I finished Susan Hill’s The Bird of Night on October 18, 2010.
They just announced the judges for the 2011 prize, and Susan Hill is one of them. Here’s a link to her bio. I realized that should probably have been linking to the Booker bios on all of the authors, so I’ve gone back and done so.
The Bird of Night is the story of the relationship between Egyptologist Harvey Lawson and poet Francis Croft. Francis is not just a poet but a brilliant poet, writing works that mark him as a genius and the foremost poet of his age. He also suffers bouts of crippling madness.
Harvey meets Francis at a weekend at a friend’s estate and in short order becomes his best friend/partner/guardian. Written retrospectively from Harvey’s point of view and framed by his intention to deny access to Francis’s papers to literary scholars, the novel covers three years of their twenty-year relationship, the years in which Francis writes the works that both establish and cement his literary reputation.
While a homoerotic relationship is hinted at in the text, with others giving the pair accusing looks, Harvey has no problem forthrightly declaring his love for Francis. The two men truly are partners, though the relationship is rendered as unsensationally as possible. Their bond is ultimately figured as chaste, with Harvey functioning primarily as caretaker and subordinating himself willingly to Francis’s talent and work. Yet such subordination does have its costs: Francis’s bouts of madness come suddenly and unpredictably, lasting for uncertain periods of time. Thus, even when Francis is happy and working well, neither he nor Harvey can be confident such periods of sanity will last. Hill makes the reader share in the anxiety both men suffer, giving us a window into a the fragility of sanity, and the toll that madness takes not only on the person it afflicts but on those close to them as well.
As Harvey keeps pace with Francis’s needs, traveling with him and setting up house in England, Italy and Germany in an effort to preserve his sanity, he finds himself feeling increasingly helpless. Hill locks you into a world that becomes ever more claustrophobic and fretful as the periods of Francis’s lucidity become shorter and shorter.
The story is ultimately is just as much Harvey’s as Francis’s. And Harvey’s insistence on keeping that story to himself, of not allowing the scholars access to it, going so far as to burn manuscripts and letters, becomes his final act of loyalty and allegiance to Francis, a way of both protecting Francis and treating as sacred what he regards as the best part of his own life. Harvey’s ability to control the story becomes, in a way, his reward. Hill renders his point of view in prose that, despite the situation it describes, is never overwrought.
Overall, I was impressed with the novel, but apparently, Hill herself was not. She remarked in 2006 that “it was a book I have never rated. I don't think it works, though there are a few good things in it. I don't believe in the characters or the story.”
So there.
Friday, January 28, 2011
Monday, January 24, 2011
1972 short list: Thomas Keneally, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Angus & Robertson
I finished Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith on November 14, 2010.
Based on a real incident in Australian history, this novel is a very moving account of racial injustice and its tragic consequences in the era of Australia’s federation and the Boer War in Africa. I thought it was a tremendous novel and probably would have awarded it the Booker over John Berger’s G. had I been one of the judges.
In 1900 as New South Wales is pursuing federation—about to become Australia—white settlers all over the country have taken control of the land and more or less restricted the aboriginal tribes to camps where alcoholism, poverty, and prostitution are rampant. Jimmie Blacksmith himself is the offspring of a black mother and one of the anonymous white men who secretly visit the black camps even as they decry black immorality.
Encouraged by an English minister who sees his “white” potential, Jimmie rejects his seemingly futile tribal heritage to pursue a “white” life, working for settlers until he has saved enough to buy his own land and marry a plump white wife. He works hard, as a fence builder and as a tracker for the police, but can make no real progress toward his ambitions due to the duplicity of the men for whom he works. He does manage to marry a white wife, but only because she is pregnant and desperate to wed anyone. After being short-changed on his wages time after time, and finally denied even food by his latest employer, Jimmie snaps, taking a bloody revenge on those who have wronged him. This action sends him back to a tribal life, as he flees into the country with his half-brother Mort, relying on native tracking and survival skills to elude the men on his trail for months before his ultimate capture.
This tabloid-ready drama unfolds in the context of both federation and the Boer War, as Australia seeks to define itself and literally become a nation. Federation will give Australia an identity distinct from England’s. The Boer War, in which Australian soldiers are fighting for England, becomes a subject of controversy throughout the novel, with characters pledging their commitment to England or arguing that the war is not Australia’s to fight. Those characters who oppose Australian participation even argue that the Boers are simply trying to do in South Africa what white Australians are trying to do: keep down the blacks and dispossess them of their land, though this ugly truth remains unspoken in the national dialogue.
While the settlers Jimmie works for, indeed, while all of the white characters in the novel are identified by their Irish, English, and Scots heritage, they nearly all act as “Australians” in this regard (with a couple of notable exceptions in the sympathetic schoolteacher MacCreaddie and the Reverend Neville). Thus Jimmie’s ultimate fate both represents and is contingent on larger political realities and necessities. The hangman, Mr. Hyberry, anticipating a CBE, hopes that Jimmie and Mort will not be taken alive so that he won’t have to hang them. The public execution of aborigines, no matter the enormity of their crime, would be bad public relations for the new nation.
Gender also plays a big role in this story. Black women become figures of forbidden desire for white men who fear miscegenation, while white women become figures of both desire and success. Further, tribal religion makes taboo any contact with women’s blood, represented here by both sex and violence. Women, white and black, bear the brunt of the novel’s complex racial politics and conflict—paying with their bodies through prostitution, pregnancies, beatings, and death.
Keneally paints a grim picture of Australia’s national origins in this novel. Jimmie, despite his brutal crimes, comes across as a folk hero on the order of Ned Kelly, who is invoked more than once here. We see Jimmie pushed to the breaking point and are not surprised when he snaps, perhaps even sharing in his lust for revenge despite our recognition of its horror.
I couldn’t put this one down—and can’t wait to teach it alongside Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang (which looks at the life and times of Ned Kelly, and the oppression he and his family faced) when I next teach a course on postcolonial or contemporary fiction.
And I can’t wait to read more Keneally.
Based on a real incident in Australian history, this novel is a very moving account of racial injustice and its tragic consequences in the era of Australia’s federation and the Boer War in Africa. I thought it was a tremendous novel and probably would have awarded it the Booker over John Berger’s G. had I been one of the judges.
In 1900 as New South Wales is pursuing federation—about to become Australia—white settlers all over the country have taken control of the land and more or less restricted the aboriginal tribes to camps where alcoholism, poverty, and prostitution are rampant. Jimmie Blacksmith himself is the offspring of a black mother and one of the anonymous white men who secretly visit the black camps even as they decry black immorality.
Encouraged by an English minister who sees his “white” potential, Jimmie rejects his seemingly futile tribal heritage to pursue a “white” life, working for settlers until he has saved enough to buy his own land and marry a plump white wife. He works hard, as a fence builder and as a tracker for the police, but can make no real progress toward his ambitions due to the duplicity of the men for whom he works. He does manage to marry a white wife, but only because she is pregnant and desperate to wed anyone. After being short-changed on his wages time after time, and finally denied even food by his latest employer, Jimmie snaps, taking a bloody revenge on those who have wronged him. This action sends him back to a tribal life, as he flees into the country with his half-brother Mort, relying on native tracking and survival skills to elude the men on his trail for months before his ultimate capture.
This tabloid-ready drama unfolds in the context of both federation and the Boer War, as Australia seeks to define itself and literally become a nation. Federation will give Australia an identity distinct from England’s. The Boer War, in which Australian soldiers are fighting for England, becomes a subject of controversy throughout the novel, with characters pledging their commitment to England or arguing that the war is not Australia’s to fight. Those characters who oppose Australian participation even argue that the Boers are simply trying to do in South Africa what white Australians are trying to do: keep down the blacks and dispossess them of their land, though this ugly truth remains unspoken in the national dialogue.
While the settlers Jimmie works for, indeed, while all of the white characters in the novel are identified by their Irish, English, and Scots heritage, they nearly all act as “Australians” in this regard (with a couple of notable exceptions in the sympathetic schoolteacher MacCreaddie and the Reverend Neville). Thus Jimmie’s ultimate fate both represents and is contingent on larger political realities and necessities. The hangman, Mr. Hyberry, anticipating a CBE, hopes that Jimmie and Mort will not be taken alive so that he won’t have to hang them. The public execution of aborigines, no matter the enormity of their crime, would be bad public relations for the new nation.
Gender also plays a big role in this story. Black women become figures of forbidden desire for white men who fear miscegenation, while white women become figures of both desire and success. Further, tribal religion makes taboo any contact with women’s blood, represented here by both sex and violence. Women, white and black, bear the brunt of the novel’s complex racial politics and conflict—paying with their bodies through prostitution, pregnancies, beatings, and death.
Keneally paints a grim picture of Australia’s national origins in this novel. Jimmie, despite his brutal crimes, comes across as a folk hero on the order of Ned Kelly, who is invoked more than once here. We see Jimmie pushed to the breaking point and are not surprised when he snaps, perhaps even sharing in his lust for revenge despite our recognition of its horror.
I couldn’t put this one down—and can’t wait to teach it alongside Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang (which looks at the life and times of Ned Kelly, and the oppression he and his family faced) when I next teach a course on postcolonial or contemporary fiction.
And I can’t wait to read more Keneally.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
1972 short list: David Storey, Pasmore, Longman
I finished David Storey’s Pasmore on November 11, 2010.
The story in a nutshell: Boy Behaving Badly on Sabbatical.
Dissatisfied and frustrated for reasons he can’t quite pinpoint, Colin Pasmore, a history lecturer at University College in London, has a year off to do research, and instead, uses that time to destroy his life. He appears to be going through a mid-life crisis--signaled by a recurring dream of being overtaken in a race--at thirty. He puts himself, his wife, three young children, parents, and sisters through the wringer by having an affair with an emotionally unavailable older woman and moving out.
The book tracks the emotional toll that Pasmore’s actions take on himself and on all those around him. His wife, Kay, and children are at first made miserable by his absence and later by his presence, with his wife eventually beginning a short-term relationship with an acquaintance. His father, a miner, feels badly repaid for the struggle he went through to insure a future for his son away from the mines. Pasmore himself never seems to solve the question of what he wants, ultimately sinking into depression once his lover calls it quits and becoming mildly unhinged before his wife finally takes him back.
Pasmore's discontent seems to have its roots in some combination of male and class anxiety. While he has succeeded, according to the terms of his parents’—specifically his father’s--wishes for him, escaping the working-class life his parents still live, he somehow feels short-changed. While male colleagues and neighbors seem to understand and sympathize with his disaffection to a certain extent, his father finds his actions reprehensible. When Pasmore goes to his parents’ home to apologize after having reunited with Kay, his father calls him out: “Don’t worry, I know why you came back here,” his father said. “The same reason you went back to Kay. She’s a fool to have you. She’s sillier than I ever thought. If she only knew she’s making it easier for you to go the next time” (191).
Though the drama here is real and the emotions necessarily overwrought, the prose is very plain and straightforward. Pasmore is clearly falling apart, but we’re given few explanations or analyses of his behavior. There’s almost a refusal to go behind the actions that take place. No one comes to any sort of realization; we sense no epiphany or growth, and Pasmore’s father’s assessment rings true. Things end up looking very much as they did at the outset, but the threat of more upheaval remains.
Storey provides no easy answers for any of the problems that the text describes—those of class expectations and mobility, of manhood and its responsibilities and desires. His portrayal of Pasmore makes him far from sympathetic. We can see the impulsive logic of his actions, even as we can see that his discontent has no easy solution. And while I grew as weary of Pasmore’s egocentrism as I did of the Jake Hersh’s in Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman, I felt less at odds with Storey’s bleak vision.
I was probably most concerned at the way Pasmore wasted a perfectly good sabbatical. Now that’s a real crime.
The story in a nutshell: Boy Behaving Badly on Sabbatical.
Dissatisfied and frustrated for reasons he can’t quite pinpoint, Colin Pasmore, a history lecturer at University College in London, has a year off to do research, and instead, uses that time to destroy his life. He appears to be going through a mid-life crisis--signaled by a recurring dream of being overtaken in a race--at thirty. He puts himself, his wife, three young children, parents, and sisters through the wringer by having an affair with an emotionally unavailable older woman and moving out.
The book tracks the emotional toll that Pasmore’s actions take on himself and on all those around him. His wife, Kay, and children are at first made miserable by his absence and later by his presence, with his wife eventually beginning a short-term relationship with an acquaintance. His father, a miner, feels badly repaid for the struggle he went through to insure a future for his son away from the mines. Pasmore himself never seems to solve the question of what he wants, ultimately sinking into depression once his lover calls it quits and becoming mildly unhinged before his wife finally takes him back.
Pasmore's discontent seems to have its roots in some combination of male and class anxiety. While he has succeeded, according to the terms of his parents’—specifically his father’s--wishes for him, escaping the working-class life his parents still live, he somehow feels short-changed. While male colleagues and neighbors seem to understand and sympathize with his disaffection to a certain extent, his father finds his actions reprehensible. When Pasmore goes to his parents’ home to apologize after having reunited with Kay, his father calls him out: “Don’t worry, I know why you came back here,” his father said. “The same reason you went back to Kay. She’s a fool to have you. She’s sillier than I ever thought. If she only knew she’s making it easier for you to go the next time” (191).
Though the drama here is real and the emotions necessarily overwrought, the prose is very plain and straightforward. Pasmore is clearly falling apart, but we’re given few explanations or analyses of his behavior. There’s almost a refusal to go behind the actions that take place. No one comes to any sort of realization; we sense no epiphany or growth, and Pasmore’s father’s assessment rings true. Things end up looking very much as they did at the outset, but the threat of more upheaval remains.
Storey provides no easy answers for any of the problems that the text describes—those of class expectations and mobility, of manhood and its responsibilities and desires. His portrayal of Pasmore makes him far from sympathetic. We can see the impulsive logic of his actions, even as we can see that his discontent has no easy solution. And while I grew as weary of Pasmore’s egocentrism as I did of the Jake Hersh’s in Mordecai Richler’s St. Urbain’s Horseman, I felt less at odds with Storey’s bleak vision.
I was probably most concerned at the way Pasmore wasted a perfectly good sabbatical. Now that’s a real crime.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
1971
I'm back. First, let me apologize for the delay: holidays, post-holidays, snow, flu, etc.
I have actually been reading and writing, but I just didn't feel like doing the 1971 wrap-up. Because I'm a little obsessive-compulsive about this sort of thing, I didn't want to post anything else I'd written until I got that out.
Well, here it is, finally. And now that I've hit publish, you can expect a pretty regular stream of posts from me in the near future.
I hesitate to say that this sort of thing won't happen again, knowing myself as I do, but I'll see if I can keep the long interruptions in posting to a minimum.
Anyway, here's my take on 1971, the year that both the first pocket calculator and Kevlar came on the market, that Idi Amin took over Uganda, Secretary of Education Margaret Thatcher ended free milk for school children over 7 in the UK, NPR began broadcasting, Charles Manson went on trial, Rod Stewart recorded "Maggie Mae," Mount Etna erupted in Italy, the voting age in the US was lowered to 18, the UK and Ireland switched to decimal currency, tsunamis killed thousands in India and Japan, prisoners rioted at Attica, women were granted the right to vote in Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand pulled their troops from Vietnam, and Disney World opened in Orlando, Florida. (Click the link above for more notable 1971 events.)
Oh, what a year it was!
**********
Short List:
Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont Hotel—a quiet story about the sober realities of aging as the widowed Mrs. Palfrey moves to the Claremont to maintain a respectable and affordable independence.
Doris Lessing, Briefing for a Descent into Hell—a harrowing journey into an amnesiac’s science fiction-y mental landscape as two psychiatrists with competing treatment philosophies try to restore the man’s memory and sanity.
Derek Robinson, The Goshawk Squadron--a very involving story about an English squadron and the brutal training its men must undergo and assimilate in order to fly missions near the front in WWI France.
Mordecai Richler, St. Urbain’s Horseman—a sprawling, realistic novel about the life and times of Jake Hersh, a Canadian Jew, who moves from Montreal to London to pursue his career as a tv and film director.
Thomas Kilroy, The Big Chapel—an historical novel based on a real political and religious dispute between a parish priest and his dioceses over control of the national school in a nineteenth-century Irish market town.
Winner: V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State—a “novel” composed of five separate pieces, all of which explore the misunderstandings, uncertainties, and anxieties that mark postcolonial existence for a series of expatriots and travelers.
Judges:
John Gross (Chair)
Saul Bellow
John Fowles
Lady Antonia Fraser
Philip Toynbee
I think the judges got it right in 1971. I, too, would have voted for Naipaul’s book.
I thought the entries this year were decent, but Naipaul’s book seemed in a class by itself, distinguished by its ambition as much as the issues it dealt with and the stories it told through its purposefully separated components. With the protagonists of its five pieces struggling with postcolonial existence from a variety of positions (natives of India and the West Indies now living in Washington DC and London respectively, members of the British post-colonial administration on their way to their compound in a now independent African state, a traveler observing the interactions of tourists on a ship bound for Egypt and of tourists and natives once there), the book suggests that the accounts of colonial rule and national independence are not simple before-and-after stories with clear-cut villains and heroes or unified political realities. The book is moving—in all of its parts—and provocative in its refusal to add up. And while its style also shifts with the individual stories it tells, none of the stories are particularly hard to read or to follow—even “Tell Me Who to Kill,” which is written in a more or less present tense West Indian dialect with repeated interruptions, flashbacks, and some weird dreamlike sequences.
While initially I might have argued that this disparate and very tonally different group of short-listed novels had little in common, on further reflection I realized that the idea of dislocation, most obvious in Naipaul’s book, is, perhaps, an idea that resonates in all of them. While the idea can be readily identified in several of the books’ settings, where protagonists are immigrants or newcomers, it also applies to the ways in which their pasts fail to square with or prepare them for the presents they inhabit.
History, personal or political, provides no ideals or certainties to embrace: Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey has given up her home and her idea of it, resigning herself to a new diminished existence in a hotel where she’ll reside until death. Richler’s Jake Hersh never feels at home in "swinging" London despite his long residence there, clinging to his identity as a North American exile and his vision of his conman cousin as a Jewish Avenger tracking Josef Mengele in South America. Charles Watkins, the amnesiac protagonist of Lessing’s novel, apparently checks out of his present life as a classics professor, opting for the "truer" if more fantastical reality of a mental landscape somehow borne of his past experiences in WWI. The men of Robinson’s Goshawk Squadron, while proud to fight for Britain and all it stands for, must jettison these very ideals to both carry out and survive their missions, existing in an eternal present of debauchery, boredom, flight, and death. Father Lannigan and other characters in Kilroy’s The Big Chapel literally find their way of life threatened and ultimately destroyed as the Catholic Church orients itself away from Irish folkways toward Rome’s more hierarchical domination, seeking to impose its will on the community. Characters in all of the novels find themselves floundering in or forced to accept a present for which they hadn’t bargained.
Their dilemmas, by and large, made for some good reading. With the exception of Lessing’s novel, which laid on the fantastical landscape for 150 pages—about 120 pages too many in my estimation—and which, as a result, I truly and sincerely hated, I enjoyed the 1971 short list. I wasn’t crazy about the Richler, mainly because I wasn’t all that sympathetic to Jake’s dilemma or point of view. I liked Kilroy’s novel for both the history it conveyed and the ways in which it revealed the complications in the positions behind the controversy, though I did think it fell apart at the end. Both Goshawk and Mrs. Palfrey were compelling in their own very different ways and made for quick reading. I probably even enjoyed reading both of them more than I enjoyed In a Free State.
Yet, I’ll probably read neither of these novels again. And it’s likely that I will return to Naipaul’s book, which has history, philosophy, questions of isolation and community, larger political and personal issues as well as some formal experimentation. It tried for more and kept me interested in the characters’ fates. The long piece that gives the novel its title—and seems in its own way to be a revision of or response to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—was particularly memorable. Again, I’m not surprised Naipaul won. As John Gross, the chair of the 1971 committee remarks, “A faint aroma of the Nobel prize - or of Nobel prizes yet to come - hangs over the 1971 Booker” with its selection of Naipaul as winner (and the presence of Saul Bellow as a judge).
Oh, and apparently Saul Bellow was 1971’s diva judge. Check out the rest of Gross’s comments on his experience that year in the Guardian’s feature on Booker judge reminiscences, “Tears, Tiffs, and Triumphs: 40 Years of Booker Judges Dish the Dirt”:
In the event, one of the things I remember most clearly about Bellow is that he insisted on being put up at the Ritz (which must have burned a big hole in the budget), and then complained because he hadn't been given a room overlooking Green Park.
Another recollection is his response when I advanced the claims of Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, which apart from the Naipaul was the book on the shortlist I most favoured. "Oh," he said, "that's one of those little tinkling teacup things that the British always do well." He was quite wrong - Mrs Palfrey is a work of deep feeling - but his dismissiveness effectively put paid to its chances.
And now, since I believe it’s always good to get another point of view, let me send you over to Dooney’s Café to see what Jean Baird, whose Booker blog originally lead me to the Guardian feature, has to say about this year’s list. I am happy to note that she’s with me on Lessing, though we disagree about the winner.
I have actually been reading and writing, but I just didn't feel like doing the 1971 wrap-up. Because I'm a little obsessive-compulsive about this sort of thing, I didn't want to post anything else I'd written until I got that out.
Well, here it is, finally. And now that I've hit publish, you can expect a pretty regular stream of posts from me in the near future.
I hesitate to say that this sort of thing won't happen again, knowing myself as I do, but I'll see if I can keep the long interruptions in posting to a minimum.
Anyway, here's my take on 1971, the year that both the first pocket calculator and Kevlar came on the market, that Idi Amin took over Uganda, Secretary of Education Margaret Thatcher ended free milk for school children over 7 in the UK, NPR began broadcasting, Charles Manson went on trial, Rod Stewart recorded "Maggie Mae," Mount Etna erupted in Italy, the voting age in the US was lowered to 18, the UK and Ireland switched to decimal currency, tsunamis killed thousands in India and Japan, prisoners rioted at Attica, women were granted the right to vote in Switzerland, Australia and New Zealand pulled their troops from Vietnam, and Disney World opened in Orlando, Florida. (Click the link above for more notable 1971 events.)
Oh, what a year it was!
**********
Short List:
Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont Hotel—a quiet story about the sober realities of aging as the widowed Mrs. Palfrey moves to the Claremont to maintain a respectable and affordable independence.
Doris Lessing, Briefing for a Descent into Hell—a harrowing journey into an amnesiac’s science fiction-y mental landscape as two psychiatrists with competing treatment philosophies try to restore the man’s memory and sanity.
Derek Robinson, The Goshawk Squadron--a very involving story about an English squadron and the brutal training its men must undergo and assimilate in order to fly missions near the front in WWI France.
Mordecai Richler, St. Urbain’s Horseman—a sprawling, realistic novel about the life and times of Jake Hersh, a Canadian Jew, who moves from Montreal to London to pursue his career as a tv and film director.
Thomas Kilroy, The Big Chapel—an historical novel based on a real political and religious dispute between a parish priest and his dioceses over control of the national school in a nineteenth-century Irish market town.
Winner: V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State—a “novel” composed of five separate pieces, all of which explore the misunderstandings, uncertainties, and anxieties that mark postcolonial existence for a series of expatriots and travelers.
Judges:
John Gross (Chair)
Saul Bellow
John Fowles
Lady Antonia Fraser
Philip Toynbee
I think the judges got it right in 1971. I, too, would have voted for Naipaul’s book.
I thought the entries this year were decent, but Naipaul’s book seemed in a class by itself, distinguished by its ambition as much as the issues it dealt with and the stories it told through its purposefully separated components. With the protagonists of its five pieces struggling with postcolonial existence from a variety of positions (natives of India and the West Indies now living in Washington DC and London respectively, members of the British post-colonial administration on their way to their compound in a now independent African state, a traveler observing the interactions of tourists on a ship bound for Egypt and of tourists and natives once there), the book suggests that the accounts of colonial rule and national independence are not simple before-and-after stories with clear-cut villains and heroes or unified political realities. The book is moving—in all of its parts—and provocative in its refusal to add up. And while its style also shifts with the individual stories it tells, none of the stories are particularly hard to read or to follow—even “Tell Me Who to Kill,” which is written in a more or less present tense West Indian dialect with repeated interruptions, flashbacks, and some weird dreamlike sequences.
While initially I might have argued that this disparate and very tonally different group of short-listed novels had little in common, on further reflection I realized that the idea of dislocation, most obvious in Naipaul’s book, is, perhaps, an idea that resonates in all of them. While the idea can be readily identified in several of the books’ settings, where protagonists are immigrants or newcomers, it also applies to the ways in which their pasts fail to square with or prepare them for the presents they inhabit.
History, personal or political, provides no ideals or certainties to embrace: Taylor’s Mrs. Palfrey has given up her home and her idea of it, resigning herself to a new diminished existence in a hotel where she’ll reside until death. Richler’s Jake Hersh never feels at home in "swinging" London despite his long residence there, clinging to his identity as a North American exile and his vision of his conman cousin as a Jewish Avenger tracking Josef Mengele in South America. Charles Watkins, the amnesiac protagonist of Lessing’s novel, apparently checks out of his present life as a classics professor, opting for the "truer" if more fantastical reality of a mental landscape somehow borne of his past experiences in WWI. The men of Robinson’s Goshawk Squadron, while proud to fight for Britain and all it stands for, must jettison these very ideals to both carry out and survive their missions, existing in an eternal present of debauchery, boredom, flight, and death. Father Lannigan and other characters in Kilroy’s The Big Chapel literally find their way of life threatened and ultimately destroyed as the Catholic Church orients itself away from Irish folkways toward Rome’s more hierarchical domination, seeking to impose its will on the community. Characters in all of the novels find themselves floundering in or forced to accept a present for which they hadn’t bargained.
Their dilemmas, by and large, made for some good reading. With the exception of Lessing’s novel, which laid on the fantastical landscape for 150 pages—about 120 pages too many in my estimation—and which, as a result, I truly and sincerely hated, I enjoyed the 1971 short list. I wasn’t crazy about the Richler, mainly because I wasn’t all that sympathetic to Jake’s dilemma or point of view. I liked Kilroy’s novel for both the history it conveyed and the ways in which it revealed the complications in the positions behind the controversy, though I did think it fell apart at the end. Both Goshawk and Mrs. Palfrey were compelling in their own very different ways and made for quick reading. I probably even enjoyed reading both of them more than I enjoyed In a Free State.
Yet, I’ll probably read neither of these novels again. And it’s likely that I will return to Naipaul’s book, which has history, philosophy, questions of isolation and community, larger political and personal issues as well as some formal experimentation. It tried for more and kept me interested in the characters’ fates. The long piece that gives the novel its title—and seems in its own way to be a revision of or response to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—was particularly memorable. Again, I’m not surprised Naipaul won. As John Gross, the chair of the 1971 committee remarks, “A faint aroma of the Nobel prize - or of Nobel prizes yet to come - hangs over the 1971 Booker” with its selection of Naipaul as winner (and the presence of Saul Bellow as a judge).
Oh, and apparently Saul Bellow was 1971’s diva judge. Check out the rest of Gross’s comments on his experience that year in the Guardian’s feature on Booker judge reminiscences, “Tears, Tiffs, and Triumphs: 40 Years of Booker Judges Dish the Dirt”:
Another recollection is his response when I advanced the claims of Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, which apart from the Naipaul was the book on the shortlist I most favoured. "Oh," he said, "that's one of those little tinkling teacup things that the British always do well." He was quite wrong - Mrs Palfrey is a work of deep feeling - but his dismissiveness effectively put paid to its chances.
And now, since I believe it’s always good to get another point of view, let me send you over to Dooney’s Café to see what Jean Baird, whose Booker blog originally lead me to the Guardian feature, has to say about this year’s list. I am happy to note that she’s with me on Lessing, though we disagree about the winner.
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