| The most prestigious literary prize in the English-speaking world, the Booker, will be announced in London next week, on October 10. For nearly four decades the £50,000 award has established a benchmark in introducing the best of new fiction to readers.
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| This year, of the 10,000 or so novels in English published, 17 made it to the longlist. Here’s what readers can expect of the shortlisted five—now available in Indian bookstores, some at specially reduced rates in anticipation of hitting the jackpot.
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| Never Let Me Go. By Kazuo Ishiguro. Ishiguro won the Booker in 1989 for The Remains of the Day, a remarkably deceptive work about an English butler in a stately home absorbed in his quotidian duties and only dimly aware of the dangerous intrigue being played out by his employer, a Nazi supporter.
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| The novel’s gentle tone and unruffled pace present a study of small lives apparently unaffected by the half-glimpsed horrors of betrayal and war, soon to engulf all. Kathy H, the 31-year-old narrator of Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro’s sixth novel, is similarly reminiscing about her placid childhood at an exclusive boarding school, set deep in the English countryside.
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| Very quietly, the larger horror seeps through the surface calm. Kathy went to a school for clones, specially raised as organ donors to rid the generally population of disease. The novel’s serenity brilliantly underscores Ishiguro’s comment on the ethics of scientific experiment.
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| On Beauty. By Zadie Smith. The author of the bestselling White Teeth gratefully acknowledges her debt to EM Forster’s Howards End as inspiration for her new novel—“he gave me a classy old frame which I covered with new material as best as I could”.
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| Forster’s theme of bridging the class divide is a sharp reappraisal of the conflicting liberal and conservative values. Smith’s modern take encompasses race, colour, gender and notions of political correctness in addition to class.
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| Her two chaotic intertwined families are headed by competing Rembrandt scholars on an American campus. The plot may not work up to a climax but the characters and conversation—in particular Zadie Smith’s ear for dialogue—often hilariously capture the ironies of cultural assimilation and division.
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| Arthur and George. By Julian Barnes. All Sherlock Holmes’ fans should get this. Julian Barnes’s novel is based on a real episode in the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Scottish creator of the world’s most famous detective. In the only time Doyle ever turned to solving a crime in his life, he defended George Edalji, a rural solicitor, convicted of mutilating cattle, whom he believed to be a victim of miscarried justice.
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| It is not the case itself that is as gripping as the rapidly intercut narrative that Barnes weaves from the intersecting of two lives in late 19th century England. Apart from literary fiction, Barnes also wrote thrillers under the pen name of Dan Kavanagh. In this novel, he says, those two separate halves of his brain have come together.
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| The Accidental. By Ali Smith. Ali Smith’s novel is a conceit in the established convention that every story should have a beginning, middle, and end. That is how the book’s three sections are divided.
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| But in practice she debunks the idea, A college lecturer, his wife and two teenage children are on a summer holiday when a young girl, Amber, enters their life. Ineluctably she changes them all, in turn, befriending, seducing and enchanting all four. Who is Amber, where did she come from and how did she magically transform their lives? Each character tells the story in “a mosaic of voices”.
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| The Sea. By John Banville. A new novel from an established Irish novelist, this is the unlikeliest winner on the shortlist. A widowed and retired art historian returns in old age to a coastal town in Ireland where he spent a memorable holiday as a ten-year-old.
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| The childhood memories centre on a grand family he knew and are interleaved with fragments from his recent life, in particular the death of his wife. What could have been an engaging meditation on growing up and growing old is made prolix by uninteresting digressions. |
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Content Guide
