WEEK 11. THIS YEAR’S BOOKER PRIZE COMPETITION AND WINNER (2009)

‘The Booker Prize represents the very best of contemporary fiction. One of the world’s most famous literary prizes, it continues to be the ultimate accolade for every fiction writer’ – Booker’s description of the Booker Prize

‘Posh bingo’ – Julian Barnes’s description of the Booker Prize

2009 Judges:

James Naughtie (chair), Lucasta Miller, John Mullan, Sue Perkins, Michael Prodger

2009 Shortlist:

A.S. Byatt, The Children’s Book
J.M. Coetzee, Summertime
Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Simon Mawer, The Glass Room
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

Abjection

I thought you'd all done Kristevan 'abjection' on your Theory core already, or I'd have spent a little longer on it in the lecture today. If you're a little unsure what it means, you could do a lot worse than to follow these links:

Here's a fairly straightforward definition.

This introductory account situates Kristeva's theory in its Lacanian theoretical context.

Here are some Google Books monographs that use the concept (sadly Kristeva's own Powers of Horror book isn't up for preview on Google Books).

And here's an applicaton of Kristeva's theory to Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, and Keri Hulme's The Bone People (by Samantha Pentony).

Anne Enright, LRB article on winning the Booker

You should read the article at the other end of this link, in which Anne Enright talks about the experience of winning the prize, and especially the subsequent book-tour and publicity.

Do you think winning the prize, and staying in a succession of posh hotels whilst on tour made her happy? Hmm. 'It is a melancholy thing, to pass hundreds of thousands of people on the road and remember so few.'

Enright's Gathering

WEEK 10. ANNE ENRIGHT, THE GATHERING (2007)

‘[A] genuine attempt to stare down both love and death’ – A.L. Kennedy

‘There are some quite good set-piece scenes . . . but, God, it’s wearing’ – Hugo Barnacle
Anne Enright was born in Dublin in 1962. After working for RTÉ for some years, she became a full-time writer in 1993. The Gathering was her fourth novel and the first to be shortlisted for the Booker.

Editions:

Anne Enright, The Gathering, (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007; London: Vintage, 2008).

2007 Judges:

Howard Davies (chair), Wendy Cope, Giles Foden, Ruth Scurr, Imogen Stubbs

2007 Shortlist:

Nicola Barker, Darkmans
Anne Enright, The Gathering
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Lloyd Jones, Mister Pip
Ian McEwan, On Chesil Beach
Indra Sinha, Animal’s People

Topics:

• Memory and the Past.
• Narrative and Unease.
• Reviewers and Sales Figures.

Reviews:

A.L. Kennedy, ‘The Din Within’, The Guardian, (28 April 2007)
Adam Mars-Jones, ‘Intimate Relations’, The Observer, (6 May 2007)
Tom Adair, ‘Every Last Piece of the Jigsaw’, The Scotsman (19 May 2007)
Hugo Barnacle, ‘The Gathering’, The Sunday Times, (27 May 2007)
Patricia Craig, ‘The Gathering’, Independent, (7 June 2007)
Eleanor Birne, ‘What Family Does to You’, London Review of Books (18 October 2007)

Guardian Book Club on Desai's *Inheritance of Loss*

John Mullan (a Booker judge himself this year, and a Professor of the University of London to boot) has been running one of the Guardian's 'book club' sessions on Desai's novel. Check out what he's said so far:

Week 1: Divisions. "A novel of shifting points of view, The Inheritance of Loss flits from one character to another, from one emotion or sense impression to the next, its narrative form acting out the sense of dislocation that is its theme. "

Week 2: the Importance of Food. "Food focuses cultural unease. Eating makes you feel you belong, and makes you know when you do not."

Week 3: Kiran Desai on writing The Inheritance of Loss. "As I wrote [the novel], I began the process of considering that one's place in the world might be merely incidental, just a matter of perspective. Perhaps the centre was not firm at all? And as I wrote I became aware of the rich novelistic moments that come from many stories overlapping, from this moral ambiguity, and from the utter uselessness of the flag. Even the past – home of sorts to all of us – wasn't fixed. History is only someone's story. I felt as if I were writing to displace myself, and to know that my story wasn't the only one – that there would always be other books on the shelf."

Week 4's installment will appear in next Saturday's Guardian. Take a look, why don't you.

Desai's Lossy Book

WEEK 9. KIRAN DESAI, THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS (2006)

‘What Desai gives the Booker panel is Incredible India as Beautiful Writing. The stories are of loss and humiliation, displacement and dispossession — the rich music of victimhood is never not heard. But that makes it all the more poignant and beautiful, testing every skill that she may have honed at her creative writing course at Columbia University. . . . And hence, this Beautiful Writing should not only tell the right Stories, but should also foreground the right Issues’ – Aveek Sen

Kiran Desai was born in New Delhi in 1971. Currently living in the United States, she is the daughter of Anita Desai, shortlisted for the Booker Prize on three occasions. The Inheritance of Loss is her second novel.

Editions:

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss, (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006; London: Penguin, 2007).

2006 Judges:

Hermione Lee (chair), Simon Armitage, Candia McWilliam, Anthony Quinn, Fiona Shaw

2006 Shortlist:

Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss
Kate Grenville, The Secret River
M.J. Hyland, Carry Me Down
Hisham Matar, In the Country of Men
Edward St Aubyn, Mother’s Milk
Sarah Waters, The Night Watch

Topics:

• Indian Writing and the Booker.
• Globalisation and Internationalism.
• Promise and Accomplishment.

Reviews:

Aamer Hussein, ‘Maps of the Heart’, Independent, (8 September 2006)
Natasha Walter, ‘Mutt and the Maths Tutor’, The Guardian, (26 August 2006)
Pankaj Mishra, ‘Wounded by the West’, New York Times, (12 February 2006)
Sarah Hughes, ‘Uncle Potty and Other Guides to the Truth’, The Observer, (3 September 2006)
Aveek Sen, ‘Voices of the Same Poverty, The Telegraph (Calcutta), (12 October 2006)

Banville and Irish Literature

I don't have much to say in today's lecture about Banville as a specifically Irish writer; but if you're interested in his place in the tradition of Irish writing you might want to look at this article: Kersti Tarien Powell, '"Not a son but a survivor": Beckett... Joyce... Banville', The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 35, Irish Writing since 1950 (2005), 199-211. Here's the abstract:

John Banville's fiction represents a sustained effort to investigate the mechanics of the creative act, where the author's own search for means of representation are paralleled by his characters' search for knowledge, understanding, and unproblematic utterance. Intertextual references nuance and reflect this quest, which will be traced from Banville's earliest, unpublished literary manifesto to his later fiction. Examining Banville's complex literary allegiances to Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, this article analyses the representation of the creative act in Banville's fiction.

Is beauty a matter of form, or content?

Since we discussed this very question in last week's seminars, and since we'll almost certainly return to it next week, I hope you all watched Matthew Collings What is Beauty? documentary on Saturday evening. Sure it clashed with the X-Factor: but that's no excuse ... it was a really illuminating and accessible attempt to define what 'beauty' is; and in face Collins begins by framing his question as being about form versus content. Luckily for you, it's there on the BBC iPlayer to watch for the next seven days. So watch it. The examples are all from visual art; but the fundamental question is one of aesthetics.

John Banville's The Sea

Week 8. John Banville, The Sea (2005)

‘It is a literary work of art’ – Rick Gekoski

‘Yesterday the Man Booker judges made possibly the worst, certainly the most perverse, and perhaps the most indefensible choice in the 36-year history of the contest’ – Boyd Tonkin

John Banville was born in Wexford in 1945. One of the most widely-admired Irish novelists of his generation, he had been shortlisted for the Booker only once before, for The Book of Evidence in 1989, losing out to Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.

Editions:

John Banville, The Sea, (London: Picador, 2005; London: Picador, 2006).

2005 Shortlist:

John Banville, The Sea
Julian Barnes, Arthur & George
Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Ali Smith, The Accidental
Zadie Smith, On Beauty

2005 Judges:
John Sutherland (chair), Lindsay Duguid, Rick Gekoski, Josephine Hart, David Sexton

Topics:

· Literature and Passion.
· Irish Writing and Modernist Tradition.
· ‘High Art’ vs. the Beachbound Pageturner?

Reviews:

Allan Massie, ‘Point of No Return’, The Scotsman, (28 May 2005)
Peter Conradi, ‘Homeward Bound’, The Independent, (3 June 2005)
Tibor Fischer, ‘Wave after Wave of Vocabulary’, The Daily Telegraph, (7 June 2005)
David Grylls, ‘Fiction: The Sea by John Banville’, The Sunday Times, (12 June 2005)
Finn Fordham (our very own), ‘High Tidings’, The Guardian, (25 June 2005)
Michiko Kakutani, ‘A Wordy Widower with a Past’, New York Times, (1 November 2005)

Hollinghurst and Henry

Henry James, that is. I wonder if it's possible properly to appreciate The Line of Beauty without some sense of James's novels.

Have a look at this very interesting review essay from The New England Quarterly [78:4 (Dec., 2005), pp. 631-642], Michael Moon's 'Burn Me at the Stake Always', which covers the odd little rash of contemporary novels 'dealing' in some sense with Henry James that appeared in 2004. Moon covers The Master by Colm Toíbín (a beautifully written novel, that; and also Booker shortlisted); Author, Author by David Lodge; The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst and a couple of non-ficton titles (Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James's Letters to Younger Men edited by Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe; and Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen, 1899-1915 by Henry James, edited by Rosella Mamoli Zorzi).

The real question: why did everybody suddenly think that writing about Henry James was the thing to do? What was it about 2004 that made it so Jamesian a year for fiction?

Amazon readers on Hollingshurst

Like many, and perhaps most, writers I have a problematic relationship with amazon, and especially with amazon reader reviews, in which fans, as many idiots as clever people preserve their considered, or unconsidered, reactions to the books they have just read. I thought I'd take a look at the page for The Line of Beauty.

There are ninety customer reviews listed, with a preponderance very impressed with the novel and with Hollinghurst's style in particular: 'this is the finest prose since Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited". Elegant and evocative English, shimmering phrases' according to Septimus; 'this book is superbly written and impressive' (Phil Shanklin). In fact, many reviewers go over similar ground to the mainstream newspaper reviews (the links to whom are in the main post on the novel): the shallowness of the characters, the effectiveness or otherwise of the satire, the treatment of AIDS.

The negative reviews are in the minority, but are in some ways more interesting. Several toot the 'boredom' horn (Mr Crow: 'it just d-r-a-g-g-e-d along...'; Ventura Angelo: 'Yawn ... absolutely boring'), which is a pretty lazy critical response -- and one banned on this course, incidentally. But some make the point that beautiful writing about (morally) ugly people can be as wearing to read as ugly writing about beautiful people.

'Pen ultmate' gives the book one-star, attacking it in terms that (I'd guess) would actually bring a blush of pleasure of Hollinghurst's brow. This, despite its hostile intention, is actually a pretty good account of the Henry James aesthetic that Line of Beauty follows:

This story reads as if it was written by someone with no personality of their own, just a lot of unexpressed mundane thoughts about the world which he's now using the excuse of a novel to finally dribble out, unfortunately. There are endless descriptions of how a character thinks he might react to something that's just been said, but decides not to, and why he decides not to, and how his non-reaction might affect the speaker differently to how he'd be affected if he had actually said what he nearly said but didn't.

It's exactly James's ability to explore that aspect of human interaction, delicately and subtly but with great penetration, that makes so many people fall in love with him as a novelist. Of course, you need to believe that what people feel but don't or can't say is a major part of human life. Similarly, some of these readers come over as, er, foolish. Here's A Customer's one-star review:

When I read the first page I thought i was reading a typical Jeffrey Archer. i have never been so dissapointed in a book.

On the upside, none of the amazon reviewers appeared phased by the detailed depictions of homosexuality as such, which perhaps suggests that homophobia is less a feature of culture today than it was in the 80s: which would be heartening if true. And some of the reports (check out this, different 'A Customer' for instance) are pretty insightful.

Hollinghurst's Beautiful Lines

WEEK 7. ALAN HOLLINGHURST, THE LINE OF BEAUTY (2004)

‘A winning novel that is exciting, brilliantly written and gets deep under the skin of the Thatcherite Eighties’ – Chris Smith, chair of the judges, 19th October 2004

‘Booker Won by Gay Sex’ – Daily Express headline, 20th October 2004

Alan Hollinghurst was born in Stroud and spent thirteen years on the staff of the Times Literary Supplement. He had previously been shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994. Andrew Davies’s adaptation of The Line of Beauty was broadcast by the BBC in 2006.

Editions:

Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, (London: Picador, 2004).

2004 Shortlist:

Achmat Dangor, Bitter Fruit
Sarah Hall, The Electric Michelangelo
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Colm Tóibín, The Master
Gerard Woodward, I’ll Go to Bed at Noon

2004 Judges:

Chris Smith MP (chair), Tibor Fischer, Robert Macfarlane, Rowan Pelling, Fiammetta Rocco

Topics:

• Sexuality and the Modern Novel.
• Tapping in to the Past: Henry James and the 1980s.
• The Luxury of Style and the Lowest Common Denominator.

Reviews:

Geoff Dyer, ‘The Last Summer’, The Sunday Telegraph, (28 March 2004).
Andrew Crumey, ‘Marque of the Master Craftsman’, Scotland on Sunday, (4 April 2004)
Alfred Hickling, ‘Between the Lines’, The Guardian, (10 April 2004)
Peter Conradi, ‘Art and the Cruelty that Goes with It’, The Independent on Sunday, (11 April 2004)
Gregory Woods, ‘Love, Loss and the Tory Story’, The Independent, (16 April 2004)
Thomas Jones, ‘Welly-Whanging’, London Review of Books, (6 May 2004)

Criticism:

There's little of this, especially for Hollinghurst's later books. Take a look at this brief entry by Nick Rennison in the Routledge Contemporary British Novelists volume for instance.

Dirty But Clean

Some links on Vernon God Little, for those interested in writing about this novel.

First, as the lecture stresses, this book is so thoroughly a 21st-century remix of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951) that you'll need to read that novel -- if you haven't already done so (and if you haven't already done so then ... why on earth not?)

One angle I'd like to discuss has to do with narrative voice, and the notion of character as performance. And talking of that, by way of overcoming my natural hesitation at straying from proper lit-crit into biography, to what extent do you think the novel's success had to do with Pierre's creation of a media-friendly authorial 'persona' or 'character'? Have a look at this for instance; and this, and see what you think.

On the subject of making comedy out of the Columbine School Massacre: do you think this is funny? How does it compare to Pierre's approach?

Vernon God Little

WEEK 5. D.B.C. PIERRE, VERNON GOD LITTLE (2003)

‘The winner was the Mexican-Australian first-time novelist Peter Finlay: a man who, we learned at the weekend, enjoyed a past life as gambling-addicted junkie con-artist who sold his best friend’s house and fled with the cash. (This is a charge levelled insufficiently often, for my tastes, against Anita Brookner)’ – Sam Leith
D.B.C. Pierre (a.k.a. Peter Finlay) was born in Australia to English parents, has lived in Mexico and the United States and was resident in Ireland when he won the Booker. Vernon God Little was his first novel. His second, Ludmila’s Broken English, was published in 2006.

Editions:

D.B.C. Pierre, Vernon God Little, (London: Faber and Faber, 2003).

2003 Shortlist:

Monica Ali, Brick Lane
Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
Damon Galgut, The Good Doctor
Zoë Heller, Notes on a Scandal
Clare Morrall, Astonishing Splashes of Colour
D.B.C. Pierre, Vernon God Little

2003 Judges:

John Carey (chair), D.J. Taylor, Rebecca Stephens, Francine Stock, A.C. Grayling

Topics:

• A Taste for Scandal.
• Ventriloquy and Originality.
• The Non-American American Novel.

Reviews:

Carrie O’Grady, ‘Lone Star’, The Guardian, (18 January 2003).
Jonathan Heawood, ‘Growing Up With Jesus’, The Observer, (19 January 2003).
Sam Leith, ‘Springer’s America’, The Daily Telegraph, (25 January 2003).
Marianne Brace, ‘A Huckleberry Finn for the Eminem Generation’, Independent, (3 February 2003).
David Robson, ‘Who Dies? You Decide’, The Sunday Telegraph, (23 February 2003).
M. Kakutani, ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas (Via Australia)’, New York Times, (5 November 2003).
Sam Sifton, ‘Holden Caulfield on Ritalin’, New York Times Book Review, (9 November 2003).
James Wood, ‘The Lie-World’, London Review of Books, (20 November 2003).
Chris Lehmann, ‘Dumb and Dumber’, Washington Post, (2 December 2003).

Note: there are some interesting things in several of these reviews, but the meatiest and most useful is the James Wood LRB piece, linked above.

Fiction and truth

Some interesting discussions in seminar today about 'fiction' (aka 'lying') and 'truth', occasioned in particular by the way Martel's Life of Pi sets two alternate stories, one 'better' than the other, as explanations of the events of his life. We all agreed that it's good to tell the truth and bad to lie, but didn't seem to certain on what grounds, exactly, we wanted to defend fiction as 'the lie that tells the truth'.

This is, as we mentioned, a large and continuing philosophical and literary-theoretical debate, one core to the very notion of 'fiction' as something more than just pleasing but mendacious escapist fantasies. Here are some links, although they only scratch the surface.

The granddaddy of debates about the status of 'truth' is Nietzsche. Read, if you're interested, 'Of Truth and Lies in a Non-Moral Sense' (1873: it's not long. The wikipedia page on this famous essay is useful). Lee Spinks's introductory guide to Nietzsche is very helpful, I think: read p.44f. on the 'Truth and Lies' essay.

Also very interesting on 'truth' and literature is philosopher Martha Nussbaum. Read her Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990)--a philosophical text, but accessibly written and covering a good deal of this material. [A fair-sized chunk of the book is available at that google-books link, there; the whole thing is in the library]. There's also Geoffrey Galt Harpham's essay on Nussbaum's thought, 'The Hunger of Martha Nussbaum' [Representations, No. 77 (Winter, 2002), pp. 52-81], which might help you get a handle on what she is saying. For example:

While, for Derrida, "literary" figuration undercuts the truth-function of language and this interferes with philosophy's ability to guide and instruct, Nussbaum sees the matter differently. For her, literature, centered in plot and character, both reveals the true nature of ethical decision-making as a constant testing of general principle against specific instances and, because of its superior vivacity, teaches virtue far more directly and effectively than philosophy ever could. ... Derrida's approach to texts presumes their alien character, their refusal to lend themselves to their readers' purposes, their insistence on remaining "undecidable" and thereby requiring readers to remain in a state of unsettled inqujiry. Nussbaum, by sharp contrast, insistently blurs the distinction between books and life, recognizing no such refusal, no such undecidability, no such submission. [56-7]

Which party do you side with, I wonder -- Derrida or Nussbaum?

Animal Fables

As I mention, animal fables have a long history in human culture. Probably the best book on the way 'beasts' have signified in human culture and self-image is by the philosopher Mary Midgeley: it is called Beast and Man: the Roots of Human Nature (1978; rev; ed., Routledge 2002), is in the library, but is also available (or at least, a good chunk of it is) free to read on Google Books.

Martel links

Rather thin on the ground, these: though there are some interesting reviews in the previous post.

Here's one interesting article: June Dwyer, 'Yann Martel's Life of Pi and the Evolution of the Shipwreck Narrative', Modern Language Studies (35:2, 2005), pp. 9-21

James Mensch, 'The Intertwining of Incommensurables: Martel's Life of Pi', in Corinne Painter and Christian Lotz (eds), Phenomenology and the Non-human Animal: at the Limits of Experience (Volume 56 of Contributions to phenomenology; Springer 2007). This is an interesting essay, but be warned: it's hard philosophy rather than literary criticism (the book's blurb: 'The question of the relation between human and non-human animals in theoretical, ethical and political regards has become a prominent topic within the philosophical debates of the last two decades. This volume explores in substantial ways how phenomenology can contribute to these debates. It offers specific insights into the description and interpretation of the experience of the non-human animal, the relation between phenomenology and anthropology, the relation between phenomenology and psychology, as well as ethical considerations')

Most of Christine Lorre's essay on the novel is available on google books.

You might enjoy Merritt Moseley's overview of 'The Booker Prizes for 2001 and 2002: Cool Young Authors and Old Codgers' The Sewanee Review (111:1 2003), pp. 157-169

Also: I mention in lecture the plagiarism row that flared after Martel won the prize: the accusation being that he had lifted important elements straight from the Brazilian novelist Moacyr Scliar's novel Max and the Cats. You can read more about that here, and here. Scliar's prior novel is about a young boy stranded in a lifeboat with a panther, you know. Martel's own account 'How I Wrote Life of Pi' isn't very forthcoming on this topic. On the other hand, this Library Journal article is rather forgiving to Martel. Some interesting questions about plagiary raised here, I'd say: relevant to the novel (but also to students writing essays and so on)

Martel, Life of Pi

WEEK 4. YANN MARTEL, LIFE OF PI (2002)

‘It is as the author says, a novel which will make you believe in God – or ask yourself why you don’t’ – Lisa Jardine

‘It is the nugget of a good idea, but it is spread out over 300 pages by an author who seems to have a knack for making the fantastic seem utterly mundane’ – Finlo Rohrer

Yann Martel was born in Spain, lives in Montreal, speaks French as a first language and writes fiction in English. His third book, Life of Pi, won the first Booker Prize to be sponsored by the financial services group Man (known from then on, officially, as the ‘Man Booker Prize’).

Editions:

Yann Martel, Life of Pi, (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002; Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003).

2002 Shortlist:

Yann Martel, Life of Pi
Rohinton Mistry, Family Matters
Carol Shields, Unless
William Trevor, The Story of Lucy Gault
Sarah Waters, Fingersmith
Tim Winton, Dirt Music

2002 Judges:

Lisa Jardine (chair), David Baddiel, Russell Celyn Jones, Salley Vickers, Erica Wagner

Topics:

• Children and Animals.
• The Concept of ‘Fun’: Sexing Up the Booker Prize.
• Narrative and Belief.

Reviews:

Justine Jordan, ‘Animal Magnetism’, The Guardian, (25 May 2002)
Tim Adams, ‘A Fishy Tale’, The Observer, (26 May 2002)
Judith Palmer, ‘Life of Pi’, The Independent, (22 June 2002)
Jonathan Kiefer, ‘Fascinating Life of Pi Gives Readers a Reason to Believe’, San Francisco Chronicle, (23 June 2002)
Gary Krist, ‘Taming the Tiger’, New York Times Book Review, (7 July 2002)
Bryan Walsh, ‘Castaway with Karma’, Time, CLX, vi (2 September 2002)

Some Carey Links

[1] In the lecture I make reference to the 'Jerilderie Letter', the most significant surviving example of Kelly's own writing. You can see a facsimile of this letter here, or read the whole thing more easily on wikisource.

[2] Google books has most of this collection of essays on Peter Carey's fiction edited by Andreas Gaile, Fabulating Beauty: Perspectives on the Fiction of Peter Carey (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2005), including the following (or most of the text of the following):

'A Contrarian Streak': an interview with Carey.

Carolyn Bliss, '"Lies and Silences": Cultural Masterplots and Existential Authenticity in Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang'

Susan K Martin, 'Dead White Male Heroes: True History of the Kelly Gang and Ned Kelly in Australian Fiction'

[3] If you're interested in the historical Ned Kelly (and who wouldn't be, especially after reading Carey's novel) there's a wealth of material online. Wikipedia is not always to be relied upon, of course, but their page on Kelly is pretty good, and contains links to a deal of other sites.

[4] Also, since this is a course on literary prizes, you may be interested to discover that the Crime Writers Association of Australia run The Ned Kelly Awards for Crime Writing.

Week 3: Kell and the Gang

WEEK 3. PETER CAREY, TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG (2001)

‘I think they only gave it to me out of sympathy because they know I’ve never won the Booker’ – Beryl Bainbridge on being made a Dame of the British Empire in 2001

Peter Carey was born in Australia in 1943. True History of the Kelly Gang was his second Booker winner: the first was Oscar and Lucinda in 1988; Illywhacker was shortlisted in 1985.

Editions:

Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang, (London: Faber and Faber, 2001).

2001 Shortlist:

Peter Carey, True History of the Kelly Gang
Ian McEwan, Atonement
Andrew Miller, Oxygen
David Mitchell, number9dream
Rachel Seiffert, The Dark Room
Ali Smith, Hotel World

2001 Judges:

Kenneth Baker (chair), Michele Roberts, Kate Summerscale, Philip Hensher, Prof. Rory Watson

Topics:

• The Booker Prize and the ‘Two Horse Race’.
• Australia: Fact and Fiction.
• History and Venriloquy.

Reviews:

Robert Edric, ‘Remaking Ned’, (6 January 2001)The Guardian
Jane Rogers, ‘Remaking the Myth’, The Observer, (7 January 2001)

Ruth Scurr, ‘One Mother’s Son’, The Times, (10 January 2001)

John de Falbe, ‘The Reluctant Outlaw’, The Spectator, (13 January 2001)
Kathy Marks, ‘Hero or Villain?’, Independent, (19 November 2001)
D J Taylor, 'A ventriloquist's tale', New Statesmen (8 January 2001)

Further Reading:

Ian McEwan, Atonement, (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001). Though reading any of the shortlisted novels listed in this booklet would be a useful exercise, Atonement is a special case, because it won the first ‘People’s Booker’, voted for by members of the general public, thereby opening up a whole new can of worms: possibly in response, the 2001 judges broke sharply with tradition to give explanations as to why they hadn’t awarded the prize to McEwan.

Newsnight Review, BBC2 11pm 9th October 2009

Tune into the abovementioned show at the abovementioned time: apparently the panel will be discussing this year's Booker shortlist and the notable absence of science fiction from it. A little bird tells me that your course leader may be mentioned in passing, or if not mentioned then at least a screen shot of my latest novel may be briefly visible. Which is exciting, obviously. Well, for me at any rate.

More details here.

[10th Oct: rather anticlimactic in the end: brief shot of the cover of Yelllow Blue Tibia, but nothing to say who wrote it, which (since this happened in the middle of a discussion of the new Hitchhiker's Guide novel) may lead people to believe that it was written by Eoin Coifer. Ah well.]

Mantel wins

To quote the Guardian: 'Hilary Mantel wins the 2009 Booker prize for her fictionalised life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall.'

Her victory is all the more impressive because this year's shortlist was widely seen as one of the strongest in years and included former winners JM Coetzee and AS Byatt.

Naughtie said the "ridiculous" odds of 16-1 originally given to Wolf Hall when the longlist was announced probably led to the betting bonanza. After the shortlist was announced the novel became easily the fastest seller, accounting for 45% of all the shortlisted books' sales, according to Amazon, although Sarah Waters's The Little Stranger has sold more overall.

Naughtie said the voting process had been spirited and friendly. "There was no blood on the carpet. We parted good friends. When we gathered this morning none of us knew which book was going to win," he said. "I think we all felt exhausted at the end of the process but there was real feeling that we had found a book that was worthy of the prize."

Mantel said she has started work on the sequel to Wolf Hall, which will be titled The Mirror And The Light. "What I have got at the moment is a huge box of notes," she added.

So there you go: you now know which book we'll be reading for the week 11 class. You can see what I thought of it by going to the sidebar (to the right) and scrolling down to the links gathered under the heading '2009 Man Booker Shortlist reviews'; but I'm more interested in your response. Seek it out, in the local public libraries, in bookshops and amazon. Have a read

Booker Prize 2000

Check out this Merritt Moseley article on 'The Booker Prize for 2000' [The Sewanee Review, Vol. 109, No. 3 (Summer, 2001), pp. 438-446]. It contains some interesting ruminations on the UK literary prize-giving scene, and on the particular Booker shortlist for that year. Moseley thinks only the Kneale and the Atwood titles had any business being on the list, although he also notes some striking features of the list as a whole:

Robert Crum, literary editor of the Observer, wrote in November that the present day is the "golden age of the arts prize"--and that (because England is "philistine, xenophobic and culturally underfed") such prizes serve a useful purpose. The problem is keeping people excited about them. Perhaps to inject some thrill, the Booker Prize judges took a "leap in the dark" by shortlisting four unknowns-- i.e. all but Ishiguro, a previous Booker winner, and Atwood, already nominated three times. McCrum concludes sadly that they then "equipped themselves with Very lights and parachutes, bumping down to earth with the predictable and disappointingly conventional choice of Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin".

What do you think of McCrum's assessment of the UK, "philistine, xenophobic and culturally underfed"? (That's you he's talking about, you know). Here are some more contemporary journalistic responses:

Dalya Alberge observed in the Times that "none of the six novels contending for Britain's most prestigious literary award is set in modern Britain." ... The Independent's literary editor, Boyd Tonkin, pointed out that half the shortlisted authors live in North America ... Critics observed other oddities about the list: for instance, all the novels rely largely on interior monologue, and all but English Passengers disrupt and fragment chronology (and [English Passengers] uses multiple narrators); what is even weirder is that four authors use the resources of the detective story ...

Some Atwood Links

Here are a few things that you may find useful if you're thinking about, or writing about, Margaret Atwood.

[1] David Ketterer, '"Another Dimension of Space": Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy and Atwood's Blind Assassin', in Jean-François Leroux and Camille R. La Bossière (eds), Worlds of Wonder: Readings in Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature (University of Ottawa Press, 2004) An essay in a critical collection. This includes a useful interview between Ketterer and Atwood about the novel: I quote from the interview at some length in the lecture.

[2] Eleonora Rao, 'Home and nation in Margaret Atwood's later fiction' in Coral Ann Howells (ed), The Cambridge companion to Margaret Atwood (CUP 2006) Interesting discussion of home and estrangement in Atwood's later writing, including the Blind Assassin.

[3] Nathalie Cooke, Margaret Atwood: a Critical Companion (Greenwood Press 2004) Some useful things here, although (sadly) the chapter on Blind Assassin is not one of the ones available for google-books viewing.

[4] Coral Ann Howells, '"Don't Ever Ask For The True Story": Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace and The Blind Assassin' in Contemporary Canadian Women's Fiction: Refiguring Identities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

Atwood's latest novel, the SF/dystopian Year of the Flood (2009) has been widely reviewed, not least by your course tutor, here.

Week 2: Atwood's Blind Assassin

WEEK 2. MARGARET ATWOOD, THE BLIND ASSASSIN (2000)

‘In 30 years, there hasn’t previously been a time when I have felt unable to forecast a winner. This year any of the six could win’ – Martyn Goff

Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939. She won the Booker Prize in 2000 having previously been shortlisted three times, for Alias Grace in 1996, for Cat’s Eye in 1989 and for The Handmaid’s Tale in 1986. Her novel, Oryx and Crake, was shortlisted for the 2003 Man Booker Prize.

Editions:

Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin, (London: Bloomsbury, 2000; London: Virago, 2001).

2000 Shortlist:

Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
Trezza Azzopardi, The Hiding Place
Michael Collins, The Keepers of Truth
Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans
Matthew Kneale, English Passengers
Brian O’Doherty, The Deposition of Father McGreevy

2000 Judges:

Simon Jenkins (chair), Prof. Roy Foster, Mariella Frostrup, Rose Tremain, Caroline Gascoigne

Topics:

• Genre Fiction and Mixed Genres.
• The Family and History.
• Literary Reputation.

Reviews:

Thomas Mallon, ‘Wheels Within Wheels’, New York Times Book Review, (3 September 2000), 7
Adam Mars-Jones, ‘Where Women Grow on Trees’, The Observer, (17 September 2000)
John Updike, ‘Love and Loss on Zycron’, New Yorker, (18 September 2000), 142-5 [partial link]
Lorna Sage, ‘Sisterly Sentiments’, Times Literary Supplement, (29 September 2000), 24
Alex Clark, ‘Vanishing Act’, The Guardian (30 September 2000)
Margaret Anne Doody, London Review of Books, XXII, xix (5 October 2000), 27 [partial link]
Karen Houppert, 'The Blind Assassin', Salon.com [Sept. 12, 2000]

An interview with Atwood from just after the publication of The Blind Assassin.

Postcolonial theory: some links

As we've been discussing today, the majority of novels studied on this course may, with varying degrees of certitude, be brought under the rubric of 'the postcolonial'. We've touched on a couple of things in the lecture and seminar; but, in case you're not wholly clear on postcolonial theory, here are a couple of useful links from Prof Amardeep Singh:

Here, on Singh's own blog, is a widely-praised 'Postcolonial FAQ' post that lays out some of the basics; and here, on the same blog, is an excellent little introduction to Edward Said's Orientalism:

Said directly challenged what Euro-American scholars traditionally referred to as "Orientalism." Orientalism is an entrenched structure of thought, a pattern of making certain generalizations about the part of the world known as the 'East'. As Said puts it:

“Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, West, "us") and the strange (the Orient, the East, "them").”

Just to be clear, Said didn't invent the term 'Orientalism'; it was a term used especially by middle east specialists, Arabists, as well as many who studied both East Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The vastness alone of the part of the world that European and American scholars thought of as the "East" should, one imagines, have caused some one to think twice. But for the most part, that self-criticism didn’t happen, and Said argues that the failure there –- the blind spot of orientalist thinking –- is a structural one.

The stereotypes assigned to Oriental cultures and "Orientals" as individuals are pretty specific: Orientals are despotic and clannish. They are despotic when placed in positions of power, and sly and obsequious when in subservient positions. Orientals, so the stereotype goes, are impossible to trust. They are capable of sophisticated abstractions, but not of concrete, practical organization or rigorous, detail-oriented analysis. Their men are sexually incontinent, while their women are locked up behind bars. Orientals are, by definition, strange. The best summary of the Orientalist mindset would probably be: “East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet” (Rudyard Kipling).

In his book, Said asks: but where is this sly, devious, despotic, mystical Oriental? Has anyone ever met anyone who meets this description in all particulars? In fact, this idea of the Oriental is a particular kind of myth produced by European thought, especially in and after the 18th century. In some sense his book Orientalism aims to dismantle this myth, but more than that Said's goal is to identify Orientalism as a discourse.

And finally: here is a slightly more sophisticated essay by Singh on 'Four Challenges to Postcolonial Theory' from The Valve, where he also blogs. It is a response to a book called Theory's Empire (an account of the recent prominence of 'Theory' in literary studies) and looks at the responses to postcolonial thought from Erin O’Connor, Priya Joshi, Arif Dirlik and Meera Nanda. If you're thinking of writing an essay on any of the novels on this course via postcolonial theory, I'd recommend having a read of this blog post.

Week I: Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008)

[Here is the coursebook page for this title with links enabled]

Week 1. Introduction: Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger (2008)

‘It won’t win any prizes for subtlety. But it hasn’t been nominated for one of those’ – Peter Robins

Aravind Adiga was born in Chennai in 1974. He has worked as a journalist for the Financial Times and Time magazine. The White Tiger is his first novel.

Editions:

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger, (London: Atlantic, 2008; London: Atlantic, 2008).

2008 Judges:
Michael Portillo (chair), Alex Clark, Louise Doughty, James Heneage, Hardeep Singh Kohli

2008 Shortlist:

Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger
Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies
Linda Grant, The Clothes on Their Backs
Philip Hensher, The Northern Clemency
Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole

Topics:

· Introduction to Literary Prizes and Prize Culture.
· Media Hype and the Book Trade.
· The ‘Man’ Booker Prize: New Dawn or Hot Air?

Reviews:

Adam Lively, ‘The White Tiger’, The Sunday Times, (6 April 2008).
Sameer Rahim, ‘The Man on the Poster’, Times Literary Supplement, 5480 (11 April 2008).
David Mattin, ‘The White Tiger’, The Independent on Sunday, (11 May 2008).
Peter Robins, ‘Review: The White Tiger’, The Daily Telegraph, (9 August 2008).
Kevin Rushby, ‘Review: The White Tiger’, The Guardian, (15 October 2008).
Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Diary’, London Review of Books, (6 November 2008).

A fuller round-up of reviews can be found here.

In the lecture I mention Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's celebrated essay, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988) A version of this difficult but much-cited piece (abbreviated by the author) is available on Google Books.

Adiga's The White Tiger

Here are a couple of further links (in addition to the coursebook page, above) that may be useful.

Here is Adiga's Wikipedia page. And here is an interview with him published in Rediff India Abroad, 16 Oct 2008: 'At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal.injustices of society ... the criticism by writers like Flaubert, Balzac and Dickens of in the 19th century helped England and France become better societies. That's what I'm trying to do -- it's not an attack on the country, it's about the greater process of self-examination.'

Here's a slightly longer interview, at Book Browse.

The influences on The White Tiger are three black American writers of the post-World War II era (in order), Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright. The odd thing is that I haven't read any of them for years and years -- I read Ellison's Invisible Man in 1995 or 1996, and have never returned to it -- but now that the book is done, I can see how deeply it's indebted to them.

The prominent blogger Amardeep Singh didn't like The White Tiger; read and find out why.

Finally, some context for the 2008 Prize more generally from your course leader. Last year I decided (I can't remember why) to read the entire Booker Longlist. I blogged my impressions on The Valve, first on the longlist here; and then when the shortlist was announced I revisited the titles. As you can see from that, I speed-read a library copy of Adiga's novel when I went through the longlist, and couldn't get hold of it again when the shortlist was announced. This has the ironic consequence that I say a great deal about all the novels selected by the Booker judges in 2008 except the one that actually won. (I've since re-read it much more carefully, of course). But there's some stuff there that might be of interest.

Start of term

Welcome, everybody, to the course blog for EN3314 Booker Prize, Aesthetics and Commerce in Contemporary Fiction. I have taken over from Steve Morrison as the course leader for this half-unit and will be teaching you this term.

The point of this blog is partly to post-up material relating to each of the novels as we cover them, week by week; and partly to coordinate more general discussion about these novels, the Booker Prize, and contemporary fiction as a whole. I also want to use this site as a record of some of the things covered in lectures and seminars: hopefully that will be useful to you. Accordingly some of the stuff here will duplicate material from the course booklet (which you all have); but some won't.

The way to get the best out of this course, and to do well on it, is to read as widely as you can, and take as active an interest as you can in the state of the contemporary novel, in prizes and the prizegiving culture, and in the questions of aesthetic and commercial judgment they entail. The course doesn't encompass this year's Booker Prize, but I urge you to at the least follow the reviews and news coverage of the shortlisted titles, and if possible read a couple, in addition to doing the reading for the course itself.

I have put some links on the sidebar: some of these are relevant to the course, and some more general. Some of the links are to pieces I've written about previous Booker titles, or to reviews of this year's shortlist.

If there's anything you would like to see posted or linked on this site, please let me know. Otherwise I'd like to see people contributing to the blog, and the course as a whole, in the comments threads ... don't be shy. I will look favourably upon students who get active enough to contribute. [Adam Roberts]

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THE BOOKER PRIZE:
AESTHETICS AND COMMERCE IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Tutor: Prof Adam Roberts. Half Unit

By presenting Booker Prize-winning novels of the last decade this course aims to develop a critical awareness of some aesthetic trends in contemporary fiction in English and to enable an assessment of these trends in relation to the book trade and the media industries. Students will gain a detailed knowledge of selected contemporary novels; a critical awareness of British literary prize culture, with particular reference to the Booker Prize; an understanding of fiction as a commodity; and an awareness of various aspects of the book trade and roles played by writer, agent, publisher and reviewer. The ability to demonstrate use of the Internet as a research tool is also strongly encouraged on this course.

TEACHING

The course is taught by a one-hour lecture and a one-hour seminar each week.

COURSE WORK

Required Reading. You will have to read a novel for each week’s seminar. You may also be required to do some other reading (for example, a short essay or extract). If you have not done the reading, you will be unable either to learn or to contribute usefully to the seminar. As a result, the seminar leader may, at his or her discretion, ask you to leave the seminar and mark you absent without reason.

Additional Reading. Suggestions for additional reading can be found throughout this booklet. Though the reading of the primary text is always the priority, this additional reading will form a major basis of writing essays, preparing presentations and, ultimately, taking the examination.

Essays. You are expected to write one essay of 1,000 - 1,500 words during the term. Essay questions and further information about a handing-in date and submission procedures will be distributed during the term. Essays will be due in Week 5.

METHOD OF ASSESSMENT

Assessment of this half unit is in the form of an examined essay of 2,500-3,000 words. Examined essay titles will be given out towards the end of the term. For further information on assessment criteria, please consult the student handbook.

FEEDBACK

If you have any issues you wish to discuss during the course, please contact Adam Roberts, either in the department or via e-mail at a.c.roberts@rhul.ac.uk.