dovegreyreader scribbles

More Booker cogitations...

" I certainly wish I hadn't taken on the Booker judging this year. I thought it would be a nice sedentary occupation, and after all I have done it before, but I've definitely gone downhill since then and I think the books have got longer - I've only done 35 so far ( I keep counting them) so 100 more to come, and already there's hardly any floor space in my little room. Also I drop off to sleep almost immediately when I start to read them - it's becoming an automatic reaction.'

I wonder if any of this year's judges have suffered as Penelope Fitzgerald did back in 1998?  Nigella Lawson was also a judge and 'looked stunning' and here Penelope's thoughts on the chairman..

'...Douglas Hurd... a marvellous hand at managing a commitee, but he admitted that his idea of a novel was a good read with a strong ending....As usual I didn't agree with anyone.'

And then what do the judges do with all the books...

'All the books (115 I think) are standing in piles on the floor of my small sitting room. Now I'm wondering who I can get to take them away.'

Or perhaps there's been a repeat of this, Penelope Fitzgerald's experience in 1991

'I've been one of the Booker judges this year and as always there have been alarming differences of opinion, and even one walk-out. the first in its history I believe.'

'I realised the dreaded Booker dinner was on that evening I hoped I might not be needed there, but now I see that because there's been so much trouble about the judging and I feel I'm more in trouble than anyone in some ways... I shall have to go.'

Those were the days, bit of a bun-fight, bit of genuine rather than some manufactured controversy, now we usually hear that the judges all got on famously and were unanimous in their decision, but Booker 2010 is here and we must pronounce.


It's been a sadly lack-lustre Booker year chez dovegrey after that initial excitement over a big pile of books waiting to be read.
So many books I have picked up and failed with, so many books that others have picked up and adored that have done nothing for me, with apologies to David Mitchell and Emma Donoghue, Christos Tsiolkas et al, I gave you a good innings but I'm sorry I just didn't get what you were trying to tell me.
The Man Booker debate forum, always a site for some great and forthright discussion about the books, and one with a loyal following, mysteriously collapsed and imploded on itself with the finishing line approaching and in the face of bizarre technical difficulties which everyone seemed to think a twelve year old could sort, but sadly no twelve year old available at Booker HQ.
Perhaps they just didn't want our predictions... something odd going on there surely, and if nothing else a really ungrateful way of saying thank you to all those who had partaken of the debate with such diligence and contributed so much and so freely to the Man Booker website.
A PR disaster if ever there was one...er... best not mention 'that' again.
Then there's been the hoo-hah about the suspended betting after one book attracted massive and suspicious attention, a real dilemma if that book happens to be the winner.
So the excitement, last year maintained right to the wire and intensely gripping, has fizzled like a damp squib for me this year with just one book radiating something special.
Before I arrived at the Everyone's A Critic evening discussion in London, more of which ever so soon, I had a Very Important Tea engagement to attend, and what pure pleasure it was to meet up with Linda Grant and Andrea Levy in a select little establishment in the depths of Crouch End for a good chinwag about books, the Booker and plenty more besides.
This all involved following very careful instructions involving both tube and bus across London which is always a bit of a culture shock for me the minute I step off the train from Devon, where we see one bus a week and the bus stop is three miles away. But have Oyster card will travel and it's only a matter of minutes before I'm up to speed and travelling in the right direction, doing all the right things, looking casual, reading my book on the train, not looking lost, coping with the fact that the tube exit Linda has told me to take was closed due to flooding and I had to find another one, and then find the bus stop furthest away from the exit I hadn't just walked out of but should have, and then get on the bus going in the right direction for about ten minutes and get off at Waitrose...or was it Budgens, and cross over and, oh all manner of unusual things for a country yokel.
But rising above all the Booker damp-squibiness, the very lovely Andrea Levy, and I'm not just saying this because we've met, she is warm, genuine and self-effacing and I am more than thrilled and delighted to have met her and to know that Andrea's book The Long Song is on the shortlist because it belongs there and would be a worthy winner. Good reviews around the blogosphere, hither and thither and for me, it is far and away the best of the Booker books that I have read, or tried to read, this year, though I think when I finally get my hands on a copy of Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question it might come close. I loved Kalooki Nights, I 'get' Jacobson's style of writing and his humour and think I will enjoy this one too.
But it was a real privilege to talk to Andrea about her golden book and hear about her and Linda's writing lives generally. I meet quite a few writers these days, mostly women it's true, but the ones I meet are wonderful, genuine unassuming people who love what they do, sweat blood over it sometimes but take their work very seriously. I'm sure the men do too but I just don't seem to meet many of them, and don't miss Amanda Craig's blog this week, she makes some very perceptive observations about author's behaving badly and it doesn't seem to be the women who have the hissy fits these days.
Having read Linda Grant's forthcoming novel We Had it So Good due for publication in January, I know you will all have a great read to look forward to in the New Year too, so I had a lovely afternoon, the chat and the cake was perfect.
Much good fortune to Andrea and The Long Song and the team at Headline this evening but meanwhile spare a thought for Penelope Fitzgerald the night she won the Booker Prize in 1979 for Offshore...all these extracts taken from the endlessly entertaining So I Have Thought of You - The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald,

'I couldn't help enjoying the dinner, though the Evening Standard man told me frankly they'd all written their pieces about Naipaul and felt they were free to get drunk, wh: he certainly was; I did notice the Spectator man, but thought he was perhaps dead...
When I got to the Book Programme, soaking wet because I'd had to be photographed on a bale of rope on the Embankment, R. Robinson was in a very bad temper and complained to his programme executive 'who are these people, you promised me they were going to be the losers'...
I'm afraid Booker McC rather wish they'd decided to patronise show-jumping, or snooker - the novelists are so difficult and odd, not appreciating their surprise announcements and little treats....'

I feel sure Andrea Levy will be looking fabulous and enjoying every moment.

 

Booker cogitations...

I've been reading John McGahern not only because I love his writing but because I have carried on casting an eye over all things Irish since finishing Ulysses.
I still feel inordinately proud of that year of reading and I hope anyone who read along does too, especially looking back on the moments when it seemed impossible, and then those other moments when the scales dropped from the eyes and the bigger picture became apparent. Everyone who was anyone has a comment to make about James Joyce and I'm also finding Joycean techniques and allusions in plenty of other books I'm reading as a result. It's as if a door that felt firmly closed has been opened to reveal a previously invisible literary landscape and I'm very excited about Team Tolstoy which starts here tomorrow.

Love of the World, a collection of John McGahern's essays, has become a right-hand book, a port in a storm when I want soothing, intelligent words about books, reading, life et al, so I have read with great interest his essay entitled Why the Booker Is Such a Hard Bet and had many of my own dilemmas over it this year answered... or at least concerns assuaged.  I have felt convinced for the last three years that the prize may be sacrificing the inclusion of some exceptional writing on the altar of publicity and popularity.
But what do I know and how hard must this be?
The judges dilemma when faced with having to pick a few books out of more than a hundred and as John McGahern explains

'Every serious reader has at least one book they resisted fiercely at first, a resistance that may have lasted for years to a work that has become an important part of their life. A decision has to be made on all these books over a few. brief moments.'

I have resisted several of this year's Booker long-listers 'fiercely' knowing full well I may come to an understanding of them eventually, had I been a judge this year (heaven forfend) I may well have lay down and refused to move before agreeing to the inclusion of a couple, but I suspect a great deal of give-and take bargaining goes on...
...let this diamond of mine in and I'll let you have that turkey, because this is all about personal reading taste in the end surely?
Writing of his experience as a judge John McGahern sheds light on the process, and those early feelings of dismay and inadequacy, initially subsumed by the first and easier stages of the judging, which quickly resurfaced as the task became increasingly difficult.

'Books without any support were eliminated, while those with the support of one judge were retained. From here on in the real difficulty began. No two judges had the same taste and at this stage all the rejected books had been admired and liked by someone...change a committee and you'll change most of the books on the shortlist and. almost certainly, the eventual winner.'

Take pity on the plight of the shortlisted author too, that posh dinner doesn't sound much like the picnic we think, John McGahern proceeds to describe his own experience as a shortlisted author for Amongst Women

'...all of it was interesting, some of it pleasurable, but, overall far from enjoyable. It's as if one's life was in abeyance as the days ground down to Booker night.'

Hilary Mantel said as much last year, likening it to that interminable wait for exam results.
John McGahern concedes graciously,

'...I learned that it has nothing to do with writing or reading or reflection : everything about it has to do with publishing. The publishers had believed in the book from the beginning, had worked well and hard to get it noticed and now it was getting widespread attention...it was their night and I was glad to have played my part.'

and he draws this salutary conclusion

'Without the book business it would be difficult or impossible for true books to find their true readers and without that solitary (and potentially subversive) figure alone with a book the whole razzmattaz of prize, banquets, television, spectaculars, bestseller lists, even literature courses, editors and authors, are all worthless. Unless a book finds lovers among these solitary readers, it will not live ... or live for long.'

Hooray for us readers I say.

Trespass ~ Rose Tremain

Hot on the heels of my successful Booker long list reading entre this year with Andrea Levy's The Long Song, comes another success with Trespass by Rose Tremain.
Heave a big **sigh** of relief.
After a string of failures I was beginning to think I'd just have to bail out from the Bookerthon and declare this a gap year, but I do think this year's list might be suffering from my recollections of last year's stellar selection, coupled with my ongoing Big Sulk this year at the omission of Even the Dogs by Jon McGregor,  and so it was never going to match up.
But for all Francophiles out there Trespass is the book for you.
Successful garden designer and writer Veronica Verey and her less successful artist partner Kitty Meadows are settled in the Cevennes, an area of southern central France that looks remarkably like Dartmoor with added trees, which is of course how Dartmoor used to look.
There presence here somehow seems fragile, their relationship unbalanced,

'They both knew that it was borrowed: the view of the hills; even the sunsets and the clarity of the stars. Somewhere, they knew it didn't belong to them. Because if you left your own country, if you left it late, and made your home in someone else's country, there was always a feeling that you were breaking an invisible law, always the irrational fear that, one day, some 'rightful owner' would arrive to take it all away...'

A challenging environment not only for gardeners but for  the local population too faced with the temptation of moneyed Brits coming in and buying up their farmhouses to turn into second holiday homes.
This is the colour of money that has a £16,000 table in the downstairs lavatory

' ...decorated in apricot toile de jouy ...the brass-galleried top over a flower-painted frieze, the base with two snakewood inlaid doors and parcel gilt festoon apron.'

Unlike our £3 one... cheap B&Q kit affair bought in the Animal Sanctuary shop, poorly stained, draped in a piece of Liberty fabric (Ianthe) to give an air of exclusivity, laden with appropriate reading matter.
Cue Veronica's brother, internationally famous antique dealer Anthony...THE Anthony Verey who, with the sudden realisation that he is a spent force in the world of antiques, arrives at adoring sister Veronica's, and the considerably less impressed Kitty's home for the duration, as he searches for the property that will house his 'beloveds', not people as you might expect but his much-treasured possessions.
Amongst the properties Anthony considers is the Mas Lunel, an isolated farmhouse belonging to Aramon Lunel, a drunken n'er do well who has a significant past and a disturbed sister sitting it out in a shanty-built bungalow in the grounds. Audrun just biding her time for the right moment to serve that ice cold dish of revenge...and I had every sympathy with her cause.
The book has opened, and this is no spoiler, with little girl Melodie wandering off from a trip with some local school children and making a startling and scream-inducing discovery on the river bank.
So Rose Tremain has set up a glorious page-turner that constantly had me wondering just who was going to meet their maker, how and when and at the hands of who.
The book is rapidly and very successfully populated and located, and very clearly so too, leaving me in little doubt about character traits as the themes slowly emerged, obsession, guilt, abuse, jealousy, regret, collusion, and the torment is slowly eked out. The knife is twisted and much as Anthony finds a loose thread on his treasured Aubusson tapestry which you feel with one tug might unravel the whole lot, so the lives slowly and deliciously unravelled before my eyes.
Those I wanted to fall flat on their faces did, those I wanted to walk tall managed it but Rose Tremain also subverts expectations nicely too, I was particularly pleased to see the men rather than the women struggling with the embarrassment of stress incontinence, it's normally our province.
So just as the sale may be going through a gaping wide crack appears in the Mas Lunel's masonry, and how significant becomes the removal of the supporting wings of the house years previously that had buttressed it up, perhaps becoming a metaphor for the props in the lives of so many of Rose Tremain's characters, and thus do the cracks start to appear. No amount of deceitful filling in with mortar and painting over is going to cover up past sins or present dilemmas. The seepage in Trespass is inexorable and insidious and the significance of the title assumes multiple meanings as the book progresses.
Now is probably the right time to confess that I have not read anything by Rose Tremain through to the end before, I managed half of Colour and that's it, my loss and I will take Music and Silence off the shelf soon and give it my best attention.

The Long Song ~ Andrea Levy

I've got off to a terrible start with this year's Bookerthon, several false starts on books I felt sure I would enjoy and then suddenly 150 plus pages in I wasn't, books that wanted to take me to places I didn't want to go and by routes I didn't want to travel at this reading moment, and then I picked up The Long Song by Andrea Levy and the sun was shining again.
In fact how can the sun not shine when you pick up a book with such a glowingly deep buttercup-yellow cover embossed with copper, but I wasn't going to be fooled,  a sunny cover that surely belies the misery of slavery that awaits?
That had been my misguided reasoning for not picking up The Long Song sooner, it was on the Orange long list after all, but I just couldn't face another 'slavery' novel. I know it's important to bear witness to it all but sometimes, to be very honest, my stomach can't take the churning, the sickening violence, the whipping and the snatching of babies all defeats me, leaves me feeling wretched and so I decide not to go there.
In fact it was with an element of desperation that I finally did but only after several people had reassured me that Andrea Levy does slavery in her own inimitable style, whilst also wondering whether I was ever going to have anything good to say about any of this year's long list.
July (born in December) is Miss Kitty's pickney, the daughter of Tam Dewar the white overseer of the Amity plantation thus making her a mulatto, not quite a negro and therefore perhaps July may be blessed with more opportunities in life than her mother. Born into Jamaican slavery but a witness to the freeing of slaves and the life that followed, Miss July is writing her story, ' a story that lay so fat within her' at the behest of her son Thomas Kinsman a printer,  who has insisted that she record it for posterity rather than keep telling it to him.
Thomas immediately reveals that he is a skillful editor and will be able to make sense of the most scribbled texts, whilst it's clear that July may also be a less than fallible narrator, thus setting up uncertainties and questions as this oral history is cast with permanence into the print man's molten metal.
Andrea Levy elaborates on this printing process towards the end of the book and something resonated with me about the hot branding of slaves as a means of leaving a permanent mark, and how the printer does something similar with the casting of molten metal and the pressing of words on the paper, or perhaps I was getting a bit carried away.
So Miss July assumes a lilting cadence to her voice that quickly becomes familiar and a pleasure to read,  a constant reminder that this is oral storytelling, as she playfully darts around with the truth of her life and as always with any novel about slavery there is that juxtaposition between the sweetness of the sugar crop and the bitterness of the lives on the plantation.
Brutally separated from her mother to become Marguerite (because it sounds so much nicer when called out)  a maid at the big house and the trials and tribulations begin. The narrative allows, indeed almost insists that the reader questions the veracity of July's frequently corrected story, this 'flimsy remembrance',  thus skilfully exposing both the fictional process and the nature of an autobiographical tale in a way that chimed with my recent reading of The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields. In fact perhaps that was a novel about slavery of a different form but July frequently writes herself into the third person as a means of detaching herself from some of the most painful moments in the book.
However I wouldn't want you to think this book was all pain, far from it and definitely don't be put off as I was with any notions that all books about slavery must be miserable. There are moments when Andrea Levy's wry sense of humour that we all know so well from Small Island shines through in a book that held its form throughout for me, no dips or moments of ennui, I loved every word.
Every reader will doubtless find their own defining moments in The Long Song, and it has been good to read a book that deals with notions of freedom from slavery, almost a prequel to Small Island in that case, but for me there was one moment of huge significance.
As one of the plantation workers watches an artist painting the family of the big house in their setting, a setting that included July but for reasons that I won't divulge and spoil. Overlooking the presence of the worker's hovels he paints in a lush island background to the complete confusion of the onlooker who states

'But they are there before you' said Dublin Hilton to he. At which the artist barked upon him, that no one wished to find squalid negroes within a rendering of a tropical idyll, before promising Dublin that he would set his dog upon him if he did not leave him alone.
'But you paint an untruth,' said Dublin Hilton.

Somehow that moment and its context exposed and encapsulated all the duplicity and folly of colonial rule. For all her wily and often scheming ways what's not to love about July, Andrea Levy's newest heroine, and that final delicious dish of revenge served up to her master, and in the end I think I'd been allowed as close to the truth of her story as I could and should be.
My thanks to Andrea Levy for being my Booker salvation when all was looking lost, definitely one for my short list and I'd be delighted to see The Long Song take the victor ludorum, but I fear it's up against some sparkly look-at-me bobby dazzlers that may just glisten and catch the eye of the judges instead.

I wasn't going to Bookerthon, but shall I...

I have been so eye-wateringly far off the Booker pace this year that I knew today was going to be painful and it is, I've only read one, February by Lisa Moore but very thrilled I am to see it there.
Except now the longlist is announced and the picture on here has become a bit of a tradition along with the Bookerthon, so I scurry round gathering in and find I have ten of the thirteen titles.
And I have been meaning to read a lot of them.

And a few I've started and been distracted from and thought I'd get back to them including most recently C by Tom McCarthy
And I had thought this Peter Carey might set me and Peter back on speaking terms again.
And I always love a good Howard Jacobson.
And...
And...
Oh alright then, I might, just one or two or thirteen or so.
But listen, ignore all that because far more exciting things are happening here in Devon because tomorrow is Barn Owl box day. Cometh the pole, cometh the machinery and eventually one hopes, cometh the Barn Owls anyway here's the full list.

Peter Carey Parrot and Olivier in America (Faber and Faber)

Emma Donoghue Room (Pan MacMillan - Picador)

Helen Dunmore The Betrayal (Penguin - Fig Tree)

Damon Galgut In a Strange Room (Grove Atlantic - Atlantic Books)

Howard Jacobson The Finkler Question (Bloomsbury)

Andrea Levy The Long Song
(Headline Publishing Group - Headline Review)

Tom McCarthy C (Random House - Jonathan Cape)

David Mitchell The Thousand Autumns of Zacob de Zoet  (Hodder & Stoughton - Sceptre)

Lisa Moore February (Random House - Chatto & Windus)

Paul Murray Skippy Dies (Penguin - Hamish Hamilton)

Rose Tremain Trespass (Random House - Chatto & Windus)

Christos Tsiolkas The Slap (Grove Atlantic - Tuskar Rock)

Alan Warner The Stars in the Bright Sky
(Random House - Jonathan Cape)