BOOKS: Booker Prize Shortlist for 2004 (with summaries and short reviews)


Bitter Fruit
by Achmat Dango

While in France I met people who had fought and won the war of resistance against the Nazi occupation, only to find their lives frozen by the physical and psychological wounds of that wartime experience. I found myself comparing them to the generation involved in resistance to apartheid in South Africa: perhaps they, too, had children who saw them as stuck in the past, or emotionally crippled by "sly and self-seductive glimpses in the mirrors of their personal histories ... a need to be recognised as a 'hero of the struggle'." Of course, people are always looking back at the events and relationships that formed them - when they really lived. But the peculiar problem of apartheid in South Africa was that it gave people a warped image of themselves as being sorted by race. And resistance to it, unlike in France, ended in a compromise: "Gave us the government, kept the money."

The sense of an on-going betrayal of people's lives - in the past and into the future - is the wounded territory of Achmat Dangor's novel. Set in Johannesburg in the closing months of Nelson Mandela's presidency, it charts the open wounds and disintegrating relationships in a "coloured" family caught up in the "grey, shadowy morality" of an ANC government "bargaining, until there was nothing left to barter with, neither principle nor compromise".

Silas Ali, the father, is an old ANC activist whose government job in the justice ministry is to liaise with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A South African spin doctor, his fate is to watch the passing of his own life marginalised on TV, "as if it was foreign, fictional". His wife, Lydia, goes to work as a nurse researching HIV transmission while entrenching her distance from an emotionally shell-shocked husband. Their son, Mikey, gets caught up with Muslim activists associated with the vigilantes of Pagad, known for their involvement in the bombings of Cape Town. All the bases are touched in a reckoning with South Africa's past and present turmoil, and no box left unopened in the search for some kind of limbo or twilight zone where all unresolved conflicts might find resolution.

The novel's sense of painful disclosure is symbolised in the dark, red seeds of a split pomegranate spilling on to the cover image. Seed is a metaphor that haunts the Ali family. Mikey, the only son - a child of the "new South Africa" - discovers he was born of rape by a white policeman. A seed of contempt germinates in Mikey as he reflects on the failings of his parents' generation: "'The struggle' sowed the seeds of bright hopes and burning ideals, but look at what they are harvesting: an ordinariness." Mikey's response to these levels of deception and self-deception is an insistence on "nowness", a determination to keep his own identity open to change as he goes in murderous search of his biological father.

Rape, incest, murder - the fruits of apartheid - unfold across a story told in three acts under the headings of Memory, Confession and Retribution. It's top-heavy, perhaps, with the sins of the fathers and the heat of the action, but Dangor deftly keeps the show on the road by routing his analysis of an underlying malaise through increasingly well-drawn characters in high-profile jobs and situations. The reader has a ring-side seat for witnessing the political, cultural and religious conflicts sweeping the Rainbow Nation.

Dangor is clearly well placed, too, to describe the world of post-apartheid South Africa. He grew up in one of the "coloured" - mixed race - townships of Johannesburg, and having witnessed the kind of forced removals described in Bitter Fruit, he rose as an activist to head the Nelson Mandela Foundation in South Africa. Descriptions of the "trite, imperious feeling" of looking out from an office tower in Pretoria, or the account of an ANC "organism" with an heroic ethos turning itself into an "organisation" with a managerial one, offer acute glimpses into the political transformation after apartheid.

Yet underneath it all, a mournful river still runs, welling up in feelings both "bruised and discoloured": race, and the unreachable hurt of having lived in a racialised society. The poet takes over from the political writer in Dangor to speak it. It lingers in the imagery of fruit, of flesh, of desire - organic matter in stages of ripeness and decay, the associations of rottenness and guilt. Blond hair along a forearm is glimpsed like the bloom on a piece of fruit, and then the thought of it stifled. Hurt is bastardised with desire. Silas is "dark-faced and dark-minded". A "coloured" girl has "a rough, bastard kind of beauty". Bitter Fruit has a shocking ability to surprise the reader with the persistence of racial feeling in South Africa.


The Electric Michelangelo
by Sarah Hall

Sarah Hall's Haweswater, published less than two years ago, was a remarkable debut; with her second novel, now longlisted for the Orange prize, she confirms her status as one of the most significant and exciting of our younger novelists. Cy Parks, the "electric Michelangelo" of the novel's title, is a tattoo artist, born in the early years of the last century and seduced, when little more than a boy, by the siren song of his demanding profession. As apprentice to Eliot Riley, a foul-mouthed binge-drinker who nevertheless maintains a reputation as one of the finest tattoo artists around, Cy endures pain and humiliation, but emerges with an enhanced sense of vocation and an impressive reputation of his own.

When Riley dies, Cy leaves Morecambe, the resort where he served his apprenticeship, and sails for America. Once there, he gravitates to the surreal world of Coney Island, setting up a booth among the freak-shows and white-knuckle rides and pursuing his vocation with the quiet concentration of a man whose life has become subservient to his art. Yet that art is, in a crucially important sense, inseparable from life. Cy's canvas is the human body and, in a characteristically physical and richly imagined passage, Hall describes how the stories that gush from his clients as they sit or lie under the needle are mixed with the tattooing ink and worked back, as translations, into the broken skin.

And for all his concentration, Cy is not immune to passion. He has had experience of women almost from the beginning of his apprenticeship - clients inflamed by the pricking of the needle and eager for sex by way of finale -though without further entanglement; but his love-affair with Grace, a bareback rider and tightrope walker who enters his life shortly after the outbreak of war, is of a different order. Grace is an immigrant of indeterminate origins, a representative of suffering European womanhood: her body is explicitly characterised as a battleground, and when she weeps "all the sorrow of Europe" seems to flood from her dark eyes. She comes to Cy with the request that he tattoo her body with a single, repeated motif: a black-rimmed green eye.

In accepting the task, Cy commits himself to experiencing with unprecedented immediacy the conflict between his priestly sense of his artistic calling and the claims of the flesh he routinely handles with such privileged intimacy. The outcome of that conflict is neither simple nor decisive, but high aspiration and fleshly desire are tentatively reconciled at last in his retrospective acknowledgment that perhaps those difficult, exhilarating tattooing sessions "were the times he was making love to her after all".

The Electric Michelangelo touches on many important themes but the novel is, above all, an analysis of pain. From his earliest childhood among the consumptive guests in his mother's seaside boarding house, Cy has been forced to confront suffering. Hall brings us back repeatedly to the subject, not as a theoretical question but as palpable fact. It's hard to read - certainly hard to read without wincing - her account of the fate of Riley, dragged out to a lonely spot by unspecified enemies who break his clever, creative fingers with a claw-hammer; and even harder to read of the suffering of Grace who, for a few brief weeks after the tattooing, is able to "celebrate the identity of her body as her own sovereign state" but who fails to reckon with the vindictiveness of the affronted male psyche as embodied in Sedak, a religious fanatic who sees it as his duty to restore her decorated skin to "God's original purity of naked cleanness".

Hall certainly knows how to shock, but the shock is an essential part of a serious artistic and - in the best sense - moral enterprise. And she also understands the value of reticence. Somewhere behind the events described in detail in these pages lies the carnage of a world war, the terror of the Holocaust; yet the reminders of the larger picture are offered with a careful obliquity simultaneously suggestive of artistic tact and a sharp awareness of connection.

There's evidence in the detail of the text that the novel has been edited with rather greater haste than was good for it, but this doesn't significantly affect its essential virtues. The Electric Michelangelo is a work of unusual imaginative power and range, and it deserves a wide readership.



Cloud Atlas
David Mitchell

It's hard not to become ensnared by words beginning with the letter B, when attempting to describe Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell's third novel. It's a big book, for start, bold in scope and execution--a bravura literary performance, possibly. (Let's steer clear of breathtaking for now.) Then, of course, Mitchell was among Granta's Best of Young British Novelists and his second novel number9dreamwas shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Characters with birthmarks in the shape of comets are a motif; as are boats. Oh and one of the six narratives strands of the book--where coincidentally Robert Frobisher, a young composer, dreams up "a sextet for overlapping soloists" entitled Cloud Atlas--is set in Belgium, not far from Bruges. (See what I mean?)

Structured rather akin to a Chinese puzzle or a set of Matrioshka dolls, there are dazzling shifts in genre and voice and the stories leak into each other with incidents and people being passed on like batons in a relay race. The 19th-century journals of an American notary in the Pacific that open the novel are subsequently unearthed 80 years later on by Frobisher in the library of the ageing, syphilitic maestro he's trying to fleece. Frobisher's waspish letters to his old Cambridge crony, Rufus Sexsmith, in turn surface when Rufus, (by the 1970s a leading nuclear scientist) is murdered. A novelistic account of the journalist Luisa Rey's investigation into Rufus' death finds its way to Timothy Cavendish, a London vanity publisher with an author who has an ingenious method of silencing a snide reviewer. And in a near-dystopian Blade Runner-esque future, a genetically engineered fast food waitress sees a movie based on Cavendish's unfortunate internment in a Hull retirement home. (Cavendish himself wonders how a director called Lars might wish to tackle his plight). All this is less tricky than it sounds, only the lone "Zachary" chapter, told in Pacific Islander dialect (all "dingos'n'ravens", "brekker" and "f'llowin'"s) is an exercise in style too far. Not all the threads quite connect but nonetheless Mitchell binds them into a quite spellbinding rumination on human nature, power, oppression, race, colonialism and consumerism.

“In a bold and unconventionally structured work, David Mitchell combines the stories of six individuals to create a masterful whole, which is both thought provoking and incredibly exhilarating. The morality and ambitions of a reluctant voyager crossing the Pacific in 1850; a disinherited composer blagging a precarious livelihood in between-the-wars Belgium; a high-minded journalist in Governor Reagan’s California; a vanity publisher fleeing his gangland creditors; a genetically modified ‘dinery server’ on death-row; and Zachry, a young Pacific Islander witnessing the nightfall of science and civilisation echo and impact on each others stories and point to a terrifying vision of the world’s future and challenges our ability to shape not only our destiny but those that will come after us.”


The Master
by Colm Tóibín

There's little in Colm Tóibín's previous work, to some of which this reviewer has been immune or even mildly allergic, to prepare for the startling excellence of his new novel. The Master is a portrait of Henry James that has the depth and finish of great sculpture. For decades now, anyone interested in this fascinating, infuriating figure has been unfailingly directed to Leon Edel's massive biography (which has pride of place in Tóibín's acknowledgments). It may be time at last to change the signposts. The Master pays ample homage to James, without suppressing a prickle of critique.

The pillars of the narrative are failure, avoidance, renunciation and withdrawal. Unpromising quartet, but appropriate to a life without obvious eventfulness, and a work with a strong, negative dynamic, structured round the missed opportunity, the faulty choice, the golden bowl with its latent crack, the 'beast in the jungle' whose annihilating leap is delayed and delayed.
Tóibín's starting point is the most painful public event of James's life, the dramatic failure of a drama. On the disastrous opening night of James's play Guy Domville, the applause of James's friends was drowned out by the jeering of an audience that wanted incident and emotion, not anaemia in three acts. After this fiasco, James reconsecrated himself to fiction, but first he visited Ireland, hoping to escape the echoes of his London failure.

Tóibín shows James missing nothing, but refusing almost everything as literary material or personal priority. On these pages, he abstains in short order from politics, history, sexuality and the expression of emotion. He has the exile's advantage and handicap, of being 'too alert... to be able to participate'. He sees the grotesque shams of British rule, but doesn't adopt anti-imperialism as a cause, as his tragic sister Alice had. An impertinent stranger seeks to humiliate him by referring to his family's humble Irish roots, and a woman he had imagined his friend makes no protest. He leaves their company as soon as he can, but even the sting of British snobbery isn't enough to make him find his origins interesting.

Returned to London, and writing again, James receives regular bulletins about Oscar Wilde. It was a play of Wilde's that he attended on that terrible first night, being too keyed-up to watch his own, and it was another piece of Wilde's which replaced Guy Domville. Now that Wilde has his own disaster, James listens attentively but without betraying any personal interest. Edmund Gosse wonders if James himself might not have some secrets to protect, which would make the night boat to France attractive, but as James hears the details of the scandal, it is the fate of Wilde's abandoned children which touches his heart and imagination.

Wilde functions in the book rather as he did in Stoppard's play about AE Housman, as an anti-type. Wilde was a self-destructive butterfly, a florid imago torn by the beaks of the law and the press, while others remained at the pupal, even the larval stage of eroticism. Nevertheless, Tóibín has had the courage and tact to include one scene of something like sexual experience for the young James. This is a remarkable feat, given that James naked was some thing that even James seems to have had difficulty imagining.

The novel covers a period of five years, during which James was becoming, indeed, 'the Master'. It also deals with earlier passages in his life, from childhood on. In Tóibín's understanding, and perhaps also in James's, the past everywhere underlies the present without doing anything as dreary as explaining it. Looking back, James takes the measure of his own consecrated egotism, which led for instance to asymmetrical intimacies with clever women. Their needs engaged and moved him, without abolishing the tender distance from which he observed them.

One extraordinary passage deals with the Civil War, a cataclysm supported by the unpredictable Henry James Snr, but one from which both William James (whose later fame was as a psychologist and philosopher of religion) and Henry Jnr managed to exempt themselves, though a younger brother fought and suffered horribly. On the day that Wilky James's regiment, the famous 54th (notable for its large number of black volunteers) left Boston with much pomp, William had an important laboratory experiment to perform, while Henry wrote to his mother that back pain might prevent his attending. He was having a relapse of the hypochondria in which she had colluded.

Tóibín's writing, though, finds something in Henry's state of mind beyond cowardice or guilt, a keynote softly being struck: 'When everyone else had fire in their blood, he was calm. So calm that he could neither read nor think, merely bask in the freedom that the afternoon offered, savour, as deeply as he could, this quiet and strange treachery, his own surreptitious withdrawal from the world.' It's possible to feel that the greatness of James's mind was a sort of immense littleness.

The habit of avoiding conflict was deeply ingrained in James. As Tóibín describes it, when his butler at Lamb House in Rye became a habitual drunkard, James's preferred solution was to eliminate soups and gravies from the menu, substances which betrayed lurching, and to seat his guests with their backs to the dining-room door, so that they wouldn't observe Smith's robotic progress out of the room.

The least successful passages in the book are the ones that deal with James turning anecdotes or observations into stories and novels. He observes an ambiguous child playing at innocence. What Maisie Knew! He hears about an American paying court to a great-niece of a lover of Byron, his real interest being some literary remains of Shelley. The Aspern Papers! Reading an old letter from his great friend, the invalid Minny Temple, he imagines a suitor for her, who would embody in more active form his own mixture of devotion and betrayal. The Wings of the Dove!
James's style is one of the most distinctive in the language, somehow surviving both self-parody and parody, from Beerbohm to Louis Wilkinson/ Marlow (in whose scurrilous version even an ejaculation in a gentleman's library becomes 'a devolvulently blanching stain').

Tóibín has been wise about which elements to adopt, which to jettison. He borrows James's vocabulary and register, but not the whole manner. Above all, he abstains from the long sentence, which made so many of James's effects possible - the oracular murmur, the air of paralysed scruple, the flaunted subtlety (God, how the man could badger a nuance). There was always wit in James, but the long sentence drowned it.

Those long sentences were tracts of prose in which James could play, sing and spout like a frock-coated whale, or else disappear inside a cloud of his own secreted ink like a giant squid of New England gentility. We shall not read their like again, with any luck. At the beginning of the book, Tóibín can only be at a disadvantage, since his writing is so much thinner in texture than the original, but long before its end he has achieved a triumph on his own terms.

Summary: “In The Master, Colm Tóibín tells the story of Henry James, an American-born genius of the modern novel who became a connoisseur of exile, living among artists and aristocrats in Paris, Rome, Venice and London. In January 1895 James anticipates the opening of his first play in London. He has never been so vulnerable, nor felt so deeply unsuited to the public gaze. When the production fails, he returns, chastened, to his writing desk. The result is a string of masterpieces, but they are produced at a high personal cost. Colm Tóibín captures the exquisite anguish of a man whose artistic gifts made his career a triumph but whose private life was haunted by loneliness and longing, and whose sexual identity remained unresolved. Henry James circulated in the grand parlours and palazzos of Europe, he was lauded and admired, yet his attempts at intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love.”


I'll Go to Bed at Noon
by Gerard Woodword

Depicting alcoholism in fiction requires a steady hand, and a clear head for sensing when lurid excess becomes as repulsive and dull in invention as it does in real life. But handled with care, the rewards are high, not least because the fictions that tend to cohere around addiction -- the grandiosity of need and satisfaction, the delusions and justifications of denial -- are so rich in ingenuity and conviction. For the Jones family, who were first sighted in Gerard Woodward's Whitbread-shortlisted first novel, August (2001), such fictions have become a modus operandi, vital to their rackety and compromised survival.

Colette and Aldous, mater- and pater-familias, conjure their determination to continue from a limited wherewithal. Colette has her own history of dependency to deal with, having previously developed and conquered a reliance on Romac, the glue from puncture-repair kits, and even now can only get to sleep with the aid of a few glasses of barley wine, her "wonder-drink", and a handful of Nembutals. Come the morning, and only another refreshing cup of fizzy wine can dispel her grogginess. It is unsurprising that she should need both sedative and stimulant to help her deal with reality, since the couple's lives have shrunk to the timorous tedium of anticipating, containing and recovering from the unpredictable rampages of their drunken eldest son, Janus.
Janus, a gifted pianist whose temperament now makes it virtually impossible for him to hold down even the most menial of jobs, thinks nothing of surreptitiously cutting out the bathroom pipes in order to pay for a few cans of Special Brew; of ransacking his parents' treasure troves for the same purpose; of flouting court injunctions and filching brains from hospital mortuaries. With his brother-in-law, Bill, a bohemian painter-turned-supermarket-butcher, he mounts imaginary expeditions to discover the source of the Limpopo, although his primary quarry is usually the mythical "Red Lion", whose "roars can be heard echoing about the eucalyptus and banyan trees". Barred from most of the pubs within easy reach of Windhover Hill, the fictional North London suburb in which the novel is set, and losing friends with each display of violent and capricious behaviour, Janus is swiftly moving closer to the margins of the respectable middle-class life to which the rest of the Jones clan stubbornly cling.

Woodward sets Janus's decline into lawlessness and self-provoked exile against that facade of respectability with impressive subtlety, evoking at the same time a precise sense of life in 1970s suburbia. Colette and Aldous's house boasts a music room, and they recoil in horror at the philistinism represented by a relative's bookless High Wycombe house, and yet their own home, under the onslaught of Janus's depredations, borders on the insanitary and slum-like.
Elsewhere, Colette's widowed brother, Janus Brian, slides into dilapidation by distilling all that his garden has to offer; when the tomato sherry and brussel-sprout whisky run out, he turns to a tin of shoe polish, hoping to extract its alcoholic essence with the aid of a kettle. It doesn't work, and Janus Brian's sole comfort is his insistence that his past simply doesn't exist, that memory is nothing but a dream. "Life must be real", insists Colette, "if I was making all this up, surely I'd make up a better life for myself". You can see her point; the demands of her family are a nagging distraction from the social and domestic pleasures that the creeping sophistication of the decade has to offer, with its parties garnished with sandwich gateaux and stilton mousses, its pubs transformed by bamboo, wickerwork and foliage, and its Sundays set off by sedate drives into London's leafy Home Counties hinterlands. In a section of the novel in which part of the family decamps to Tewkesbury on holiday, a less ragged life is glimpsed, one that, for Aldous, is defined by his ability to create and protect his own solitude. Colette's problem is that she has a foot in both camps and that, for all her terror and despair at Janus's solipsistic rage, she would quite like to join him. "You'd be happier if the whole world was drunk", rails Julian, the precocious youngest son who dreams of a gun with which to kill Janus, and he is not far wrong.

Gerard Woodward's narrative proceeds at a finely judged pace, its vivid set pieces exploding into the quiet flow of day-to-day living. In similar style, he carefully rations the novel's seductive moments of caperish humour and nicely modulated wit, balancing them with an intelligent and frequently moving sense of pathos. This is a clever and accurate mimicry of drunkenness itself, of its combination of sharp releases of energy and emotion and its sapping sense of self-exhaustion and diminishing returns. The drunken antics of the Jones family and their circle might not be much fun to live among, but in I'll Go to Bed at Noon their fictional existence capivates and appals in equal measure.

Summary: “Colette Jones has had drink problems in the past, but now it seems as though her whole family is in danger of turning to alcohol. Her oldest son has thrown away a promising musical career for a job behind the counter in builders’ merchants, and his drinking sprees with his brother-in-law Bill, a pseudo-Marxist supermarket butcher who seems to see alcohol as central to the proletarian revolution, have started to land him in trouble with the police. Meanwhile Colette’s recently widowered older brother is following an equally self-destructive path, having knocked back an entire cellar of homemade wine, he’s now on the gin, a bottle a day and counting. Who will be next? Her youngest son had decided to run away to sea, but when her own husband hits the bottle Colette realises she has to act. As the pressure builds on Colette to cope with these damaged people, her own weaknesses begin to emerge, and become crucial to the outcome of all their lives.”

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