain’s major harbor, Cadiz. It included a squadron of Dutch warships; the Dutch were always eager to strike back at their colonial masters. On June 3, 1596, a counter-armada of 120 ships sailed out of Plymouth, Walter in charge of one of the five squadrons.

They caught the Spanish completely by surprise, with a large merchant fleet trapped in the harbor and the harbor guarded by only four galleons, though they were giant ones. But Essex and Howard made a major mistake, an attempt to land troops through the Atlantic breakers and attack the city, thus circumventing the four great warships. Raleigh insisted on a direct attack on the warships, shouting down his colleagues. Since their plan was failing, they allowed him control.

The attack was so overwhelming that the four Spanish galleons cut their cables and ran aground, their crews abandoning ship. Two of the galleons exploded. The English sacked the city, while the Spanish burnt their merchant ships to keep the English from making off with them and the wealth they contained. But Walter was not among the looters. At the start of the attack on the galleons, a cannon ball had bashed into the deck right beside him and driven shards of splintered wood into his leg. He went down in agony, and ever after walked with a limp.

Though he went back to England penniless as usual, word of his heroism preceded him. He and the Queen were soon back into their familiar, pseudo-domestic habits. After five years of disgrace, he was back in favor, once again the Captain of the Guard. He was one of three, with Essex and Robert Cecil, who circled Elizabeth in her last years.

Then Essex began losing influence. With Walter as Rear Admiral he made two more strikes at Spain that degenerated into privateering excursions, and unsuccessful ones at that. He was supposed to be destroying the Spanish navy. Because he wasn’t, the expected second armada arrived in the English Channel. Once again it was driven off by weather, fortunately for the English, who were not prepared. The Queen blamed Essex. Where was this vaunted navy that she had spent her money on?

Then Tyrone launched a full-scale rebellion in Ireland, and Essex was sent to quell it after a confrontation with the Queen when he tried to get someone else, preferably Walter, appointed to the task. Essex wanted to be close to the Queen, who was obviously dying, so he could facilitate the transition to and curry favor with her obvious successor, James VI of Scotland.

Essex failed spectacularly in Ireland and, paranoid about what Walter might be plotting with Cecil against him (nothing, as it turned out), made a surprise return to London and raised a rebellion. On 8 February 1601 he captured a deputation of Privy Councilors who had gone to read the Riot Act to him. Walter prepared his Queen’s guardsmen to defend the palace. As Essex approached the palace, however, his support fell away and nobody from the crowds joined him. Walter presided over his execution.

Meanwhile Cecil was making his own arrangements with the Queen’s successor, James. One part of his plan was to put Walter in a bad light. He could raise him as a threat, protect the King from him, and earn his gratitude. Essex had also been corresponding with James, evidently offering him a faster access to England’s throne than waiting for the Queen to die. James decided that Walter was responsible for “martyring” Essex. Later in 1601, when James sent a Scottish earl to weigh Walter out on the issue of succession, Walter replied that he was so deeply indebted to the Queen that he could not consider the issue of her successor. James decided that this hid a plot, and that Walter was the main threat to his succession to the crown. He referred to him as “that great Lucifer,” a reference not just to his supposed antagonism but also his supposed knowledge (through Hariot) of the black arts.

In 1602 Walter, at the height of his power, unaware it seems of the ruin that was to come down on him with the Queen’s death, commissioned a painting of himself and Wat. Wat, nine years old now, his head reaching to Walter’s waist, imitates his father’s posture in every way. They seem even to have the exact same impression on their faces, eyes slightly away from the painter, slight smiles on their faces. Wat would have been aware of his father’s, and accordingly of his, status, familiar with the routines and accoutrements of power and some of the great men of court.

Then the Queen died, James took over as James I of England, and Walter was stripped of his monopolies, offices and London house and finally, on the basis of a trumped-up charge of treason, thrown in the Tower and put on trial. He faltered at first under the knowledge that “the world” was no longer to be his, but his defense was a turning point. He showed courage and dignity, and people began to admire him again.

He was sentenced to death. He sent his blessings to Wat and Bess. Then his execution was postponed, and postponed. Bess and Wat, now ten years old, were allowed to stay near him, and a third son, Carew, was born in February 1605 and baptized in the Tower. Hariot visited and with Walter set up a lab and began refracting light through liquids. Hariot corresponded with Kepler, proposing a rational explanation for rainbows. Also, he and Walter continued to design ships. But there were bad times too. James attacked Walter in a pamphlet for picking up the habit of smoking from “the beastly Indians” and introducing it to Europe. Sherborne, which Walter assumed he had successfully transferred to Wat back in 1601, was taken. James appointed a less amiable Lieutenant of the Tower to manage Walter’s life and the experiments were over. Walter concentrated on his writing, prose.

It’s hard to say how much of Walter Carew might have seen. Walter published no poems about or for him. He may have written some, but the Commissioners of the King’s warrant after his execution took all Walter’s papers and destroyed or lost them.

Wat, in 1607, now living under straightened circumstances but still the son of a famous man, went off to Corpus Christi college in Oxford for what would now be called high school. He was a high-spirited, barely controllable boy, his teacher reported, of good intelligence and some ability in music. Bess ignored the complaints and concentrated on the praise. Wat argued that his teacher was a tyrant.

Walter must have been concerned, because in 1607 he wrote a pamphlet ultimately published as Instructions to his Son. The pamphlet contained a generalized set of moral rules to be followed by a young man setting out into adult life. Many of these rules sound funny coming from Walter, since they are rules most of which Walter never followed in his own life, especially those about lying and making and keeping friends. Wat seems to have understood this; he made a point of breaking every rule except the one about not drinking much. Like his father, he kept away from alcohol.

Walter’s prospects rose considerably when James’ son Henry, Prince of Wales, began to visit him, regarding him as the great English hero, the man who had prepared England against the armada and captured Cadiz. He talked with Walter about his explorations in Guiana and attempts to set up a colony in Virginia. Henry interceded with his father, at times over-rode him, when it came to keeping Walter happy and productive. “No king but my father would keep such a bird in a cage,” he said. It seemed that Walter had acquired a fourth son. Henry, aware that his father was allowing England’s navy, now the greatest maritime fighting force in the world, to deteriorate, set Walter to work on designing a new warship, the Prince Royal. Also he encouraged him to write a history of the world, parts of which Henry took off to the printers despite his father’s wish that they be banned. And Henry sent a small fleet to Guyana.

But then Henry suddenly caught a fever and died, on November 6, 1612. He was no longer there to stand between his hero and his father, a father who was now jealous as well as afraid of Walter. And Wat’s escapades were getting to be a bother. Bess couldn’t handle him, and Walter was stuck in the tower.

In order to keep Wat out of trouble, Walter hired Ben Jonson, a fellow poet and Shakespeare’s great competitor, as Wat’s tutor. This seems to have been a strange miscalculation, considering that Walter knew that Jonson, for all his merits as a poet, was a fighter, drinker and womanizer. Jonson and Wat went to Paris. At that time, you couldn’t leave England with more than £20 in your pocket (the yearly wage of two schoolteachers), so Walter funded the year-long trip through some agents in Paris, Brussels and Antwerp. Jonson and Wat cut a fine swath through the brothels of Paris, Wat taking to displaying the love tokens of damsels on a codpiece (a flap concealing the opening on men’s breeches). He also on one occasion found (or as Jonson later explained it to Walter got) Jonson drunk, handcuffed him spreadeagled to a wheelbarrow, and rolled him through the streets, arguing that he was a livelier crucifix than any the French had in their churches.

On their return from Paris, in April 1615, Wat wounded an opponent in a duel and had to go back to France and hide out for awhile. Jonson seems to have been involved in this event too.

On March 19, 1616, James released Walter, under guard, evidently deciding that Walter should prepare an expedition and go back to the Orinoco and find El Dorado. Walter had petitioned him to this effect a few times, with the backing of Prince Henry. Also, some expeditions, inspired by the pamphlet Walter had written long ago for the Queen, had successfully set up trading posts, established plantations and indeed formally claimed the area for England.

The King’s sudden decision to call Walter’s hand, and his approval of what was to that point the largest expedition to sail into the Caribbean, was actually a trap. James provided the Spanish ambassador with a list of Walter’s ships, armaments, ports of call and estimated dates of arrival. And he told Walter that any breaking of the peace with Spain would amount to treason. In other words he armed him to the teeth, told him he couldn’t fight, and told Spain where he would be.

Walter guessed he was being set up, and took precautions, cutting a deal with the French. Though the Hugenots that Walter had fought with in his youth had lost, their leader Henri of Navarre had accepted Catholicism and come to the throne, starting a new line of rulers, the Bourbons, who had great admiration for Walter. The deal with France was that Walter on his return could put in at a French port and from there appraise James’ reaction to the success or lack thereof of the expedition. If he could not safely go back to England, he could stay in France and help run the navy.

Once he was out of prison, Walter wandered around London noting the changes and visiting old friends. He dined with Jonson at the Mermaid Tavern, a place that the two had made famous as the site of their literary club meetings. It was here that Walter learned of Wat’s adventures in Paris. Wat was eager to play a part in the expedition and was made captain so he could go out and recruit a company of soldiers. It was at this time too that Walter and Wat were invited to a dinner party. Wat entertained the table by telling of how he’d gone to a whore that morning who refused to sleep with him on the grounds that she’d just been with his father. Walter struck Wat who turned and struck the man next to him, saying, “box about. ‘Twill come to my father anon.”

The fleet was battered by storms, and many men died of disease, but Walter arrived off the mainland of South America on 11 November 1617. He sent a ship back with news of the arrival and an optimistic pamphlet-length manuscript, News of Sir Walter Raleigh from the River of Caliana (now the Cayenne). Also there was a letter telling Bess that young Wat was well, amazingly resistant to the usual diseases that raged on board ship. Walter didn’t tell Bess this, but he himself wasn’t feeling at all well.

Walter organized the expedition up the Orinoco. He was sick and too old — sixty-five — to go himself, and anyway was needed to command the fleet that would guard the mouth of the river against the Spanish. Wat was passed by as leader of the 400 men and five small ships that would go inland. He was considered too impulsive. Keymis was chosen; he had the experience and the knowledge of the river. George Raleigh, Wat’s cousin, was given military command. However, Wat’s company of pikemen went, with Wat as leader.

As it turned out, Walter himself had nothing to worry about from the Spanish navy. Spanish authorities regarded Guiana as low priority and had other more important jobs for their fighting ships. Also they didn’t believe the report they received on Walter’s location; why would the English provide the exact location of a large fleet except as a feint for an attack that would come at some more important point? The information about Walter’s agenda was sent only to military officials in Trinidad and San Thomé up the river.

On January 2 1618, Keymis landed a few miles away from San Thomé, hoping that a few Spaniards would come down from the fort to negotiate. He would assure them that he was no threat and get some information about any mines or veins of ore. He thought he was far enough away from the town to discourage any concerted attack, but a dozen Spanish regulars struck at midnight at one corner of the camp. Unfortunately for them it was where Wat and his men were. Wat heard the shouting, Perros Ingleses!, and rallied his company, who quickly beat the Spanish back. But Wat forgot his orders about engagement and pursued the Spanish right to Thomé. When he noticed his men hesitating at the sight of the citadel, he shouted, Come on, my hearts! This is the mine you must expect! They that look for any other are fools!

It seems he had little faith in his father’s vision of El Dorado and was proposing to grab the wealth more immediately at hand by sacking the town. Maybe he was angry that he wasn’t playing a bigger part in the expedition. He charged and was felled right away by a musket ball. His troops, enraged at his death, broke through the defenses, and chased out the entire garrison, killing the governor and four of his main officers.

Keymis arrived to see the town taken and being sacked, and to realize that Wat had just given James the excuse he needed to execute Walter. He buried Wat with full honors. In the house of the dead governor, he found an exact copy of the expedition plans that Walter had given to James when the expedition was approved. Keymis seems to have panicked, deducing that the fleet at the mouth of the Orinoco would likely be under siege or maybe already destroyed. He and his men would be bottled up in the river to be picked off gradually by Spanish patrols. Instead of doing a thorough search of the immediate area for any mine or information about a mine, he decided on a rush trip further up the river with George Raleigh and a special party of volunteer troops. At some point he sent a party back to the fleet, and Walter received, on February 14, the news that San Thomé had been taken and Wat was dead. Walter knew that the message was his death warrant.

On his way back, Keymis burned San Thomé to the ground. He had nothing, finally, to show Walter but evidence of the King’s betrayal, a couple of gold ingots and several tons of tobacco found in the town. He was reprimanded by Walter and committed suicide. Walter now had the deaths of two people on his conscience, for Keymis had just been pursuing the dream that Walter himself had created and fuelled. If anyone apart from Walter himself was to blame for the total failure of the expedition, it was Wat.

The fleet broke up, a couple of Walter’s captains turning pirates as a way of recouping their losses. Historians have puzzled over why Walter didn’t go to France. Likely, he wanted to die.

He was executed on October 29, 1618. Carew Raleigh, now 13 years of age, wrote a last-minute appeal to James I to spare his father, and he spent the rest of his life defending him. He had a lot of help in this. As James and then Charles I more and more intrigued with Spain and insisted on their divine right to rule, Parliament and the people of England got more and more angry. They needed a hero and adopted Walter. He was from an old family, ardently protestant from the time of Henry VIII. He had fought the protestant cause in France, and he had defended England from the Spanish. He was regarded as a martyr.

Bess sent Carew to Oxford and then to Court. James didn’t like to see him there, crying out that he appeared like “the ghost of his father.” He was seen to share in Walter’s martyrdom since James denied him his inheritance, though it was returned to him by Charles I in 1628 in what turned out to be a futile attempt to lay Walter’s ghost to rest.

When Bess died in 1647 Carew came into possession of his father’s embalmed head. He married in 1649, the same year that Charles was beheaded. He had three sons and two daughters, and his older son Walter was knighted. Carew sat in parliament for four years. When he died in 1666, he was interred, with the head, in his father’s tomb in Saint Margaret’s Church, Westminster. The tomb had become a protestant pilgrimage site.

Likely there’s no sign of Wat’s grave up the Orinoco River, but his father’s poem for him is a much better memorial than any grave could be. It shows love and an understanding, at a very early stage, of Wat’s character. It contains for present readers the irony that it was Walter, not Wat, who ended up in the hangman’s bag (the equivalent for the nobility was the block). Wat had the luck to die in battle.

***

[Poet and Son is a series-in-progress about poets and their male offspring.]

Ford’s only current competition for size, behaving badly, and headlines is a former media reporter, Mike Duffy, who was appointed to the Canadian Senate by the Stephen Harper government, and then got into trouble over losing his lunch money or daily allowance or somesuch fiscal pittance. The Prime Minister’s chief-of-staff cut a $90,000 cheque to allow the miscreant senator to pay off his debts, and then promptly became the PM’s ex-chief-of-staff once the news got out.

Hey, wait a minute. Is this really Toronto the Smug, Canada the Well-Governed? And why are those charming high school cheerleaders at the edge of the football field waving their pom-poms, shaking their booties, and crying out, “Etobi-COKE! Etobi-COKE!!”?

I missed a very important point in my guide to administering prizes.

The Griffin Prize does not limit the numbers of books a publisher can submit. Neither do the Governor General’s Literary Awards. But the Giller does and so does The Writers’ Trust. That rule puts enormous power into the hands of publishers who are interesting in marketing their books. Don’t you think they would tend to submit the books for which they have paid the biggest advance or for which they have invested the most advertising dollars. And, who would blame them? But it takes the emphasis off literary merit and puts it onto marketing.

It means a great many worthy books never make it to the starting gate. If you are administering, find a way to remove that rule and widen the field.

Jean’s guide to readers

Be promiscuous. Read around. Don’t get trapped into reading what it is fashionable to be seen reading. Or politically correct. Or the latest buzz in the academic world. You’ll miss out.

The best way to find books:

• Follow your nose. Find writers you like, read more of their work. Find out the writers they like, and read their books.
• Talk to other readers. Read what they recommend.
• Spend time browsing bookstores and libraries. Read the dust jackets. Read a few pages.
• Don’t be fooled by what is on the tables or windows of booksellers, unless you are in an independent store. Publishers have paid to have those books prominently displayed.
• Talk to the people who work in your local independent bookstores. Talk to your librarian. Talk to the staff at used bookstores.
• Join a book club.
• Read reviews. You’ll quickly learn the reviewers to trust.

Some CBC shows are of interest to readers—Writers & Company and The Next Chapter. I don’t trust much of what goes on with Canada Reads, as regular readers of these reports will already know.

If you want to know where the real stuff is happening—innovation, experimentation—don’t spend much time surveying prize lists. For the most part, they aren’t catching it. Pay attention to what the small literary presses are doing—they are still fostering innovation rather than focusing on the bottom line. You may find certain publishers or editors that are publishing work that is of interest to you. I used to buy up all the old Penguins with the green covers—old detective series.

If you are looking at prize lists, don’t dismiss the short-list, for the reasons mentioned often in this report. Luck and politics play too big a part in prizes to really be a solid basis for reputations or literary merit. Don’t be suckered.

If you are considering reading prize-winning books check to see who was on the jury that handed out the prize.

Of all the prizes, the ones that might point you toward high literary merit are Lifetime Achievement Awards.

In first year university English class our Prof encouraged us to develop our own critical skills and not to be swayed by popularity, etc. Prizes have become about consumerism. When the chair of the Booker says that booksellers will be pleased with the jury’s choices he means lots of people will buy books. Prizes are turning people into sheep, not into critical readers. So I will say to you what my first year Prof said to us—Don’t be sheep. Be goats.

Jury: James Naughtie is a well-known broadcaster. During his career, Naughtie has anchored BBC radio coverage of British and American presidential elections and has written and introduced numerous documentaries and programmes for BBC Radio and television. He has written two books on contemporary politics, The Rivals – The Story of a Political Marriage, and The Accidental American – Tony Blair and the Presidency. Lucasta Miller has worked as Deputy Literary Editor of The Independent and, more recently, as a critic for The Guardian. Her novels include The Bronte Myth (2001) and Secrets and Lives. John Mullan is Professor of English at University College, London. His books include Anonymity. A Secret History of English Literature, How Novels Work, and What Matters in Jane Austen? He is also a broadcaster and journalist, writing a regular column on contemporary fiction for The Guardian. Sue Perkins is a comedian, presenter, broadcaster and scriptwriter. She regularly appears on radio and television programmes such as Newsnight Review, Have I Got News For You, Just a Minute and The News Quiz. Sue currently stars in the second series of the critically acclaimed BBC2 show, The Supersizers Go, in which she eats offal and cow brains in restrictive corsetry. (Jean: good literary critical skills, don’t you think?) Michael Prodger has been a literary journalist for many years and is a former Literary Editor of The Sunday Telegraph.

In Canada the Giller is often charged with being Toronto-centric. The Booker is all about London. Over the years, with few exceptions, all the jurors live in London.

Check out the strange stats of the Booker:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/datablog/gallery/2012/oct/16/how-win-booker-prize-charts?CMP=twt_gu#/?picture=397748599&index=0

A. S. Byatt—The Children’s Book VPL

Category: overstuffed Victorian historical novel.

Byatt has based this novel on the unusual life of E. Nesbitt, author of The Railway Children. It is deeply researched and deeply layered. The novel begins in what appears to be a very safe world, reminiscent of the world of Swallows and Amazons. The adults seem to respond with patience and understanding to the concerns of children, and to those less fortunate. Slowly other things start to creep in; the tone shifts. The infamous Oscar Wilde trial is taking place. Some of the characters go to see Aschenputtel, the very unDisney German version of the Cinderella story that is full of violence and devoid of charity and forgiveness. As with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, all is not as it first appears. By the way, this name-dropping of other writers and other books, plays, stories and so on is very much a part of the way Byatt stacks this novel.

Olive Wellwood, the Nesbitt character, is an expert in British fairy lore. Her character is used to explore the theme of creative impulse and spirit, and the responsibilities of creation. Another central character is the volatile potter Fludd, who makes a mess of his life, and the lives of his children. His apprentice, the young Phillip, is better able to function with people, though he has the same poor roots as does Olive. Other characters are puppet makers, playwrights, etc. It’s the Arts and Craft movement in full swing, and Byatt captures the bohemian spirit and excess of it and the Fabians. This is a world unknowingly desperate for Coco Channel—clean lines and no frills.

Every Edwardian concern, and I do mean every, makes an appearance in this novel—suffrage, women’s education, industrial revolution, European unrest, and so on, ad nauseum. There are endless descriptions of pots and their decoration, the details of every wardrobe item of every character and mini-lectures about various Edwardian concerns.

For example: E. M. Forster grieved over the invasion of Abinger by machines and the violation of Chanctonbury Ring. Bloomsbury coexisted in Bloomsbury and in simple farmhouses on the Downs, where they had servant problems and problems with plumbing. They loved the earth, but they loved it for something irretrievably lost, as well as for its smells and scents and filth and bounce and clog and crumble. Those great masters of the description of the English earth, Richard Jefferies and later W. H. Hudson, who can describe the whole expanse of the clean air, and the currents in it, and the rabbit-nibbled, sheep-cropped grass on the Downs, the close trees in coppices, the solitary thorns shaped by the wind, the fish fanning against the current, the birds riding the thermal flow, so that we think they are our guide to the unspoiled green and pleasant land—both of these are in fact men of a Silver Age, elegiac. They spend pages listing the species of birds and mammals erased from their land by pheasant-rearing gamekeepers. The goshawk, the pole cat, the pine marten, gone, gone away. Pike decimated. Trees tidied out of their wild shapes and habits. The Golden Age was when no humans interfered with anything.

The cast of characters is just as sprawling, including cameo appearances by every famous Edwardian who actually lived. Apparently Byatt had to create an excel spreadsheet when she was writing this novel is order to keep track of everyone.

At the core of the novel is destruction—war, incest, adultery, and rape. But the most destructive act is the way Olive treats her children and uses them as fodder for the work. Moral: don’t be a child of a children’s writer.

I haven’t touched much on plot but will supply a link below to a mostly glowing review. As I’ve said before about Byatt, the detailed excess puts me off. This novel is large in its ambition and noteworthy for how far it goes to capture a time in its fullness but I found myself skimming as I headed toward page 600 and something.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/09/as-byatt-childrens-book

J. M. Coetzee—Summertime VPL

Jean’s Booker Club

Summertime is the third book in Coetzee’s memoir trilogy. Maybe. The first two books Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life and Youth, as the titles suggest, are about the boyhood and youth of a character named John Coetzee. Aaron, who is very familiar with Coetzee’s work, says these books are fairly straight ahead narratives. Summertime begins with about a dozen pages from the Notebooks of the character John Coetzee. The next five sections are interviews that the biographer of the character John Coetzee conducts with people who knew John. The final section is undated Notebook entries. The book is not a straight ahead narrative.

Do you notice how careful I am being? To simplify things, if that is possible with this slippery book, I will refer to the author of Summertime as J. M. and the character in the book as John. A great deal of our discussion focused on how to operate this book. Not to suggest that the book is a difficult read, because the reverse is true, even in the sections where the biographer’s writing is deliberately horrible, such as “Julia.” But nothing about the book is straightforward.

Judith liked the book but said that there were parts that irritated her, such as the above-mentioned section with the despicable biographer. She then went on to tell us about her liaison with Coetzee when she was in Cape Town in 1972. We weren’t sure whether to believe her or not. Read the book, folks. Read the book.

GB asked, Who is the central character? Dennis suggested it might be John’s father, with whom he lives and who appears in all sections. In part, it is about the biographer and the nature of biography. Biographers prey on people. What can we ever know about someone we’ve never met, as the biographer has never met John?

Or is the central character John? So J. M. Coetzee creates a character named John Coetzee so J. M. can be deeply honest about the task of writing? Do we all have another self? John is awkward, socially inept and mostly boring in bed. Well, if we can believe the account of the women being interviewed. Or if we can believe the recording of the biographer who likes to embellish the things he is told in order to make them more interesting. Or if we can believe J. M., who has created the character of the biographer. But the biographer doesn’t have a clue that he is being written by Coetzee.

Phew. It’s constantly shifting ground

Okay, if we can’t determine the central character then what is the book about? We did agree that it is fiction and that in part the novel is about how we are all fictioneers, busy creating and adapting the stories of our lives. It’s also about writing and language, particularly avant-garde writing. And a major theme plays with the way we read, and our expectations as readers—symbolically the removal of John’s father’s larynx is about the removal of language.

Colin noted that the book is a massive portrait; a huge novel about masculinity that is archly cynical. What it means to be male and the world’s expectations of men. The novel also explores what it means to be provincial, and of mixed race. And it’s certainly very much about South Africa.

We couldn’t agree about the ending, which is ambiguous. Does the novel end with cruelty or survival?

Dennis didn’t agree. He said the novel is about a dysfunctional family. It’s a “cheap Cuban cigar.”

Aaron believes that in 50 years the trilogy of which Summertime is the third book will be thought of as Coetzee’s masterpiece.

But what if, asked Colin, there is a sequel. Colin suggested the groundwork has been laid in Summertime for a novel about adults and children. And abuse.

Our concluding voting:

Dennis, 4. Colin, 8.5. Judith, 8. Charlie, 8.3. Deb, 7. Aaron, 8. GB, 7.75. Jean, 8.25

Did our discussion enhance our understanding and appreciation for the novel? You bet it did.

In the email discussion that followed our meeting Colin clarified, “I said that the novel was a massive portrait of masculinity, and that the “failed” male/masculinity portrayed is analogous to the Boer, and to the Boer state, a rigid, repressed, potentially brutal masculinist state. The novel seems to me to be a way of trying to comprehend why the Boer state was the way it was, and why it was so paralyzingly unable to change

“The male in this novel cannot help to conceive life, and his death seems to resonate with the death of the Boer state.

“I wondered, and wonder, if there is a deeper reason for all of this.”

Pauline: “Yes to all of the comments: I found the layering and interweaving of different narratives made for pretty interesting reading, especially when I’d suddenly remember that this was Coetzee writing his own bio. His familiar theme of the ineffectual intellectual (male) in the midst of political and social change took on more resonance. I got a bit tired of the “biographer” at the end, though, so I’d give it a 7.5.”

Renee: “I like this interpretation, Colin, since Coetzee seems always to be grappling with his responsibility as a male and as a white citizen in a racist State. In Summertime he expresses a deep admission of guilt and culpability, a profound fallibility. As well he is reckoning with how personal and political history is recorded and revised. The impossibility of ‘getting it right’ on either level. I’d give it an 8.”

Colin: “I found myself thinking of the males in all colonial enclaves/nations. They were in those places to push aside the previous populations, extrude minerals, grow food and harvest trees for the mother countries. I’m not sure the Boers had a mother (country) after a while. Which may be significant.

“Of course these men were also grown to be harvested and shaped into armies, in the ongoing expectation in the home countries of wars of expansion and acquisition. They were a crop.”

Judith: “Nobody took that story about me and Coetzee seriously, did they? I never did, not even in 1972. And was it Cape Town?”

A few weeks later, from Judith: ““I agree with Colin but I think what we missed in our discussion was the importance of the women in the book, not just their characters as presented through the biographer’s manipulations of the interviews, but as Coetzee, who has framed the notebooks and the “biography” within a larger, I would say, documentary style fiction, places them.

It seems to me that Coetzee was unable to continue the trilogy as he began it with Boyhood and Youth, as fictionalized memoir, because the character has not been able to reach maturity (and neither has his country).  Maturity is impossible in this context, so how can there be Adulthood as a third volume? What is exasperating to us is the character John’s clumsiness and self-consciousness as he attempts to understand and reach for something bigger in his own life, and to address the Boer legacy that clings to him. The women in the book are somewhat disdainful of him, he has a place temporarily in their lives, but he is not loved. He is not a romantic hero. Even his cousin Margo’s appreciation of him finds it limit in exasperated affection, deep love somehow defeated by what she sees as his ineffectualness. He has ideals, but he can’t seem to live properly.

I liked the fact that the character John has these dreams.

Coetzee seems to suggest, by leaving the question at the end, that the choice is between two different kinds of masculinity (or humanity?), one that is dogged and dutiful, if not loving, but that cannot break out of that, and one that that may not be fully evolved but is trying. I liked that John is trying, in his clumsy, boyish, sometimes intelligent, sometimes naive way, for a deeper, more connected way to be, even as he fails. Coetzee doesn’t let us stay with a romantic vision.

I decided to read Diary of a Bad Year after our meeting, a $6.99 remainder I’ve had for a few years but forgot about. Right away I disliked the way Coetzee set up the young woman character. I didn’t find her first person thoughts believable, in the way that I do believe the women in Summertime, despite the biographer’s manipulations. But is that Coetzee tricking me into seeing the women as somehow more authentic, because even in their anger they seem more straightforward? As I kept reading Coetzee subverted that notion, batting this way, then that…. Characters as deadly ping pong or something.”

Adam Foulds—The Quickening Maze

Foulds was the new-comer and underdog for the 2009 Booker, up against many seasoned writers. His first novel was published in 2007. His book-length narrative poem The Broken Word won the Costa Poetry prize. In 2008 he was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year.

The writing style of the novel seemed what you’d expect from a young writer, still learning the craft. There were far too many similes and sentence fragments for my liking.

Hannah turned and saw her sister’s face in the window. She wouldn’t come out, Hannah knew. She didn’t like extraordinary people. She like ordinary people and was preparing for her wedding, after which she could live almost entirely among them. She retreated out of sight like a fish from the surface of a pond, leaving the glass dark.

The novel takes its plot from a time when the now-regaled environmental poet John Clare was in the innovative mental institute of Matthew Allen. Dr. Allen invented a disastrous wood carving machine, convinced Alfred Tennyson (whose brother was also in the institute) to invest, which bankrupted the Tennyson family. Structurally, the novel takes us into the heads of various characters, including the mad and delusional John Clare and other patients. Brave, I suppose, trying to explain the thinking of a madman. It was not convincing for me.

In part the novel is about poetry and poets, “Poetry will survive. Civilization has never been without it.” I never really got any sense of the characters of the poets.

Readers didn’t respond all that favourably, but reviewers sure did:

Andrew Motion review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/02/the-quickening-maze

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/22/AR2010062204374.html

Sarah Waters—The Little Stranger

Regular readers will know that the previous two short-listed novels by Waters didn’t smite me. In this book, Waters has put aside the lesbian theme. The Little Stranger is a gothic romance ghost story set in post WWII England.

Dr. Faraday is called to the local manor to treat a young servant girl. He had been to Hundreds Hall as a child; his mother was on staff. Decades later the house is much changed, “the once grand house is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its garden choked with weeds. All around, the world is changing, and the family is struggling to adjust to a society with new values and rules,” says the jacket blurb.

For the first 120 pages the novel is a straight-ahead narrative about changing traditions and the clash of old and new, upper class and lower class. Around page 120 a “bad thing” is introduced and from that point the novel turns toward the occult.

The doctor narrates the story in first person. He’s a bit of a dolt and an unreliable narrator. His voice is that of calm reason and a bland bachelor.

I wasn’t persuaded by all the plot twists, and non-explanations of psychic events but the novel is a rip-roaring good read, if you like that sort of story. Does Waters bring anything new or fresh to the gothic romance story? No, I don’t think so.

In the odd twists that happen in the prize world here is a glowing review of the novel by Hilary Mantel who beat out Waters to win the Booker for this year:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/23/little-stranger-sarah-waters

Simon Mawer—The Glass Room

Another house. This one isn’t an aging English manor house but rather a brand new ultra-modern piece of artwork in a provincial Czech town—it is a vision of and a symbol for the future.

Viktor and Liesel Landauer commission the “brilliant” architect Rainer von Abt to build them a family home. The result is hailed as a modernist masterpiece. But there is an undertone to the success of the house and the domestic bliss of the young family. Liesel is Aryan but Viktor is a Jew, and the Nazi movement in Germany is unsettling, and threatening. Plus Viktor has strayed from the marriage bed.

The glass room of the title is the house that Rainer designs, a house that actually does exist, as do many of the characters. Hedy Lamarr makes a visit to the house, as do real life merchants and industrialists of the time, the tense days before WWII.

The real story of the house is deeply compelling. As in the novel, it was abandoned by the owners, who fled the country before German occupation. Then it was used by all manner of organizations and governments, including a dance studio and a children’s rehab gym, until finally in 2010 a vast amount of money was committed and the building was fully restored. reopening March 2012

http://www.tugendhat.eu/en/

In the novel there are too many unlikely plot twists for my liking and the frequent and often sentimental rhapsodies about the room and the space became irritating.

Her words are a shock to Liesel, and yet not a surprise. It is as though the Glass Room has prepared her for this, its spirit of transparency percolating the human beings who stand within it, rendering them as translucent as the glass itself.

Hilary Mantel—Wolf Hall WINNER

Karen Kain once said that when she was dancing Carmen if she missed one day of practice she lost the whole role and had to start from scratch. That’s how I felt reading Wolf Hall. I felt I was lost at least once per page. Part of the challenge is the narrative style. The novel is not first-person but the story is told from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell—much of it from inside his head. The reader figures out that every time the narrator says “he” the pronoun refers to Cromwell, unless you are directed otherwise.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/111733914

Many reviews have raved about the language but I often stumbled over that aspect as well. Far too often Mantel relies on short, breathless sentences to supply whacks of information.

He turns a page. Grace, silent and small, turns the page with him. The office is Prime. The picture is the Nativity: a tiny white Jesus lies in the folds of his mother’s cloak. The office is Sext: the Magi proffer jeweled cups; behind them is a city on a hill, a city in Italy, with its bell tower, its view of rising ground and its misty line of trees. The office is None: Joseph carries a basket of doves to the temple…

I found that I was avoiding reading—never a good sign. I sought out reviews to discuss what I was missing and to be spurred to continue

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/books/review/Benfey-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/nov/05/how-it-must-have-been/

I made it to page 155. Then broke my rule for the first time during this project—I didn’t finish the prize-winning book and returned it to the library.

The Coetzee book is a remarkable work but it would not have been a popular winner.

In Freiburg im Breisgau, in southwest Germany, two tall silent men clear the dishes from the guest tables in the Hotel am Rathaus breakfast room. The men bend forward from the waist before each table and their strong fingers are gentle with the delicate porcelain cups and plates. The used cutlery tings as they gather it in their palms. Their walk back to the kitchen is smooth and excellent. They seem to float among their guests. The men wear designer jeans and white short-sleeved shirts and runners, and they are the proprietors of the Hotel am Rathaus where I am staying . Their names are Thomas Hass and Richard Herkert.

*

Yesterday Thomas helped me retool my new lightweight-for-travel laptop computer keyboard so that I could write accounts and emails in both English and German. In German “keyboard” is Tastatur, a word I didn’t know in what is often still my first language. Thomas translated it for me. He and I laughed when we had solved the riddle of how to make my keyboard speak two languages: Thomas had done most of the sleuthing work, but I helped him navigate the Windows 8 operating system with which he was not yet familiar. He reminded me when we had finished that in the German keyboard setting the English “y” is a “z” and the “z” is a “y.”

*

The room where I am writing, Zimmer 21, is on the third Obergeschoss, which means the fourth floor, if you think in English, of the Hotel am Rathaus. It is a single room, something not common in the hotel business in Canada, but perhaps common here, in the old, Altstadt, part of Freiburg. The buildings crowd together in a way that, when you walk through the narrow cobbled lanes and look up, you feel you are inside an extended single dwelling.

*

On narrow Konviktstraße inthe Freiburg Altstadt, residents have strung wires between the top stories of their homes on opposite sides if the street. The wisteria vines, planted at street level among the cobbles (round metal grating around the stems allows room for irrigation) climb the building walls and creep out along the wires to form a canopy. Blue petals drip down on you as you stroll through a garden ceiling.

*

On Konviktstraße, also, there’s a restaurant (Gasthaus)called Die Wolfshöle. It means “The Wolf’s Den.” A stone plaque on its wall informs you that when the building was erected in the early 19th century construction workers discovered a previously unknown “bridal cellar,” ein Brautkeller, below street level. It dated from the 15th century. This cellar provided sanctuary for (one assumes) brides who were hidden there in a time when “wild animals including wolves still inhabited the hills surrounding Freiburg” and “the wolves sometimes entered the town in search of human prey.”

*

Each room in the Hotel am Rathaus has a small bookshelf affixed to the wall above the bed, so if you want to read Günter Grass’ The Tin Drum (Die Blechtrommel) or Siegfried Lenz’s Das Vorbild (The Example) as I could in my room, you can reach up and do so. A small notice glued to the bottom of each book’s cover lets you know that you can purchase a copy of the book you started last night in bed from the hotel’s reception desk when you leave next morning. You can check out and/or purchase books of your choice also from the larger bookshelf on the wall across from the reception desk.

*

In my room on the third Obergeschoss (it translates as the third “upper floor,” if you are still thinking in English) the single bed is arranged so that its headboard forms the front of the desk at which I am writing. The bed (new sheets every morning) guides my eyes to its foot and from there to a dormer through whose double glazed window glass I see the tower of St. Martin’s church on the other side of the Rathausplatz. The chrome lamp between me and the bed serves as both a desk lamp and a bedtime reading lamp. In the corner, a few feet behind me on my left, is a floor-to-ceiling glass-and-chrome shower cubicle inside which I can “see” myself naked as I shower in what is part of my writing room, bedroom and bathroom.

*

Beside the shower, jutting out from a tiled part of room 21’s wall, is a chrome and porcelain Vitrine. It mimics the wash cupboards one used in hotel rooms (and homes) before the days of running water and plumbing. Except here the water runs from a chrome faucet into a porcelain bowl crafted to look like the olden-day washbowls into which one poured water from a pitcher and, after use, dumped it out the window into the street. The contemporary water in my room drains out the bowl’s bottom and disappears into the polished wooden shelf that juts out from the wall and on which the bowl rests. One wonders where the water goes, and how it gets there.

*

My favourite part of my hotel room is the floor. It’s polished oak, and the slats are thin and range in shading from yellow, through brown, to black. They run diagonally across this narrow attic room that in the early 18th century, when the house rows here were built, would have been servants’ quarters. The angled floor slats make the room seem wider (and certainly newer) than it is, and the yellow slats, on occasion, flash lightning-like bolts across the room. When the woman who cleans the rooms comes each morning to clean the floor, the Vitrine, the shower, and change my sheets, she speaks in the local Swabian dialect. Its lilting tones are as old as the town plus its region.

2.

Every half hour Freiburg’s many church bells toll out of synch, then in synch, and then in counterpoint. Their music rolls through the town like a strong wave and bounces and bangs around. It leaves no surfaces untouched. All of them are stone. After they’ve been going for a while the bells and their echoes and reverbs combine to produce a continuous single ring tone. When my father left Germany for Canada, it was the bells ringing in his hometown that he missed the most. His eardrums, in Canada, ached for Rheinberg.

*

What you get by way of balance to the churchy thunder is the high pitched chirping (Zwitschern ) of the swallows and sparrows and larks who build their nests in the cornices, facades, spires, towers, pillars, buttresses, ornamental statuary of the local architecture. They’ve been living in these human-made miniature eco systems, I’m thinking, for what in their time lines will have been a few hundred thousand generations.

*

Yet the birds’ sound—you can actually hear it while the church bells go at it because the two sound spectra create separate acoustic niches—is exactly the same as that made by their country cousins. I walked through the German forest, der Deutsche Wald, up the Schlossberg just outside Freiburg a couple of days ago (the famous Black Forest, source of Grimm tales, starts there) to empirically check this out. I heard not a tweet of difference between the two feathered cultures.

*

You don’t get the songbirds, I recall, in western Canada because the forests are too black. Our trees are conifers, not broadleaf, and there’s no real canopy in which the constantly jubilant fowl can have their way with the universe. It’s all straight up, back there, like the church steeples here. Pointy and prickly evergreens. We get squawks and caws and seagull screech in Canada west, not old-country chirping.

*

On another walk into the Black forest—it’s still speckled, higher up, with bright green beeches, lindens and oaks—I saw a logging operation. The felled logs, laid out neatly beside the Wanderwege, walking trails, were the local slightly smaller versions of our Douglas firs. No broadleafs had been cut. There was no sign of BC-style forest ravaging. The birds chirped at will.

*

It’s not hard in the city and the country songbirds’ compositions to notice licks from Hayden, Mozart, and the various Bach brothers. It’s impossible, in fact. I experience this as a convergence—of countryside and city, of the human and the animal, of time and eternity.

3.

I arrived in Freiburg just in time for Spargelessen. This is the rite that takes place locally (in most parts of Germany) when the white asparagus is harvested and the thick, two-finger-long shoots appear on your plate (you’re sitting on the cobbled city marketplace that surrounds the Freiburg cathedral at an outdoor restaurant) smothered in hollandaise sauce and accompanied by a retinue of new potatoes, neue Kartoffeln, that taste almost sweet, are also slathered in hollandaise sauce, and whose life purpose is to add greatness and glamour to the asparagus shoots. One needs long German-style sentences to get a hold on this cultural phenomenon.

*

The secret of Freiburger Spargel, or Spargel generally in Germany, is that it is grown in raised rows of earth and harvested just before it sprouts, touches sunlight, and begins the chlorophyll business. It’s therefore, because it’s not yet begun real world life, tender and innocent, free of prejudice or attitude. It’s just for you. And you are it, eating Spargel in Freiburg Deutschland. Man ist am Ort—one’s arrived.

*

The way to eat Spargel, or more specifically, to do Spargelessen with proper comportment and behavioral range, was taught to me by my friend and occasional mentor when I studied in Freiburg many years ago. His name was Wolfgang Peitz. He demonstrated how to properly say Spar-gel, with a slight pause between the “r” and the “g” and an ever so light roll of the “r” in the Swabian manner, and to understand that the asparagus fingers that form, when laid properly on the plate, a kind of hand without thumb or palm, should not be experienced entirely as metaphor.

*

Wolfgang Peitz explained how the dates when one ate the Spargel (the season starts in early May and ends in late June) were important to acknowledge and were anchored in all sorts of Catholic and pre-Catholic early agricultural heathen rituals in which one honours time, space and human occasion. You toast each other with ein Viertel, a quarter litre, of white Kaiserstuhl local wine served in special glasses whose stems are miniature pillars, and, if you are a real warrior tourist (or just German) you can eat the Spar-gel also with a side of what the menu on the cathedral square restaurant calls roher Schinken, raw ham.

4.

I didn’t, when I was a student here in the late 1960s, have the money to indulge and honour these agricultural rites and historical nodal points but am able to indulge them now. In memorium to the past in general, I rode my (rented) bike, yesterday, to the entrance of the Albert Ludwig Universität’s main building, KG 1, and I beheld there the larger than life bronze statues of Homer and Aristotle I could well recall from the many times I had passed between them as a youth. Homer holds a lyre, and has titled his head slightly upward, mouth open; Aristotle stares intently at a massive scroll he’s spread across his lap, and his lips are closed. At 19, I didn’t recognize the historical reasoning behind these details or know their possible meanings.

*

Homer and Aristotle seem now to provide the same encouraging ambience for the lunch eating students who sit below them and chatter and throw crumbs to the patient pigeons as they provided for those of us who sat there and did the same in 1967. The only difference is that the students I saw yesterday were spending a good part of their time chattering on their Händys, a German kind of mobile hand device.

*

No, the students I saw yesterday didn’t look much different than “we” did back then: guys with beards and long hair, scruffily clad, girls with long cascading hair (the kind Joan Baez knew how to use) and open faces. I found it impossible, as I stood and gazed at them, to imagine that these charmed kids could soon become not my children’s but my grandchildrens’ generation. They moved in that sure way in which students move: faces forward, full of certainty, eternity, always ahead of time (theirs, not the university’s) and gifted with a logic of truth.

*

I walked through Albert Ludwig’s broad cobbled courtyard that’s framed by the wide red sandstone arms of the university complex, a location I, as a student, had often walked in (less certain than the German students, but able, so I thought, to fake it) and for no reason I turned, looked over my shoulder. I saw Norbert, there, walking behind me. He didn’t recognize me, but I recognized him. He strode briskly, exactly like the sure-footed German students, forward, with a future as wide and distant as the terrain Homer and Aristotle had sung and then mapped out for him. He passed close by my shoulder, but we didn’t make eye contact. I kept my eye on him, wanted him to turn and look back as he walked away. I waited a few seconds. Then I let him go.

5.

Today, my last morning in Freiburg at the Hotel am Rathaus, a man in the breakfast room approached and with great courtesy asked the people at the table next to me—a group of four elderly women, and one elderly man—which language they were speaking. He asked in German. I had been asking myself the same question in English but had not been able to muster the cosmopolitan air required by such a mission. I had listened to the group for a while, and had heard Dutch, Belgian, French, Italian, or even local dialect inflections in various combinations. But I could not settle on a single language. When the German man said Darf ich fragen welche Sprache Sie sprechen?, May I ask you which language you are speaking?, and a woman in the party at the table said Wir sprechen Luxemburgisch, We are speaking Luxumborgian, a double take snapped my consciousness: who knew that such a language existed !?

Freiburg, May 7-9, 2013

Jean’s guide for prize administrators

Administering prizes has become another part of the industry. As James English points out, “the literary-value industry, that is, the whole set of individuals and groups and institutions involved not in producing contemporary fiction as such but in producing the reputations and status positions of contemporary works and authors, situating them on various scales of worth.”

Why is your organization administering prizes?

When the terms Giller effect, Booker effect or Canada Reads effect are used what is being referred to is sales = commerce. Ask yourself, is your organization in the business of selling books? Or establishing reputations? If the mandate of your organization is promoting literature, supporting writers or encouraging readers, then administering prizes might not be the best investment of your time and funding. Prizes only support a couple of writers. Prizes don’t create readers—prizes preach to the already converted.

What criteria are you using to select jurors?

Put lots of research and effort into jury selection. It’s the most important part of the process. Check out “Jean’s Guide to Being a Juror” and use the list of qualifications as guidelines. Strive for a balanced jury. A jury with one senior, established writer and two writers with only one book out likely won’t work. The GG increasingly has minor, little-known writers on juries and the resulting short-lists and winners’ lists show the timid results. Avoid celebrity jurors. They make the prize about something other than literary merit.

Pay jurors well. It is hard and demanding work. If you can’t pay the jurors, why are you running the prize? Some underpaid or volunteer jurors will work hard, but others won’t put much effort into the task.

Pick jurors because they have the skills to be good jurors. Do not pick jurors because they need the money or are famous.

Have a staged judging process, as outlined in the 2006 report. The ability to leave a discussion and come back to it later results in better selection—as reported by jurors.

Other than jury selection what are important details of administering prizes?

A ratio of 60% for prize money and 40% to administration is the minimum to run an efficient larger prize.

Prizes are supposed to be about creating discussion about books, right? So don’t create a prize with mail-in ballots. If you can’t trust your jurors to make wise decisions, why are these people on the jury?

Will you get enough quality entries to give the prize any authority? If a yearly prize is only going to have 6 or 8 books submitted, or less, is it worth the time and money?

Archival information is of value for future scholars and should be kept and at some point made accessible.

Have a table for book sales at the award ceremony.

Sponsors, the folks in whatever form who are putting up the money, should have no role whatsoever in selection of short-lists or winners, or jurors. Having sponsors involved in any of these elements suggests that prizes can be bought. Prizes should not be a way for people to receive tax receipts for giving money to writers they personally want to honour or help. Lifetime achievement awards should be about accomplishment, not about financial need.

But research also suggests that people who administer a prize should not be responsible for selecting the jurors. Here are the reasons:

• Administrators will be dealing with the jurors. Distance is essential. If the administrator has been involved in the selection process there is already a conflict on the part of the administrator.
• If administrators have any say or influence on jurors it gives the impression that the administrating body can influence the prize, which is undermining.

It’s an ordeal of waiting for everyone on the short-list. As the prize administering body you must work hard to include short-listed writers in valid ways. The Griffin Prize does a wonderful job in this area with a sold-out reading the night before the award, receptions and lunches.

Figure out a way to include schools and students. Perhaps have a student at each table. Or have the publisher donate copies of short-listed and winning books to schools. Prizes in themselves don’t create new readers but including schools creates the potential.

Encourage feedback and respond to it. From writers. From jurors. From the public.

Jury: Michael Portillo is a British journalist, broadcaster, and former Conservative Party politician and Cabinet Minister. Alex Clark, a literary critic for many years, writing for publications such as The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph and The Times Literary Supplement. She has been the Editor of Granta Magazine and writes for The Observer. Louise Doughty is a novelist, playwright and critic. She has worked widely as a cultural commentator and broadcaster and is a highly experienced judge of literary awards, in particular those for new and emerging writers. James Heneage founded Ottakar’s Bookshop chain and is now Chairman of The Times Cheltenham Literature Festival. Hardeep Singh Kohli is a writer, comedian, actor, presenter, director and cartographer. He is a regular presenter/contributor for BBC TV and radio shows.

Steve Toltz—A Fraction of the Whole VPL

I laboured through this novel. It took me weeks to finish it. Partly my slowness was due to travel and other distractions. But mostly I slogged along because the book is so self-indulgent.

The narrator is Jasper Dean, writing from prison, though we don’t know why he is there. Jasper is writing the story of his father, Martin Dean. The extravagance of the life of the father and son knows no bounds. Martin’s brother, Terry Dean, is a famous criminal so we learn the lengthy story of Terry’s sports career-ending injury at the age of 8 and his turn to crime. Martin and Terry have an odd relationship because Martin had been in a coma for years when Terry was born. Jasper is also seeking information about his mother Astrid, whom he never met, after finding out that the grave he has visited for years with his father doesn’t actually hold the coffin of his mother. Are you starting to get the picture?

Yes, Australians have a reputation for a quirky sense of humour, passion for flamboyant criminals, and appreciation for satire and sports. But this novel goes over the top, over and over and over:

• Martin associates with career criminals
• For a time Martin runs a strip club
• He writes a book about how to be a career criminal—the publisher credits it to Terry
• Terry becomes famous for murdering sportsmen who cheat, coaches who dope their players, and crooked bookies. (That part is really funny)
• From the book jacket: “It’s a story that takes them from the Australian bush to the cafes of bohemian Paris, from the Thai jungle to strip clubs, asylums, labyrinths…”

And so on…

The sweeping novel is about family relationships, sibling rivalry, the nature of mortality, the purpose of life, and the nature of happiness, love, responsibility and happiness. Toltz uses various mechanics to tell the story, including Martin’s journals and notebooks. And the whole thing just gets tedious.

The first section, about Terry, is the best part. And that’s what kept me reading—the hope that Toltz would return to the success of the first 100 pages or so, because he really can write a rip-roaring story. But it doesn’t happen. Instead the plot is full of philosophical and political rants:

Heroism in war is no longer an act of valour but attendance.

Sometimes the rants go on for pages, about the philosophical approach to life. Martin is a character, so the rants do fit his character but such writing doesn’t serve the novel well. And other times Toltz just seems in love with his own indulgence:

Let’s not mince words: the interior of the Sydney casino looks as if Vegas had an illegitimate child with Liberace’s underpants, and that child fell down a staircase and hit its head on the edge of a spade.

A Fraction of the Whole is Toltz’s first novel. The publisher calls it an “epic debut of the blisteringly funny and talented Steve Toltz.” And it is often that funny and outrageous. But I would argue that it is an overly ambitious novel by a writer who does not yet have the full skill to maintain the pace at such length. Prior to this novel Toltz honed his writing skills on movie scripts.

Aravind Adiga—The White Tiger WINNER

Jean’s Booker Club:

Chinese Premier Jiabao is about to make a visit to Bangalore. Entrepreneur Balram Halevai, known as The White Tiger, learns of the impending visit and decides to write a letter to the premier to tell him “the truth” of Bangalore. The letter is the novel. Everyone in the group had problems with that framing device. The intended audience of the novel seems to be Brits and Americans, not the Chinese premier. Colin Browne, our newest member, said that the writing gave the impression of a book written by committee; Adiga has a lot of points he wants to make and inserting them all through one first-person narrator, particularly this one, isn’t persuasive. Pauline, who is often heard complaining about how many first-person narrators we read for this group, did say this novel is the best so far.

Charlie pointed to the complexity of the hatred that the novel presents and thought that aspect was well done. We agreed the novel is not like the romantic versions of India we have read from other Indian-born Booker short-listed writers, all of whom are what reviewers call NRIs, non-resident Indians—Rohinton Mistry, Salmon Rushdie, etc. Adiga still lives in India. Certainly, Adiga is not trying to aestheticize poverty and squalor. He describes post-colonialism’s being replaced by international corporate screwing, as Renee puts it. India and China are the two rising superpowers. We waggle our fingers at China for its despicable record on human rights and India becomes the darling because of its British ties and so-called democracy. The novel shows the ugliness of the place and the deep corruption of all its public institutions, from government to medicine to transportation and housing. Brian Fawcett, visiting from Toronto so joining us for the evening, suggested the novel is romantic but it’s the dark side.

Balram is sometimes deceptively simplistic and naïve and other times pretty sophisticated in his views. We weren’t always convinced by either extreme. It isn’t an easy or comfortable book. The reader knows from the beginning that Balram has murdered his employer. As we learn the story of Balram’s life, our insider knowledge of the impending murder creates a vicarious pleasure and makes the reader complicit in the act. The murder scene itself seems pornographic. As Colin pointed out, Balram is an immoral moralist and the novel raises the difficult, uncomfortable and not easily answered question—if by killing someone you are doing the world a favour, then is it okay?

The novel has a limited focus. We see the extreme poverty of Balram’s life as child, then the difficulty of being a servant. His employer and family show the extremes. What is nowhere to be found is India’s middle class.

Colin had an argument with the very intent of the book. Does Adiga do anything new? Charlie suggested, probably not.

Why oh why, as we so often wonder at Booker Book Club night, did this novel make it to the short list, then actually win? It is Adiga’s first novel—do Booker juries like to discover new writers and make stars? Do they favour Indian books? As you read the rest of this year’s report you will see that from my opinion, it was not a stellar year.

Denis Bolen was unable to attend but sent his comments:

I found this book almost shockingly easy to read (perhaps it was one of the tomes that started the whole ‘Readability’ debate re the Booker) which was a surprise because I find most Indian writers entirely too stuffy. The conversational/diarist style serves the interior narrative well, despite the lapse in credibility due to framing the whole thing as a supposed letter to the Chinese Premier. Somehow Adiga gets away with it, perhaps because the action is quick starting and continuous.

I also found the amoral tone of the character refreshing. There seems no tolerance for the ridiculous ins and outs of Indian sub-continental religious-cultural nonsense; it is treated instead as simply a convenient entrée to methods of taking advantage of others. Perfectly diabolical. In fact, when/where has there been a darker, nastier and more cynical anti-hero than Adiga’s Ashok Sharma? Dickens used to enjoy creating such blackguards—and let them make mayhem in many different ways, including murder—but they never got away with it in the long term, not like our Ashok.

I have not read the other short-listed books; this one I thought overall deserved attention, but perhaps the Booker people might have been swayed by ethnicity and the remarkable fact of its being a first novel. I give it a seven on the deserving list.

Rex off on Cortes Island also sent his comments, which I read to the group:

I liked this book for a while. I admired the exposé of mass delusion, pretension, and cultural deceit. It was a refreshing “wait a minute” counterpoint to the capitalist rise of the third world.

Early on, I enjoyed some of the vivid detail, but eventually the writing style got a little tedious. It reminded me of annoying movie scripts that remind us every 2 minutes that the bad guys are really bad or that the workaholic husband is ignoring his family. As George S. used to say: Completely without irony.

As a result, the characters in this book become sort of stand-in sock-puppets for the author’s social commentary. Rich snobs are snooty, condescending, and corrupted by money. Okay, I get it. But what about the characters as actual people? I didn’t ever sense these characters were real people. Except sometimes Balram appeared complex and ironic. Eventually, however, even Balram grew predictable, always coming off as the low-class bumpkin preoccupied by the glitter of the new wealth.

The low-class poor did not seem real. They seemed trite. Simple, rural people can be intelligent, complex, nuanced, etc. These people didn’t seem to have much depth or native intelligence. And Balram’s descriptions of village life did not feel authentic, especially when he returned to the place he supposedly grew up in. His descriptions seemed like a school essay, not a memory of a returning hometown citizen.

The letters-to-a-Chinese-leader technique didn’t really work. I kept thinking: This isn’t a letter, it’s a novelist trying to make his story sound like a letter. Interesting idea, but the voice kept shifting from character to author.

Adiga exposes a cultural myth about progress in poor nations, so I give him credit for that. And he is right about the way meanness and bullyism arise during such economic transitions. So points for that. First novel. Okay. Not bad.

Rex’s score: 5.8

I forget at what point in my reading of Rex’s email that Judith cracked us up by saying, “I liked this review for a while.” As our voting will reveal, we were not in agreement about this novel

Deb 7, Colin 4, Judith 5.5, Brian 5.63, Pauline 6.63, Charlie 7, GB 6.5, Jean 5.

The book is an easy read but was not a popular winner with the media:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/sameerrahim/5457077/Dont_buy_the_Booker_winner/

It is a first novel.

Philip Hensher—The Northern Clemency

Here is another novel that seems to me to be self-indulgent and overly long.

Hensher uses the clumsy and so-obvious device of a house party to introduce the various characters of the neighborhood that is the primary focus of the novel, and very specifically two families—the Glovers and the Sellers. Katherine Glover has decided to have a house party—for reasons we will be told later—and the whole neighborhood is invited. Katherine’s husband Malcolm pours drinks. Daniel, the handsome and personable 16-year old son entertains and eyes the ladies. Jane, 14, puts up with the event. Tim, 9, hides behind the sofa and reads. Katherine hoped the new neighbors would be able to attend, but the Sellers have not yet moved in across the street. Each character is introduced by the clothes they are wearing, the number of the house on the street, job, etc. It’s like bad summer stock theatre.

The Sellers—mother Alice, husband Bernie, daughter Sandra and son Francis—have been living in London, where Bernie works for the electric company. They move to Sheffield because Bernie has been offered a job promotion.

The novel is pre-Thatcher. We are just at the beginning of the labour problems that were to wrack Britain in the 70s. Hensher uses these two families to illustrate the growing isolation of 1970s British culture and community. So, the things you’d expect—changing economies, family relationships, the effects of politics on the individual, and how values change and alter with age. Tim becomes an unemployed radical protestor which provides lots of friction with Bernie and the establishment’s position.

The story, and the stories of each character, are unwound in an interesting patchwork, though not always convincing. There are many plot twists that I found melodramatic, and very Freudian. The young friend of Tim, Andrew, is bullied at school, is attacked, and breaks both his legs. In hospital it is discovered that Andrew has a rare disease (why his legs broke so easily) and will die. Tim visits every day, asking, How does it feel to be dying? Andrew’s mother suffers from depression and is unable to leave the house. All the teachers are horrible and harass their students verbally.

Tim saves up to buy himself a snake, a topic with which he is obsessed. The day that the Sellers move in, Mrs. Sellers sees Tim at the upstairs window holding the snake and reveals this secret to Tim’s mother, unwittingly. Tim’s mother Katherine has a fit, marches out of the house holding the snake about her head and stomps it to death in front of the 9-year old Tim. But it wasn’t this episode that put Tim on the strange path of his life, involving a lifetime obsession with the older girl across the street, Sandra. And it wasn’t Sandra’s bizarre behaviour of opening her shirt, undoing her bra and forcing the head of the 9-year-old Tim between her breasts that sent Tim off the rails. It seems he was marked at birth, as noted by his mother:

She could remember the shock of coming in, one day, and peering over the by then very shabby and well-known bars and seeing, instead of what she had expected, the calm expectation or funny screwed-up understandable rage that Daniel and Jane had displayed, the unnerving face of Tim as a baby, like no baby she had ever seen, lying there on his back observing and calculating with what looked unmistakably like adult resentment.

Tim has a face that even his mother can’t love. It’s no surprise near the end of the novel, when Tim finally confronts Sandra and is rejected, that he walks off into the ocean, and commits suicide.

Sandra is not unfamiliar with sudden death. Her Australian roommate has hanged himself by mistake while masturbating.

The novel is sweeping in its scope and my review is nitpicking. But I do wonder, How did such a heavy-handed novel make the short list? Hensher has a habit of bringing slight characters into an already crowded situation, unnecessarily. Often the plot is clumsy—you can see the puppeteer pulling the strings. Alice has a brain hemorrhage and goes into coma allowing her husband and son to sit by her side and tell the unhearing Alice about their feelings (and showing the reader that Hensher doesn’t know much about brain injury, coma, or recovery). Katherine’s previous employer is charged and Alice is forced to testify. To bring some relief, Katherine’s husband brings out their photo albums to sort, allowing the married couple to retell the stories of their lives and their growing children. Ho hum.

It is obvious that Hensher is mapping the changing landscape of London neighborhoods and the communities of England. But you’d need a lot more context than the novel provides to know whether he has done a good job at this task.

Hensher, you may remember, was a judge the year Hotel World was short-listed, when the jury made a point of saying they were picking novels that would connect with the reading public (versus looking strictly for the highest literary quality). That jury also focused on new faces, turning its back on what some call the established elite or literary old guard. Hensher has received lots of media attention in Britain as a hot, young writer.

Sebastian Barry—The Secret Scripture

Category: The long-suffering and dysfunctional Irish

The framing device of the novel is two written pieces by the two main characters. Roseanne, locked away for decades in a mental institute, is now 100 and decides to put down her story. She steals some paper, writes daily, and hides the papers under the floorboard.

Dr. Grene works at the mental hospital where Roseanne lives; the institution has been slated for closing. It is his job to assess all the patients and determine where they should be relocated. He writes his thoughts in a commonplace book. So the novel is the splicing of Roseanne’s autobiography and the doctor’s commonplace entries.

Although the two stories are often referring to the same incident the “facts” are often conflicting. Dr. Grene finds out that Roseanne’s father was once a police officer. Roseanne’s account refutes this assertion, and when questioned by Dr. Grene, she denies the information.

As usual with Irish novels, themes include the ripple effect of Irish politics for decades and generations, the oppression of religion, and the social issues of Irish society.

Father Gaunt is an evil creation. The young Roseanne is wildly beautiful. Father Gaunt sees her as a threat to all the males in the community.

Roseanne, you are a lovely young girl, and as such I am afraid, going about the town, a mournful temptation, not only to the boys of Sligo but also, the men, and as such and in every way conceivable, to have you married would be a boon and a rightness very complete and attractive in its—rightness.”

He tries to marry her off to a 50-year-old bachelor and at the same time insists that she must convert to Catholicism. Roseanne refuses and marries her beloved Tom, but still won’t convert. There are many intricacies to the plot but the Father succeeds in having the marriage to Tom annulled, Roseanne scorned, declared a nymphomaniac and committed to an institute.

Spoiler alert: don’t read the rest if you have any thoughts of reading the novel. Unless, of course, you subscribe to the belief that knowing what is coming enhances your experience of reading.

Barry has written previously about some of the characters in this novel, specifically Eneas McNulty. Eneas is a brother of Tom McNulty, Roseanne’s husband. Again through a complicated series of events, some years after the annulment of her marriage Roseanne takes compassion on Eneas and they share a bed. Roseanne gets pregnant, is outcast by the McNulty matriarch (another nasty bit of business) and ends up giving birth to a son in the middle of a terrible storm (yup, over the top in the melodrama department). But if that weren’t enough, the baby is snatched from the exhausted and finally sleeping Roseanne’s breast and spirited away to an orphanage, then adopted. Father Gaunt says Roseanne murdered the child. Dr. Grene, decades later, discovers that he is that son. So aged patient Roseanne is actually his birth mother.

Apart from the hijinks of the plot, the framing device falters. Often Roseanne’s sections topple into high lyricism. Maybe, the reader wonders, everyone born in Ireland has the gift of lyricism. Okay, I’ll let that go. But Roseanne is a rural girl and she writes with accomplishment and delivers her story in a well-organized and suspenseful fashion.

Some sections of the Dr’s journal are also hard to swallow. Why would he write a lecture about the politics from decades earlier?

It’s readable, as the jury claims. Barry says the novel was inspired by a story told to him by his mother. “We were driving through Sligo and my mother pointed out a hut and told me that was where my great uncle’s first wife had lived before being put into a lunatic asylum by the family. She knew nothing more, except that she was beautiful. I once heard my grandfather say that she was no good. That’s what survives and the rumours of her beauty. She was nameless, fateless, unknown. I felt I was almost duty-bound as a novelist to reclaim her and, indeed, remake her.”

The novel won the 2008 Cost Awards despite one juror’s publicly saying the jury agreed that the novel was flawed, and no one liked the ending.

Amitav Ghosh—Sea of Poppies

Category: Bollywood comes to the written page.

I try to avoid reviews until after I have finished a novel. But sometimes if I am struggling I do search them out—what are other reviewers and critics finding that I am missing? Sometimes those reviews spur me on to finish the novel, and to find deeper levels of meaning.

Sea of Poppies drove me nuts from the get-go. It’s an extremely well researched imaginative interpretation of people’s lives during the Opium Wars. Not the bigwigs, but the little guys. On-line readers report that this novel is the first of a trilogy and that Sea of Poppies just ends abruptly. In other words, a longer work that has been cut up rather than a complete novel in itself. I wouldn’t know because I became so irritated and bogged down by the bedlam of language (and, yes, I know that is the very point Ghosh is making) that I made it to page 100, read the review from New York Times and returned the book to the library.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/books/review/Bahadur-t.html

The scholarly work and the 40 pages of annotated dictionary at the back make me wonder if Ghosh might have tried for a popular history of the time. But, many disagree with me, as did the 2008 Booker jury.

Linda Grant—The Clothes on Their Backs ebook

Vivien Kovaks is the only daughter of Hungarian Jewish Immigrants. Some months after the death of her second husband, she visits a woman who had an important role in an earlier episode of her life, allowing Vivien to tell the reader the story of her childhood and early 20s.

Vivien’s parents never say much about their lives before escaping to London in the early days of the Nazis. Her father has worked his whole life as a gem setter but otherwise the Kovaks keep to themselves and as a result Vivien had a sheltered upbringing. One day a flamboyant man arrives, announcing that he is Vivien’s Uncle Sandor. Vivien’s father refuses him entry to the house, says he is scandalous and refuses to speak about Sandor.

Years after this event, when Vivien’s first husband chokes to death during their honeymoon, Vivien searches out Sandor, curious about the past of her parents and her own lineage.

The novel is another version of the holocaust survivor novel. Grant can write well, but her plot devices often seen awkward. Vivien’s courtship and first marriage aren’t convincing, simply there to create a reason for her curiousity about Sandor during a time when she is depressed and has time on her hands. Equally unconvincing is the affair she has during this time with a 19-year-old punker. Not enough is done with clothes motif, how they shape us, and we shape them, and how they hide things, or reveal them and connect to our needs and cravings. Parts of the story are rushed, barely more than sketches—like the brief description of Vivien’s second marriage.

The best part of the novel is the relationship that develops between Vivien and Sandor. She wants to believe, as the papers have dubbed the slum landlord Sandor, that he is the “face of evil” but his story is more complicated. Like Falstaff, he is a survivor with a huge zest for life. It isn’t easy to hate him or dismiss him.

Linda Grant won the Orange Prize in 2000 for her second novel, When I Lived in Modern Times. This novel was her fourth, and she has also written successful non-fiction books as well as a noted career as a journalist with The Guardian.

I wouldn’t give the 2008 prize to any of he books on this short list. If this short list is the best, British publishing is in the doldrums.

At the announcement of the short list the Chair, Michael Portillo said, “We particularly think that this is a great year for readability. These books are great page turners.”This comment makes me wonder whether he read Sea of Poppies. The language makes the reading of that novel real work.

He said three or four of the books were very funny, adding: “Book sellers should be pretty pleased with this list.”

That’s commerce, folks, not literary merit.

An interesting excerpt from Alan Bennett’s 2008 journal, from London Review of Books, 1 January 2009:

“4 September. A good deal in the Guardian about the Booker Prize and the experiences of those who have been its judges. I was once asked and had no hesitation in turning it down, the prospect of reading ten novels let alone a hundred was quite enough to put me off. Later I read somewhere that Martyn Goff had said that no one had ever turned down the chance of being a judge, which confirms what several of the judges say – namely, that he’s a tricky customer. Happy to see Rebecca West stigmatized as a bully as I’ve never understood why she was and is made such a fuss of – a sacred cow, I suppose. Roy Fuller gets some stick, too, which chimes with my remembrance of him when he was briefly a television critic. The whole thing reinforces what I always feel – that literature is a much nastier profession than the theatre.”

I’ve walked around town, gone to a movie, started reading a book, all the while with your report on my mind, especially Kim’s expose. I can only begin to tell you how depressed I felt when I read that “heavily experimental” work was just wiped off the table, indeed, not even on the table. Admittedly some of this work is way out there, some narcissistic, some just plain silly; however, there is work that genuinely tries to do it from another angle, another vantage point. I know some of these writers and I know how hard they work. I know that they are committed to their vision of writerly practice. I know that this work is backgrounded in solid research and reading. I know that to be completely wiped off the table in a one-day selection where what garners no controversy is deemed an eligible entry is horribly wrong.

Let me digress a bit… Just before the end of WWII the major thrust of painting headed into abstraction. My contention concerning abstraction is that the horrors of the war, the holocaust, Hiroshima, the war itself in its unconscious ramifications could not be depicted by the limitations of Group of Seven-type painting; yes, the best of it goes beyond depiction but it cannot contain in any shape or form what abstraction can do to render visible an event or feeling itself.

I’m going to digress a bit further… it will come together, I can assure you… I attended the readings for the Griffin, and in the foyer beforehand I spoke with one of the prize’s “administrators” who was betting on Jan Zwicky. Not knowing her work, I didn’t say anything but was interested to hear her out along with the other Canadians. Okay, well crafted, but images and metaphors of love as “fire” and “forge”? Nineteenth century metaphors in this now… I don’t think so. Babstock, on the other hand, delivered new words and new metaphors and new images to express this now. This is required if language in poetry is to signal anything beyond the page. And he won!!!

This ties up, for me, where the abstractionists are the experimentalists in writing. You bet there are some failed works, but there are also some great works… and not just NY painting but right here in this country despite the grumbling of some old-fashionistas, just as there are some really great and wonderful reads in the avant garde of Canadian writing. To see these works disregarded at the GG table is so arierre garde and subject to criteria that has nothing to do with literature… the get down and grapple with it reading that is the hallmark of some of the greats of the twentieth century is not just depressing but truly alarming. Yes, the GG’s feel like the country cousin trying to hold up their end of the conversation… it’s stuttering.

I am coming to the end of this project, finally. With the 2007 report I will start posting my suggestions, observations and conclusions, beginning with juries.

Jean’s guide for jury members:

A much-experienced juror suggests that the following are requirements for a competent jury member:

• The ability to read a large number of books in a limited period of time. This is something that many (not all) academics are trained to do, and that some jury members find totally overwhelming.
• Good literary judgment.
• The ability to articulate ideas, put forward choices, argue for them in a reasonable unbelligerent way, and abide by the jury consensus in a civil manner.
• Moral integrity in matters of conflict of interest and confidentiality.

That seems to me like a pretty good list of qualities. And perhaps the most important qualities. I would add a few other suggestions.

When you have been asked to sit on a jury here are some questions to ask yourself, and the administrating body.

Are you getting paid? Being on a jury can be an enormous amount of work.

Did your very best friend publish a book this year? Don’t agree to be on a jury if your spouse has a book that would qualify for the prize. Don’t even think about it. Same applies for lovers, children and your best friends.

Find out who the other jurors are, or might be, before committing. I believe most organizing bodies really do their best to put together good working groups but the publishing community in Canada is relatively small and word does get around. Are you the token purple person on a jury with four green people? That may be just fine, but it’s best to know what you are getting into.

Why are you being asked to sit on this particular jury?

Do you have enough time to do the job? Can your life accommodate the task and has the organizing body given enough time?

Once you have agreed to be on a jury, keep the following in mind:

Find out the jury process. Most jurors say the prizes that work the best follow something like the following:

-jurors submit a list, usually 10

-once the organizing body has all lists submitted, they are circulated to all jurors (in other words, no juror gets to see the others’ lists until all lists are submitted)

-jurors meet, by phone or in person, to discuss the lists and produce one shorter list. Depending on the number of jurors the shortened list can be 10 to 20 books. This process can also be done in two or more stages to accommodate more than one shipment of books. With larger prizes the jury may start to meet and discuss (in person but more frequently by phone or email) many months before a long list is shaped.

-jurors take a couple of weeks to review the new list, reread material

-another discussion occurs to attempt to create a short list, usually 3 to 6 depending on the prize

-some prizes provide for several conference calls to allow for lots of discussion and review

-a final meeting, or series of meetings, determines the final winner.

In my discussions with jury members those prizes for which the jury meets only once and the whole process is supposed to take place in one stage are often the decisions which the jurors are least happy with—they have felt rushed, or bamboozled. Having a break to reflect is important. If you are asked to participate as a juror in a process that is not staged, ask if more than one meeting is possible. At the current time the GG juries meet on one day and are expected to do the whole process in one go. The Giller jury is a staged process, as are the Griffin, Booker and IMPAC.

Another jury system is mail in or numerical, where jury members do not meet and discuss and may not even know who are the other jury members. Some people find this system cleaner—you read the books, make your decisions and submit your list. No fuss and no confrontation. Others argue that lack of discussion results in a prize of little if any authority.

Sometimes this system is used because it is less onerous to administer and usually less expensive. But sometimes this system is used because the administrating body doesn’t trust jurors and assumes that if the jury meets, one juror will get an unfair advantage. If the administrators don’t trust you to discuss the books, why are you on the jury?

Make yourself familiar with the rules of the prize. If they aren’t adhered to, consider filing an objection. For example, if rules stipulate that all jurors will supply a short-list of 10 books 3 weeks prior to the first discussion and one of the jurors does not comply, file an objection. If the list does not appear that juror should be asked to withdraw. I’m not suggesting that jurors should be fusspots about rules, but my discussions with jurors who have had a bad experience—which often result in winning books that the juror is embarrassed to appear to have supported—indicate that it is often because rules haven’t been followed, giving one or more juror an unfair advantage.

Ask if there is an entry fee for the prize. This shouldn’t affect your decision, but it might have some influence on what gets submitted. For example, there is a fee to publishers to enter a book in the BC Book Prizes. A small publisher might not submit a lot of books because of cost. What this means as a juror on this sort of prize is that you should familiarize yourself with books that would qualify in case something of merit has not been submitted. As a juror, you can call that book in. A juror can do this on most prizes (if the book qualifies, except for the GG) but it has extra importance for prizes that charge an entry fee.

Another time it is important to familiarize yourself with qualifying books is when the prize limits the numbers of books that can be submitted, as is the case with the Giller and the Booker. That is also the reason lists of submitted books for those prizes are confidential (to protect the publishers and to lessen anger of writers). The press release for the 2009 Booker long list said the jury had called in 11 books. I contacted the Booker administration office and the confidential rule would not allow them to tell me which 11 books, but they were able to tell me that 1 of those books did make it to the long list. So, somewhere there is a publisher with a novel on the Booker longlist that she didn’t think had a chance. Just goes to show.

Ask whether there are prereaders for the prize. If so, who are they? It is important that each submitted work is read by at least two prereaders; otherwise the risk is high of having experimental work tossed at this stage. Prereaders should be as qualified as jurors and they should always err on the side of generosity.

Strategy

When putting together the short-list, concentrate on literary merit and ignore issues of gender, ethnicity, geography, age, body of work or past wrongs (either by the writer to you, or by previous juries to the author).

Pick your battles. You can’t champion all of your picks.

Be cautious about putting your first pick at the top of your list—it’s a giveaway to other jurors. Put your first pick lower, then bring it up later. If you are lucky and are on a good jury this won’t matter. It’s preemptive strategy.

In an article in the Globe and Mail, book review editor Sandra Martin points to a trend with recent juries as “star makers.” That means favouring books because they are by new writers and shunning books by Old White Guys or members of the perceived establishment. The task of the jury is to follow the rules of the prize, and in most cases that means identifying the “best” book regardless of the gender, age, and point in career or ethnicity of the author. Stick to the task at hand.

Be prepared for criticism. If you collude in a bad decision, particularly on the bigger prizes, you will be criticized, as well you should be.

Jury: The director of the London School of Economics, Howard Davies, acted as chair. The other jurors were poet Wendy Cope, journalist and novelist Giles Foden, biographer Ruth Scurr and actor Imogen Stubbs.

Nicola Barker—Darkmans

Guest report from Sharon Bakar, Kuala Lumpur:

Despite being 838 pages long Darkmans never felt a long or arduous read, maybe because I was enjoying the joyfully meandering narration so much.

To talk about the plot of the novel is almost beside the point. Yes, there are story threads that run through, but they seem almost incidental, and not all are gathered neatly together at the end leaving the reader still caught in the mystery of who and how these folks in a modern Kent town become possessed (it seems) by characters from the past. When I was a kid I loved time-slip novels like Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, and Phillipa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, and always squeeze my eyes up tight to try to see a place as it was hundred of years ago, so this aspect of the novel greatly appealed to me.

The action doesn’t (for the most part) move out of a tiny geographical area, the town of Ashford in Kent. When I’ve mentioned this to British friends over the past week or two, I’ve seen their eyes boggle in disbelief that anyone would want to set a novel there.

It’s a nowhere sort of place, a transportation hub, serving the Eurostar service to continental Europe and torn up by roads. Whatever charm and history it had in the past has become pretty much obliterated in the interest of “development”. But Ashford, with its bypasses and Tesco’s and substandard modern housing estates, is arguably the main character of the book, and the past comes back to haunt … with a vengeance.

There’s a relatively small human cast for a book this size, the interrelationships between those individuals are thoroughly explored.

Beede and Kane are a father and son with apartments in the same house while remaining essentially estranged from each other. Beede works in the hospital laundry and is fascinated by the past. Kane deals in prescription drugs, and is haunted by the attempted suicide of his mother many years before.

Then there’s Kane’s larger than life ex-girlfriend, Kelly Broad, (a girl of the sort we would have called, not very kindly, “a right little scrubber” in my day); Gaffar, a Kurdish refugee who comes to work for Kane and is terrified (to the point of fainting!) of salad leaves; Elen, Beede’s chiropodist (who may or may not be a witch); Isadore, her husband, barely clinging to sanity at times; their son, Fleet, building a model of a cathedral from matchsticks. And several others including, the builder from hell, an art forger, and an incontinent spaniel with paralysed back legs.

Oh yes, and there’s also a shadowy character from the past, a sort of lord of misrule, who appears to be playing some rather nasty practical jokes on the characters.

There’s an awful lot of talk but in the sharp dialogue and in the asides of the completely garrulous narrator. (I kept thinking that it would be fun to see the novel written as a hypertext novel – it would be a fraction of its length without the detours!)

I came away from the book with more questions than answers. But I came away satisfied and I came away wanting more. (And disagreeing vehemently with Chairman of the Booker Prize committee, Howard Davies’ snippy comment about how it could have been more tightly edited … did he get what Barker was trying to do?).

I can’t think of another novel that manages to be both brilliantly comic and hauntingly sinister at the same time. Darkmans has its finger firmly on the (British) social pulse, while also being startlingly innovative in form and style.

Here are the comments from the Booker chair that appeared in The Guardian, mentioned above:

Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, one judge’s favourite, was the subject of much comment. There can’t be very many other people on the planet who have read this long, dense novel as many times as us. While Barker’s choice of subject matter and setting were thought to be original, indeed urgently necessary, the general impression was that not enough thought had been given to the reader. It seemed a book written for the author, whose evident zeal for language could only take one so far. But some stylistic adoptions from Pop Art and computer games added to a novel which, with much more disciplined handling, could have been a Middlemarch for our times. A number of judges had difficulty with italic interjections, broken out of the main text, as a way of presenting a character’s thoughts.

“Not enough thought given to the reader.” What? It seems he is saying that books that make you pay attention, pay really close attention, aren’t good. What nonsense. I don’t recall ever reading a book where I was so immersed in the reading but also so aware of the words on the page. The world of Ashford is so immediate. People are fixated by text messages, shop on abebooks and listen to Puff Daddy and Sting. This is not the soft, fuzzy Britain of PBS specials. Characters discuss the trivia of the Internet, the manipulative nature and unreliability of the tabloid press and the consumerism inherent in the Nike brand. But the novel is so richly concerned with language and linguistics:

I mean where do words come from anyway? What is it that gives a word its longevity, its staying power? Who legitimizes it? Why? And how? I’m seriously thinking about researching further into this whole area now, creating some kind of spontaneous academic thesis around it. Bringing it all right up to date, too, via patois—my speciality—musical and urban street-slang, African prison languages…Maybe even researching another book.

On her publisher’s website Barker explains that Darkmans is a book “about how history isn’t just something that happened in the past, but a juggernaut with faulty brakes which is intent on mowing you down.”

This novel mowed me down. I will search out Barker’s other books.

Ian McEwan–On Chesil Beach VPL

Jean’s Book Club

Charlie made a comment on facebook that let us know he was not enjoying the novel. At our Booker club meeting he said it improved once the Main Event took place. Hmm, I don’t think I’ll tell you about the actual event. For anyone who decides to read the novel, it would ruin the careful construction of the narrative. It’s a pattern in some of McEwan’s novels to build the story around a very minor event that becomes life changing. But Charlie said The Event made him interested in the characters, where he had not been before.

I will share with you part of the blurb from the dust jacket:

It is July 1962. Edward and Florence, young innocents married that morning, arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their private fears of the wedding night to come…

The narration is not first person. Though we get most of the story from Edward, the narration does slip in and out of both their heads. Both characters have been affected by their childhoods, and both have difficulty talking about their feelings, or their fears. So they marry, not knowing much about each other. As described by McEwan, their inability to talk to each other is painful

Edward’s mother was brain-damaged when he was young. The father, a teacher, takes over the housekeeping and childcare while also holding down a job. The mother vacantly wanders the house, dabbling with various projects. GB particularly liked the descriptions of Edward’s childhood, his interest in school and history.

Florence’s mother is emotionally absent. She spends a lot of time with her father. The Booker club members were not in agreement about the father/daughter relationship. Some pointed to sections that seemed to indicate that her father had sexually abused Florence. Others were not convinced the text was making this suggestion. The former would make the plot rather Freudian and formulaic—sexual abuse by a father of a daughter makes the mature woman sexually frigid.

We wondered if the novel really captured the early 60s. Was it as repressed sexually as McEwan suggests? Is the novel a nostalgic approach to the time? It is certainly a very focused look at two lives during a short period of time, and how those lives are affected by parental relationships, class structure, generational differences, sexual repression (and its consequences) and social climbing

But we also discussed whether the ideas have been historized, as moments in history that result in liberation are often idealized. Is McEwan using a formula, ignoring that individual problems can’t be reduced to a formula?

Deb and GB both said the novel reminded them of Hardy, or to be more precise, McEwan trying to be Hardy.

Dennis Bolen insisted that we talk about the writing and language. Dennis is new to the group so he wasn’t aware that we always do that at some point, though more often than not we get really sidetracked by other things before we get there. Dennis argued that in structure the book is not a novel, more a novella or an over-blown short story. It’s like Daisy Miller, he argued—a straight arrow narration with no turns. Novels have turns.

Pauline pointed to the excessive use of adjectives, often useless adjectives:

As he leaned in she felt the scent of his hair cream wrap itself around her face. His papery skin had a jaundiced gleam in the low light, his eyes were reduced by thick lenses to narrow black slits.

We talked about the irony of the narration, bathos and pathos, and in the end we were a bunch of fence sitters. It’s not a book that can be easily dismissed but it is not a shining star, either. Pauline gave it a “pass” when we did our rating, explaining that she was undecided. Dennis, 6. Charlie 6.75. Deb, 5. Judith 5.5. Aaron 6. GB, 4 (no surprise there). Renee, 6. Jean, 6.

George kept saying, “I wish Kim were here.” Kim is our in-house British specialist.

Mohsin Hamid—The Reluctant Fundamentalist VPL

The novel has a curious structure. Changez, a Pakistani who has become very successful in New York City, has returned to live a very different life in his native city of Lahore. In a café in Lahore Changez meets an American stranger and starts a conversation, eventually telling the American the story of his life, his disenchantment with the USA, why he turned his back on his job, and his heartbreaking relationship with an American girl. It’s first person narration. Well, monologue. Changez talking to the American, always addressing him as “you.”

Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America. I noticed that you were looking for something; more than looking, in fact you seemed to be on a mission, and since I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your language, I thought I might offer you my services.

This technique has several effects. The tone must be totally conversational to be persuasive. Rather than have a space to indicate that the American has said something, Changez repeats everything the American says. It gets irritating, and assumes that the reader isn’t smart enough to hear the other side of the very lop-sided conversation (the American says very little).

In part the novel is a scathing assessment of American attitude; “his tone—with, if you will forgive me, its typically American undercurrent of condescension.”

While Changez is in New York the World Trade towers are attacked. He grins, “I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees.”

He watches how America responds, post-911—“As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums.”

He is articulate at expressing the contrast with his own country, and its past:

Four thousand years ago, we, the people of the Indus River basin, had cities that were laid out on grids and boasted underground sewers, while the ancestors of those who would invade and colonize America were illiterate barbarians. Now our cities were largely unplanned, unsanitary affairs, and America had universities with individual endowments greater than our national budget for education. To be reminded of this vast disparity was, for me, to be ashamed.

The novel is gutsy, though sometimes thin. Here are two worthwhile reviews:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/books/review/Olsson.t.ht_r=1&scp=1&sq=%22the%20reluctant%20fundamentalist%22&st=cse

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/mar/03/featuresreviews.guardianreview20

This novel is the second from Hamid.

Indra Sinha—Animal’s People VPL

On December 3, 1984 one of the biggest industrial accidents of our times happened in Bhopal, India. “A runaway reaction in a tank containing poisonous methyl isocyanate caused the pressure relief system to vent large amounts to the atmosphere. The factory was owned by Union Carbide. The chemicals that spewed into the air killed thousands and for decades to come made the local residents ill, crippled and riddled with disease. Nothing was done. No clean up. No compensation.” This is a real event on which Sinha constructs his novel.

The narrator is Animal. He was born That Night, and was abandoned by his parents, or they died. He was raised by nuns. While still a child his spine twists, forcing him to walk on all fours with his ass in the air. He is teased by the other children, and the taunting name of Animal sticks and that is how he has been known and how he identifies himself. He is 19 when he speaks his story into a tape machine left behind by one of the many journalists who show up on a regular basis to report on the slum community to the international world, who continue to stand back and do nothing. Animal is a photo op for these journalists.

For a time Animal makes his way by living on the streets, scamming people and scrounging for food. Then he is taken under the wing of Zafar, the local hero who fights the company and tries to get justice in the courts. Zafar is beloved by the people of the slum, like a cult figure or Christ figure.

It sounds pretty grim, and it is but Sinha does not dwell on the sadness or sentimentalize the situation. The novel is remarkably full of life and the ribald humour of the perpetually horny Animal. He is in love with the unattainable Nisha, daughter of the widowed (from That Night) singer who lives across the street from Zafar. He both loves and lusts, as he yanks and whacks.

Then a young American doctor, Elli Barber, arrives and opens a free clinic to treat the victims of That Night. Zafar is suspicious that Elli is working for the company, assembling data to show that the illnesses are from water contamination, or poor hygiene—anything to get the company off the hook of an impending court case, decades after the event. He tells the people to boycott the clinic and they comply, despite their desperate need for medicines and treatment. Animal hopes Elli can heal his back so that he can stand tall, and win the love of Nisha.

There is such strength and skill to Sinha’s rendering of this community that the inhabitants aren’t portrayed as victims. They are frustrated, yes. But full of life, having complex relationships despite the lack of hope.

There are a number of things worth noting in this complex novel, if only to compare it to other Booker short-listed novels. One is the portrayal of 911. Animal responds to the televised broadcast:

The big thing that happened in Amrika, when it I saw it on the tele do you know what I did? I clapped? I thought, fantastic! This plane comes out of nowhere, flies badoom! Into this building. Pow! Blam! Flowers of flame!

Animal thinks it is a hoax, a clip from a movie. “Stuff like that doesn’t happen in real life. Not in Amrika anyway.” The reader knows how the USA responded to the 911 event and it stands in stark contrast to the treatment of the people of this Indian slum. Americans are not thought well of in this community:

If you collected every swear word in every language, every filthy term of abuse, melted them together to make one word so hateful, so utterly revolting, so devoid of goodness that its mere utterance would create horror and loathing and hatred, that word would be…

Amrikan?

I laboured through this novel, and I’m not sure why. Through the voice of Animal you get inside his head, and right into the language. This novel is the most exciting for use, playfulness and inventiveness with language since Darkman’s. Perhaps the language slows the reading, forcing you to take it slowly. It is both scorching and funny, but it would not have made a popular winner for the Booker, though it did win the Commonwealth Best Book Prize. Indra Sinha has published Sanskit translations and other non-fiction books. This is his second novel. He remains a passionate advocate about the injustice of the events after the Bhopal and the lack of accountability for the companies and its employees.

Lloyd Jones—Mister Pip VPL

Another novel using the device of a naïve, young first person narrator. This time it is Matilda, a 12-year old native black girl on the island of Papua New Guinea during the uprising in the 1990s and the time of Francis Ona. In my head the narrator was always a boy, and I was surprised each time I was reminded she is a girl, at least for the first hundred pages. Apparently Jones was a journalist in the area during this civil war. I was not persuaded that he knows much about being an aboriginal teenaged girl, though that might not be intrinsic to the book.

The political uprising results in the whites, there mostly to run the mine, leaving the small island “all but forgotten, where the most unspeakable things happened without once raising the ire of the outside world.” Only one white remains, the peculiar Mr. Watts who pulls his black (mad?) wife through the community on a wagon, wearing a red clown nose. “Everyone called him Pop Eye,” begins the novel. The children now have no teacher and Mr. Watts decides to run the school house, though he has no training and few apparent skills for the job. He reads Great Expectations to the students and they become immersed in the 19th century world of Pip. It provides an escape from the horrors of their own world. Yes, the novel is very much about the power of the imagination and the power of stories.

The renegades decide there is a real Mr. Pip who is a risk. The community will not serve up Mr. Pip so the soldiers sack their houses and burn all the contents. There are complicated plot devices involving: issues of trust; community; honour; mother/daughter relationships; nationalism; responsibility; how political positions trap people in situations; native versus white values and religion; basic survival and what motivates the will to live, or the power to surrender to death in favour of beliefs.

Later in the novel violence takes over but we are told that despite the destruction of the natives’ home and life as they have known it, they still have their stories. “Stories have a job to do.” “They have to teach you something.” The tone can be preachy, pushing the redemptive power of art. In ways it reminded me of Life of Pi, a rather holier-than-thou knowledge that will be spelled out to the humble reader, though a much better-written novel.

Jones was an established writer in New Zealand but this novel gave him an international reputation by appearing on the Booker short list. Jones won the Commonwealth Writers prize for his geographical region and also for Overall Best Book. A film staring Hugh Laurie is due for release in 2012.

Anne Enright—The Gathering WINNER

Category: the long-suffering and tortured Irish.

Veronica Hegarty is one of twelve children. Maureen, her mother, had 12 live births and 7 miscarriages. Veronica is driven to tell the multi-generational story of her dysfunctional family because of the suicide of her closest brother, Liam; only 10 months separate their births. There are too many Hegarty children for many of the still-living 9 to come into focus in a 260-page novel. They get brief labels—Ernest, a priest in Peru, Mossie the psycho, Bea the drifting sister and so on.

Veronica writes that the root of all the pain and trouble, including Liam’s suicide, began the day her grandmother Ada Merriman met her grandfather Charlie Spillane, and his friend Lamb Nugent. Through the grief and mourning of the family, Veronica reveals that she caught Nugent sexually involved with Liam when Liam was 8 and she was 9. She never told anyone.

I am saying that, the year you sent us away, your dead son was interfered with, when you were not there to comfort or protect him, and that interference was enough to send him on a path that ends in the box downstairs.

Part of Veronica’s crises after Liam’s death includes her troubled marriage with Tom:

It was the children that did for us, at least for a while. I think he stopped hating me after I left work. Of course, Tom would say he never hated me, that he loved me all along. But I know hating when I see it. I know it, because there is a part of me that wants to be hated, too.

There must be.

And anger with her family and her fading mother who can’t be bothered to remember the names of her children:

Family sins and family wounds, the endless pricking of something that we find hard to name. None of it important, just the usual, You ruined my life, or, What about me? Because with the Hegarthys a declaration of unhappiness is always a declaration of blame.

I’m getting weary of novels about people indulgent of their own lives. But the Irish seem to wallow in it, generational pain and angst where every choice is potentially fatal. This novel pulls toward resolution and life when at the funeral, a past mistress of Liam shows up with a three-year old son. Liam’s son that no one knew existed. It’s just too pat.

After winning the Booker this novel sold 300,000 in the USA alone. Thanks, Oprah, for training such readers.

Giles Foden From The Guardian

Everyone expected arguments, and we had them, but with dignity (my fellow judges were Howard Davies, Wendy Cope, Ruth Scurr and Imogen Stubbs). We never fell out. In fact, we are meeting up this autumn for a drink. Some had their favourites that others couldn’t stand; others tried to hold up yardsticks against which all books might be measured. The favourite supporters made persuasive cases for AN Wilson and Nicola Barker, but only Barker got through to the shortlist, despite an unfortunate error in transmission – not the judges’ fault – which suggested Wilson had. The longlist is where the real argy-bargy takes place.

Once an author is on the shortlist anything can happen. In our case we arrived at a situation in which every judge had mutually exclusive first and last choices. Luckily, in Howard Davies we had a competent chairman, who helped us mathematically towards a choice of winner with which everyone was happy. PS: note to publishers, try not to write call-in letters with spelling mistakes, or one that make foolish claims. Some of these letters looked as if they were written in haste. Then again, so did some of the novels submitted.

So the winning novel was very much a compromise win. The novel got many good reviews but readers didn’t like it. Check Amazon. Also note that the “competent chair” devised a mathematical system when needed.

During our explorations, we went to Ambergris Caye where numerous high-end resorts that cater to the all-inclusive crowd are located. The low-end hotel we usually stay at was full so we had no choice but to take a room in one of the middle-priced establishments. While checking in, the desk clerk suggested we place a bet on the chicken bingo out back.

“Chicken bingo?” John was curious.

We went to the hotel’s beach and followed the signs to the chicken bingo site. We found a large plastic tarp, squared off with numbers in each square similar to a bingo card. It was corralled off with a chicken-wire fence.

“Place your bets ladies and gentlemen,” the attendant droned on over and over while a ghetto blaster spit out rap songs in about the same volume. Numerous hotel guests, mostly men with large guts were hanging around the bingo corral sipping rum and sucking on cigars.

The bets were taken by the droning attendant and marked on an ordinary bingo card that he held in his hand. Hotel guests dribbled in and out of the hotel waiting for the event to start.

Once all the bets were placed, the attendant hauled over a gunnysack and hurled the “chicken,” (actually it was a rooster) over the fence and onto the card.

The guests roared, clapped, stomped sand and bellowed out the number they had placed their money on. The rooster appeared confused, his one foot up, his head moving about three inches to one side and then three to the other, his eyes blinking rapidly. The men continued calling to the rooster, who started walking around, uncertain it seemed as to where he should go. Finally, the prize was dropped; the rooster shit on number 11. The number was shouted out, the guests roared. The bet-man handed the money to the dancing and gyrating winner who, in turn, offered to buy everyone another rum at the bar.

The attendant unhooked part of the fence, scooped up the rooster and plunked him into the sack.

“Test your luck again tomorrow ladies and gentlemen,” hollered the attendant. “Same time, same place.”

John turned to me and said he was feeling nauseated so we headed up to our room where he stretched out on the bed for a nap. Joy and I sat on the balcony and sipped a beer while watching the street traffic pass by.

After an hour John woke but didn’t want dinner. Only after we promised not to sit with the chicken bingo crowd did he agree to join us. Joy spotted a secluded little bistro with no patrons and we went in.

The following morning John was feeling grand so we had our coffee, showered and started out for breakfast. He opened the door and greeting him in the hall was one of the chicken bingo crowd — a paunchy fellow sporting a glass of rum in one hand and a cigar in the other. He was wearing nothing but shades and a swimming thong. John rotated and informed us that he couldn’t eat.

Joy and I went down the street and purchased some yogurt and bananas for him. Then we left to do our morning’s work on the book. On the way out I convinced the desk clerk to let us stay for just two hours past the check out time without charging us for another day. I told her that my husband wasn’t feeling well. We returned mid day to find John lounging on the bed reading a book, his very favorite pastime. The yogurt and banana were gone.

We packed up and headed to the docks where we could catch the daily ferry to the mainland. John was in great spirits until we arrived at the ferry slip where we found the boat’s entire engine laid out on the pier. The captain told us that there’d be no ferry that day and maybe not the next either. John collapsed on the curb and laid his head in his hands.

“You’re not going to puke are you?”

“The mainland is just across that water …. I can see it! Maybe we can swim.”

Since John can’t swim, I suggested we try the airport just 100 meters down the road.

At the ticket wicket we were informed that they had just two seats left on the flight and it would be leaving in ten minutes. I suggested Joy and John leave together and I’d join them the following day but John would have no part of that. The ticket seller listened to our discussion. John turned grey and started to hyperventilate. I patted his arm.

The ticket seller went back into her office and a few minutes later, returned. “We can take all three of you,” she said, “ but one of you will have to sit in the co-pilot’s seat.”

It was my turn to hyperventilate.

“No co-pilot?” John squeaked. “What if the pilot has a heart attack?”

“It’s just fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll be the co-pilot,” said Joy staring at the plane just outside the window. “If he has a heart attack I’ll fly this baby.”

John nodded. I purchased the tickets before he could change his mind and dug out the Gravol from my daypack. I passed them to John and he tossed back the pills like popcorn.

We boarded just as the drug was taking effect. The flight was smooth, scenic and quiet. John instantly passed out. I could see Joy snapping photos and chatting up the pilot.

Once we were in Corozal I could see a touch of pink on John’s cheeks but the pink was short lived. When the taxi from the airport arrived at the low-budget hotel we had stayed in before, we found it full.

John informed us that he was truly sick and needed a five-star hotel no matter what the price.

“Corozal has no five star places,” I said. “But I know of a new one just a block from here.” I left John in Joy’s care and marched over, booked a room and returned for John and Joy.

John instantly perked up when he saw, surrounding the building, a 12-foot high brick wall with glass shards cemented onto the top. He pushed the intercom on the locked gate and nodded his approval. Inside, the room was spotless and there was satellite TV included.

“Joy and I’ll go for some pizza and beer,” I said.

“I’ll go!” said John magnanimously. “Some pizza washed down with a couple of beer sounds great.”

***

[More Vivien Lougheed adventures on the road can be found at www.chickenbustales.com.]

And Lullaby my loving boy,
My little Robin take thy rest,
Since age is cold, and nothing coy,
Keep close thy coin, for so is best:
With Lullaby be thou content
With Lullaby thy lusts relent,
Let others pay that have more pence,
Thou art too poor for such expense.

In the poem, George sings his ambitions etc to sleep, and advises his son to take a more moderate, relaxed attitude to life than he himself did. Part of that would be to not be impulsive with money. Solid advice, but the story behind it shows how complicated that was for George himself and for William.

William and George are listed as son and father in the geneology of the gentry of Befordshire. William’s mother’s name is not given there, but his demise is described: “died in the voyage with Sir Francis Drake to St. Domingo of Carthagen.” That’s the Elizabethan way of denoting Carthagena, now in the Dominican Republic.

George is listed in the geneology as the eldest son of Sir John Gascoigne, “knight Recorder of Bedford.” Sir John was a reasonably well-off landowner and Member of Parliament for the area. He did what fathers of his class were supposed to do at the time, sending George to Cambridge and then, in 1555, when he was 21, to Grey’s Inn in London to study law.

Grey’s was one of four residences (called “Inns of Court”) located around the palace of Westminster that housed the courts and the great Hall and was the London home and administrative center of the Kings and Queens of England. The students there were all gentry, including some of the sons of the nobility like, around George’s time, Lord Grey of Wilton and the Earls of Oxford and Bedford. Grey and Bedford eventually became George’s friends and patrons.

Few of the gentlemen at Grey’s were really studying law, or studying that much law. They were making connections and learning to become courtiers. They were learning to sing, to compose music, plays and poetry, to play instruments, to speak foreign languages, to act, and to fight. The Queen patronized Grey’s, saying that it “fitted youth for the future.” It was important to be able to devise and partake in entertainments. It was important to speak Latin, the language of diplomacy, along with Spanish and French, the languages of England’s great adversaries. As we will see, once George made it as a courtier, he was sent to Paris and Antwerp (controlled then by the Spanish) as a spy.

The Queen could handle all these languages and some Italian. Also she wrote poetry, not (it’s safe now to say) the best, but passable, with the odd flash of a good line or metaphor. She used poetry as one (of many) possible tests of intelligence.

While he was at Grey’s, George sat in place of Sir John in Queen Mary’s last parliament (1558), a time of great conflict between the Catholic Queen and her subjects who had been rigorously protestantized by her father and brother, Edward. George was in parliament when Mary’s death was announced. Then he served as a minor functionary (again replacing his father) at the coronation of Elizabeth I in 1558, an event greeted with rapturous joy by everyone but Catholics and the King of Spain, the superpower of the time and in effect the military arm of the Catholic Church, which at that time was the religious arm of the King of Spain.

George’s wife, William’s mother, was Elizabeth Bacon Breton, even better connected than George but a widow when she married George, with four kids — one of them, Nicholas, turning into a poet and publishing his first works in the mid 1570’s when George was publishing his. She was the daughter of John Bacon, related to Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal and the father of Sir Francis Bacon, who grew up to be a famous essayist and scientific theorist. Sir Martin Frobisher, working his way up to being one of the Queen’s most trusted admirals, was another relative. In addition to these impressive connections, Elizabeth had a considerable fortune, including a big house on Red Cross Street, left to her by her first husband, William Breton.

But the condition in the will was that she not re-marry — Breton was worried about the inheritance of his children. Elizabeth flagrantly ignored the will. She married George on the 23 of November 1561, only three months after Breton’s death. Not only that, but she married him despite being promised to one Edward Boyes.

She might have been trying to escape Boyes, the choice perhaps of her family, but she was likely also smitten by George. He was, as his writings show, witty. He was tall (“long George” to his friends), strong, and good-looking — or at least, he drew pictures of himself as such. These pictures occurred in “emblems,” or illustrated poetry/prose broadsides, which seem to be what finally endeared him to the Queen and her peers. Probably they were more or less accurate; the Queen was no fool. And, while officials and moneylenders came to hate him, George was popular and made permanent and loyal friends. He was, as well as talented, fundamentally honest, well-meaning, and brave.

But he was impulsive. He was also, when he married, broke and alienated from his father. He’d basically squandered his inheritance in the attempt to hang out with the wealthy aristocracy and become a courtier, and Sir John, fearful of being held responsible for further debts, had disinherited him. So George may have married for reasons other than love. Or as well as love. Whatever, he must have been happy to move into Elizabeth’s fine house on Red Cross Street, thinking himself in a much better position to pursue preferment at court.

Her family reacted violently, taking George to court. Boyes did that too, and more. Less than a year after George and Elizabeth had married, a neighbor of theirs, Henry Machyn, noted in his diary for September 30, 1562: “That same day at night between 7 and 9 was a great fray in Redcrosse Street between two gentlemen and their men, for they did marry one woman, and diverse were hurt; these were their names, master Boyes and master Gascoigne gentlemen.”

Litigation was to go on for years. In the meantime, the Mayor of London intervened to protect the property of Elizabeth’s children against their new stepfather. In May of 1563, he kicked George and Elizabeth out of the house. George took Elizabeth to Bedfordshire and lodged her in assorted rental dwellings. Attempts to reconcile with his father went nowhere, so by late 1564, George returned to Grey’s and his pursuit of preferment, now the only course available to him apart from soldiering. He was welcomed back to Grey’s as an “ancient” of the society after successfully completing some initiatory poetry challenges.

George commuted between Grey’s Inn and Bedfordshire. Elizabeth gave birth to William in 1565. George was at Grey’s for another four years, in 1566 writing and (for the Christmas celebrations) staging the play Jocasta. Other plays and performances followed. Jocasta in particular was a hit, partly because it dealt with royal succession, a topical issue at the time since the Queen was still young enough to have children but had no husband. George made extra money from the printers at Westminster by translating some Italian classics — he’d long been studying Italian with Claudius Holyband, a Hugenot refugee. One of these translations, of Ariosto’s play The Supposes, was another hit at Grey’s.

In 1568, Sir John died and George went back to Bedfordshire. As the eldest son, he inherited the estate. He immediately took out a mortgage for the entire value of the property, and a number of lawsuits were launched by the executor of the estate, by some of the tenants on the Gascoigne farm, and by George’s brother John. Sir John’s property, like Elizabeth’s, was frozen in court.

On June 13, 1569, George was ordered to pay his debts or leave Grey’s. He left, and was soon sent to Bedford Gaol, a debtor’s prison.

He did some patronage writing in jail, and one of his projects, a wedding masque for Lord Montague, earned him appointment to the seat of Middlehurst (Sussex) in parliament. This got him out of jail since MP’s for the duration of their presence in parliament were granted immunity from their debts. George was able, as he put it, “to show my face openly.” But ultimately he was not allowed to take his seat. The Privy Council, which had to approve all appointments, decided that he was “a common rhymer, a notorious ruffian, a spy, an atheist, and a godless person.” So much for George’s progress in making friends among the Queen’s top advisors, though Montague remained a permanent friend and patron.

The only way George could avoid returning to Bedford was by enlisting. Soldiers were needed for the Queen’s off-and-on wars against the French and Spanish in Flanders and the Netherlands. While they were in service, their debts were suspended.

George joined a regiment raised by Captain Thomas Morgan and provisioned by the Queen’s top official, Lord Burleigh. The 300 men were reviewed by the Queen at Greenwich, in April 1572. Their mission was to defend Flushing in Holland, a port-city that guarded the passage to Antwerp, Europe’s greatest port. The English did great trade in Antwerp, sending their woolen fabric there to be dyed and sold. Flushing was also a convenient place for English ships to land troops. Morgan’s men joined up with a hundred men raised by Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Walter Raleigh’s older half-brother and the Queen’s childhood playmate, and George served under the joint command of the two men.

George was to spend the next four years in Holland. Before he left, in a final bid for patronage, he prepared a manuscript of all the poems and plays written during his years at Grey’s, and gave it to a Westminster publisher. This is the book, entitled A Hundred Sundry Flowers, in which “Lullaby” appeared.

Printers, who then functioned also as publishers, had found a market only for miscellanies, or anthologies, not for books by single authors. So George simply assigned his poems to various fictitious authors, some men and some women, and called the book a miscellany.

He identified the authors by giving each a motto and an introduction by the gabby and gossipy fictitious editor G.T. In this way George could comment on his own poems, which is very modern or even postmodern. Also he hoped through anonymity to protect himself from accusations of libel and obscenity as some of the writings in the book are sexually explicit, at least in Elizabethan terms.

Fifty copies were confiscated by the authorities, and the book was banned at the insistence of the religious members of the Court of High Commission. This of course increased sales. When George came back on his next leave he found himself to be famous. Back in Holland almost immediately, because the Spanish were attacking Walcheren Island where Flushing was located, he corrected and revised the book, added more items to it, and send it home to be published, under his own name, as Poesies (1575). That version was confiscated too, but finally released for sale. George had done a good job of “sanitizing” his writing and playing the reformed rake, the prodigal son. Discriminating readers, then as now, prefer the Hundred Flowers to the Poesies, but really George hadn’t changed his book that much except for adding profuse descriptions of how reformed he now was.

He’d also done a good job of soldiering, attracting in the battle of Middleburgh the attention of the Prince of Orange, the overall commander of the Dutch, English and German forces. He was made a captain.

By spring, 1576, when he came home for good, he had enough reward money and booty to pay his “scores.” Likely his rank also helped to line his pockets. Captains were front-line officers but also the army paymasters. It was common practice for them to fudge their accounts by claiming pay for more men than they really had.

When George made his reappearance at Grey’s, Gilbert introduced him to his cousin Raleigh, 21 years old at the time, just arrived from six years of fighting in France and ready to make his way into court. They became friends and co-conspirators in writing. Raleigh was ultimately, on George’s death, to claim George’s motto, Tam Marti quam Mercurio, “as dedicated to Mars [war] as to Mercury [poetry].”

It must have been good for William, now 11 years of age, to have a father who was getting ahead if not by any means secure, and at home at least some of the time. George writes of his return that he is now “amongst my books here at my poor house in Walthamstow,” adding, “where I march among the muses for lack of exercise in martial exploits.” This particular “march” turned out to be more lucrative than any George had gone on in Holland. Work came pouring in. George was finally where he wanted to be.

The printer Christopher Barker immediately commissioned him to translate a French book on hunting. The published work included drawings, done in reverse to transfer to blocks of wood, of the Queen hunting and hawking, two of her favorite activities. The fact that George could draw would’ve been important to Barker; pictures were so expensive to print that the cost of them was usually charged to authors.

George put himself in all these drawings, showing himself in favor with the Queen. Barker’s commission may have led to Leicester commissioning a play for his three-week-long entertainment of the Queen in July 1575. The Queen never saw the play, Zabeta, because she got wind of its topic in a preview. That topic, assigned by Leicester, was a marriage of a Queen to her favorite courtier. Offended, Elizabeth left, but Gascoigne, there to act in his play and other events as Sylvanus, a man of the forest, clad in ivy and armed with bow and spear, jogged beside her carriage reciting an apology he had contrived. He won her forgiveness, and Leicester was most appreciative.

George was invited to participate in the exchange of New Year’s gifts at court. His gift was an illustrated manuscript of Sir Henry Lee’s The Tale of Hermetes the Hermit, translated into Latin, Italian and French. The illustrations were George’s, and all of them are autobiographical, including the frontispiece with George’s motto hanging in the air over George as he kneels before the Queen. In January, George brought together a long-poem satire that he had been working on since the previous summer, the Steel Glass (referring to a polished copper-tin mirror). It was published in February 1576 and contains an introductory poem by Raleigh — Raleigh’s first published poem.

In March George published an account of the Queen’s entertainment at Kenilworth. These entertainments were lavish, to the point where they could seriously break the budgets of the Lords and Ladies who had to stage them.

In April he wrote a forward to Gilbert’s Discourse to Prove a Passage by the North West to Cathay, and paid to have it published. Gilbert had been circulating the pamphlet in manuscript form for some years, and had gained the support of many great men (Leicester, Sir Philip Sidney, Burleigh, Walsingham etc) for an expedition led by Frobisher to find a northwest passage to China. The pamphlet sold well and provided more backers. The Queen gave her approval (but did not contribute). Frobisher set out that year, the first of many voyages to what is now Canada. One of these voyages, by Gilbert, in 1578, resulted in the English claiming Newfoundland, their first colony.

Other books were finished that spring and summer, despite George being, as he says in one of his prefaces, “in weak plight for health” in April and May. Then in September Walsingham commissioned George to go on a fact-finding mission to Antwerp. Leicester may have been behind this appointment. George was to report to Walsingham and Burleigh. He went to Paris as a diversion, informing Burleigh of his arrival on Sept. 15. Early in October he traveled to Antwerp. He was there on Nov. 3, staying at an English merchant’s house near one of the English docks, when mutinous (unpaid) Spanish troops suddenly sacked the city. Eight thousand people died, one thousand houses were destroyed.

George worked to protect the English merchants trapped in the city. He arrived in London on Nov. 21 and reported to Walsingham at Hampton Court. Walsingham, who had already received letters of appreciation for George’s help, gave him permission to publish the report and George did so immediately; The Spoils of Antwerp appeared in late November, 1576.

In January 1577 George sent an emblem to his wife’s influential first cousin, Sir Nicholas Bacon. The Latin motto says “He who becomes wise late in the day, eventually, nevertheless, becomes serviceable.” George was using his growing respectability in court to get in with his wife’s family.

But George’s illness returned and, on October 7, 1577, he died. Some historians think the disease might have been malaria, contracted in Flanders. He was only 39. William was only twelve, and with no real inheritance. He would not be able, unless his mother could influence her own family to support him, to go to university, or to study law.

George didn’t die at home, but he wasn’t far away. He’d gone to Stamford to visit George Whetstone, another gentleman soldier-poet, and one with a similar history to George’s. Whetstone, a good friend, wrote a long, dedicatory poem to George, in which he pretends to be transcribing George’s deathbed confession. Since he was the one to see George into the afterlife, his testimony has credibility. Also, it sounds, if roughly, like George:

My loving wife, whose face I fain would see,
My love I give you all the wealth I have
But since my goods (God knows) but slender be
Most gracious Queen . . . I crave
You will vouchsafe to aid her and my son.
Come, come dear son, my blessing take in part
And therewithal I give you this in charge
First serve thou God, then use both wit and art
Your father’s debt of service to discharge,
Which (forced by Death), her Majesty he owes
Beyond deserts who still rewards bestows.

Since Whetstone immediately published his Remembrance of the Well Employed Life and Godly End of George Gascoigne, Esquire, Elizabeth and William would doubtless soon have heard about or read it. They knew that George was thinking, first and foremost, about them, that he was worried, and that he felt he had short-changed them. Bequeathing William a debt of service to the Queen is pretty lame, as is asking the notoriously parsimonious Queen to look after his wife and son.

But maybe it wasn’t such a longshot. If George said something like this to Whetstone, he might’ve felt that he had made an impression on the Queen, especially at Kenilworth. The fact was that in turning up on Drake’s expedition eight years later at the age of twenty, William would be paying a debt of service, putting his life on the line for the Queen. It may seem rather young for him to be doing this, but in those days it was not uncommon, Raleigh being a famous example, a seasoned soldier by age 16.

Paying the “debt of service” bequeathed him by George would put William in the way of preferment. So Drake’s voyage was a rare opportunity, and William might have used some of his parents’ connections to get it. Nicholas Bacon was close to the Queen. The Vice-Admiral of Drake’s fleet was Frobisher. And maybe the Queen herself was answering George’s last petition.

Drake would’ve been flooded by volunteers wanting to serve on his expedition. He was England’s most successful pirate — a government-approved one, as anything was good that weakened the nation’s great adversary Spain and forced Phillip II to postpone or cancel his long-expected attack, which came three years later. Delaying or weakening the attack by draining his coffers was one objective of the expedition — the one argued by Walsingham. Also, Phillip, angry about English assistance to the Dutch and at English piracy, especially Drake’s, had just ordered an embargo on English goods in Spain and English ships in Spanish harbors. This angered the Queen, who was all for open trade and the taxes it produced.

Because of this Drake’s fleet was larger than usual: 21 ships. The ships carried 1,800 soldiers, and they were well trained. This was to be the biggest raid to date on Spain’s empire, and it was meant to extract the biggest possible toll.

So it was likely that the expedition would prove economically as well as politically lucrative, as had all of Drake’s previous expeditions. Expeditions were joint-stock affairs in those days. Drake had a record of success and had no trouble selling shares; the Queen herself was one of his biggest investors, and this fact encouraged others. Those that Drake took on board as soldiers and sailors also got a share.

William sailed with Drake from Plymouth on Sept. 14, 1565. First they attacked Santiago in the Cape Verde Islands just off the coast of Spain. Finding no treasure, they torched the town. Then they crossed the Atlantic, some three hundred men, both mariners and soldiers, dying on the crossing, most likely of scurvy. They were heading for Santo Domingo, the capital of Hispaniola and the oldest Spanish settlement in the New World.

Drake landed his army at night, six miles down the coast from the town, and they marched through Bocagrande to Punta del Judio (where the naval club is today). They came up behind the city, a wall that was relatively unprotected because the Spanish were focused on the harbor. Later the Spanish built a bulwark, which is still there today, at the point of attack.

There were few losses after that; once the English entered the town, the Spanish garrison quickly surrendered, and most of the citizens had been evacuated. So there’s a good chance that William, if he didn’t take ill and die in the middle of the Atlantic, was killed where the bulwark is now. The Bedfordshire records say he died on the voyage, and that may have been meant specifically.

* * *

[Poet and Son is a series-in-progress about poets and their offspring.]

Christy Clark, re-elected B.C. premier.

Instead, Clark won a comfortable majority, taking 50 of 85 seats, pretty much the same result as in the 2009 and 2005 elections. Social Democrats, weeping into their beer and lattes, could take only minor comfort in the small glitch of Clark losing her Vancouver-Point Gray seat to NDP up-and-comer Dave Eby. The NDP again forms the official opposition, with 33 seats. The first elected Green Party MLA and one independent round out the legislative complement. Only about half the eligible voters cast a ballot (again, not much different from previous elections), prompting one wag to quip about the much-vaunted impact of social media on politics, “There were more Tweets than votes.” The Liberals won by a sizeable 5 percentage points, 44 per cent to 39 per cent, just the reverse of the way the pre-election pollsters called it. The pollsters spent the post-mortem dawn tweaking their algorithms.

Meanwhile, the Oracle of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, emerging from a dark lane filled with discarded needles and condoms, explained it all, muttering, as did the winning and losing politicians, “The People, the People. The election belongs to the People.” Maybe the pundits, to echo a famous line by poet Bertolt Brecht, need to elect a new people.