Steve_Bamlett_blog

2020 Booker Shortlist & Longlist below. – The Books I read this year.

FINAL update – 16th Sept. (history: 24th Aug, 1st Sept., 2nd Sept, 9th Sept (x 2.), 15th Sept (SHORTLIST DAY). Publication material in italics if NOT on shortlist

I’m aiming to keep these lower (perhaps very low) – certainly than the full list but maybe considerably lower than than that. In previous year’s I blogged the full list. Finding Booker now too focused on USA writers.

Here’s the Longlist – and how I’ll record my adventures with it:

Bought (B) Borrowed (A) Not or Not YET B or A	Date Finish	The 2020 shortlist is:	Outcome: Blog = URL Explanation or location of paragraph length summary
B 1/09	Sept 15th	The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (Oneworld Publications)	Note 4 below
B	abandon 16th Sept	This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Faber & Faber)	Some books you only need a few chapters to decide they aren’t for you to judge, because you know you will get no joy from them personally. Didn’t like either style or comic tone.
B	Aug 24th	Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)	Note 1 below: Why was it shortlisted?
Not YET	N/A	NS Who They Was by Gabriel Krauze (4th Estate, HarperCollins)	Not SHORTLISTED. Not reading
Not	N/A	NS The Mirror & The Light by Hilary Mantel (4th Estate, HarperCollins)	Not SHORTLISTED. Not reading Not a fan of 2 prequels or of bodies awarding to same novel thrice
B	April 28th	NS Apeirogon by Colum McCann (Bloomsbury Publishing)	https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2020/04/28/try-the-occupation-of-your-imagination-end-the-pre-occupation-reflecting-on-colum-mccanns-2020-apeirogon/ Why wasn’t it shortlisted?
Not YET	–	The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste (Canongate Books)
Not YET	–	Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing)	Not SHORTLISTED. Not reading
B	Aug. 29th.	Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Picador, Pan Macmillan)	WINNER! https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2020/09/01/lost-looking-boys-his-own-age-standing-in-bubble-shaped-anoraks-and-tight-denims-loitering-booker-2020-longlist-selection-no-3-douglas-stuart-2020-shuggie-bain/
B	Aug. 22nd	Real Life by Brandon Taylor (Originals, Daunt Books Publishing)	https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2020/08/23/folded-up-into-this-language-that-robs-the-world-of-all-its-honesty-this-oblique-shadow-speak-1-booker-2020-longlist-selection-no-2-brandon-taylor-2020-re/
B (1/09)	Now read	Redhead by The Side of The Road by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus, Vintage)	Note 3 below Not shortlisted. Good decision
B	2nd Sept.	Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward (Corsair, Little, Brown)	Note 2 below Not SHORTLISTED. Good decision.
B	5th Sept	How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang (Virago, Little, Brown)	https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2020/09/08/what-people-see-shapes-how-they-treat-you-ma-said-again-and-again-booker-2020-longlist-selection-no-4-c-pam-zhang-2020-how-much-of-these-hills-is-gold-london-virago/ Why wasn’t it shortlisted?

Quick Paragraphs

I uses these to record reading a novel but choosing not to blog on it.

•    1. Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)

This novel has a very worked style which I find unattractive (and rather rhythmically flat in comparison to the Stuart I’m reading now or the Taylor I read before) and an inventive way of working through some fairly hackneyed themes about mothers and daughters and the reproduction of female subjectivities that occur there. I’d see it in the feminist literary autobiography tradition with some conscious play, some of which is highly fantastical, using some quasi-scientific knowledge about memory in Alzheimer’s type dementia to justify these exchanges – particularly when Tara the woman with Alzheimers symptoms but no signs, Antara (Un-Tara), her daughter and the main protagonist and fictional narrator, and Kali (Godess of Time, Creation & Destruction) / Annika, Antara’s daughter meet in one room. There are exhanges of relationship, including mother-daughter inversions, and spouses. These match highly moralised memories of a man exchanged between Tara and Antara, without Tara’s knowledge, who became a focus of Antara’s art of fragmented icons. There is much play with stock metaphors of the edible woman and autophagy – self-eating – (p. 182) and Anthropofagio (which appears in Othello as the Anthropophagi) – cannibalism p. 185):

Incorporation and digestion lead to the production of something new.

p. 185

The novel has a dual narrative structure with flashbacks to earlier memories in sequence. This means behaviours, ideas and feelings discovered earlier in mother and daughter are gradually anchored in events that are often traumatic and cruel in the attachments and separations they cause, including the daughter taking her mother’s lover and basing her art on him. The ashram at the centre of both women’s lives with its sexually predatory father figure feels so less Indian than American in its origin. There is use of the violence of Independence and Partition to explain generational separations – physical or mental.

• 2. Love and Other Thought Experiments.

This is a book that so obviously bathes itself in an academic approach to literary endeavour and I find it the less for that. It glories in its cleverness about the use of those little narratives called ‘thought experiments’ in philosophy, contrasted with at least one character, Eliza, whose work focuses on controlled scientific experiment. It then tries to embody these narratives. Thus Eliza as the book opens:

“I’m not sure you can be a thought experiment,” Eliza said. “They are supposed to help you think through a problem”.

“If you can imagine it, then it is possible”.

“That is one theory”.

p. 1

And on we go to imagine every problem in the story. They are moving problems of life: the existence and nature of love, the issue of identity in change (the Theseus’ ship thought experiment), the possibility of immortality and relative life in differently constituted spaces (under certain conditions), subjective knowing (Nagel’s bat). Rachel is a great character – although the cyber version creeps me (a kind of continuing narrative based on Searle’s black box used to undermine the concept of artificial intelligence as used by Turing). The gay couple (Hal the sperm donor and biological father) and his American lover with more inventive narratives about life and death. Those latter narratives help shape the son Arhur into a spaceman travelling the galaxies. I loved the prose of the ant’s story.

But for me, this does not add up into a novel. Nor does it answer any of the questions that novels should. It doesn’t demonstrate them as possibilities of how we live, ought to live or insist on living. It is novel but it isn’t (for me) a novel. Novels are more than well written pieces that are well synthesised into some kind of whole with deliberately wide open seams. That works in the greatness of Ulysses but here it looks like an exercise in an academic’s year off.

There is pain here about death from brain tumour and its consequences but the answers to me, whose father died like this, are paltry thoughts whatever realities on which they might be based. Of course narrative open up endless possibilities: other realities and counterfactual narrative versions (as in the story of Al / Ali), Rachel’s putative father. But this thought isn’t improved by being stretched on the rack of two academic disciplines: philosophy and literary theory. Consciousness imagined in an ant or an eternally renewed in part Cyber-Rachel may make us think about thinking and the limits of its freedom, but then so does Middlemarch. This is a book I want to forget. The main question it raises: what are literary prizes for? It increasingly looks like they serve the academy.

Steve

• 3. Redhead by The Side of The Road by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus, Vintage

Some novelists taunt us by minimising plot so much that we know they are insisting that the job of the novel lies elsewhere than story. Sometimes even character is pared to the bone and this is certainly the case here. It is like a virtuoso performance in which the slightest musical passage or theme can be cast into a structure that stretches its limitations and opens up riches from previously unseen domains. But I don’t feel this one of Tyler’s novels can be justified on a list that failed to see the importance of David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue Tyler plays with the smallness of her materials especially in her final chapter wherein: ‘You have to wonder what goes through the mind of such a man. Such a narrow and limited man; …’ (Tyler 2020: 167) . It is pure artistic virtuosity that dares such openness.

And it has its reward but perhaps not in prize list that is biased already to the USA. Even the title plays with you. Who is that ‘redhead by the side of the road?’ Nearing York Road, he: ‘mistook the hydrant for a redhead …. how repetitious that thought was, ….’. (ibid: 97

Such perceptual errors are later generalised in terms of the ‘faulty vision’ that, ‘converts inanimate objects into human beings’ (ibid: 169). These details are part of the moral adventure that will also metamorphosis this obsessively tidy man into someone who learns to value and share his basic humanity. For Micah Mortimer is a lovely man, who has over-systematised his life, even if not at the cost of his ability to care for others. even his relationship to his lover, the teacher, Cass can be suumed up as by the fact they: ‘had it down to a system’. (ibid: 20). The source of the metamorphosis is an encounter with a messy teenager, who thinks Micah is his father (he is not) but also has dreams as its harbingers, including one about a baby needing care, which might well represent his own neglected vulnerability: ‘He was still trying to figure out what to do about the baby’ (ibid: 25).

Micah lives for praise from a Traffic-God, a cognitive invention of Micah’s which praises his care in New York traffic, but he learns to inhabit, as his family already do, more ‘noisiness and pell-mellness’. (ibid: 113). Thence untidiness creeps into his life together with a second visit from the teenager, Brink. Perhaps none of us needs ‘character’ or even its equivalent in a digital economy, identity. Micah only changes when he realises that: ‘Right now … losing his identity would be a plus’. (ibid: 173). Only then can he do something uncharacteristic and the possible redemption of his life begin.

A perfect jewel or ‘little bit of ivory’ as in Jane Austen (http://www.jasna.org/persuasions/printed/number27/auerbach.pdf ) yes but hasn’t such perfection been reached in the novel too often to be worthy of great literary prizes.

• 4. The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (Oneworld Publications)

I finished the book on the day it was announced it had been shortlisted. I cannot for the world understand why it was shortlisted. It feels to me a debut novel where nothing really comes together. The core of it is a story of the relationship(s) between mothers and daughters, focused around Bea and Agnes. The point of view in the novel is in large distributed between them and their various kinds of unreliability, and reliability, is built into the theme of observation of self and others (see Cook (2020: 41, 249c.), of modeling and imitating social behaviour. For instance on p.218 the observation of her own past behaviour with her mother by Agnes (ibid: 218) subtly re-calibrates our sense of that relationship as seen by Bea much earlier (ibid: 25). Both passages orchestrate the meaning of bodily imitation modelling in groups (ibid: 292). The testing of boundaries in and between loving exclusively heterosexual couples and families is tested – real and chosen families and mother-daughter relationships.There is necessarily an important play on a mirror motif to theorise this (ibid: 122). Mirrors are were lives are made-up, where the boundaries between pretending and lieing (ibid: 177) are organised.

These themes emerge through what I find a very unconvincing superstructure if the division of the lands (if you want to see this well done see Rupert Thomson’s Divided Kingdom). In fact this world has many compartmentalised versions of human reality – many of which may or may be not fictitious, emergent or passed over already in history (ibid: 79). The key myth is that of capitalism considered as both dream and / or reality of bourgeois security – the ‘Private Lands’. They are certainly seen as emergent (ibid: 259). This structure parodies ideas in the patterning of human history with various play-offs between self-centred or communal value systems and the relationship to both possessions or land and their accumulation(ibid: 290f.). It is no mistake hat it plays with ideas of hunter-gatherer distinctions and communal identity as well as less specialised roles in communalism. The inclusion or exclusion of animals in such communities is an important theme (ibid: 302f.). There is also an element of Wild West mythology. I decided I didn’t favour this novel in coming across this sentence which has a characteristic awkwardness in its invention of mythical times and space:

They were waiting for the Gatherers to come back from the mountains with the pine nut harvest when a lone Ranger appeared on horseback.

ibid: 275

I just can’t read that sentence without an expectation Of Tonto emerging to complete the Lone Ranger myth of the West that it carries with. The old TV series of my youth had been reprised in 2013 by Hollywood. Was this association intentional or clumsy – about as much as the historical associations of the Gatherer (and Hunter) as models of human economic origins I’d guess.

Novels often ponder on problems of the desire for control and look at very carefully the ontology of what humans want to control. This themes is basic here. To be honest, this part of the novel was what I liked best, as in this beautiful piece about the motivations which make couples split or heal and children get hurt and healed in the process. It is about too our expectations of control that come, or more often fail to come, or inextricably vary in children’s pre-cognition and realisations of adulthood:

“What can I do?” Her mother’s voice sounded small. Like Agnes’s used to. When she lived in the City. when there was so much that was bigger than her. So much beyond her control. When she didn’t realize she had any control.

p. 245

There is a lot going on in this novel and I believe the film rights are sold already. But a novel as good as How Much Of These Hills is Gold, it is definitely not. Disappointed. However many people will love the storytelling and the theme of storytelling mothers it encompasses.