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.

On the Canada Council

A note from one of my Booker readers, and a prominent Canadian writer:

I think I have made my position known to you: that prizes are only as relevant as the organizations that select the jurors and the jurors that select the titles.

I worry that a bias is developing against older, more established writers, and that jurors are seeing the awards less as a measure of a work succeeding on its terms, and/or going to new heights, than a way to break new authors, whether they (or better yet: their work) deserves to be broken or not.

A response to these statements from another prominent Canadian writer:

Relevant to what? That’s the right question, not whether the process works or doesn’t work. It’s relevant to the market, which is largely made up of people who are resistant to your product. Is it relevant to cultural growth, (no because all prizes are prizes for conventional behaviour. The most experimental book that’s ever won a prize was John Berger’s “G”–and that was before market culture gained absolute control. Is it relevant to artistic merit? No, and you and your Booker research are the best witness to the fact that it isn’t. What else could it be relevant to? The relative enriching of conventional novelists and the impoverishment of unconventional novelists (and all the others who don’t win.)

Prize culture simply isn’t about artistic merit. It’s about acceptability to the marketplace. It’s about winning and about sales.

An excerpt from Daphne Marlatt’s speech on accepting the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement in the Literary Arts:

When I began writing in the 1960s, at a time when there was a push to recognize not only our national literature but a distinctively British Columbian literature, improvisation and free collective effort were understood to be a necessary part of art-making. In recent decades, the publishing industry has opted for a celebrity best-seller model that obscures the community aspect behind all writing, an aspect that poets still understand because poetry is and will always be less of a commodity than either fiction or nonfiction.

I think these comments about art, marketplace and commodity are pertinent to the following examination of the Governor General’s Awards in the Literary Arts, administered by the Canada Council.

I haven’t kept track of numbers, but over the years that I have been conducting this research I have interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people—writers, jurors, publicists, prize administrators, librarians, agents, publishers, etc. I took the same approach with this project as I did with the CanLit in secondary schools report. That is, try to connect with everyone who has an interest. I always assure people confidentiality to allow them to be as honest as possible.

A lot of things that people tell me are anecdotal. Sometimes the concern being expressed is distinctive to a specific jury when things were confrontational. I try to figure out why the situation happened but the individual incident isn’t what I’m after. I’m looking for larger patterns, and the implications of those patterns. 

When I keep hearing the same concern over and over a red flag goes up and I try to get more information. One red flag was raised by the number of people who expressed concern, increasing in recent years, about both the makeup of GG juries and the results they produce. Again, I am not interested in pointing a finger at any specific jury or juror. That is not the point. What is the point is that people in the publishing community are concerned that less than stellar juries and poor procedures for the GG are undermining the integrity of the prize. These concerns stand in sharp contrast to the interviews I conducted around The Writers’ Trust prizes where there was only praise for the administering body.

The same questions and concerns kept being mentioned. What are the judging criteria? To what degree are the jurors being pressured to examine other criteria, or are affected by the history of the GGs: i.e. if someone has won before, shouldn’t we spread around the glory, pressures to reward rookies, all kinds of corrupting criteria based on race and ethnicity and sexual preferences, and other elements of quotaism. Not to mention who is selecting the juries.

The publishing industry really wants the GGs to mean something, to be important. There was a time when academics, librarians and researchers looked to the GGs to spot books they should take note of and careers that might be watched. Far too many people I interviewed said that “no one cares” about the GGs and the impact of the prize has dramatically declined.

Interviewed people say there are too many very junior people, virtual unknowns to the community, being selected for GG juries. They believe that a national prize should have jurors with some national recognition. This response is not specific to any one category but seems endemic to the English speaking juries (my research is only involved with the English part of the prizes, not the French prizes). That includes categories for adult literature as well as children’s literature.

Within the publishing community there is an assumption that senior writers turn down the GG gig because it is too much work. That may be partly true, but in the interviews I conducted with senior writers that didn’t seem to be the case. Some said they had been on juries “back in the 70s” or 80s but “haven’t been asked since” to sit on a GG jury. I suspect that the CC doesn’t want to be accused of being supporters of an oligarchy of the elderly. Also, the young writers, some say, are much louder about getting what they want.

The other comment from past GG jury members that occurred frequently was about being rushed to make a decision because the jury meets, selects the short list and winner all in one day. All jurors must submit a list of the books they think merit winning in advance but the actual decision takes place in one day in Ottawa with the discussion being steered by a CC representative. It should be noted that the jury members who felt rushed or pushed were unhappy with the results of the deliberation. Other jurors said one day was sufficient for the task with a good, functioning jury.

Since my research does support the premise that the jury selection process is the most important part of the whole shebang, I asked the folks at the Canada Council if they would agree to an interview on the subject, which was granted. Here are some notes about what I was told by the CC:

In selecting juries, both for prizes and grants, the Canada Council has a high concern and commitment to diversity of geography, gender, literary style, age, ethnicity, etc. These considerations which, in part, are also the qualifications for jurors are outlined in detail on the CC website. The CC also wants people who have had some other jury experience and are respected by their peers. There is a high concern to avoid jurors who might have a conflict of interest with any of the nominated books. The CC finds potential jurors in a number of different ways:

• Research within the CC, speaking to other people who work in the publishing division, etc.
• Considering names put forward by others.
• Consulting with colleagues at the CC and the community at large.
• Always being on the lookout for potential jurors at festivals and other literary events.

It’s a big, big job finding GG jurors. Each year the CC must find 42 jurors in 14 categories. CC staff compiles potential lists that are in turn approved by heads of departments. And because of the rules for the GG, jurors are being asked to do more work than for some of the other major national prizes. For example, the Giller and The Writers’ Trust prizes limit the number of submissions that can be made by one publisher while the GG does not. That means a GG juror for creative non-fiction might be tasked with reading well over 200 books while a juror for the same category for The Writers’ Trust prize would be reading about 100. Because the GG does not limit publishers’ submissions, jurors are not allowed to call in books. Note to writers: if your publisher does not submit your book to the GG you are out of luck because even a well-informed juror will not be able to call it in.

My research suggests that a staged jury process produces the most favourable result—by favourable result I mean that some time after the decision, jury members are content with the choice, and the book stands up to criticism over time. This is the system used by the WT, Griffin and most major international prizes. Is the GG system of sitting down in a room and hashing it out in one day antiquated given the advances in technology that provide various ways for jurors to communicate easily and effectively over a period of time? Those interviewed jurors who were displeased with the results often cited the time rush at GG juries—there is no opportunity to walk away from the table, reflect, then resume the discussion days later with more energy and cooler heads, if that is an issue. CC staff says that more can be achieved in a face-to-face discussion.

CC staff said they had received no feedback about either the quality of the juries or the jury process. The CC is a powerful organization, and writers know that. Some writers have told me they are fearful of consequences/reprisals if they question the CC or provide negative feedback. I don’t see any way around that conundrum.

But to say there has been no feedback just doesn’t hold water. Over the past few years there has been a lot of discussion in the mainstream press and on blogs about the GGs. Christian Bok was very public about his stint as a juror, until he was removed from the jury because the CC said he had a conflict of interest. That lengthy interview was a part of this Booker report several years ago.

Kim Goldberg has also been public about her experience. With her permission, I include the following:

Canada’s Poetry GG – Afterthoughts of a Juror (or: You’ll Never Adjudicate in this Town Again)

by Kim Goldberg

June 6, 2012

Two years ago, I spent the entire spring and summer sitting in my garden reading 171 new Canadian poetry books published in 2009-2010. I was one of three jurors chosen to select the 2010 winner and shortlist for Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Poetry.

Being paid to read poetry for five months in a private garden surrounded by swallowtail butterflies and garter snakes sunning on rocks may seem like a dream job. But the dream faded by September in the jury room in Ottawa once I fully grokked the protocols and structure of the adjudication system itself, and the role I would be required to play in that process.

(Please note: The comments that follow are a general critique of the Canada Council’s protocols for adjudicating the Poetry GG. The problems are systemic and structural. They are not limited to one particular year.My previous experience adjudicating a major arts award had been a thoroughly positive one: a few years earlier I had been tapped to sit on a BC Arts Council jury to select the Creative Writing grants for the year. So when the Canada Council phoned in 2010 and invited me to be a juror for the Poetry GG, I didn’t hesitate.

THE BC ARTS COUNCIL MODEL

In the case of the BC Arts Council Creative Writing grants, after spending a month reading all 154 project proposals privately (each proposal included a 20-page manuscript sample), the five jurors then spent five full days together in a board room in Victoria to determine the approximately 35 grant recipients.

In the room, the Program Officer unobtrusively guided us through a well-organized protocol in which all five jurors discussed and debated each of the 154 proposals in turn over the five days, assigning (and revising) numeric values for each proposal. By the time we were done, the numeric values had generated a ranked list of all 154 proposals. The jury could rejig it to correct any obvious omissions. We’re the jury after all, and formulae shouldn’t supersede common sense. But I don’t recall much rejigging happening. The money was then awarded from the top down, until the pot was empty.

The entire experience was fun and, for me at least, creatively stimulating. The tone in the room was jovial (although not without debate). I made friendships that persist to this day. And, most importantly, I felt we had done the fairest and most honest job possible of selecting arts award recipients from a pool of excellent candidates.

(Sidebar: The most important thing I learned from my time on the BC Arts Council jury is that just because you don’t get a grant, doesn’t mean the jury didn’t like your project. They may have loved your project. They just loved 35 others a little bit more.)

In a single word (or five): I went away feeling clean. I cannot say the same of my experience on the Canada Council jury for the Poetry GG.

THE GOVERNER GENERAL’S POETRY AWARD MODEL

Jury Selection

The three jurors for the Poetry GG (all poets with books of our own) are selected by the Canada Council, presumably on the basis of other juries we have served on, or awards we may have won, as well as our own publications. In my case, the Canada Council officer referenced my poetry books listed on the League of Canadian Poets website when she called to invite me onto the GG jury. I had also been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award two years earlier. And I suspect my prior service on the BC Arts Council jury was a factor.

My two fellow jurors also received a phone call “out of the blue” inviting them to sit on the Poetry GG jury. In other words, this wasn’t a gig any of us applied for.

Reading Time

In theory, the three jurors each had five months to read the 171 books, which were shipped to us continuously over that period of time. (We each received our own complete set of books, which were ours to keep.)

However, in actual fact, I was the only one on the final jury who had the full five months to read the books. My two colleagues were each last-minute replacements for the original jurors who withdrew late in the game. So the other two final jurors had a mere eight weeks and five weeks respectively to read and evaluate 171 books.

Conflict of Interest Rules

Due to controversies in previous years over perceived conflict of interest involving certain GG jurors and the winners, the conflict of interest rules were tightened up by the time my year came round. Among other things, a juror cannot remain on the jury if there is a book in competition that she has reviewed or blurbed, or in which she is listed in the acknowledgements as making any sort of contribution to the book (even if the contribution is unbeknownst to the juror).

However, the titles for each year’s GG competition are being submitted continuously by their publishers throughout the months that the jurors are reading. Even the Canada Council doesn’t know what the full list of books in competition will be until shortly before the three jurors fly to Ottawa for the single day of jury deliberations.

Consequently, a juror can be three or four months into her GG reading when a book lands on her doorstep that she has blurbed or is thanked in, and that’s it. She must excuse herself from the jury and walk away. And the Canada Council must scramble to find a replacement juror. At least these were the rules in 2010.

The ‘Long List’

Ten days prior to flying to Ottawa for our single day of jury deliberations, each juror is required to submit a list of up to ten titles that constitute our top picks. The Canada Council then compiles the three lists and emails the three jurors the single combined list containing all of our top picks, listed alphabetically by author.

To me, this is obviously a Long List. And as such, it is in everybody’s interest to release it publicly, and with as much fanfare as it deserves, and as much fanfare as every other literary Long List receives. Besides which, your tax dollars paid to generate this Long List. It is wrong to keep it secret. So, for all of the above reasons, after the 2010 Poetry GG Short List and winner had been officially announced by the Canada Council, I posted our jury’s Long List on Facebook.

The Canada Council was not amused. The Council claims this Long List is not a Long List but some kind of in-house work product and, as such, is covered under jury confidentiality rules. I do not anticipate further invitations for jury duty. But if I had it to do over, I would do the same (except I would post the Long List even more widely than I did).

If nothing else, our Long List revealed that there was, in fact, a much broader aesthetic sensibility among the jury than our Short List or winner would suggest. Which brings me to the nub of the problem:

Jury Deliberations – Timeframe

The three jurors meet in a Canada Council boardroom in Ottawa for a single day, from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm, with a one hour lunch break and a couple of shorter breaks. So, in approximately 6.5 hours of working time, we not only determine the five titles for the Short List and the one winner, we must also draft the jury statements about each book (two separate statements for the winning title) that will be widely used by media, authors and publishers. Try being scintillating, cogent and pithy – six times! – after your brains have been wrung dry of all judgment and your entrails are strewn across the board table.

We are flown to Ottawa the day before the jury meets, put up in a nearby hotel, and flown home the day after.

Obviously 6.5 hours is a ridiculously short time to make a decision on Canada’s most prestigious poetry award – and from a field of 171 candidates. It’s an insult to every author, publisher and juror participating in the GG competition.

Jury Deliberations – Process

In theory, we had already winnowed our field of 171 titles to just 22 – the titles on our Long List That Isn’t a Long List. So we were actually selecting the five finalists and winner from a field of 22 in that 6.5-hour period. And in fact, those 22 books were the ONLY books on the table when we entered the room – all face up with their carefully designed covers and titles vying furiously for our eye. (The remaining 149 contenders were around somewhere – maybe in boxes. I don’t recall.)

We started working our way through the 22 books one by one (alphabetically by author’s last name). The Canada Council Program Officer in the room held up each book (or slid it forward on the table). We discussed it briefly and decided if we wanted to keep it on the table, in contention for the Short List, or physically set it aside.

Although it was possible to resurrect a title from the set-aside pile of Long Listees, I felt considerable unspoken pressure not to do this – not to take any step backwards – because of the intense time constraints we were working under. I can only assume my colleagues felt likewise.

It was also possible (although this never occurred to me at the time, and was certainly never mentioned) for a juror to call back a book from the pile of 149 also-rans that were moldering in boxes somewhere if she felt upon reflection that there was a better, more vigorous title among them than on the Short List being generated in the room.

Because of the time constraints, there was subtle but considerable steerage to keep moving forward, never back – to keep narrowing the field, never widening, never reconsidering…

Jury Deliberations – The Short List

Somehow by mid-afternoon we generated a Short List of five finalists. There was one book on our Short List that was sharply contested in the room. But the other four titles basically came down to being the books that no one fought too hard against. Yes, good books all. But markedly better than the 166 left behind? I can’t really say that they were.

The most heavily experimental works (many of which I loved!) were all total non-starters in the room. They simply had no hope. You pick your battles.

Consequently, the GG Short List for any given year is formed more by various jurors’ debating skills and level of obstinance and caffeination than by a measured analysis (such as the BC Arts Council system of numerical ranking). The result of such a process as the GG uses will tend to be a Short List of well-crafted, comprehensible, uncontroversial books. The one non-conforming title on our 2010 Short List got there simply because the juror arguing for it (me) wore down the juror arguing against it. And the clock was ticking.

Jury Deliberations – Picking the GG Winner

Somewhere toward the end of the day, in the process of our final deliberations to determine the GG winner from our Short List of five titles, the Program Officer told us that we must have consensus on the winner. All three jurors must be able to get behind the winning book.

And so, to cut an already very long posting short, that criterion became the primary factor in selecting Canada’s 2010 winner of the Poetry GG (and I would suspect for most other years as well). It was the one book out of the five that no one in the room had any major problem with. (Hardly the stuff blurbs are made of.)

The high-minded ideals we had entered with had been pulverized by a process that is far too rushed, and with no mechanism (or time) to backtrack, review, or deploy common sense to halt a runaway train.We ground out our requisite blurbs, walked around the corner to the nearest bar, got hammered, retired to our respective hotel rooms, and flew home the next day – our duty done.

For Future GG Juries (are you listening, Canada Council?) :

1. One day in the jury room is not enough. Fix that first!

2. The adjudication process needs to occur in stages. There needs to be a gap of time for reflection and reconsideration before the jury finalizes the Short List from which the winner will be selected. For it is at this point that jurors, if given some space to privately collect their thoughts and reflect on their five months of reading, will likely say: “Book A never even got on the table, but Book B is on the Short List? That’s crazy!” It may mean a skyped or teleconferenced jury for one or both stages.

3. Some system of numerical ranking needs to be used. A book (or an entire poetic style) that is hated by one juror can nevertheless make the Short List in a system of numerical ranking. Under the current system, entire schools/streams of Canadian poetry can be shut out of all mention in the GGs if a single juror can’t abide it.

4. Each of the three jurors should be allowed to place her top pick of all titles on the Short List. The two remaining spots on the Short List can be filled by a system of numerical ranking. This too will widen the aesthetic scope of the Short List and potentially enable experimental works to be better represented, thus creating a Short List that more accurately reflects the true diversity of current Canadian poetry and poetics.

5. Publicly release the goddam Long List! And do it with pride, honoring the authors and publishers who are on it.

6. Fix the ridiculous conflict of interest rules. You can’t have two-thirds of the jury bailing in the final weeks before adjudication. If a juror has a conflict on a particular book, then allow her to simply be silent on that title. This is the way BC Arts Council handles conflict of interest. The juror announces it in the room and does not weigh in on that candidate.

Why would anyone agree to be a juror and read 171 poetry collections in 5 weeks? That’s an average of 5 books a day. Where is the care and respect in that sort of approach? And why have a process that has the administrating body scrambling at the last minute to find jurors?

I have a minor quibble with Kim’s conclusions. The GG has a long history and that still counts for something but for the very reasons and arguments that Kim presents, it is no longer the most prestigious poetry prize in Canada. The Griffin now holds that distinction.

It must be a difficult time to be working in Ottawa if you are involved in the arts world. It seems everywhere you look our cultural institutions are being undermined and dismantled. I have been writing and editing and editing this short section about the GG prizes for months now. After much thought and reflection I am posting my findings because I agree with so many of the industry people I interviewed—I’d like the Governor General’s Awards in Literature to be the most prestigious awards in the country. But that is no longer the case in certain categories and I don’t see how the reputation can be restored when the CC is quotaing all its juries and the prize is driven by political correctness rather than the highest literary merit. Sometimes excellence requires review and feedback. Far too often the current system is a recipe for both nepotism and mediocrity.

“Under the circumstances, how could anyone even feel happy winning an award knowing the award was the result of such a crap shoot. Everyone says it’s a lottery—actually, a lottery would be better. Someone at the CC should just pick a title from a hat. I suppose it seems churlish to complain, and no writer would want to for fear of being accused of sour grapes…I remember being on a GG jury—it was definitely a compromise decision and I’m still ashamed of it.”

Jury: Hermione Lee is a biographer, an academic and a reviewer. Since 1998 she has been the Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford and a Professorial Fellow of New College Oxford. Simon Armitage, poet and professor. Candia McWilliam is a novelist and reviewer of fiction, biography and poetry. Anthony Quinn, freelance writer and reviewer. Fiona Shaw, actress and theatre director.

Kate Grenville—The Secret River VPL

The novel is a movie-in-waiting; a deeply moving movie with breath-taking scenery and sweeping proportions. Or as the book jacket claims, “Grenville vividly creates the reality of Australian settler life, its longings, dangers and dilemmas…a groundbreaking story about identity, belonging and ownership.”

The novel has two parts; each part is focused on a river. The first is the Thames in the early 1800s, where the main character William Thornhill is born, raised and earns a living carrying rich men across the river. His seven-year apprenticeship ends with his marriage to the daughter of his master, the long-suffering Sal. Forced by tough times, Will periodically steals to keep afloat (oh, why not? I’ll let that stand) and finally is caught and condemned to death. Sal figures out the system and gets Will a pardon from execution on the condition that the family be transported to New South Wales.

We are familiar with this world from other historical novels. Grenville’s rendition is strangely safe, as though you are watching a Disney movie. It’s sanitized, romanticized and sentimental. There are some hardships but the deep love of Sal and Will will carry them through.

So off they are shipped to New South Wales where again Will turns to the water to earn a living. They struggle, they work hard and they begin to thrive. Will has been traveling a merchant route, picking up goods upriver and returning them to the settlement. On his journey he has become entranced with a piece of land. He convinces Sal to give it a try, for “five years” and then they will have their fortune and return to London. The first part of this section reminded me of Little House on the Prairie with the deep wisdom of Pa, except that in this novel it is the stoic Sal who is most often the voice of sense and reason.

Dealing with the aboriginals is the biggest challenge. With a bit of land, Will now feels he has some power, which gives him a nasty edge. Sunny Sal is willing to compromise, try to work and live together without confrontation with the aboriginals. A pivotal scene in the novel occurs after the blacks have left the area and for the first time Sal goes to the place where they have been living. She sees a life, domesticity and the structures of family and order. Will sees an intrusion on his ownership. Of course, it doesn’t end well. Will participates in the blood bath of the aboriginals but survives and becomes a wealthy and respected landowner.

If you like historical romance, you’ll probably like this novel. It is well researched, and lets you know that point. It’s mostly well written though I got annoyed with the phoney phraseology:

When he could, he worked on the lighters owned by luckier men, and had only the wind and the tide to hate. With a load of coals or timber he pulled away at the oars, reduced to an animal, head down and mind blank. He felt like a man who had lost an arm, still waving the stump around. There was a great emptiness in him, which was the space where hope had been.

That internal, reflecting voice of Will is a constant in the novel. Grenville portrays him as a deeply feeling man, forced by circumstances to take actions against his own heart and morality. She portrays him as insightful to what some people would call the human condition:

Thornhill watched him sourly, thinking his praise only angling for the plate to be passed to him again, but after a time he saw that praising the food was Smasher’s way of giving thanks for human company. My word it does a man’s heart good to have a yarn, he said. His smile was a sudden sweet thing, opening on his pinched face like a flower. In that smile was a guileless boy on whom life had now laid its mark.

I didn’t buy it. The novel is so clearly a work of the 21st century, with our sensibilities and colonial guilt. Grenville is projecting those things onto Thornhill. Remember at the end of Bonnie and Clyde when they are finally shot, and you feel badly, even though the two bank robbers have spent the whole movie killing other people? The same emotional manipulation is happening in this novel. Thornhill participates in a massacre but the novel suggests he was just as much a victim. Fudging the perspective doesn’t help.

Grenville set out to write a non-fiction work on the colonization of Australia based on the history of her great grandfather but then the research turned to fiction. Grenville won the Orange Prize in 2001. The Secret River was short-listed or won almost every Australian prize going.

M J Hyland—Carry Me Down VPL

Another disturbed and disturbing first person narrator. 11-year-old John Egan thinks he is a human lie detector. He is obsessed with the Guinness Book of Records and dreams of going to Niagara Falls to visit the museum there. Mostly he’s an unreliable narrator. It took me a while to twig that some of the things that John says are happening probably are only taking place in his overly active imagination. He may walk into the room where his Gramma is sleeping but is she nude on the bed except for her underpants?

John may be only 11 but he has the body of a grown man, and this is a point of unexplained tension in his family. At one point the mother arranges for John to have a chat with the school principal. The mother seems to have an awareness that John is struggling with his growing sexuality. But she also molly-coddles John and treats him as if he were a much younger boy. She takes him into her bed, under the covers, to hold and comfort him. Or does she?

One scene, as reported by a confused and distressed John, suggests that John might be having homosexual awakenings.

On the front cover of the copy from the library J. M. Coetzee is quoted, “This is writing of the highest order.” Now, I find that curious. As noted above, the writing is the first-person narration of an 11-year-old. For sure one accomplishment of the novel is that the viewpoint is persuasive, mostly (there were a few places where I faltered—for instance, would an 11-year-old say he was “agitated”?) But is that writing of the highest order? The simplicity of the language does create a sense of urgency, and also a sense of menace. Is the reader being taken inside the mind of a psychopath? Does that develop at age 11? There isn’t much about John that is childlike.

At the beginning of the novel John is living with his paternal grandmother, with his mother and father. The grandmother has a falling out with her long-unemployed son and kicks the family out. They end up in a tenement, the father takes to drinking and spending time with the prostitutes upstairs. John figures this out, tells his mother, who then kicks out the father. The mother falls into an emotional and physical despair and John feels the weariness of an old man. In an attempt to bring his mother back to herself he almost smothers her to death.

Then the professionals are brought in. Social workers and analysts. We see all the adult characters through the eyes of John, but they seem inept, at best. And the plot moves toward pulp fiction—the mother forgives the father; the grandmother forgives her son; the family go back to live with the grandmother and the father gets a job. The mother decides to forget that her son has tried to murder her. So there is something of a Hollywood ending with a restored family and perfect parents.

Well, watch out, because the reader who has been paying attention recognizes that the mother is pregnant. There is a baby on the way and I for one doubt that John will react kindly not to be the centre of attention any longer.

This is Hyland’s second novel. The first, How the Light Gets In, was a “sleeper hit” and you’ve got to wonder if that acclaim is what landed this second novel on the Booker shortlist.

Edward St. Aubyn—Mother’s Milk VPL

The novel is a snapshot of the Melrose family—father Patrick, mother Mary and their two sons Robert and Thomas. Each section is in the third person but with shifting perspectives. The first section, August 2000, has the five-year-old Robert remembering his birth:

Why had they pretended to kill him when he was born? Keeping him awake for days, banging his head again and again against a closed cervix; twisting the cord around his throat and throttling him; chomping through his mother’s abdomen with cold shears; clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side; dragging him out of his home and hitting him; shining lights in his eyes and doing experiments; taking him away from his mother while she lay on the table, half-dead. Maybe the idea was to destroy his nostalgia for the old world.

It doesn’t matter that a five-year-old wouldn’t have such perspective and vocabulary—that’s not the point. It’s a remarkable opening to a novel very much focused on what John Mullan in The Guardian calls the “sustenance—and the poison—of a mother’s influence.”

The second section, August 2001, is Patrick’s. He feels abandoned by his wife, who has thrown all her energy into their second child, Thomas. Thomas has replaced Patrick in the matrimonial bed and consumes all of Mary’s waking time. Patrick takes to the bottle, then takes a mistress. The following section, another year and another August, gives voice to Mary and Thomas. But a plot synopsis doesn’t capture the intensity of the novel, its hard-edged humour or what St. Aubyn calls “sardonic ambiguity.”

Francis Wyndham: I think Mother’s Milk is St. Aubyn’s finest achievement to date. As before, the wit of his sophisticated characters and the unconscious humor of some of the others combine to create a shimmer of potential amusement over everything he tells us, even though the content may be almost unbearably painful. Again, his prose, in itself so pellucid and controlled, somehow manages to convey the chaos of emotion, the confusion of heightened sensation, and the daunting contradictions of intellectual endeavor with a force and subtlety that have an exhilarating, almost therapeutic effect on his readers. An undercurrent of human sympathy, present but not obvious in the earlier work, seems now nearer the surface. While the trilogy had at its center such lurid and particular themes as child rape and drug addiction, Mother’s Milk addresses with equal penetration a more general range of concerns: being a spouse, being a parent, being a child, being born, and wanting to die.

In August 2003 the family vacations in the USA. In previous summers they have gone to the French home of Patrick’s mother, but she has bequeathed it to a shaman. One of the underlying themes of the novel is the sense of entitlement of the affluent, the vulgarity of that position and how the rich control by disinheriting their children. The USA trip gives St. Aubyn the opportunity to point his pen at that culture and at the same time show up the arrogance of the Brits. On the plane as they are leaving for the USA, Patrick spots a family of large people trying to squish into their seats:

‘Get in there, Linda,” said the enormous father of the family.

“Dad!” said Linda, whose size spoke for itself.

That certainly seemed typical of something he had seen before in London’s tourist spots: a special kind of tender American obesity; not the hard won fat of a gourmet, or the juggernaut body of a truck driver, but the apprehensive fat of people who had decided to become their own air-bag systems in a dangerous world…

Eventually, the Airbags dented themselves into their seats. Robert had never seen such vague faces, mere sketches on the immensity of their bodies. Even the father’s relatively protuberant features looked like the remnants of a melted candle.

Patrick drinks his way through the USA, imposing on, and then getting kicked out by various relatives. After downing vast amounts of Maker’s Mark he heads to The Better Latte Than Never coffee shop to get coffee:

Old enough to remember the arrival of “Have a nice day,” Patrick could only look with alarm on the hyperinflation of “Have a great one.” Where would this Weimar of bullying cheerfulness end? “You have a profound and meaningful day now,” he simpered under his breath as he tottered across the room with his giant mug. “Have a blissful one,” he snapped as he sat at a table…

The novel is acerbic satire of the best order. This novel is the fourth in the Patrick Melrose series.

Sarah Waters—The Night Watch VPL

Regular readers will remember that I wasn’t enthralled with Waters’s earlier short listed novel, Fingersmith. Turns out I liked it more than this offering. If Fingersmith is “lesbian Victorian romp” then this novel is WWII lesbian romp. Except there is less romping.

I was about 1/3 into the novel when George and I headed off to the Galiano Writers’ Festival. I was carrying around the book in case there were gaps, and I had time to read. Several people approached me and asked how I liked the book, which was a bit awkward since it turned out they had read the novel and “loved” it. Waters has a large fan base who love her characters. According to online reviews, this novel annoyed some of those fans who wish Waters would stick with the Victorian shtick.

The novel focuses on four characters “three women and a young man with a past—drawn with absolute truth and intimacy” says the book blurb. Who writes these things? The first section is 1947, the second 1944 and the final and shortest is 1941. So you can see the plot device, showing the consequences of the actions then backtracking to reveal what really happened.

I found the novel to be overburdened with description and details, about everything. Each time a character shows up we are given a complete description of clothing. Same for changing scenery. And most of it doesn’t matter to the plot:

They had brought china cups to drink from. The beer foamed madly to the curving porcelain lips. Beneath the froth it was chill, bitter, marvelous. Helen closed her eyes, savouring the heat of the sun on her face; liking the reckless, holidayish feeling of drinking beer in so public a place. But she hid the bottles, too, in a fold of the canvas bag.

Okay, this section is telling about the character of Helen and produces atmosphere. But that’s where I had my major problem. With all the atmosphere and details, the characters get lost. And in a novel about characters, that seems to me to be a problem.

There is lots and lots of dialogue, which often is an indicator of a less literary work. And considering the time in which the novel occurs I found too much authorial manipulation. All the characters are gay. Where is the rest of the world?

On page 247 I gave up. If you like detailed historical novels you will probably like this one—it is very much in that tradition.

Kiran Desai—The Inheritance of Loss WINNER

A review in the New York Times claims that this novel explores, “with intimacy and insight, just about every contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence. Despite being set in the mid-1980′s, it seems the best kind of post-9/11 novel.” Here is the complete and highly favourable review:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/books/review/12mishra.html?pagewanted=all

For my part it was all I could do to finish the novel, often cursing my You Must Read All of the Winning Book Rule. It is the “intimacy” to which the review refers, partly, that bothered me. Like many of the novels by NRI (non-resident Indians) there is, for my critical tastes, an over abundance of adjectives. And sentimentality:

Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.

Many details just don’t make sense. A son goes to New York City and works, illegally in a series of underpaid Joe-jobs, in various ethnic restaurants. He lives in squalid apartments with refugees/immigrants from other third world countries, dreaming of a green card. But when he does leave, a few years later, he suddenly has a huge amount of savings and is able to purchase televisions, electronics, watches, calculators, and on and on. It would require another fortune to ship this stuff.

I read in an interview that Desai was pushed to take this novel to publication. She was then faced with plowing through 8 years of notes and hundreds of pages. That might explain my difficultly (and indifference) to the characters in the various plots—the editing has not been thoroughly refined. In sections that should produce tension there is only mishmash and plodding. I think this win might be a case of topic trumping talent. Not that Desai doesn’t show ability and promise but this novel is not an international award winner. It is too often overwritten and cloying. Here is a review that takes the time to muster an argument and raise some concerns. If you take the time to read it, also read the comments:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/nov/06/the-inheritance-of-loss-kiran-desai

Desai is the daughter of novelist Anita Desai. This is her second novel.

Hisham Matar—In The Country of Men VPL

You can’t help wondering how much of this novel is autobiographical. Matar was born in the USA to Libyan parents. His father worked for the Libyan delegation to the UN. The family moved to Tripoli when Matar was two and he lived there until he was nine, when the family fled to Cairo, escaping the terror that resulted in the 1979 September revolution of Qaddafi.

Nine-year old Suleiman narrates the novel in first person. Suleiman’s father is a businessman who travels and is away a lot. Often in the absence of her husband Suleiman’s mother gets “ill.” It is clear to the reader that she is drunk. During these drunken times it is her habit to talk to Suleiman about her past, much of which focuses on how her family married her off at 14 to a man she’d never met and didn’t love. The father believes in democracy and is involved with people who do not want to see Qaddafi in power. He is arrested, badly beaten, and then dumped because the mother has intervened with powerful people to save his life. Fearing for the safety of their son, the parents ship him off to Cairo to live with a trusted and beloved friend who has already been forced to flee.

The novel has been much praised for showing the suffering of everyday people during political unrest. The novel does force considerations of patriotism and nationalism, and their costs.

I had problems with the young narrator’s voice. Often it’s not convincing—the perspective is too mature. Here is an instance after the father has been beaten:

‘He made me cover the mirrors. He doesn’t want to see himself. He doesn’t want Slooma to see him either,’ she said, running her fingers through my hair as if she and I had discussed all of this before, shared all the details and retold them to one another so many times neither of us could truly say who had first told the story to the other.

The narrator is not a boy. In the last handful of pages, as the narrator quickly tells what happened to him from the age of 9 and his exile to his current age of 24, there is a new narrative voice, that of the 24-year-old Suleiman. It’s the best part of the book. Why not use that voice throughout, establish at the beginning that it is the older voice looking back? The contradictions between the language being used and the age of the boy narrator are distracting.

The characters are pretty flat. In part that, again, may be the result of the young narrator. His mother begins as a subservient and unhappy wife, drowning her sorrow in booze. After her husband is beaten they appear to be a solid, committed couple. How did that transformation take place? How can she so easily shut off the alcohol?

At times the writing is highly sentimental and flowery:

The clouds were cotton, the blue tremendous, the world below the page of atlas alive with worm-like cars, silent windows reflecting the light. Libya was coastline, on one side the relentless yellow desert stretching into Africa, on the other the foam-sprinkled and curling royal blue of my childhood-Mediterranean.

Again, not the voice of a 9 year-old child.

I didn’t learn much about Libyan politics. This story could have taken place in any country suffering under harsh political policies, and perhaps that is the point—the tension and confusion of a 9-year-old.

This is the first novel by Hishma Matar. It was much hyped before publication, resulting in a bidding war and foreign rights being sold in 14 countries before the manuscript was even delivered. Little wonder, with such financial investment, that the publisher submitted the novel to the Bookers.

Anthony Quinn—from The Guardian

I enjoyed every moment of the 2006 Booker until the very last minutes of our final meeting in the Guildhall. That was when I realised that the novel which I had set my heart on would not be the winner. On anecdotal evidence from friends who had judged the prize in previous years, I gathered that there was usually someone on the jury who would be a complete pest and make the whole process as awkward as possible. Not this time: our chairman, Hermione Lee, set a tone of almost heartless conviviality that Candia McWilliam, Fiona Shaw and Simon Armitage consistently upheld. Indeed, we had been so likeminded in the final reckoning of our shortlist that I must have blanked the ominous build-up of support for Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and assumed that everyone would come round to what was clearly the best book, Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk. When I was outvoted 4-1 I was surprised, and appalled. Six months of reading and re-reading – only to be thwarted at the last! I asked for a recount, which at least got a laugh. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I felt sick to my stomach. I was pleased for Kiran Desai, who’d spent eight years writing it. But we chose the wrong book.

I think Quinn is correct—the wrong book won in 2006. An example of a jury favouring a topic from a very new writer over the accomplished work of a senior writer.

The word allowance can’t convey how much I’m enjoying this series by Jean Baird: also, I can’t decide if I want her to speed up or draw the thing out as long as possible. Or just to come read the books in my living room and talk about them as she drops them at her feet. I’d make her sustaining drinks and keep the fire built up.

Ah, shucks.

In the same week that Christopher Hitchens died I stumbled across an article he wrote for Vanity Fair Magazine in 1992:

Let’s be plain in our speech. The unstoppably inflating awards business exists to reward sponsors, to pacify egos, to generate sales, and to puff reputations. This doesn’t matter so much in the world of ads and artifacts, any more than it does in the world where you see the “hotel employee of the month” scowling at you from a reusable plastic frame as you drum your gnawed fingers at an abandoned (“Thank you for giving us the opportunity to serve you better”) reception desk. It does make a difference, though, in the world of letters, where it helps to establish a bogus hierarchy among the composers of fiction and nonfiction alike…

But it’s probably too late to stem the rush of mutual prizegiving, which supplies publicity and status to sponsors, free prestige to publishers, free money to authors, free handout copy to reporters, and free eminence to editors, as well as free certification and validation to readers who aren’t sure what is chic this year. The triumph of the meretricious is now unstoppable.

The full article, which is well worth reading, can be found here:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/1992/12/glittering-prizes-199212

You may remember the name of James Wood, a juror for the Bookers in 1994. He’s the one (and probably not the only one) who swore he would never serve as a juror again, saying “prizes should mean nothing in literary terms.” Here’s a little note about Wood:

Wood is noted for coining the genre term hysterical realism, which he uses to denote the contemporary conception of the “big, ambitious novel” that pursues vitality “at all costs.” Hysterical realism describes novels that are characterized by chronic length, manic characters, frenzied action, and frequent digressions on topics secondary to the story. In response to an essay Wood wrote on the subject, author Zadie Smith described hysterical realism as a “painfully accurate term for the sort of overblown, manic prose to be found in novels like my own White Teeth…”

Keep that term in mind as you read the 2005 reviews.

Jury: Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Dinah Birch, academic and literary critic. Amanda Foreman, historian, author and professional juror! (From the Man Booker website: “In addition to her writing and public speaking, she has also served on a number of juries in the UK and the US including The Orange Prize, the Guardian First Book Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pen History Prize.”) Dan Stevens, actor, though he also has a university English degree. He has starred in many TV and movie adaptations from novels but it beats me how that would qualify him for this type of jury. Bharat Tandon, academic writer and reviewer.

Kazuo Ishiguro—Never Let Me Go VPL

The first novel I read from the 2005 short list was also tackled by Jean’s Booker Club. Here’s what happened:

There was general consensus that the first 50 to 100 pages make for pretty dull reading. The banal first person narration of Kathy H. perfectly fits her mundane life. The seemingly endless details about school, bad behaviour of students, etc., doesn’t make for riveting reading. Once you figure out that Kathy is a clone, as are all the other students at her school, bred for their organs which they will eventually donate to normal people, our attention picked up. In the end we concurred that the narration which never seems to lapse is the book’s greatest accomplishment, and also presents the reader with the biggest challenge. If the novel were not by Ishiguro, how many jurors would get past 50 pages?

Like other Ishiguro narrators, Kathy isn’t sure what is going on. The reader is left to sort it out, and in our discussion we established that we are still sorting it out. It is such a narrow reading path that the reader is forced to confront what is and isn’t there. The absence of information is as important as what Kathy tells us.

Ah, and who is the “us” that Kathy thinks she is addressing? Apparently other clones. She doesn’t know the “normal” world, how it works. And the novel forces the careful reader to reflect on the whole notion of normal. What is normal? Who is normal? What is normal behaviour? Etc.

The novel is not about rebellion. Although Kathy and her friends are destined to “completion”—what happens to a clone after several donations, i.e. death—they stay the course. They don’t consider running away, or complaining. They accept their prescribed destinies.

That lack of rebellion sparked a lot of discussion. (I use the word discussion loosely. We scream and yell and wave our arms. When six or more people are talking at once I slam the table and call for order.) If Kathy et al were cloned from real people, wouldn’t they rebel, even a couple of them? Well, maybe the cloning is selective. Maybe certain aspects of the DNA are removed, altered, etc.

The normal people of the novel are the guardians at the school. Near the end of the novel, after Kathy has left the school to become a carer, those clones who look after donating clones during recovery, Kathy visits her old guardian, Miss Emily. Miss Emily explains that the specific school Kathy attended was an experiment, an attempt to illustrate that the clones have souls. Miss Emily claims that her work made the living arrangement of the clones better. The guardians taught the children to produce art, then had shows of the best pieces in an attempt to persuade the establishment to give better treatment to the clones.

What sort of society would accept cloning people for organs? How could the religions ofsuch a society justify cloning for organs? Maybe by insisting that the clones have no souls? As readers, we have no evidence that we have souls so how can this be proven about ourselves, or others?

As you start to ask these questions the chilling aspect of the novel starts to take hold. Are we “normal” people in many ways similar to these clones? Do we share the false liberalism of Miss Emily—she and her staff of teachers illustrate the worst clichés about art. How much are we like clones, passively accepting the things we don’t like and following a narrow path? Do we live our lives as automatons? How are we managed? Do we passively accept the erosion of hope?

Aaron has taught this novel and he offered some additional insights that teaching can provide. He suggested that the novel had similarities to Frankenstein, a mash up of genres, with a mixture of voices and different registers of voices. Both novels expose the possibility that what science produces is not necessarily improvement—science can be wrong.

As we summed up I asked each person to respond to two questions. Did our discussion of the novel change or enhance your ideas of the book? And the usual, on a scale of 10 where 10 is a great book, how do you rank this novel?

On the scale of 10—7.5, 7, 7.5, 6, 6.75, 7.5, 7.8, 7.5 from the gang. George gave it 4, claiming to be a serious reader of science fiction. He suggested that work by Robert Heinlein is far superior. He found the technique obvious, as if he was watching the writer manipulate the reader. He said the discussion the book creates is not the discussion he’d want for one of his books, or the books he searches out to read. I gave it a 5 because I thought it was indulgently long for what it accomplished. It’s a showy experiment and too much of it is just plain boring. But from the group, the novel had a better response than most things we’ve read.

As for the discussion’s enhancing our individual opinions, again mixed response. Rex said the discussion softened his objections. Pauline said the discussion deepened her understanding of the novel. It sure helped clarify my position. But for the most part, my group said the discussion hadn’t significantly altered their opinions of the novel.

Ali Smith—The Accidental VPL

Another creative writing experiment from Smith. A stranger named Amber, in her early 30s, arrives at the summer rental home of a dysfunctional family—mother Eve is a B-list author with writer’s block, father Michael is a philandering academic, son Magnus is a 16-year-old mathematical virgin, and 12-year old Astrid prefers to see the world through a camera lens. It is never clear why the family lets Amber stay, but stay she does and over the summer they all become smitten with her in various ways. And she seduces all in various ways. Amber is quick to relieve Magnus of his virginity.

Stylistically it’s the same post-modern dialogue Smith used in Hotel World. Each chapter is seen through the eyes of one of the characters. And there is the same air of menace. Three sections—the beginning, the middle, the end. This novel is not intended to be representing reality—in the very end we are asked to wonder if Amber was just a ghost—but even so, whatever world these characters inhabit, their relationships are not persuasive. Yes, they are all stuck in their isolated worlds, but the relationship between the mother and the two children just doesn’t work at any level. The character is an idea of a mother, paper-thin.

One reviewer suggests this is Smith’s reworking of Pasolini’s 1968 film Theorem starring Terence Stamp. Stamp arrives at the home of a family, one by one seduces them, then leaves them in tatters. Perhaps, but if so the novel lacks the elegance of the film.

There is a running theme about cinema, film, photographs and all captured images. But I didn’t find those sections particularly interesting or illuminating:

Eve knew that something quite mysterious happened the more she looked at the pictures. She knew it was supposed to happen like that, that although these photographs were a signal to the eyes about something really happening, the more she looked at them the less she felt or thought.

The frustration of my reading experience was heightened by the fact that Smith really can write. After two novels I’m not persuaded she has much to say, and I don’t think the showing off ability to write in several different voices does much. The section where Michael pours out his feelings for Amber in various poetic forms is mostly embarrassing.

Zadie Smith—On Beauty VPL

Category: dysfunctional academics and their families.

About 30 pages into the novel things seemed familiar. I couldn’t remember reading this novel before, and even as I read through the next 50 pages and was convinced I had read it before, I had no memory of what was going to happen.

As Smith points out in her acknowledgements, the novel is indebted to E. M. Forster, specifically Howard’s End. Smith says the novel is homage. On Beauty shows the lives of two families with very different beliefs and social positions and how their lives become entwined—the device of Howard’s End. There are similar themes around class, familial relationships, parental relationships, and the nature of friendship, etc. But Smith adds the early 21st century issues of race, feminism, ethnicity, and affirmative action. The patriarchs of both families in the Smith novel are academics—one black, the other white but married to black American women. Both fathers are having sexual relationships with students and these relationships form part of the complicated discussions around anger/forgiveness, liberal belief/conservative belief, tolerance/judgment, and the “power of the inappropriate.”

It’s a complex and well-written novel, well worth the read. But I have a lot of complaints. There are far too many lengthy descriptive passages, often about the physical appearance of a character, or their clothing. Usually these descriptions add nothing to the novel, or knowledge of the character.

The editing is sloppy. Once in a while in any novel you’ll spot a typo and realize how it got overlooked. On Beauty had so many such errors that it became a distraction. When I came across the following line, page 345, “Erskine hung his head in cod misery” I had such low confidence in the editing that I’m not sure if cod misery is some term I don’t know, should it be cold misery, and how is that better, etc.

The hip-hop characters are not convincing, either in their mannerisms or dialogue. Smith seems to be grasping after a world she doesn’t know, except from a great distance.

Kiki is a black woman from Florida and Smith makes her the heart of the novel. But she also makes her obese, which seems a cliché. Although Kiki is from Florida her speech, cooking habits and wardrobe are more in fitting with a black woman from the islands.

The setting for most of the novel is a small university town near Boston, much like the real Harvard. But it’s just not convincing. Smith spent a year at a New England university but she doesn’t persuade me that she knows much about American life, or even American campus life.

The novel talks about “worlds that would not coalesce” and that is what Smith has done. The US part of the novel does not coalesce with the UK world, where she really does seem sure-footed.

The novel is very funny, particularly the scenes within the walls of the university. But the scope of this novel is too vast; see Smith’s comments above about hysterical realism.

Smith can write well and her first novel White Teeth was much acclaimed. The book won multiple honours, including the 2000 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, the 2000 Whitbread Book Award in category best first novel, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize, and the Betty Trask Award. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. It’s hard not to wonder if On Beauty made the Booker short-list on the writer’s reputation rather than the strength of the novel.

Here’s an odd thing—one scene I did remember vividly but had not been able to connect to the specific novel until I reread On Beauty occurs when a female academic takes her students to a poetry reading. She watches as the young people order various menu items then “She did as she had done for thirty years. ‘Just the salad please, thank you.’” I don’t know why this scene stayed with me. Perhaps it is the accuracy of a woman who defines herself so much by her small stature, a lifetime of under-eating. In this instance, that moment, quickly captured, does nail the character.

John Banville—The Sea VPL WINNER

Jean’s Booker Club

We struggled with this novel. We all agreed that the first-person narrator, Max, is odious. The book isn’t much about plot—its focus is on story-telling, the nature of memory and how our memories (real, imagined or enhanced) create our present. Max’s wife of many years has died of cancer. He doesn’t have much of a relationship with their only child, a daughter. Max returns to the resort town of his childhood, where a trauma took place. For most of the novel Max is in the resort town, but the time shifts from present to past, quickly and frequently.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for our group was the language—the novel is over-written, full of clichés, too many adjectives, compounded adjectives. Deliberately, we wondered? Where is the line of separation between the author and the narrator? Why would Banville create such an unsympathetic character and then compound the reader’s dislike with excessive language? Is it a spoof; because it is very clear Banville is an accomplished writer.

The character of Max is an art historian who in theory is writing a book about Bonnard, though he doesn’t have much of it written. But the novel is full of comments about Bonnard’s art, and other art. Our group looked to Aaron, since Aaron is an art critic. Aaron argued that the voice of Max is not the voice of an art historian. He said Max writes phony art appreciation.

Before our Booker club meeting Aaron had sent me a wonderful rant: “So I’m reading The Sea, and I know this is a spoiler — viz., that we aren’t to discuss a book with anyone first, hence not sending it to the whole group, just you as I figure you’ve already read it — but I don’t think I’ve ever read a book I’ve disliked so much before. The whole author/speaker divide seems to be at issue here, particularly with the misogyny. But what’s with people saying this guy is a ‘stylist‘ a la Nabokov? Cliché-ridden, overwrought, flat prose. The sentences, so full of descriptive, concrete words, sometimes don’t even cohere into an image. The words dangle together, like cheap watches in a department store display. If anything I am enjoying the page-by-page indignation it inspires. At least one passage per page is so egregious that is demands to be read aloud. Still, I’m trying to get through it as quickly as possible so that I can move onto something better. Baffling in its sentiments. Does prose have a word equivalent to doggerel?”

Why, we all wondered, does Banville want us to dislike Max so much? And our dislike travels quickly from Max to the writer. What on earth is he up to? Has something gone wrong? Are British publishers afraid to edit? But that can’t be it, because this novel won the Booker. Why? Is this the sort of novel admired by what Pauline calls “an emotionally repressed culture”?

We pulled back, again, and took another run at it. Charlie suggested the novel might better be called The Light since that is as prevalent a motif in the novel as the sea. Yes, we agreed he might be on to something, that Banville is painting a canvas with words. Some of the sections we most admired, and there is writing and moments to be admired, are like images caught on film, mostly about memory and death. We also agreed that Max’s deep concern with improving his class position—he marries up—is compelling.

The sea surrounds Ireland, and it figures prominently in the country’s myths and memories—the sea is primordial. But our memories are not clear, not photographic (Max’s wife dabbles in photography as a contrasting way of showing the present, but it’s too stark a medium). Memories are filtered. Charlie pointed to the novel’s focus on shafted light.

So, what’s the point? It seems to be about how memory works, our expressed memory as well as sexual and sensual memory. Is it worth it? George, citing Beckett’s Unnamable as a 10, gave The Sea a 4. Aaron, noting Banville’s poor use of the Bonnard motif and citing Proust as his 10 gave The Sea 2.5. Charlie said he’d just watched Back to the Future and that’s his 10, but refused to vote because he hadn’t quite finished the novel—the last 5 pages reveal several if not all the significant plots details. But he did say that what he had read reminded him of a drunken movie usher, swinging his flashlight in the wind. The rest of us voted 2.8, 2, 3.5 and 4.

Rex was unable to attend but sent his remarks: I haven’t read any notes yet from the meeting last night, so will now reveal my pre-thought ideas about this book as post-talk:

I gave the book a generous 4.5 .. the point-five I added out of respect for the author trying to be creative and at least he wasn’t writing copy for a marketing agency. Or, was he?

I found The Sea to be too predictable. I knew within a few pages that we were going to get a big surprise historic memory moment at the end, and I thought: This better be good. It wasn’t. A woman loved another woman. wow. Underwhelmed. 

And the journey seemed mostly tedious to me, the author trying too hard to be post-modernish, and sort of pulling it off in a completely unadventurous manner without any new twist of style or vision. The unreliable, unlikable narrator thing just got tiresome for me.

So I gave it a 4 .. and then in a moment of sympathy for the artist, gave it a 4.5.

Judith replied, Rex, I found it interesting that, having already read The Sea some years ago, when I reread it I completely forgot his surprise plot twist ending, which Renee had to explain in the car on the way to Jean and George’s as I didn’t have time to finish it again. I knew that I HATED the book the first time (yes, I felt that strongly), I remembered the odious main character, the seaside setting, somewhat more dimly the very uninteresting Graces but mostly the murkiness of it, how irritatingly overwritten, how tedious most it was. However, when I reread it and found the occasional good phrase or insight I felt slightly less vehement towards Banville. I agree with something that Aaron said before we put our coats on, that he disliked The Sea so much it made him curious to read some of Banville’s earlier work.

Is Banville a talented writer who lost his way? Got lazy? It reminds me a bit of reading one of Timothy Findlay’s last books (not that their styles are anything alike), where on every second page the main character was opening yet another bottle of Wolf Blass. Seems the author’s own drinking had become his main theme. Perhaps Banville, drunk on his own adjectives, just let them take over the book, and then tacked on a bad whodunit ending, Mrs. Grace on the beach with Rose etc.. If that’s the way he handles plot in his detective novels I don’t want to read them. But would, say, his second or third novel, reveal what his reputation as a stylist is all about? Aaron, please read it and let us know.

Sebastian Barry—A Long, Long Way

In the first chapter with great economy Barry establishes the great sweeping nature of history, the large force against which the individual is eclipsed. The language and writing show Barry to be a stylist. He also has the ability to be sharp, focused and funny in his crisp presentation of characters. Willie “was as plagued as any other boy by desire, trying to put manners on the endless erection of his sixteen years.” Then a few pages later, after he has met and fallen in love with Gretta, “She wasn’t so wedded to the idea of his erection as perhaps he was.”

In chapter two Willie signs up as a volunteer, answering the call of Lord Kitchener. Willie does his training time then heads off to the infamous trenches of WWI. The writing remains unsentimental, mostly, as Barry focuses on the small human details rather than the blood and gore. There is certainly nothing glamorous or valiant in Barry’s detailing of this war. Told to take a message back to headquarters Willie responds to the terror of crossing no man’s land, littered with dead Germans and Irish, “clogging up the way under St Peter’s gate,” by shitting his pants. He delivers the message, smelling “like hell.”

“Major Stokes was just staring ahead now. There was a little table in the corner of the destroyed barn with a cut-glass bottle on it that Willie just happened to notice at that moment. Whisky in it or the like, and three small red glasses beside it. It was like a fragment from another world, adrift in these confusions. He wondered what went on here between the three, what they would talk about when he went off again.”

There are moments of deep tenderness. Willie gets leave time and arrives home unexpectedly. His sisters rush to embrace them, but he shields himself and says he must bath, have his clothes washed and the nits removed before they can touch him. Their gruff father arrives and washes his son, carefully combing his hair, removing and squishing the lice.

The tension between Willie and his father is a dominant motif of the novel. The father is a policeman and chief superintendent so the family live at Dublin Castle while the father tries to keep order in the city for the King. Many young Irishmen signed up as volunteers because of the promise of Home Rule. At the end of his leave heading back to Belgium Willie gets caught in the Easter Uprising and sees Irishmen gunned down in his homeland.

I was not able to sort out the complicated nuances of Irish politics, and it is that approach to WWI for which this novel is praised. Of course, published in 2005 there is also the modern backdrop of Britain’s response to the post-911 world and the push to join the USA in its War Against Terrorism—a topic that is just as slippery as Ireland’s Home Rule.

I also found some of the plot devices pretty contrived. Willie’s Da is a policeman and dreams of his son following in his footsteps but Willie doesn’t attain the required six feet. Gretta’s Da is on the side of the Labour leader and has had his head smacked with a baton by the police—yes, the star-crossed lovers. One night with a bunch of his comrades Willie gets very drunk, ends up with a prostitute and a spiteful soldier writes Gretta about the betrayal, resulting in Gretta marrying another man. But these details may rankle because, as I’ve confessed before, I’ve reached a saturation point with war novels.

Julian Barnes—Arthur & George

George Ernest Thompson Edaliji is the son of a vicar who grows up to be a solicitor. George’s mother is Scottish and his father is Parsee. George is raised as an Englishman and faithfully answers his father’s question, “what is England?” with “England is the beating heart of the Empire.” George is dour, friendless and earnest.

Arthur comes from a poor family. His father is a drinker and constant source of trouble to the family. An uncle provides money for Arthur’s education and he grows up to be a doctor and the famous creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle. Arthur is an adventurous athlete.

In his life Doyle was constantly being asked to help with real criminal cases. The only time he ever did was the Edaliji case. Edaliji was wrongfully charged and convicted. Barnes takes that real incident and spins a deeply compelling story. In part the writing is homage to Doyle and Victorian style. But it is also an attack on British superiority complex—apt in a post-911 Muslim-anxious age.

The publisher’s blurb: “With a mixture of intense research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings into sharp focus not just this long-forgotten case but the inner workings of the two men and the wider psychology of the age. Arthur & George is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes. It is a novel about low crime and high spirituality; guilt and innocence; identity, nationality and race; and thwarted passion. Arthur & George explores what we think, what we believe, and what we know.”

All that is true, but the novel is also richly funny. Why don’t publishers celebrate humour? Two examples.

Doyle’s response the first time he meets Jean, the woman who will eventually become his second wife:

He sits there, perched on the sofa’s edge, longing to concentrate on her words, her face, the date and the thought of snowdrops; but they are all driven out by the awareness that he has the most tremendous cockstand of his entire life. It is not the decorous swelling of a pure-hearted chevalier, it is a thumping and unavoidable presence, something rowdy, something living up to that word cockstand which he has never himself uttered but which is pressingly in his head. His only other thought is a relief that his trousers are loosely cut.

Doyle was interested in the spiritual world, as were so many Victorians. Edaliji attends the occasion (deliberately not called a funeral) that marked Doyle’s passing over into the spirit world. Mrs. Roberts, Doyle’s favourite medium also attends. There is a lengthy section of Mrs. Roberts’ comments as she tries to contact the spirits, and lists off those other spirits who are in attendance, all pushing for her attention.

George listens to the crowd of spirits being given fleeting description. The impression is that they are all clamouring for attention, fighting to convey their messages. A facetious if logical question comes into George’s mind, from where he cannot tell, unless as a reaction to all this unwonted intensity. If these are indeed the spirits of Englishmen and Englishwomen who have passed over into the next world, surely they would know how to form a proper queue? If they have been promoted to a higher state, why have they been reduced to such an importunate rabble?

John Sutherland, from The Guardian

When I chaired year 37, it more or less, as airline pilots say, flew by wire. The year was, by general agreement, a bumper one for fiction. As usual, no minds were much changed by the panel discussions – candidate B merely came forward when one judge’s candidate A was voted down. John Banville came out top with The Sea. King of the As and Bs. Teeth were gnashed in the press the next day; but they would be if Jesus Christ had written the winning novel. I spoke to Kazuo Ishiguro (shortlisted for Never Let Me Go) shortly after. “The goalkeeper jumped the wrong way”, he sportingly said. I wish I’d been quick-witted enough to rejoin “not even Petr Cech has to save five penalty shots all coming at him at once”. Julian Barnes, in an interview for the New York Times, was more savage (he had been shortlisted for Arthur & George). Not, he felt, a bumper year for judges. Perhaps he was right. But posterity will forget us. Barnes, Ishiguro and – I believe – Banville they’ll remember. And make their own judgments.

Probably the most popular place was Tuc-el-Nuit Lake, which was not then surrounded by houses. It is the only lake I have ever swum across, so you can see how small it is. Back in those days it would freeze over, and we used to skate on it, enjoying the pings we heard in the ice in front of us. But in the summer, even though kids said it was bottomless, it was for swimming, and the few top inches of the water would be as warm as the coffee I am just now finishing. There was a lot of that green muck in it, though, because it was connected to the river somehow.

Just north of Tuc-el-Nuit were two small lakes called Gallagher Lake and Mud Lake. Mud lake was shallow and full of reeds, and all we did there was fish for yellow perch, but the south end of Gallagher Lake was our second most popular swimming place. There was a high rock cliff all along the east side. Highway 97 was just barely invisible up to the west. Apparently the nuns who ran the hospital in town lived at the north end. We never went there. But the south end of Gallagher Lake was a great place to gather, and in those days there were no drugs and sex at the beach. I even went there with my pal Fred Van Hoorn after he somehow acquired my girlfriend Barbara.

If anyone had a car, or if we were hanging out with our parents, we would go to the beach at the bottom of the main street in Osoyoos. Osoyoos Lake was bigger than any Oliver lakes. The U.S. border ran right across it, and I don’t think we ever went swimming south of the border. We were always interested in impressing Osoyoos girls, but the rumour was that they were mostly “Yankee bait.” The nice thing about the beach in Osoyoos was that you had a choice of grass or sand when you were out of the water, having a cigarette or Mission Orange or something.

I never knew anyone who went swimming in Vaseaux Lake, a few miles north of Gallagher. I once went canoeing on Vaseaux Lake, and promised myself that I would do that again, but that was a promise I never kept. The next lake up was Dog Lake, at Okanagan Falls, but I don’t remember swimming there. Late on Graduation Night I came to to discover that I was sitting on the back of a horse for the first time in my life, and almost falling off frontward because the horse was drinking out of Dog Lake.

At the other end of Dog Lake was the less used of Penticton’s two long and sandy beaches. We went there a few times, but we were much more likely to use the beach that was next to downtown, the north beach, at the bottom of Lake Okanagan. This was my favourite beach. When you sat in the sand and looked north you could see that the lake was bordered by clay cliffs on either side. You could see but not grasp the melted glacier’s immense age. Looking more closely, you could see that the grains of sand were of many colours, some red, some black, some white, and so on. About three hundred feet off shore were big moored rafts, to which you swam and from which you dived. At the east end of the beach was a giant peach, inside which teenaged girls were stationed to sell you ice cream cones.

The temperature was somewhere in the nineties. There were hotrods parked at the curb. Almost all the girls were blonde. Is it any wonder that we grew up feeling more like California than Ontario?

They built a swimming pool in Oliver when I was a kid. It was always opened officially for the May 24th weekend, but for some reason there would be water in it well before that. So we would climb over the fence and get an unsupervised swim, the kind any kid likes best. I think a lot of us peed while we were in the pool. What are the odds? We managed to feel up the girls or at least press our bodies against them. There was green sludge in the water, as there was in any swimming water around town. Once a week the pool would be drained, and a kid was hired to clean it out, with big brushes on handles. Ronnie Carter had the job until he quit for some reason, and my parents suggested that I would be ideal for the job. I got to keep the things I found in the green sludge, coins and bracelets and so on. It took hours to clean that pool in the 95-degree sun. I got sunstroke and wound up in the hospital for a while. Now, sixty years later I like the sunshine but I can’t be out in it with no hat.

I think they built the pool partly to keep us kids away from the swimming hole in the river just down the hill from the Oliver Theatre. My parents told me I was never to go swimming in the river, and I think that a lot of parents felt that way. But there was no grass near the river at the swimming hole, so there must have been a lot of foot traffic around there. Sometimes in the movies shown at the Oliver Theatre there would be a bucolic scene of American boys cavorting at the ol’ swimming hole, with a rope for swinging out over the water and letting go.

But the Okanagan River was fast and as they say treacherous. There was a kid who was supposed to be the best swimmer in town, and he drowned there, or rather downstream. Seems he was sitting on a chair in the water for some reason, and he just disappeared. I used to go down to the swimming hole sometimes, but I don’t remember trying to swim there.

But once in some evening sunshine I was down at the swimming hole. I don’t remember whether any other kids were there. I was probably watching myself having an imagined adventure involving spies or secret interstellar visitors. Then I saw a man and woman, he in a suit and she in a dress with a belt around her waist, with their arms around one another, walking toward the quick-moving green river, walking then into the river, never pausing, walking until they were deep into the river and gone, downstream.

I looked around, but saw that I was the only witness to this scene. Since that time I have had numerous ideas about what might have been going on. But that night while I was waiting for sleep I had the edges of a familiar feeling, that I was going to have to be something like a poet when I grew up.

The campaign team of Justin Trudeau, the son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, according to the report’s analyst:

Justin and Pierre Trudeau, in the pre-post-partisan era, c. late 1980s.

“has long admired the ability of the likes of Tony Blair and Barack Obama to put their personal touches on a modern way of doing politics, and wanted to create a Canadian version of a broad-based, centrist approach to a grassroots politics. The goal is to transform the Liberal Party… into a movement for the post-partisan age.” Ten Bonus Points to anyone able to make sense of the previous two sentences of political bafflegab.

Post-partisan politics refers to a so-far non-existent utopian era of political stasis in which no one has any new ideas, policies, or intelligence. Values are faded to bland, language is bleached of meaning, and the post-partisan parties remain gridlocked, unable to agree on what to do. Politics is reduced to an adjunct of celebrity culture. At the liberal end of the spectrum, this is called “muddling through”; at the authoritarian end of the spectrum it’s called “North Korea.”

[There] is an ongoing debate within the literary community about the purposes of the novel today. Should it elevate or entertain? As Jonathan Franzen pointed out in the New Yorker, there are ‘two wildly different models of how fiction relates to its audience’. In what he calls the ‘status’ novel, the author (following Flaubert) places himself above the herd, declares his writing a work of art and disdains the appreciation of his readers. Or there is the ‘contract’ novel, that makes a compact between writer and reader, in which the novelist’s responsibility is ‘to create a pleasurable experience’, i.e. to entertain…

Within the industry, ‘literary fiction’ has become identified as another label for second-rate novels that don’t sell. The publishers, who for so long paid lip-service to ‘literary fiction’, have also played their part in the drive towards narrative. The twenty-first-century publisher, motivated by the corporate machine, has to find books that sell. Armed with computerised sales tracking, which exposes writers whose work finds no audience, the ‘new era’ publisher cannot afford to nurture a writer of ‘difficult’ or ‘experimental’ fiction to the point where they might break even.

The full article can be found here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/29/ bookerprize2002.thebookerprize

One UK study, “An investigation into the attitudes of public librarians towards the Man Booker Prize for Fiction” conducted by Karl Hemsley at the University of Sheffield to fulfill course work for graduate librarian degree, shows that UK librarians also fall into two categories: camp one believes that the job of public libraries is to be patronizing, to give the public what it wants (entertain); camp two believes that in part public libraries need to be elitist—if books aren’t available they won’t be read (educate). UK libraries are tasked with reader development. Camp one believes that happens by supplying the book users demand. Camp two believes you need to encourage users to widen their reading habits.

The librarians interviewed by Hemsley express the usual assumptions and accusations about prizes. Many point to the enormous control and vested interest that publishers have on the Booker. Some even said publishers decide the Bookers because publishers are the ones who decide what books will be put forward. So despite the intentions of the Booker administration, these librarians argue the agenda of the prize is actually set by publishers.

Many of the librarians argued that “literary fiction” is elitist which they defined as pretentious and unreadable. One stated that literary fiction means “a novel that places style before content, puts prose before plot and subordinates character and narrative to nebulous aesthetic concerns.”

These librarians were very articulate about the challenges of the juror process—the Booker demands that each juror must read all submitted novels. When you are faced with 120+ novels in a matter of months you must be speed-reading. The librarians know that prize jurying does not allow for careful reading. The librarians also pointed out that Booker jurors are “like-minded high-brow people.” Librarians know that the biggest factor in winning prizes is luck.

The Hemsley research did unearth one very interesting fact. Some UK writers have it stipulated in their publishing contracts that their novels will be submitted to the Booker. Since a publisher only has 2 slots for the prize that contract clause is very powerful. And telling, don’t you think?

Jury: Chris Smith was Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport from 1997 to 2001, and is now Director of the Clore Programme for Cultural Leadership. He was first elected as Member of Parliament for Islington South & Finsbury in 1983, and has held this position ever since. Tibor Fischer has worked as a journalist and was selected as one of the ‘20 Best of Young British Novelists’ by Granta in 1993. His first novel Under the Frog won the Betty Trask Award in 1992, and was the first debut novel to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1993. Robert Macfarlane, writer, critic and academic (28 at the time he was a juror). Rowan Pelling founder and editor of The Erotic Review, and journalist. Fiammetta Rocco journalist and novelist.

Gerard Woodward—I’ll go to Bed at Noon VPL

The story of the Jones family. Father Aldous and mother Colette and their four children, Janus, James, Juliette and Julian. These are not the Joneses you want to keep up with. This novel is the second Woodward has written about this family. In the first, Colette was sniffing glue. In this novel her preferred substance is barley wine. Colette’s brother, Janus Brian drinks himself to death after the death of his wife. Colette’s other siblings drink. Her son Janus is a reckless, destructive drunk. Category: dysfunctional families.

There is a bit of chat about the impending election, and the reader knows it is Margaret Thatcher who will win and that Britain is in for a thrashing. But otherwise the novel is about the Joneses, bouts of drinking, the small changes in the pattern of life as the children age, move away, marry, move back, travel, etc. They stagger on. Some die. Some survive.

I wasn’t totally persuaded. An alcoholic doesn’t throw up after three beers, as Janus does at one point. But the relationship between Colette and Janus does portray the codependency of addiction, and without judgment.

The novel, Woodward’s second, is highly readable but I had to wonder if it was submitted by the publisher because Woodward’s first novel was short-listed for the Whitbread prize.

Colm Toibin—The Master VPL

The novel is about Henry James from January 1895 to October 1899, with lots of stories of earlier times in the life of the novelist. The first section marks the disastrous reception of a play written by James at the same time that Oscar Wilde’s plays were meeting with huge success. James is crushed, and retreats to Ireland. Much of the novel explores the lifetime habit of James to be withdrawn and his failure to make connections with people. Toibin doesn’t make conclusions—this event explains that behavior of James—but he does present lots of supposedly actual events that might have influenced the personality development of the Master writer, including his suppressed sexuality. In this regard the novel pulls the reader in and draws a compelling portrait of James. And like James, Toibin has an eye for detail:

Sometimes when they spoke he heard Minny Temple’s voice. He envied them their lack of self-consciousness, their unawareness that their American voices, so filled with enthusiasm, were not as original as they imagined, nor as uncomplicated by history as they supposed…He deplored the girls’ accents and corrected them regularly as they moved from one museum to another. When Rosina, for example, admired the jewels in a Parisian shop window, Henry immediately corrected her.

“Jew—el, not jool.”

But when Toibin turns to explaining how James mostly used events from his life and life of acquaintances to build literature, the writing becomes stilted. Many times during these sections I thought of abandoning the novel. But I’m glad I persevered because the section about the relationship between James and Constance Fenimore Woolson is a wonderful combination of tenderness and pity, that two such talented writers would be so inept in their own personal lives.

While not mimicking the style used by Henry James, in part the novel is homage. Well-written but it isn’t the startling and often brilliant prose of Henry James. This is Toibin’s fifth novel, and his previous appearance on the short list for the Booker helped to establish his stardom.

Sarah Hall—The Electric Michelangelo VPL

From the book jacket: In the uniquely sensuous and lyrical prose that has already become her trademark, Sarah Hall’s remarkable new novel tells the story of Cy Parks, from his childhood years spent in a seaside guest house for consumptives with his mother, Reeda, to his apprenticeship as a tattoo-artist with Eliot Riley—a scrapper with a reputation as a Bolshevik and a drinker to boot.

His skills acquired and a thirst for experience burning within him, Cy departs for America and the riotous world of the Coney Island boardwalk, where he sets up his own business as ‘The Electric Michelangelo’. In this carnival environment of roller-coasters and freak-shows, while the crest of the Edwardian amusement industry wave is breaking, Cy becomes enamoured with Grace, a mysterious East European immigrant and circus performer who commissions him to cover her body entirely with tattooed eyes.

Hugely atmospheric, exotic, and familiar, The Electric Michelangelo is a love story and an exquisitely rendered portrait of seaside resorts on opposite sides of the Atlantic by one of the most uniquely talented novelists of her generation.

This blurb suggests to me that the novel was quickly and indulgently edited. Sarah Hall won the Commonwealth Writers Best First Novel Award. This novel is her second, appearing a brief two years after the first; extremely quick given the slow pace of big publishers (Faber and Faber).

The book jacket blurb covers the plotline. The rest of the novel is very much about atmosphere, of both seaside and carnival-like communities. The writing is flowery and in a strange way keeps the characters at a distance. It’s a motley group of people but not one of them ever seems more than a caricature. This dullness might in part have to do with the minimal amount of dialogue. Yes, the novel is about physical and emotional pain, both personal and societal, but those things are mused on over and over and over, and too often with some mythical overtones that are just outright sentimental and laughable. I was never once convinced that I was anywhere other than the early C21st looking back to the beginning of the C20th. I thought to get a friend with significant tattooing to read it and write a report, but I like her too much for that.

David Mitchell—Cloud Atlas VPL

Reading this novel right after the one by Hall further emphasized the skill of the Mitchell and the indulgence of the Hall. From the first page the reader is immersed in a different time but without all the atmospheric description and poppycock.

Mitchell strings together narratives and makes startling connections without stooping to cliché conclusions. He has borrowed and stolen widely from different written traditions, somehow making it all new. The narratives travel into a centre, then move from that centre back to the beginning. The ride out had some blips but the ride in was one of the best and exciting reads I’ve had in years. I insisted George Bowering read it. Here is his report:

Recently I saw a male American movie star talking with the comedic host of a midnight television show. The movie star reported that he had been in Germany, working in a movie titled Cloud Atlas. The host asked him what it was about. The movie star said that he did not know. Fair enough. The host asked him where the movie idea came from, and the movie star did not seem to know that either. They did not pursue the subject beyond that exchange. My guess is that for every person who reads David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas there are a million people who recognize the movie star.

The novel is constructed of six novella-length stories, each of which involves people who are desperately travelling, often being pursued by others who do not wish them well. A cloud atlas is a book of photographs depicting the various kinds of clouds; it is used by weather-watchers, especially those who are travelling by sea or air. The term “cloud atlas” shows up a couple of times in Mitchell’s book. In one case it is the title a musical composition written for six instruments. In the novella titled “Letters from Zedelgheim,” a young composer describes his “sextet for overlapping soloists.” “In the first set,” he writes, each solo is interrupted by its successor: in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order.”

That is the structure of the novel, of course, and as each of the instruments has “its own language of key, scale, and colour,” so each novella is set in its own place and time—and genre. We see a nineteenth century sea story, an epistolary fiction, a satirical British comedy, a post-apocalypse dystopia, and so on. In each novella a character is allowed to read something from the previous narration. And each of these characters bears a peculiar birthmark in the shape of a comet. So it goes: abcdeffedcba.

At first one is put in mind of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, and one is inclined to congratulate Mitchell for stepping out of the general everyday meadow or backstreet of standard British fiction. Then one is delighted to catch quick glimpses of other writers, great or domestic. One is encouraged to recall the entire structure and history of literary architecture. And here is the accomplishment I admire most: while David Mitchell took the time to invent a tricky, puzzling, intricate and lengthy machine of experimental writing, he also provided some admirable chase scenes that will have you reading well past your lights-out time. I am not the first reader to attest that I wished for, say, another three novellas in the composition.

Jean forced me to read this book, and I want to thank her for that. It is better than any of the nine other Booker finalists I have had to read for the book club that she supervises.

Achmat Dangor—Bitter Fruit VPL

It’s late in the 20th century, Nelson Mandela is the President of South Africa and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is preparing its final report. This novel is one of the few Bookers that is about the modern world. Characters use cell phones and surf the Internet. But that modernity is betrayed by the aftermath of apartheid.

I struggled with this novel. Many times the writing is bothersome, as if an indulgent poet has taken over the text. As a reader, I thought the novel is an important document, but how well does it stand up to literary analysis? Dangor is a well-known activist; he has written a couple of collections of poetry and some other novels.

The following review hit on many of my concerns and grapples well with the challenge, if you forgive the academic jargon:

http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/viewArticle/436/836

Alan Hollinghurst—The Line of Beauty VPL WINNER

Another novel about sex and power. And a lot of lust.

Nick Guest finishes university and ends up living with the family of his school friend, Toby. Toby’s father is an MP in the Thatcher government. Toby’s sister Catherine is a troubled teen, with self-destructive tendencies and an acerbic wit. Toby’s mother comes from a wealthy, established family. Well-written, the novel takes on the Thatcher era, and the Iron Lady herself, but in a new way.

In her fine essay “Let’s Dance,” Kim Duff writes that “Hollinghurst draws on the sociopolitical context of the 1980s, exploring how the politics of inclusion/exclusion affected Thatcherite ideas about consumption and wealth, and private and public space. In this sense, Hollinghurst’s text illustrates the way that the specter of Thatcher haunts 1980s British bourgeois society as she is coveted socially and politically, and how some 20 years later she continues to haunt British society through issues of deregulation, immigration, and gay rights.”

And this is very much a gay novel. We are with Nick on his very first sexual encounter, in the private garden behind Toby’s house, with Leo. The homosexual relationships, and the need for secrecy also inform the political world. Nick’s lover Wani, son of a rich immigrant businessman, is able to travel in the world of the British establishment in ways that Nick only yearns for because the wealth of Wani’s father lends him credibility. Nick and Wani, sniffing cocaine at every opportunity, squandering money in the search for aesthetic beauty and picking up as many threesomes as they can, blur the Line of Beauty—is it the aesthetic of the coke?

Something was bothering me about the novel, though I couldn’t put my finger on it. You may recall that Stan Perksy wrote a guest review for the previous short-listed Hollinghurst so I asked him about The Line of Beauty:

I continue to think that his best book is his first one, The Swimming Pool Library. All of the books (except The Spell, where he was befogged by Ecstasy — the drug, not the phenomenological experience) are “beautifully” (and beautifully, without the quote marks) written, but there’s always something wrong with them. (Daniel Mendelsohn in a recent New York Review essay reviewing H’s latest, The Stranger’s Child, gets as close as anyone I’ve read to explaining the hollowness that afflicts H’s elegant literary architecture.) So, H. writes exceptionally well, and he’s enormously smart. But there’s something repulsive about his protagonists, and Nick Guest is no exception. It’s hard to care what happens to him, or to the Arab prince snorting cocaine, or to Gerald the MP, or just about anyone. All of H’s novels are “recent historical” novels and have the curious limitation of historical realist fiction. I didn’t find any of the allusions to Henry James in Line of Beauty to make any sense. Mainly, I end up admiring how H. turns a sentence, renders a scene, structures a novel, etc., but it turns out I’m not particularly moved by whatever it is he’s trying to say. The appropriate comparisons for Hollinghurst are the other gay novelists of the period, Edmund White (A Boy’s Own Story, The Married Man) or Andrew Holleran (Dancer from the Dance).

That’s it. There is so much to admire, but there is also something hollow. Here is the NY Review to which Stan refers:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/10/gay-and-crumbling-england/?page=1

I would have given the win for 2004 to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.

Tibor Fischer From The Guardian

I’d heard the rumours. The hair-pulling, the eye-gouging, the shameful flouncing. I was, however, extremely impressed by the rigour of my fellow judges, who, unlike me, had proper jobs and families to distract them from the mound of books. What did I learn? Discussion is futile. No one changes their mind about a book. You might as well have a show of hands straight away. There aren’t many bad books (only one novel ended up in the bin after two pages), but there are a lot of so-so, nondescript novels that leave no trace. Publishers are idiots. I was very pleased Alan Hollinghurst won. But I wouldn’t say The Line of Beauty is a better novel than David Mitchell’s very different Cloud Atlas (which came in second) or Neil Cross’s Always the Sun (or others on the longlist).

There are good reasons why Midnight’s Children has been chosen as the Best of the Bookers (although every novelist I know rates Shame as Rushdie’s best book), but it would have been a more interesting exercise to have chosen the best of the shortlisted novels. It’s a pity that Beryl Bainbridge has always been pipped, and my favourite novel in the Booker annals (I’ve read it at least a dozen times) is Derek Robinson’s Goshawk Squadron

Thomas had connections through his father, the son of a wealthy wine merchant, and more importantly through his mother, Philippa, who was born into the aristocracy. She was a member of the Queen’s household and then the household of the wife of King Edward III’s powerful brother, John of Gaunt. Thomas seems to have lifted the family even higher. His daughter, Alice Chaucer, the last of Chaucer’s traceable descendents, ended up married to the Earl of Salisbury and then the Duke of Norfolk

Geoffrey likely met Philippa at court. He’d been sent to work as a page at the home of the king’s son, Lionel of Antwerp, and worked his way up in court, serving as a soldier, diplomat, Controller of the Customs of the Port of London, member of parliament for Kent and much else.

When Lewis was ten, Geoffrey gave him an astrolabe and a set of instructions on how to use it that Geoffrey had himself translated into English, since Lewis was too young to know much Latin. The book was by the eighth-century Arab astronomer Messahala, and its Latin version was called Compositio et Operatio Astrolabii (The Structure and Use of Astrolabes).

Astrolabes were invented by the Greeks in the second century BC and developed by the Byzantines and Arabs. They use triangulation to measure the heights of planets and stars from the horizontal. Knowing your latitude, you can tell the time from them (at night); knowing the time, you can calculate your latitude. They were especially useful to mariners who on the open ocean are out of sight of any landmarks. For example, you could hold your course (your latitude) across the Atlantic and hit Cuba, Iceland, Greenland, etc. If you got blown south, the North Star, if that’s what you were sighting on, was closer to the horizon; north and it was further up.

We know from Geoffrey’s poetry that Geoffrey himself was interested in such things. The Canterbury Tales are full of medical and astronomical references that are up to date for their time, and Geoffrey often mentions his sources. He was a great reader.

In introducing his set of instructions, Geoffrey says to Lewis: “Little Lewis my son, I perceive that you have the ability to learn sciences, and I have heard you say often that you want to learn how to use an astrolabe. . . . So I have given you an astrolabe adjusted for our horizon, set to the latitude of Oxenford, and I intend to teach you its use in my little treatise.”

Geoffrey goes on to explain that he has translated the treatise into English, using “naked” (simple) words and basic grammar, “for you don’t know much Latin, my little son.” He actually translates only what a kid could understand, sticking to two parts of the Compositio, the description of the instrument itself and a set of simple problems that can be solved using it.

The treatise begins as follows: “Your astrolabe has a ring to put on the thumb of your right hand when you take the height of things. Note that I will henceforth call this height of a thing its ‘altitude.’ This ring is fastened to the body or ‘mother’ of the astrolabe in such a way that the instrument can hang freely. The mother is a thick plate pierced with a large hole that receives in her womb the thin plates made up for diverse locations. These plates are made in the manner of cobwebs.”

And so it goes. It’s the first scientific or technological report, the first set of instructions for a scientific instrument, in English.

***

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