The Secret River (Kate Grenville)
Historical fiction. Hmmm. On the whole, I’m, not keen. There’s something a little too loving about the way many authors treat the past, and research often weighs a book down. As it happens, I’m currently reading a book that was researched to death, Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet, which couldn’t be less weighed down if it tried. If that’s the standard (and it is), then Kate Grenville’s novel is not up to the mark.
Humour. Irony. Has the modern novel forgotten about its history? Novelists should be made to (re)read Fielding, Cervantes, Bulgakov, Thackeray, Rabelais and Gogol. Bulgakov wrote at the height of the Great Terror, and yet could find humour and irony. The Master and Margarita is perhaps the least serious novel of the 20th century, and yet it doesn’t suggest for a minute that the soviet regime was innocent. There is little or no humour here.
The Secret River is a very conventional novel that traces the development of William Thornhill from waterman on the Thames to the penal colony at New South Wales. The blurb tells us that Thornhill is ‘a man no better or worse than most’. Well, that sounds like a riot.
Once again there is a political undercurrent here, although it’s altogether more successfully executed than in Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. Here we are forced to confront the moral dilemma of the colonist: how does he treat the indigenous people? This is far from a simple matter. Convicts were, after all, forced to be there and had a right to try to survive. Clearly the aboriginals had the right to be there too.
While this is an interesting question (and one the novel stays well away from providing an answer to), it doesn’t sustain the narrative well enough. The novel is broken up into very small sections, and this renders it episodic and disjointed. Ultimately we feel for William and his family, but there’s a rather disconcerting moral emptiness at the core of the book. Perhaps this is deliberate. Is it asking us: ‘what would you do?’
The Inheritance of Loss (Kiran Desai)
I hinted in my booker predictions that I wasn’t that fond of this novel. I suppose that’s partly because it’s so obviously a Booker novel that I find it all a little formulaic. There’s more than a hint of Rushdie and others have found echoes of Naipaul (although I’m not familiar with his work, so I’m not a reliable guide on that). Not that there’s anything wrong with being influenced by great novelists, of course.
There’s the classic picaresque Indian milieu (the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga) where a motley collection of misfits come to be divided by politics they don’t believe in or understand. A substantial portion of the book is set in the New York immigrant community, which are by far the weakest sections. The end is a the same time utterly predictable and silly.
The publishers are keen to tell us how much this is a novel to help us understand the lives of immigrants, and those ‘left behind’ and that’s noble and everything, but I find myself allergic to issue fiction. I remain impervious to David Hare’s argument in Obedience, Struggle and Revolt that political drama (or fiction) is somehow more valuable than ‘pure’ drama.
The novels I admire the most have very little, if anything, to do with politics. Of course, looking at how people are affected as the tide of history sweeps over them is certainly a worthy subject for fiction; one only has to think of the Prague sections of The Unbearable Lightness of Being to see that. Maybe this is just an attempt to do something similar that failed to resonate with me.
I think ultimately that I’m prejudiced against novels like this. I’m not keen on admitting that to myself, but there we are.
Booker Prize Predictions
I haven’t had time to write up my review of all the Booker contenders, and the winner is announced tonight. So, here are my predictions and my personal choice.
To put things in perspective, I thought that last year there were two outstanding novels (Banville’s The Sea, the winner, and A Long, Long Way by Sebastian Barry) and two very good ones (Never Let Me Go by Ishiguro and Arthur & George by Julian Barnes) on the shortlist. If any one of those novels were on the list this year they would be the runaway winner. It’s a very disappointing list this year.
That said, there are three books that I’m undecided between: Carry Me Down by M.J.Hyland, In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar and Mother’s Milk by Edward St. Aubyn. It’s very difficult to pick a winner out of those three. I keep wavering between them, but in the end I think I’m going to plump for Carry Me Down with Mother’s Milk a close second.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sarah Walters or Kiran Desai won.
But the really big question is: why isn’t Andrew O’Hagan’s Be Near Me on the list? That’s the best eligible novel I’ve read this year by a long distance.
Booker Prize Thoughts
Every year, there’s a different set of things to irritate book lovers in the Booker Prize Shortlist. This year, established names such as Peter Carey and David Mitchell have missed out in favour of relative unknowns. The only previously nominated author is Sarah Waters.
As with last year, I’m aiming to read all of the books on the shortlist. Last year my favourite of the nominees was John Banville’s The Sea which actually won the prize, although I had thought that Julian Barnes would finally get the nod for Arthur & George.
So far I have read all but Mother’s Milk by Edward St. Aubyn and the last 100 or so pages of The Secret River by Kate Grenville and it’s not easy to pick a winner. Personally, I didn’t think much of Waters’ The Night Watch and I stand by that judgement. I wouldn’t be surprised to see her win it, mind. The best novel, which is after all what the Booker is supposed to be about, is either Carry Me Down by M.J. Hyland or In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar in my view.
Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss is a Rushiesque novel that is ultimately rather aimless and sentimental, even though it has moments of great beauty and pathos. It reminded me a lot of Rushie’s Shalimar the Clown, without any of the irritating bits. It’s exactly the kind of book that can win the Booker.
Once I’ve finished all the books, I’ll post my reviews, name my choice and prediction for the prize.
