And the (SPS) Booker Prize of 2022 goes to ...

Yesterday evening, the Kayton Library hosted SPS’s fifth Predict the Booker prize evening, where six Pauline readers lobbied the live and online audience to persuade them that their chosen novel from the Booker shortlist deserved to win the prize. 

As the evening’s host, Mr Mahmoud, pointed out, the SPS audience’s success rate in predicting the prize so far is 100% - 100% failure. Will this year be any different? You’ll have to wait until Monday 17th October to find out: but in the meantime, here are the Pauline readers’ thoughts …

First up was Enyu, who won the audience vote last year with his passionate account of Richard Powers’s Bewilderment. This year, however, much as he would liked to have done the double, he admitted that he could not in all honesty recommend his chosen book, NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, about which his feelings were (put generously) ‘mixed’. 

Inspired by Animal Farm, Glory chooses a key moment from recent Zimbabwean history - the coup that overthrew Robert Mugabe in 2017 - and re-tells it in the style of a fable where animals take the place of humans. This was one of Enyu’s strongest criticisms: whereas Orwell’s fairy-tale gone sour makes inventive use of the animals’ individual traits in its satire, Bulwayo’s animals behave exactly like humans do, with human clothes, and human mannerisms. What, then, Enyu argued, was the point of making them animals in the first place? 

While the novel’s stylistic features were interesting - allusions to folk-tales and oral narratives, typographical jokes (such as almost an entire page that repeats one word: ‘take’) - much of the satire was unsubtle and irrelevant (gratuitous references to Donald Trump, for instance), and the comparison with Orwell’s devastating political critique did Glory no favours. The imagery was occasionally clever - for instance, the red butterflies that symbolise both beauty and violence - but the novel’s style more often felt banal and lacking in invention, and while its subject was clearly important, Enyu felt that this on its own was not enough to make the novel enjoyable or engaging. At times, he confessed, he struggled to get through it.  

With Glory out of the competition, the torch passed to Paddy, recommending The Trees by Percival Everett - a writer whose previous novels, Paddy observed, are marked by their exceptional diversity in both style and subject matter, with protagonists ranging from a hyper-literate baby to a suicidal English professor risen from the grave. The Trees is another virtuouso tour de force, a satire of thrillers and detective fiction, which traces a series of brutal murders in Mississippi, seemingly inspired by the lynching of Emmett Till. Is the perpetrator a serial kiler, a vengeful vigilante, or a flock of acrimonious ghosts?? 

The novel’s prevailingly sardonic tone reflects the investigating officers’ habit of shielding themselves from the horrors they encounter, but also creates an incongruous yet balanced blend of terror and comedy, designed, Paddy felt, to make the reader question ‘where’s the outrage?’ when terrible crimes take place. Everett’s idea, he argued, was to create a parallel with Emmett Till’s mother, who publicly displayed the battered, mutilated body of her son, and refused to let the world look away. He felt that The Trees works both as a crime novel, and a parody of a crime novel: it has all the elements you’d expect in a thriller, from inciting incident onwards, but presents them satirically, and although it starts in a small local community, it ends up exploring problems on a national, and possibly even global scale. Paddy’s only reservation, initially at least, was the novel’s ending, which is left (no spoilers) open. With hindsight, however, he felt that this actually worked better by forcing the reader to engage their own interpretation.

Our next presenter, and the first of four sixth formers participating this year, was Theo, speaking up for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka - the shortlist’s third satire based on historical events (here, the recent Sri Lankan civil war). The novel blends fantasy and realism in the tale of war photographer Maali, who finds himself a ghost in a bureaucratic afterlife, with only seven days (the seven moons of the title) to make things right with the world he has left behind. 

Told in the second person, the novel explores Maali’s reassessment of his relationship with his lover, and the people and events he photographed, relationships characterised by critical detachment or personal and professional exploitation: in contrast with the stark black and white of his photographs, Maali’s soul is a moral grey area. The narrative perspective, Theo argued, reflects Maali’s reluctance (while alive) and inability (while dead) to actually engage and interact with his world - an ineffectuality that mirrors the reader’s own inability to affect the world about which they are reading.and thus cleverly puts them in Maali’s position. There were questions from the audience about whether the novel’s comedy worked, especially in conjunction with the dark events it depicts, and whether this sort of satirical/fantastical fiction is really appropriate for dealing with such sombre history. Theo felt that it does, and it is: the comedy is largely focussed on the presentation of the after-life, and is juxtaposed with a more sober realism for the events dealing with the ghost’s former life - without this comedy, the darkness of the novel might have become unbearable.

The fourth novel on the shortlist, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, was introduced by Archie, who found this a classic Christmas tale, following in the footsteps of Charles Dickens, both timely and topical, hopeful and distressing, and packing far more into its 110 pages than many longer novels. 

Set in the 1980s, the novel traces the journey of its central character, builder Bill Furlong, from inaction to engagement, as he encounters the traumatic consequences of the Magdalene Laundries - church-run institutions whose ‘care’ for unmarried mothers has subsequently been exposed as scandalous abuse. Archie was struck by this novel’s optimism: despite its focus on the church’s paralysing grip on Ireland (a domination presented here as more powerful than politics), it nevertheless leaves you with renewed faith in the human spirit. Its central character is far more complex than he initially appears, and although the conflict he has is with the church, Archie felt that Bill’s story was universal, shedding light both on the victims of powerful institutions, and the fear that stops people helping them. 

Questions from the audience focussed on the novel’s ending: what did Archie think happened next? Without giving too much away, this was hard to answer: but Archie felt that the ending, as it stands, worked well - Bill’s destination is less important than his journey. The novel’s relationship with British ignorance of Irish history was also raised, with the suggestion that the gaps and deliberate evasions in Bill’s life and community might reflect gaps in British knowledge about Ireland, and Archie agreed that this was a plausible interpretation.

Our penultimate presenter was Richard, who had the challenging task of deciphering Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker, a novel which he acknowledged could seem baffling and nonsensical at first, but which had an underlying profundity and philosophical seriousness that repaid patient re-reading. Although it’s the shortest novel on the list, he felt that it was only when he read it for the second time that the novel started to make sense. Beneath its verbal whimsy and allusions to old English folk tale and mythology, Richard detected an engagement with philosophical paradoxes - such as the nature of time, and the problem of Theseus’s ship (if you keep on repairing and replacing each element of Theseus’s ship, does it remain Theseus’s ship, or does it become something else altogether?). 

Focussing on one moment in the novel, where the central character, the eponymous Treacle Walker, makes a flute out of a dead man’s bones, Richard argued that Alan Garner is subtly presenting the reader with an exploration of metaphysics - is something dead really dead? do the bones of a mortal man constitute the whole of what he is? if a bone flute can make living music, is this a kind of immortality, and if life is eternal, what becomes of time?  Noting the range of critical reactions to the novel, and interpretations of its meaning, he concluded that Garner’s idea, ultimately, is to allow the reader’s imagination and interpretation to shape their understanding of what the novel is ‘about’: it will be different for everyone, and that in itself is the point. This was a lucid, and fascinating exploration of a challenging novel, of which, Richard argued, there is no one ‘right reading’, but rather a multitude of individual perceptions.

Our final presentation came from Lachlan, who had (rather impressively) just hot-footed it over Hammersmith Bridge, direct from competing in the Maths Challenge at SPGS. Modesty forbids us from disclosing the result* but if Lachlan is as good at recommending novels as he is at Maths, we think that Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William! looks like a pretty safe Booker bet. 

The third of Stroud’s books about writer Lucy Barton, Oh William! has marriage as its theme, with a clear and gripping storyline, and satisfying character arcs. But ultimately, Lachlan argued, it has at its heart an exploration of the protagonist’s thoughts and feelings, what goes on inside her head, and what it means to be true and good in the modern world. Much as he would have liked, he admitted, to dazzle the audience with his devastating critique of a middle-class novelist’s story about a middle-class novelist, he could only endorse the overwhelming critical enthusiasm for Stroud and the brilliance of her best-selling trilogy. 

The audience wondered whether the novel worked as a stand-alone, or must you read the other two books in the trilogy to fully enjoy it? Lachlan thought not: although he has read all three of the novel’s in this series, and felt that you will definitely get more out of Oh William! if you are already familiar with the characters and their stories, it is not essential - the novel works independently. Casting his gaze back over the shortlist, Lachlan could see why the Booker judges might opt for other novels, on grounds of their diversity, originality, their brevity or their author’s longevity - but in his view, Oh William! - an easy read about difficult themes, as he put it - was a clear winner.

But would our audience agree? As is traditional, Mr Mahmoud asked them to give two votes: one for the novel they thought should win; another for the novel they thought would win. Interestingly, in the first category, both the online and live audience were in complete agreement:  this year's Booker Prize should go to ...

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan! Congratulations, Archie for successfully persuading everyone of its merits. When it came to the novel that they thought would win, live and online audiences differed. The Kayton Library vote went to Treacle Walker ('because it's the sort of book that wins'). Our online audience stuck with Claire Keegan: 

Claire Keegan and Alan Garner 

So congratulations to Richard, and once again to Archie.  But have we got it right this year? This post's ending - like Keegan's novel - is unresolved (but full of optimism!): the Booker judges will reveal all on Monday October 17th - and you can watch the livestream broadcast on their website here.  Thanks once again to our brilliant Pauline panel for their hard work in reading and elucidating such a challenging range of novels in such a short space of time; to Mr Mahmoud for chairing with such calm poise and erudition; to Mrs Cummings and the Kayton Library for organising and hosting the event; and to all our audience, live and virtual.  If you'd like to catch up on previous Predict the Booker evenings, you can read our account of our 2021 event here, 2020's here, 2019's here, and our inaugural event, Predict the Booker 2018, here. Happy reading!

*OK, the SPS team won …