And the SPS Predict the Booker Prize 2024 goes to ...

Yesterday evening, the Kayton Library hosted our annual 'Predict the Booker Prize' event: five Pauline readers bravely volunteered to tackle this year's shortlist and persuade a live and online audience that their book should (or shouldn't) win. But did they get it right? 

Fred, Ishan, Freddie, Alex and Tom with their books

Our history so far is dismal: for six successive years, we have consistently failed to correctly predict the winner - a track record of complete, utter and abysmal failure. But this year - for the first time ever - we were holding the event on the very same night as the Booker Prize itself. Would such synchronicity make a difference? Would there be another first - our first ever correct prediction? Read on and find out …

Mr Mahmoud, chairing with unflappable authority, opened the discussion by introducing this year's books, featuring stories that take us from World War I to beyond the earth's atmosphere, from the American Deep South to a Dutch house in the 1960s, and from a cave network in France to a convent in Australia. They explore the gravitational pull of home and family, the contested nature of history and the challenge of projecting our real identities. He also reminded us how much difference a Booker Prize can make: last year's winner, Prophet Song, saw its sales boosted by 1500% as a result.  

With that in mind, Alex stepped up to discuss the first novel on the shortlist, Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner, which follows Sadie Smith, a freelance undercover agent who tries to infiltrate a commune of eco-radicals in southern France. 

Alex was, to put it mildly, not a big fan of this book, which he found anti-climactic, with a plot that doesn't feel real, and humour that falls flat. The story is slow to get moving and switches disjointedly between the narrator and the lengthy emails they receive from Bruno, leader of the eco-commune, neither of which are particularly gripping. The novel's themes, he argued, are not developed in much depth, and its political elements, while potentially interesting, feel disconnected from the story. The narrator is supposed to be complex but her cynicism and opaque motives make her hard to engage with, and her development towards the end of the novel doesn't feel earned. 

Alex responds to audience questions

While Alex thought that there were definitely some interesting moments - Bruno's memoir, in which he remembers his childhood, and the war in which he lost many of his family, for instance, is more fluid and absorbing - ultimately, Creation Lake felt superficial, a novel that tries to be clever and misses the mark. Asked why he thought it had ended up on the shortlist, Alex wondered whether the novel's political themes might have been the reason, speculating that there can't be many modern literary novels that combine nihilism and eco-radicalism in the form of a spy thriller. Some have praised the author's language and humour, and perhaps, Alex generously conceded, the critics could see something in the novel that he'd missed: but overall, he found it distinctly lacklustre.

As Reuben, who was going to talk about Samantha Harvey's Orbital, was unfortunately unwell, we moved straight on to James by Percival Everett, a reimagining of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim, the runaway slave who accompanies Huck for part of his journey along the Mississippi River. 

This novel was recommended by Ishan, the only sixth former on our panel. Impressively, Ishan had read not just James, but Twain's original, and his perceptive analysis of the relationship between the two novels was at the heart of his interpretation. Written by a black novelist, 120 years after its predecessor, James sheds a new light on the character of Jim. In Huckleberry Finn, Ishan explained, Jim seems simple and gullible because, as James reveals, he is forced to veil his knowledge and seem inferior, in order to flatter and reassure nervous slave-owners who fear a slave rebellion. So while James follows Twain's plot, it is told in the slave's real voice: and what's strikingly different is that as a narrator, James is freely able to express himself and speak eloquently, using the power of language on his own terms to escape his slave name and identity. In this respect, he is like the novel's other black characters who are articulate with each other, but not with their owners, an exploration of code-switching which - even if it is perhaps not historically accurate - Ishan felt to be particularly resonant today, and not just in contexts about race. 

Ishan introducing Everett's novel

Ishan found the way this new perspective was seamlessly integrated into Twain's story extremely impressive, and felt that James is a thought-provoking re-telling of a timeless classic - not a corrective to it, but, as Everett himself has explained, a conversation with it. Although you don't have to have read Huckleberry Finn to read James (and you don't even necessarily have to read them in that order), Ishan felt that knowledge of Twain's novel made it more interesting to compare and contrast the ways in which Everett re-imagined the original story. Considering whether the novel's dependence on Huckleberry Finn limits it as a creative work on its own terms, Ishan felt that ultimately it didn't: James is interesting in its own right - but it is even more interesting in conjunction with its source, making us re-think the original's innocent hero and his relative ignorance of the reality of slavery.

Next up was The Safekeep, the debut novel by Dutch writer Yael van der Wouden, introduced by Freddie, who judged it a brilliant start to this young writer's career. The novel explores the relationship between the protagonist - reclusive, obsessive Isobel - and Eva, a woman who is everything she is not, and whose presence in Isobel's carefully controlled vacuum of a house forces her to reexamine her past, her memories and herself. 

Van der Wouden uses this story, Freddie explained, as a way of tackling a relatively unexplored and unknown topic in Dutch history, the country's treatment of its Jewish citizens during WWII. In this context, small and seemingly insignificant matters of daily trivia become a way of illuminating much larger and more complex issues.  At its core, however, he felt this was a love story, with a theme of desire that becomes dependence, and where the author's use of language superbly conveys the central character's changes and development as the novel progresses. 

Freddie introducing Van der Wouden's novel

English is Van der Wouden's second language, and Freddie noted that the novel's occasionally broken and difficult expressions beautifully highlighted the sense of foreignness, and 'otherness' that is central to the story, reminding us that language is not original, neutral or natural, and creating a sense of disjointedness entirely appropriate to the novel's overarching theme. Although some readers have found The Safekeep is slow to build tension, Freddie disagreed, arguing that the pacing is extremely successful, building from the slower start to the intense and hectic final sections of the story. And while the historical context is clearly integral to the novel's purpose, Freddie felt that the love story at its heart was universal.

Following Freddie was Fred, who introduced the penultimate novel from this year's shortlist, Stone Yard Devotional, by Charlotte Wood. This is the story of a woman in her mid fifties, burnt out, and losing faith in her life and her work, who seeks refuge in the life of an abbey. Three subsequent 'visitations' - from a plague of mice, the bones of a nun, and a figure from the narrator's earlier life, who stirs up troubling memories - force her to make a reckoning with and resolve her past.  

Fred clearly enjoyed and admired this novel enormously: it would be, he felt, an exceptionally worthy prize-winner.  The plot may be uncomplicated, and the setting a small and quiet world, where more is left unsaid than said, but ultimately, he argued, this is a novel that deals with profound themes, such as the nature of grief and forgiveness, and what it means to be a 'good' person or even to be human at all.  He found the novel's structure intriguing and skilfully designed, and admired the symmetry of its opening and closing images.  The setting - a landscape that is beautiful but harsh - acts as a metaphor for the sense of unearthing and reburying old hurts throughout the book.

Fred takes questions from the audience

At times, he suggested, the novel reads like a memoir: there are flashbacks to the narrator's past, and her relationship with her mother - shaped, Fred explained, by the author's own family relationships, and her experience of illness.  But while Stone Yard Devotional clearly has an autobiographical element, it also acknowledges that memories can be slippery and not necessarily real.  The clarity of the novel's bare bones style seems to have been further influenced by the novelist's illness: both she and her sister were diagnosed with cancer within six weeks of each other, an experience which, she says, burnt away all the trivial things in her life and led her towards a style without artifice, focussing only on what truly matters. Ultimately, Fred acknowledged, you could see this book as a simply a depressing list of deaths: but the experience of reading it doesn't feel sad - instead, it feels personal and intimate, contemplative in its exploration of grief, something everyone will experience and which shouldn't be hidden away, and which the plague of mice that visits the abbey perhaps represents. Initially, people are frightened of them, but gradually, they become something they learn to live with.  

Nick Cave

Questioned about the novel's epigraph by musician Nick Cave, Fred felt that this was beautifully apt, because of its resonances with the novel's themes and style. Cave  has often written and spoken about his grief after the death of his two sons, and it felt perfectly appropriate that the words of a singer noted for his lyricism should grace a novel that reads like a song.  Asked for his thoughts, as a student of RS and Philosophy, on the novel's presentation of religion, Fred felt that although the novel clearly draws on religious symbolism - the abbey's rituals, its stories of saints, and its visitation by a plague -  ultimately, the narrator is converted not by an external divine force, but by herself, and by her own understanding and acceptance. Is this a novel that could be recommended to younger readers, in the fourth form for instance? Fred felt that it was: it's accessible, with short chapters, only a few pages long, and although the central themes, such as grief and mortality, are clearly mature, they are presented in a way that makes you think, and as such, they would be appropriate for younger readers.

Our final book from the shortlist was Held by Anne Michaels, presented by Tom. This is a highly episodic and fragmented novel, Tom explained, that starts in 1917, on a battlefield during World War I, and then flashes forwards and backwards, from country to country, as it traces the impact of war on four inter-connected generations.

It would be fair to say that Tom was not particularly impressed by Held. He felt that the style created unnecessary layers of confusion, with names, landscapes and events that recur unhelpfully, and historical figures that pop up at random. Sometimes there is war (but not snow). Sometimes there is snow (but not war). Sometimes there is Marie Curie. While this might work, Tom argued, in a collection of poems or short stories, it was baffling in a novel, where the reader might justifiably expect more focus on plot and story. It was all, he felt, very 'quirky', and while quirky is not necessarily a bad thing - Tom cited several reviewers who admired the novel's poetic language, particularly praising its challengingly fluid structure, and 'the way it doesn't concern itself with being fully understood' - he himself grew frustrated with the novel's 'bouncing around' in time and space, modestly concluding 'this is probably why I am not one of the Booker judges'.  

Tom gives his thoughts on Anne Michaels's novel

At which point, it was time to turn to our audience - live and online - and invite them to step into that very role. What had they made of our panel's recommendations? Did they persuade their audience to vote (or not) for their chosen novel? We were about to find out.  As is customary, Mr Mahmoud called for two votes: one for the novel the audience thought should win, and one for the novel they thought would win.  And here are the results. The audience, live and online, were unanimous in their choice. The novel that they felt should win this year was ….

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood: congratulations to Fred for outlining its virtues so successfully.  

Mr Mahmoud announces the result of the audience vote

But when it came to which novel would win, we were divided. The audience in the Kayton Library thought it would be The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden ; but our online audience opted for Percival Everett's James.  So - did we get it right? Finally?? After five years??? 

NO. Of course we didn't. This year's Booker Prize Winner was …

Orbital, by Samantha Harvey. To be fair, it was the only one we didn't consider, so this is perhaps a sin of omission, rather than an error. But at least our 'Sisyphean record of unflinching wrongness' (as Predict the Booker veteran Enyu, who joined us in last night's audience, memorably put it) continues.  Perhaps we can get a prize for that?

Huge thanks, as ever, to our brilliant volunteer readers; to Mr Mahmoud for his calm and gracious chairing; and of course to Mrs Cummings and Mrs Wilkinson for organising and hosting the event.  If you'd like to read about previous years' Predict the Booker evenings, you can find them here: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 and 2018. See you next year!