SPS Predict the Booker Prize 2021

Last night, SPS held its fourth annual ‘Predict the Booker’ event, streamed live from the Kayton Library to an online audience, and chaired by Mr Mahmoud. A panel of six Pauline students each selected one of the novels on this year’s shortlist and pitched the case for it as a possible Booker Prize winner. At the end of the evening, viewers cast their vote for the novel they’d been persuaded should win, and the novel they thought would win. Read on to find out what they decided …

Our first presenter was Suleyman, speaking up for Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead, a novel that traces the intersecting stories of two women - Marianne, a pioneering aviator from the first half of the 20th century, and Hadley, a contemporary star who wants to portray her on screen. 

This is, Suleyman argued, an engaging and accessible story, highlighting how women’s lives can be constricted, whether by attitudes to gender or by the limitations of a Hollywood contract. What he found particularly interesting is the way in which Shipstead brings out the differences, as well as the parallels between these two women’s lives: dedicated and determined, Marianne makes compromises to fund her dreams of flying (running bootleg liquor during Prohibition; making a loveless marriage to a wealthy man), whereas former child star Hadley deliberately destroys her career through the sort of drifting, restless, self-destructive behaviour that makes her a publicist’s nightmare. Only by reviving Marianne’s story can she achieve some sort of personal and professional redemption.

Presenting each woman’s story from a different narrative perspective in alternating chapters (Marianne’s in the third person, Hadley’s in the first) made the novel a rich and varied reading experience, Suleyman felt. The juxtaposition also draws attention to the differences between the ‘facts’ about Marianne’s life and the way that Hadley’s film alters them - a double perspective that highlights the liberties cinema sometimes takes with truth, and encourages the reader to reflect upon their own relationship with the media's version of reality.  

Maggie Shipstead

Suleyman was also impressed by the seamless way in which Shipstead’s central themes were woven into the story - themes such as the unspoken pacts that underpin relationships (the absence of love in a marriage, the ever present threat of death in friendships between early aviators), or the barbarism of a pre #MeToo Hollywood, that makes reading the novel a discomfiting but thought-provoking experience, particularly for male readers. Ultimately, he concluded, this is a novel that asks pertinent questions in an interesting and elegant way, with a story that is both grand and intimate at the same time: admittedly long (at 600 pages, the longest novel on the shortlist) but nonetheless eminently worth reading.

Next, Federico introduced No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, probably the most experimental  novel on the short list and one that (on the basis of the comments from the online audience) had clearly challenged several readers. 

Divided into two halves, it is set in a world very similar to our own, dominated by‘the Portal’ (Lockwood's equivalent to the internet) - a force through which everyone appears to mediate and experience their lives. Part 1 mimics the random and fragmented stream of attention grabbing, ironic, superficial, clickbait-y content that the Portal produces: Part II shifts to the story of a child born with Proteus syndrome - a child who is almost aborted, but whose fragile existence, and unique and precious individuality challenges the empty banality of the collective 'hive mind' that Part I embodies.

Federico expertly showed how Lockwood's novel critiques many aspects central to our contemporary lives, in particular the way in which the internet has changed us, but also contemporary attitudes towards abortion, and populism in modern politics. His thoughtful exploration of the novel offered a persuasive justification for its stylistic complexity: while it might be a struggle to get through the deliberately inconsequential and disengaging trivia of Part I, the juxtaposition with the deep and powerful emotions of Part II creates a devastating analysis of what it is to be fundamentally human - the 'this' that no one is talking about.  Ultimately, he felt, the novel's experimental elements were worth persevering with: taken as a whole, it offers a powerful and moving challenge to the reader, forcing them to reflect on how we engage with our world, and what we really value (and several of the online audience commented that he'd persuaded them to give it another go!).  

Our third presenter was Enyu, recommending Bewilderment by Richard Powers. Powers’s epic story of trees and eco-warriors, The Overstory, featured on the Booker shortlist three years ago (Powers ‘was robbed’, according to one of our online audience members). 

Bewilderment, Enyu explained, shares the earlier novel’s environmental message, but is narrower in scope: set in a future world close to our own, where all science’s gloomiest predictions have come true, the novel tells the story of an astrobiologist and his relationship with his nine-year old son, in the aftermath of his wife’s death. Enyu's lucid analysis showed how this is an extraordinarily timely novel - believable, accessible, sensitive, and potentially life-changing: Powers makes the reader share and understand the boy’s frustration and bewilderment at a world where the powerful (including a Trump-like US president) do nothing to prevent or alleviate environmental catastrophe.

Another central theme of the novel, Enyu argued, is scale - in all sorts of different dimensions: the scale of the universe and the earth’s cosmic irrelevance within it; the loneliness and terror humanity feels confronted with something so much bigger than themselves; the incredible scale of the earth itself, and the detail and significance of even the tiniest things, such as a bird, or a blade of grass; the singularity and uniqueness of an individual human life, reflected through the father’s feelings as his son begins to grow up and develop his own separate identity, moving away from his parent and leaving a ‘crater’ of loss behind.

Richard Powers

Powers’s remarkably vivid and evocative description, Enyu suggested, makes the reader re-think their relationship with an environment that they take for granted, and look at the world afresh - a mind-opening book that would work for readers of any age and might (the online audience suggested) prove illuminating for the world leaders and politicians currently attending COP26 in Glasgow ... 

Our next presenter was Tom, whose introduction to Damon Galgut's complex but rewarding The Promise began with a deeply philosophical exploration of the purpose and function of the novel per se, and why we read.  

The novel has already garnered considerable attention in South Africa, where the story is set - which, Tom felt, illustrated how important a novel can be in increasing awareness (in this case, of the country’s bleaker historical past). Galgut draws upon his own experience of growing up in Pretoria, and tells the story of a dysfunctional white family, imploding as the result of the ‘promise’ made thirty years ago to their black maid and never kept.

Damon Galgut

Tom was particularly struck by the unusual style of this novel, which reminded him of Virginia Woolf's Modernism: told in the third person, by an unidentified, but not impersonal narrator, it creates a narrative almost cinematic in its detachment, capable of zooming in almost at random, on a detail, a thought, an animal, an object. Questions from the audience suggested that there is perhaps something unusual about the novel’s ending, but Tom deftly avoided any spoilers about exactly what happens, or how; he also singled out the novel’s humour and hopefulness, despite its darker elements.  

Our penultimate nominee was The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed, recommended by Joe. Set in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay in the 1950s, the novel is based on the tragic true story of a Somali man hanged for a murder he did not commit - a miscarriage of justice only belatedly acknowledged when he was retrospectively pardoned in the 1990s. 

Joe found this to be a deeply powerful and complex novel, with a central theme of racism and injustice that feels all too familiar against the contemporary background of George Floyd’s murder, the Black Lives Matter movement and the fire in the Grenfell Tower. If the novel is felt to be the most ‘commercial’ of the books on the shortlist this is, he argued, a good thing: it is a gripping novel, with an important message, and if 'commercial' means more people will read it, so much the better.

Joe was also impressed by the vividness with which the novel evokes the cosmopolitan world of Tiger Bay - a 'multicultural pot-pourri', as he put it - alongside the all-pervasive hierarchy of racism in British society of the time, where the family of the Jewish murder victim are given little more respect than the Somali man accused of the crime. The novel also foregrounds the Somali community in the UK, hitherto relatively under-represented in British fiction: details of Somali culture are embedded throughout the novel, subtly educating the reader (for instance, individual Somali words are included in the dialogue, without translation: the reader figures them out through context). 

Nadifa Mohamed

The complexity of the novel’s characterisations are also integral to its success: Joe respected Mohamed’s refusal to sensationalise her story, presenting the central character, pickpocket Mahmoud, as a flawed human being rather than a suffering saint. The writer’s research enabled her to flesh out his personality not just with what she found on the historical record, but by adding details from her own father’s life, creating a compelling and sympathetic character. Overall, Joe's analysis created a strong impression of this striking and moving novel, with somehow manages to offer glimmers of hope despite the tragic conclusion which the reader knows is coming.

Our final presenter was Zac, acting as advocate for A Passage North, by Anuk Arudpragasam - the story of a Sri Lankan man insulated from his country’s thirty years of civil war by privilege and affluence, until the death of his grandmother's carer sends him on a journey home, and shifts him from apathy to action. 

Zac traced the roots of the novel in the Arudpragasam’s own ambivalence about his country’s history and the role it plays in his fiction: a key image of the novel is the train in which the central character travels through the countryside, observing the horrors of war, but oddly detached, immune and helpless to make a difference.

The central character’s vulnerability was, Zac felt, integral to his development throughout the novel, which leads him from a process of disengagement to participation, and to happiness as a result: Zac compared this to Nietzsche’s observation that to live dangerously (by building your home on the side of a volcano, for instance) can bring more personal fulfilment than staying within your comfort zone. He also found parallels between the character's journey and the more recent experiences of isolation and powerlessness, and the challenges to emotional resilience, caused by the pandemic - parallels which, he argued, make this a particularly prescient and moving novel. 

And so we came to the crunch moment of the evening - the audience vote. As Mr Mahmoud pointed out, when it comes to predicting the Booker Prize result, the SPS audience has a 100% record - of getting it wrong. Will this year be the exception? 

The audience votes were counted, and the result was, for the first time in SPS history, a double victory - for Richard Powers’s Bewilderment, which voters decided not only should win, but WOULD win. Congratulations to Enyu, for making such a powerful and persuasive pitch for this brilliant-sounding novel: on Wednesday night, we will see whether the Booker judges agree …! You can find out more about the Booker prize shortlist here on its website, where you can also watch a live stream of the awards ceremony on Wednesday.  

This year's judging panel

Huge thanks to the six students who produced such astute and perceptive analyses of their chosen books, as well as managing to avoid too many spoilers (!) - this post's brief summary hardly does justice to the breadth and complexity of their arguments, and all present agreed that the standard of insight this year was extraordinarily high. If you would like to read some of their essays in full, you can find them here. Thanks also to Mrs Cummings for organising the event, to Mr Mahmoud for chairing the presentations so smoothly and fielding such erudite and stimulating questions, and to all of our online audience for contributing their thoughts and ideas. We hope that you all enjoyed it, and that even more of you will get involved in next year's event!