On the Man Booker Prize longlist 2013

There is a tweet going viral today. It reads:
Breaking: @ManBookerPrize has gone into labour and is expected to deliver the 2013 longlist at midday (UK) today. #manbookerprize

Yes, that’s right. Enough with this painfully bad Royal Baby journalism. It is time to get excited about books. Well, fiction anyway. It is that day when people get excited about books they have and haven’t read, we all pretend to know what we’re talking about, and go to bed a little poorer having bought all those books we weren’t sure about until they appeared on the list. It’s an enigma, this Booker list. On the one hand, I love all the excitement and discussion about books. It is a rare and wonderful thing to see people sharing my obsession and I enjoy it as much as possible. But on the other, it is really rather arbitrary and I’m not sure I believe in prizes really. Literature shouldn’t be about competition. The importance of a book is the effect it has on the reader. I really don’t think I believe there is such thing as objective quantifying of literature.

And so ,with a slightly bad taste in my mouth only slightly souring the general enthusiasm I’m feeling, I give you my utterly pointless rundown of the leading contenders for this years Booker Prize.

There don’t appear to be any huge names in contention this year. JM Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus has received mixed praise at best, while few of the other prominent novelists have published this year. That makes this list potentially even more interesting. Which of the great and often overlooked writers out there will take a step forward?

Of those I’ve read, Mohsin Hamid’s How To Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing, stand out as titles that deserve the most acclaim. Mohsin Hamid plays with form in this wonderful take-up of the self-help genre. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia tracks the life of a single character as he progresses from rural poverty at birth to wealth and power in modern-day Pakistan. Hamid has described it as a 19th Century generational epic made small for a modern technological age and this, combined with his tight economical prose should make him a favourite with the judges.

Evie Wyld, on the other hand, is a novelist whose brilliance is all in her prose. All the Birds, Singing is probably the most arrestingly written, stunningly composed novel I’ve read this year. She writes violence and danger and fear and inability to communicate like few others. Here is the first sentence:
‘Another sheep, mangled and bled out, her innards not yet crusting and the vapours rising from her like a steamed pudding.’
Evie is a huge writer in the making and this should be her time. She deserves it.

Of the other books I’ve read, I’m not sure Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden is quite good enough. I read it in Pakistan earlier this year and it didn’t set my world on fire. The novel is heartfelt and emotionally resonant. It creates a picture of Pakistan (as the Blind Man’s Garden of the title) and tells a story of post-9/11 divisions, Islam, and the War on Terror. At its best there are brilliant passages. But it felt a little drawn out and ultimately didn’t introduce me to anything major that I didn’t already know.

I’m not entirely sure whether Katie Kiramura qualifies or not, but her second novel, Gone to the Forest is a sharp, slashing, and perfectly balanced novel that explores the death throes of colonialism in a nameless nation. At its heart is a volcanic eruption that covers the land in ash and brings tensions to a head. Sending animals wild and driving people to recklessness. It’s a powerful metaphor, the earth purging itself of colonial rule. The cataclysm that births a new age. Identities are questioned, relationships strained. If writers made swords, Kitamura would be the sort fabled in a Tarantino film. You will not find sharper, finer minimalist prose anywhere.

I haven’t read Patrick Flanery’s Fallen Land yet but I loved Absolution and have heard only good things about his second novel. Absolution effected me like few books do. There was something of Damon Galgut there, in the way he created space for the readers’ imagination to run away with itself and manufacture its own tension.

And now onto all those thousands that I haven’t read so shouldn’t comment on. But I will, nonetheless. I’d love to see something as experimental as Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half Formed Thing (Galley Beggar Press) on the list but it all depends upon the tastes of the judges. It would also be great if the brilliant work of smaller publishers continued to be celebrated this year. Others seem sure Jim Crace’s Harvest will be amongst the favourites, while Tash Aw, Aminatta Forna, James Robertson, Taiye Selassi, and Ivan Vladislavic all appear to have a reasonable chance of being included. Basically, it is all guesswork. But fun guesswork. And my dream is to one day be on the judging panel. Until then, I’ll just have to pretend!

Book Review: Gone to the Forest by Katie Kitamura

‘The country was in turmoil. And there was besides: sickness and growing and dying. How could they do anything but give in, to what was obvious, rather than what was good? In the face of that accumulation.’

Katie Kitamura’s debut novel, The Longshot, was one of the unexpected delights that come along only too rarely. The story of the final fight by a not-quite brilliant Mixed Martial Arts fighter, it managed to recreate the computer game feeling of having an opponent reach into my chest, pluck my heart out, and holding it aloft, gently squeezing it, from first sentence to final image. It revealed Kitamura as a brilliant writer in her own right; and an air to the minimalist legacy of Hemingway, McCarthy and Coertzee.

Gone to the Forest (The Clerkenwell Press, 2013) confirms such comparisons as entirely appropriate. With sharp, slashing prose and perfectly balanced storytelling, Kitamura explores the death throes of colonialism in a nameless nation.

Tom and his father live on a large rural farm. Ever since he came to the country, the old man has bent everything to him. His unremitting desire, big personality, and ruthless control ensure the farm has been successful, all those around him reliant on him for their safe orbit. But now disruption and native rebellion in the country threatens all he has built, and ill health begins to catch up with him. Tom, cowering in his father’s shadow, has eyes only for the land. It is all he has known. Other farmers circle, danger looms. And when a woman named Carine arrives, the future – whatever it holds – begins to bear down upon them.

In a chapter of pounding intensity, Kitamura brings these man-made tensions together in the midst of a massive volcanic eruption. Fire and brimstone filling the sky. Blocking out the sun. Then covering the land in ash that falls relentlessly. Sending animals wild and driving people to recklessness. It’s a powerful metaphor, the earth purging itself of colonial rule. The cataclysm that births a new age. Identities are questioned, relationships strained.

There’s much Coetzee here, a sort of mix of the wild frontiers of Waiting for the Barbarians and the search for peace away from troubled times of Life and Times ofMichael K. What is particularly clever is the way that Kitamura subtly questions notions of affinity with a landscape. Where much literature associates native peoples with affinity for the land, here it the character of Tom – slow, passive, uncertain; Michael K with privilege – who longs for nothing other than to escape people and live in peace with the landscape. But he is less resourceful than Michael K. Where Coetzee’s character bends a spoon to a natural well and drinks a thimble full at a time – ‘in that way, one can live’ – one does not have the feeling Tom would survive long. And his father’s health is rapidly failing.

On the other hand, the natives here ‘do not believe in property until it is theirs’, at which point they subject it entirely to their will. Cut it up into little pieces. This is the story of the colonialists, but that is not to say that this is a pro-colonial book. It is not pro-anything. Merely presents a series of characters in a fresh light, and the tragedies of upheaval.

Gone to the Forest is a tense, expertly controlled novel. One to read in one sitting. It is short, and the prose races along at a pace not even change can keep up with. Katie Kitamura is one of the most exciting voices in contemporary writing, and this is a marvellous addition to the already heaving realms of colonial/post colonial literature. If writers made swords, Kitamura would be the sort fabled in a Tarantino film. You will not find sharper, finer minimalist prose anywhere.