The Booker Prize 2024 Longlist, thirteen novels of varying quality, include some attention to contemporary politics and some airbrushing out of contradictions (as mainstream fiction often threatens to do). There are, however, some possible escape routes from reality among these, and some potential presents for those you love (as well as some for people you dislike). This was then whittled down by the panel to a shortlist of six. I try to give a flavour of each to help you make up your own mind. Here, in order of preference, is my run-down on those who made the lists.
My shortlist
Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep is a multi-layered and beautifully locked-together thriller set in the Netherlands in the early 1960s that is best read cold, not to ruin the surprising twists that happen at the end of the first and second act. It is about the house and the body that uptight Isabel inhabits, and what unwanted guest Eva plans to make of that. It has a compelling cinematic quality, with finely-drawn characters, some of them at first sight unpleasant, until we discover why; their motives are sometimes unbeknownst to themselves, pushed by hatred and then passion. It is set in the near past, but its historical reach goes further than that, and it also gives us a currently politically-resonant tale of possession and dispossession. The denouement, it has to be said, is slightly problematic, repossession linked with guilt and commitment. It is, among other things, about the circumstances in which people are driven to get what they want, and in which some of them only discover what they want in the course of the events, in which they surprise themselves, rather than by conscious premeditated decisions. Booker shortlisted.
Hisham Matar’s My Friends is a moving account of dissidence turning into activism against the Qaddafi regime in the Libyan émigré community. I remember being told by Libyan comrades in the late 1970s, before the 1984 St James’s Square embassy shooting and siege (which figures in this book as a traumatic turning point), that you should expect that among students here in the UK there would be “readers” (those who were genuinely here to study) and “writers,” spies of the regime busy writing reports. That motif is repeated here, and the narrator is clearly one of the “readers” appealing to other readers, and the appearance of a sympathetic academic tutor will be soothing to those finding a way to solidarity through the tangle of suspicion and fear that kept Qaddafi in power. The book takes us through to the 2011 Arab Spring and the agonisingly slow fall of the regime, and it is framed by memories of those times and the relationships between three friends, young men who were eventually, and in different ways, comrades. It didn’t make the Booker shortlist. It should have done.
Percival Everett’s James begins with familiar favourite tropes from his earlier excellent books like I am not Sidney Poitier and Erasure (filmed quite successfully recently as American Fiction). Everett is a Black literary academic who loves to play with how subaltern identity is deliberately performed in line with the usually racist stereotypes that white folk expect, and how those performances ironize and sometimes subvert dominant expectations and practices. Unlike most of the other books on the list, I already had an idea what this was going to be about – a narrative from the standpoint of the slave “Jim” in Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (books I always disliked) – and so we learn that the well-read “James” (who is not supposed to be able to read) plays along with and plays with the quaint speech codes Huck and the others demand of him. I thought this would run along well-worn Everett tracks, thought it would be a bit repetitive, even predictable, but the plot twists and turns in strange directions and turns into a quasi-Fanonian novel of oppression and resistance, cathartic. Shortlisted.
Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake was both puffed as a winner (included on the Booker long list even before it was published) and torn to shreds in different sections of the liberal press, and that mixed reaction seems to revolve around the cynical viewpoint of the narrator (“Sadie,” nom de guerre for the now private security services industry operative, ex-US state provocateur and snitch inside left organisations, now going into action in France). This character, a nasty piece of work, has interesting if jaundiced observations to make about anarchist eco-activists she is tasked with infiltrating, and there are knowing winks to groups like the Invisible Committee as well as some nice history scooped up during her ”research” about the situationist left, particularly Guy Debord. It’s very good, but you might hate it. That depends how you read it, whether amused at the cynical gaze it offers or enraged by the political line it insidiously spins about possible resistance to big agribusiness. You also learn something about Neanderthals (real ones) along the way. Shortlisted.
Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional is from an Australian author with a good publishing track record, and it takes us into a quite different space, a space of escape. Written in first person, the narrator finds refuge in a convent sanctuary in New South Wales, first as a guest and then as part of the community. There are some nice transitions from her scathing comments about religious idiocy when she arrives to acceptance and then resentment, with hints that she may once again flee from there. One of the threats comes from an eco-feminist activist, fictional “Helen Parry,” trapped in the community by the pandemic. She is both an admirable fighter for the future of the planet (and the book has an ecological, feminist and anti-colonial sensitivity) and chilling (to the narrator) reminder of past school horrors. There is pandemic and plague. Warning: this might not be for you if you don’t like mice, lots of mice, alive and dead; they’re a metaphor of some kind, but even so. Shortlisted.
Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot is a surprisingly gripping novel about teenage women’s boxing. I was ready to hate it as glamorising a stupid and stupifying mostly male sport, and there is an unwise final section that reads as tacked on, that makes it seem as if this kind of spectacularised fighting is galactically universal. But it’s good, interesting, moving. We are taken through the brutalising finals of a match in Reno, and through the lives and agendas of the poor (white we assume, though race is not topicalised) participants who have travelled there, sometimes with family, sometimes alone, driven by the kind of hopes stoked by neoliberalism, to be a “winner.” It’s a journey that should persuade you not to go into the ring.
The rest of my longlist
Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses takes us into petty drug gang culture of County Mayo, and deep into some potentially unpleasant scenarios after “Doll” English is kidnapped by two unpleasant characters at an isolated house owned by a very unwilling accomplice, who is a very interesting figure. There is a sense of foreboding and menace but then, mercifully, some resolution, with some sharply drawn character sketches of how different kinds of people are drawn into violence. Different players with quite different histories have different stakes in what is going on, and there is some very clever tracing of how past relationships lead to some surprising but quite believable turns of events. Threads of narrative tangle together in quite a short timeline, and this book works well as something to be read, and lost in, on one day. It would not be a plot spoiler to say that Barrett’s favourite word in this novel is “popped,” and the word pops up in various ways, some trite and some unexpected, before the finely crafted plot pops everything into place.
Anna Michaels’ Held is a fragmentary meandering small book that takes longer to read than you would expect, for you have to take it slow to navigate the many different ideas. The links between characters appear as the different narratives unfold. Among the people Michaels dedicates this book to is someone she has worked with, John Berger, and though one of the main characters is called John, that is not him. Nevertheless, the book, which ranges from before the First World War in continental Europe and Britain to next year at the Russian border, has, on the plus side, a Berger-like sensitivity to the imbrication of space with culture and subjectivity with detailed observation and attention to nuances of feeling and relationship. That also carries with it some of the negative characteristics of Berger, which is a kind of humanism that borders on nostalgia and sentimentality. I warmed to it, this very absorbing and poetic book. Shortlisted.
Richard Powers’ Playground is stuffed full of all that he knows about oceans – specifically the South Pacific in which a patronising Clochemerle-style frame is used to describe one of the tiny islands facing further despoilation – and about social media platforms, of which the “Playground” of the title, headed by a compressed character clone of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, is one. The upbeat marvelling style is grating, and the relentlessly individualising description of the deep love this or that character has for this or that family member or childhood friend is cloying, and the play of emotions normative (and the indicative phrase “doubt and his more sanguine younger brother curiosity” made me gag). The author’s reputation and some savvy pushing might have led it into the Booker longlist, even though it was not actually published until the end of September. It is absorbing enough, with some sweeping description of some fantastic marine life, but when it bewails the bleaching of coral reefs and destruction of sea species it leaves us aground politically. It is a universe away from an ecosocialist sensibility, and it champions the very kind of “Playbuck” entrepreneurial ethos that it describes; witness the sad limits of the best of liberal creative writing.
Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars is marked by repetitions, which include the explicit historical repetition of displacement, exclusion and erasure of the Cheyenne people, and it begins promisingly. But the novel also doubles this in an irritating affectation of repeating phrases whenever it wants to be repeating phrases (like that), something that, once noticed, turns into a trademark tic (already signalled in the title of his first book “There There”). The book patches together a number of different motifs or lines of narrative, with a pervasive AA sobriety-speak thread of the “it is what it is” mantra and reference to a “higher power” that then frames appeals to identity; there are hints early on that the book will be about addiction, but we have a long and more interesting “generations” account first, and the addiction discourse itself gestures at the marginalisation of what the characters refer to as “American Indians” as they discover their history and so, they tell themselves, discover who they really are. Shortlisted.
Samantha Harvey’s Orbital takes you round and round the planet in a space mission in which the six characters revolve around each other and reveal to each other, and more to us, through the author’s ventriloquising of their childhood memories and links with the earth, aspects of their lives that led them into space as astronauts or cosmonauts. There are some pretty feeble and liberal hints at the climate crisis, reduced to human “want” and even to “politics” which is messing things up down here, and there are some wistful reflections on the divisions created by artificially imposed human borders, banal contrast with the little world (and toilets) they share up there. There is a ratcheting up in this book of apparently Google-search driven writing as different parts of our planet’s surface are described as the six take the sixteen orbits that comprise their day. If you want a slow story book journey around Google Earth, then this is the book for you. No, it isn’t that bad, and it’s short. Shortlisted.
Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History unfortunately follows the first rule of creative writing, write what you know, which in this case is her family history. Here, the author has lapped up the kind of stories that circulate in family gatherings – ranging from nostalgic wish-fulfilments to the settling of grudges – and evidently worked hard to flesh them out with detailed research, and she regurgitates them here. It is a very big sickly dish which smothers barbed observations with a gooey sentimental sauce. The story of a pied noir family from Algeria that lives through the Second World War and travels from Australia to Argentina and to the US cannot but include some moments of interest, but while this points to historical context (the “eventfulness”), it then disregards that too often to focus on how much, we are told repeatedly, they (mostly) loved each other.
Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment fuses scientific reason and religious faith, finally subordinating the former to the latter in a seemingly interminable narrative which has the main character marvel at discoveries concerning the discovery of a comet by a still present ghost, “discoveries” that have not convincingly been set up as interesting to start with. This should at least keep you away from chapel. Anything of political interest about Essex (which Perry champions) is erased, bar some gratitious subtexts about homophobia in the church. The heavy handed metaphors of orbiting bodies and accompanying phantoms is laced into some awkward prose and interspersed with tedious mannered, supposedly poignant, newspaper columns.
You can find out who the official winner, announced on 12 November, was here. You can probably guess that I was looking for books that would draw me in, into a different place and a different way of thinking about the world, whatever world it was – escape – and that would also show some radical connection with the kinds of things we grapple with in our political work – commitment. Some of the books were too escapist and apolitical, on the liberal luvvie dimension, and I’ve tried to hint at which ones to avoid if you don’t like that kind of thing. This is a selection from a particular slice of cultural life, limited, but some of them showing that fiction is a necessary partner in our engagement with the real world.
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