Steve_Bamlett_blog

2023 Booker Longlist – The Books I read this year.

I’m aiming to keep these lower – but only by not buying unless in 1^st impression. Although wanted to read Pearl so got it on Kindle

Here’s the Longlist – and how I’ll record my adventures with it (so far I have only read one from the list – the Sebastian Barry): THE SHORTLIST NOW OUT. VERY DISAPPOINTED BY SOME ABSENCES. Ayò̦bámi Adébáyò̦ a very sad omission

Bought (B) Borrowed (A) Not or Not YET B or A	Date Start/ Finish	The 2023 longlist is:	Outcome:Blog = URLExplanation Paragrah no. below PREDICTION BEFORE SHORTLIST
B 1/8/23	02/8/23 to o5/8/23	A Spell of Good Things by Ayò̦bámi Adébáyò̦ (Canongate)	https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2023/08/07/booker-2023-longlist-this-blog-examines-a-spell-of-good-things-by-ayo%cc%a6bami-adebayo%cc%a6/ Massive shame that this WAS NOT shortlisted
B March 1983	F 11/3/23	Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry (Faber & Faber)	https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2023/03/11/he-had-a-sudden-strong-desire-to-tell-his-story-to-someone-as-long-as-it-was-to-someone-without-ears-billy-and-june-would-have-different-versions-they-were-sort-of-uncompleted-ch/ Massive shame here too!
B 1/8/23 SHORTLISTED	10/8/23 – 12/8/23	Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein (Picador)	See Quick Paragraph 2 on this below. Beautifully written novel but not one for me, nor one I think one that should be on the shortlist.
B 1/8/23 SHORTLISTED	15/8/ 23 – 18/8/23	If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (4th Estate)	This is possibly a great book but not for me. See Quick Paragraph 3 below.
B 2/8/23	21/8/23 – 27/8/23	How To Build A Boat by Elaine Feeney (Harvill Secker)	In the end I loved it: https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2023/08/28/booker-this-blog-is-about-elaine-feeneys-2023-how-to-build-a-boat/
B 20/8/ 23 SHORTLISTED	29/8/23 – 30/8/23	The Other Eden by Paul Harding (Hutchinson Heinemann)	This is a superbly plotted, finely crafted novel that fails to strike me for those very reasons. I find it almost a fine writer’s exercise in novella writing. See Quick Paragraph 5 below.
B 3/8/23	06/8/23 to 07/8/23	Pearl by Siân Hughes (The Indigo Press)	Purchased Kindle ed. From Amazon (Kindle pagination referencing therefore – not always same as in hard copies). SEE Quick Paragraph 1 below
B 1/8/23	19/8/23 – 21/8/23	All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow (Headline)	This is clearly a very accomplished first novel and an innovative take on exploring the voice of neurodivergence. That voice has a strange relationship to the cultural markers that have grown up around the novel – especially the ‘convention’ (for it is that now) of the ‘unreliable narrator’. Hence don’t want to think this out in full – no blog then. Quick Paragraph 4.
B 20/8/23 SHORTLISTED – MY PREDICTIVE WINNER	21/8/23 – 01/9/23	Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Oneworld)	Excellent: https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2023/09/03/booker-2023-paul-lynchs-prophet-song-a-book-of-humanity-set-against-injustice-and-other-deeper-things/ shortlist: 6=
B 19/8/23	01/9/23 – 04/9/23	In Ascension by Martin MacInnes (Atlantic Books)	This surprised me by its holding power. Blog. https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2023/09/05/booker-2023-this-is-a-blog-on-martin-macinnes-2023-in-ascension/ Possible shortlist: 6=
B 1/8/23 SHORTLISTED POSSIBLE WINNER	13/8/23 – 14/8/23	Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (Picador)	Loved the writing and the people in it. https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2023/08/16/pa-believed-in-ghosting-and-so-did-i-this-is-a-blog-on-chetna-maroo-2023-western-lane-info-to-agent-camillaelworthy/ SHORTLIST: Co-WINNER or 2
B 1/8/23 SHORTLISTED	12/8/23 – 14/8/23 (Abandoned) CAN I BRING MYSELF TO READ IT NOW?	The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Hamish Hamilton)	Started this very long novel 12/8/23.I am not good with comedy anyway admittedly but having sort of liked his earlier novels (especially Skippy Dies) with their shaggy-dog story manner, wanted to like it but just can’t get on with it using a distancing irony to know absolutely everyone. Got to second section end (about PJ) but not sure if I will go back. Perhaps if its shortlisted I will challenge myself again.
B 1/8/23	7/8/23 – 10/8/23	The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (Canongate)	Blog address. Tremendously good book. https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2023/08/12/booker-2023-lesley-hamlyn-confronts-the-character-willie-near-the-end-of-the-novel-and-says-to-him-that-he-has-never-written-about-a-homosexual-affair-in-any-of-your-books-youve-n/ MASSIVE SHAME NOT SHORTLISTED

Quick Paragraphs

I use these to record reading a novel but choosing not to blog on it (none as yet of course).

• 1. Pearl by Siân Hughes (The Indigo Press)

I find this novel unappealing though tremendously interesting. It’s topic is maternal suicide and the inheritance of mental illness and suicidal thoughts (or at least of escape and letting go of self and responsibilities). The theme is necessarily not a cheering one, although there are moments of sheer joy in here too which come with the narrator’s determination to break through ‘a history of grief’ which this story might have been in its entirety (p.9). Some joy emerges in her capacity to stand up ‘for my right to have a positive memory of my mother'(p. 13), for instance. From the early reflections on the ‘revenant’ and ‘the resurrection of the flesh’, this book becomes obsessed by bodily self-harm, anorexia and self-cutting as part of the cyclical self-making of daughters from their mothers, distaste for the thinness of what passes as mental health care, and ways of learning to love, as a young lesbian (the story on pages 79f. is quite appealing I think if over-viscous and ‘shiny with sex’), then dog carer and latterly ascetic asexual mother. Though mothers get all the blame (p.165) being a mother survives the book as a venerated positive role, even when vulnerability passes with it to its next avatar of that role. What appears to make the book coherent, (though I don’t think it is in my judgement) is the mistake the narrator makes in thinking the medieval poem Pearl best represents her mother and building her life and artistic work around this fact, whilst learning, as we may have suspected, that it is in Sir Gawain & The Green Knight, which was inlaid into her mother’s copy of Pearl, in which a true story of her mother’s painful route to her destiny in ‘the distance of the dead’ (page 202) in search of her dead lost son is told. That is the poem that comes to be understood and accepted by the narrator as her mother’s ‘poem’. If it is unappealing still to me, it is because the rhythms of loss and misery are so insistent at the piece’s opening and ending that they drown out some of the joy of the young troubled girl coming to know herself, her body and her father in new ways. What dominates, as it must probably, is the ‘horror of forgetting, and then remembering’. It is a book about the necessity of the constant return of and to the dead and dying to make sense of complex lives. And we need that whilst the only alternatives in institutional life are taking ‘pills for it, and make a wellness recovery plan, and meet with your key worker and tell your consultant if you are still seeing angels on the stairs’. How terrible a prospect is the latter.

• 2. Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein (Picador)

Michael Delgado ((2023: 53) ‘Paranormal Activity’ in Literary Review (Issue 521 August 2023), 53) reviews this novel with much gusto and a lot of retelling of its story in his own way. He is very friendly especially to the prose style of this novelist (‘where everything is unspecified, nameless and suggestive’) that he calls it ‘so finely tuned, that its allusive quality is a virtue throughout, allowing interpretations to proliferate in the absence of solidity’. Even if we miss the allusions, we know they exist for there is a paginated reference list at the end of the novel, which lists the sources cited silently otherwise in the text and reminds one of T.S. Eliot’s Notes to The Waste Land. I found the list off-putting. And the story turns upon incidents of animal cruelty, of which this seems the worst: ‘In my brother’s garden a kite plucked out the intestines of a grey rabbit. The rabbit had been alive until as recently as a few seconds before, death had not come swiftly enough for this rabbit, it had struggled’ (page 29). In my view the novel fails to engage precisely because it sometimes appears to be about a specific form of oppression that might be both symbolic and real. We know the narrator and her family are Jewish, as Delgado says, and the narrator’s sense of being persecuted may well recall antisemitism, but that doesn’t really lock into the sources of alienation expressed which come from failures of communication – the narrator does not know the language or customs of the Northern land to which she is transported in order to look after her brother’s home whilst he is on distant business trip care. Nothing stays the same however. Her brother begins to be so ill when he returns from business that she becomes his carer.

The narrator doesn’t know really the answer to the question: ‘How did one get here?’ (p. 151). That word ‘one’ though grates on me in part because it assumes a kind of voice that uses the term ‘one’ rather than ‘I’. The story sometimes fall away into speculation the narrator seems to think is her specialised role, ordained in some science: ‘Anthropology has not been my area, the social sciences never of particular interest to me, and yet I sensed dimly the outlines of complex networks of exchange and relation that structured the society one lived in, structures that in certain case required the presence, or more appropriately the exclusion of a particular individual or object, to enable the cohesion of the whole’ (page 150). Otherwise the narrator services the community by digging out the manure from a cow-shed but gets no gratitude, for people believe that she is responsible for the death of the cows that once lived in the shed, a hapless pregnant ewe and her lamb and for a major disease that hits the town simultaneously in the first place (page 129). My favourite character is her dog, given the name ‘Bert’ (an odd choice for someone who says ‘one’ all the time). Bert has no testicles but the narrator accepts he has impregnated a native’s dog when accused of that. Bert though participates somewhat in local dog life – for these dogs howl thrice daily – as the narrator does not in local human life: ‘Bert, who normally was so docile, so undoglike, who I would have thought above such affairs, participated, rounding his little mouth and howling the most terrible, the most heart-wrenching lament three times a day’ (page 115). Fancy that novel. It’s all yours. Not one I’d tip.

• 3. If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (4^th Estate)

This is in all possibility a great book and the very finest on the Caribbean diaspora you will find but it was not a book I could enjoy. One reason it is great is that it is a truly intersectional novel of diaspora. The issue of migrancy is multinational and transnational and identities are never fixed in this novel and that fact is sometimes necessary to be recognised in the detail of the stories in here. It is told in episodes but the timing and scheduling of the ends and beginnings of these are not sequential. Sometimes it takes time to recognise – half way through the chapter ‘Independent Living’  – to recognise this is about a character you are already supposed to ‘know’, in the case of this chapter, Trelawney. The characters metamorphose – so that even the two ‘main’ characters: the brothers Trelawney and Delano become slippery and harder to understand than we thought they were.

The reader indeed is to be convinced throughout that they as readers often get things wrong and think too often in stereotypes, forgetting the global picture in the West is one dominated by US imperialistic capitalism, so that our thinking about Jamaica is often askew, as it is for Cuba and Hispanic South America, and the connection of all these to Africa. We do not really understand social care for elders and the chapter ‘Independent Living’ is brilliant for this purpose but hard reading. The suicide of an elder resident of a private independent living tower block is messy (fragments of his flesh are all over the space onto which he jumps from the block roof) but the horror is in the scramble for his home by other interested tenants, and is the same horror as in the self-interested corruption we see throughout from more obvious (middle-class) stereotypes – including in Trelawney who had engaged our empathy previously. There is nothing to like much, he convinces us, in him or a world where issues of human security, decent work, and future prospects are reduced to the only joy he can imagine of having: ‘a toilet on which to sit and unload your twisted, clogged-up colon …’ (p. 137). Delano is a petty criminal at the end who accidentally falls into more major crime. People who return to Jamaica are generally deluded about its qualities because the USA is so viscerally and obviously riddled by selfish anarchy. People query in this novel whether or how they are Black or white as another source of fundamental questioning of identities and even the social construction of ‘race’ is an insufficient explanation (p. 45f.) . The last scenes of the novel focus around the sexual fantasies of a white couple who must have sex whilst watched by a Black man in a hoodie. It is all a rather f…d up world where only prison is a certainty to hold onto.

This is a book for the those who like their literature fragmented and incoherent (though each of the story episodes is extremely readable and well written) because that is how the world is after all. But maybe I cannot bear ‘too much reality’, so it isn’t for me. It may be a definite for shortlist and more. I don’t know because I couldn’t care for the characters when I read it. But it may be for you an eye-opening revelation about what contemporary story-telling – wound out from that twisted, clogged-up colon is really all about – and the rest of it (such as our desire for a coherent story – or at least subtextual understanding of a story) is just fantasy to cheer ourselves up.  Will leave it up to you.

• 4. All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow (Headline)

This is a fascinating novel and the first I know to really explore how the ‘unreliable’ (for reliability in novels – and perhaps life more generally –  is built on norms and conventions) voice of neurodivergence can be used in the novel without it being a marker for the moral being of the narrator as a character. That is because this narrator (though, in her mother’s words, ‘not wired right’ (p. 165)) is a more formidable moral compass than anyone else in it – for they are characters who are, especially the ‘bird-heart’ in chief, Vita, ‘unpredictable and unsettling’. Using strategic tics and life routines to control the ‘unpredictable and unsettling’ is sometimes said to be a means of characterising autism. In this character the life routines are formed through constant reference to the fictional (I think) Edith Ogilvy on Ladies Etiquette, control of food colours and other visual violence, over-attention to the manner of speaking rather than content, and the invention of an unproblematic population of Sicilians to contrast with bird-hearted reality etc.  However, this ‘insight’ should not be what we take away here from this novel: ideed rather than being about autism, the novel shows rather that there are underlying problems with those who apparently live by, and  sustain their own image, self-justifying norms – the bird-hearts (p. 23, 135 for examples) – who are not categorised by other as AUTISTIC.

For me this novel was painfully beautiful because it was an analysis of HOW people ‘leave’ each other, of  the ways ‘in which people actually ended things’ (p. 198), whether they be love bonds of biological and/or social origin, friendships, lives – in the case of the dying – or even property contracts or other acts of legitimate or illegitimate possession (see p. 160, 175). There is a lot here about children, childlessness, child death (Dolores), child substitution and theft and the politics and economics of non-parental care. There is an orphanage – Lakeview (p. 99 etc.) – at the cold heart of the novel that deepens this subject and then segues into its treatment of property development in relation to the robbery of all meaning from the term ‘home’.  May have a chance of shortlist if not winning. But a good novel

• 5. The Other Eden by Paul Harding (Hutchinson Heinemann)

These are very much times in which the stereotyping of the disadvantaged victims of changes brought about by late-stage capitalism is a theme needing our time. So is the wasting of natural resources so that these migrants are dealt with by a poorly funded and punitive medical model of the state’s duty of care and good mental well-being. Migrants are victimised in our days, cast adrift on pitiless shores,  But I think I would read Danny Ramadan’s The Foghorn Echoes (link is to my blog -https://stevebamlett.home.blog/2023/07/18/there-are-some-novels-that-tackle-queer-life-performance-head-on-without-reducing-it-to-the-absurdity-our-enemies-see-in-us-this-blog-is-a-review-of-danny-ramadan-2023-the-foghorn-echoes-info/  ) if I wanted a book on that theme. Harding’s novel is the novel of the age of MFA and the doctoral novel – perfect in its plotting of character development and story, well regulated so that though pace varies and narrative foci shift, all contributing to a dramatic denouement with the possibility of wistfulness in the last paragraph. There is a tremendous Shakespearean/Dickensian sub-character throughout called Zachary Hand To God Proverbs, who ‘lived in a hollow oak tree’ (33), the interior of which he decorates with Biblical story lines that do not have the nuance in themselves that he had in his head creating them (217), who definitively becomes the moral voice of a novel singularly lacking in such people.

This book shows  a world of medical stereotyping in mental health and learning disability, extreme racism and class hatred of those that capitalism impoverishes and marginalises. Put thus, I OUGHT to love it and I do find it a moving (to tears at one time) fable but I also think it too wrought a piece – even down to tieing the final tear-jerker down to the execution of the island’s dogs, whom we have come to know and love, at a point where they robbed of their names for no-one who lives on the island now any longer knows them.  I will blog on the book (and re-read if  it makes the shortlist) but it ought not to do so I think in a year where we need innovative writing more than ever, that captures new voices. This novel might have done this given the kind of events it covers from history but it sacrifices everything to the principle of being a well-wrought urn and thus remains a trhing about and of the past it paints, whatever the writer’s intention.  The character Ethan almost appeals but not as much as the way we see art history recovering him – I find it satirically funny (whether that is intended or not). You will not regret reading it of course for craftspersonly work like this is rare. However, it is very much the product of the over-institutionalised art of  modern USA.