On Monday evening, SPS readers gathered in the Kayton Library, and online, via the live-stream, for our annual Predict the Booker event. Six Paulines, from the 5th form to the U8th, stepped up to the podium, each of them recommending one of the shortlisted novels and attempting to win the audience's vote.
But is the audience vote worth winning? As our host, the imperturbable Mr Mahmoud, politely pointed out, when it comes to predicting Booker prize-winners, the SPS audience have a spectacular record of unrelenting wrongness. For six successive, success-less years, we've failed to back the right horse. So could this be the night that finally broke the curse? Read on, and find out …
Our first reader was Tom, making a welcome re-appearance after last year's memorable take-down of Anne Michaels's quirky prose poem Held. His chosen novel this year, Benjamin Markovits's The Rest of Our Lives, was definitely less quirky (although Tom admitted that the novel's bright pink and orange cover initially threw him off). Its central character (also called Tom) is a college professor, professionally and personally adrift, and in flight from an empty and dysfunctional marriage: only basketball gives him purpose. A contemporary American road novel, The Rest of Our Lives is realist in its tone and deeply rooted in the novelist's own personal experience of long-term marriage, children leaving home, and unexpected illness.
Tom observed that 'high status' reviewers liked this novel more than the public (one Good Reads reviewer found nothing to praise but its font). The plot is, he conceded, 'somewhat uneventful': the narrator drives a bit, meets someone, plays some basketball, and then moves on - but underneath the surface, the story has elements of tragedy, its subdued mood representing characters whose emotions have been eroded by life. By the time it reaches its conclusion, Tom felt the novel had gained in emotional depth and engagement: the reader's ability to pity and sympathise with the narrator definitely intensifies as the novel goes on. The ending is ambiguous - the characters are awaiting a critical call which will determine the narrator's future - and, in Tom's view, ominous: a title which suggests marital commitment could also hint that time may be running out. Diplomatically non-committal (as Mr Mahmoud put it), Tom felt this novel was a 'maybe', rather than a sure-fire winner: but he felt it had a chance.
Our next presenter was Harper, discussing Susan Choi's Flashlight, an epic novel that spans continents and generations, covering themes of displacement and inherited trauma through the story of Serk, a Korean boy raised under the Japanese occupation, and subsequently torn between his different identities. If The Rest of Our Lives focusses on what happens to parents when their children leave home, the theme of Flashlight, Harper argued, was what the children take with them. Starting with Serk's disappearance from a beach in 1980s America, the novel flips backwards and forwards between past and present to explore ideas about generational legacies, tracing the origin of Serk's trauma and its impact on his daughter, Louisa.
Loneliness and isolation are central to the novel, Harper thought, and highlight the importance of identity and belonging. Serk lives in a web of loneliness: he has three names - his Korean name, in its original and anglicised versions, and his Japanese name, Hiroshi - but none of them entirely reflect who he is, and he doesn't fit in anywhere, a lack of belonging that his daughter inherits. Harper admired the way in which Choi uses her narrative style to develop this theme more fully. For instance, the titular object centres around a moment of trauma for Louisa, when her father disappears on a beach, leaving nothing but a flashlight behind. This 'frail jellyfish of light' subsequently haunts the family, recurring symbolically throughout the novel, and finally bringing things full circle at the novel's close, when the truth about Serk's vanishing is known. Harper also liked the way in which Choi's language can be playful - for instance, describing a tumour as a plum - creating a blurring between what people say, and what's actually true, and perfectly encapsulating the novel's plot, which also hinges on a disappearance that might not be quite as it seems.
Although the novel takes a while to get into, with its epic scale and long sentences, Harper felt that it repays the reader's efforts, and it highlights an aspect of Korean history that deserves to be better known. Our live and online audience raised questions about the novel's fatalism: did it suggest that trauma is inevitably passed down from one generation to another, without any hope of breaking the cycle? Harper felt that it probably did, citing the recurrent symbol of the flashlight with which the novel opens and closes, and its despondent and melancholy mood. The novel's shifting perspectives also generated debate: were all the characters merely refractions of the protagonist? Harper didn't think so: but nevertheless he felt the exploration of different perspectives - some developed, some fleeting - was one of the novel's strengths.
Our next - and youngest - presenter was Olly, currently in the fifth form. Olly's recommendation was Andrew Miller's The Land in Winter, which has been seen as a very traditional novel: a well-crafted story, with compelling characters, and a meticulous sense of time and place. But the characters, Olly argued, are the novel's beating heart: Miller's interest is as firmly on their individual behaviours and psyches, as it is on the socio-historical context in which their stories take place - Britain in 1962, not yet anywhere near the 1960s as we commonly think of them, but a country on the cusp of change, while still haunted by the recent world war.
Olly was particularly struck by Miller's narrative voice, which he described as detached, observational, and non-judgemental. The reader feels untethered, a floating observer of the four individuals, flung, like them, into a new and unfamiliar context. The novel is entrancing, poignant, bittersweet and masterfully constructed: Olly compared it to a snow globe, dazzling in its beauty, but without pretensions to broader resonance or universality.
This was a fascinating analogy - and one immediately pounced on by the audience: should the experience of reading a novel be like looking into a snow globe? Yes, Olly felt: a healthy literary culture should have room for novels that are purely aesthetic, and there is huge value in the novel as a beautiful work of art, rather than a political polemic. He wouldn't, he conceded, call The Land in Winter a page turner, but the story nevertheless had a compelling narrative aspect, and - without giving anything away - a poignant and powerful ending.
Our next presenter was Sammy, who, as Mr Mahmoud noted, had tackled the longest novel on this year's shortlist - Kiran Desai's 700 page epic The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. Had he perhaps drawn the short straw? Sammy's response was an emphatic 'no!', and his account of the novel, and its theme ('happiness is for other people') rapidly made it clear why. This, he felt, is a novel on a vast scale, with epic resonance, that touches on important post-colonial themes. But - as Sammy put it - 'any novel can have themes'. What sets Desai's novel apart are her central characters - people who can acknowledge and remember happiness, but fundamentally cannot possess it.
Sonia and Sunny are two young, westernised Indian students in the USA: disappointed and disillusioned, they return to their home country, finding romance and reconciliation, before being driven away by their families' possession and oppression. Their journeys take them to different sides of the world - to Mexico and Goa - and their relationship spans decades, before their final reunion. If the ending of The Land in Winter left Olly pacing his kitchen, trying to get the trauma out of his head, the conclusion of Desai's novel, in contrast, felt to Sammy like 'a quiet exhalation, a happy ending conjured out of despair'.
Sammy also thought this a beautifully written novel, easily digestible and 'a comfortable level of gripping'. The characters live parallel lives, yet the intensity of their connection, even if the only thing they share is loneliness, dominates the reader's experience. Their tragic solitude is heart-rending, but Desai weaves their experiences together with threads of love - and the result is a book that combines subtle and nuanced social commentary with heartfelt characterisations, in a personal and not over-laboured narrative. The novel - notoriously - took Desai 20 years to write, and Sammy found this a virtue: a canvas so vast and thoughtfully processed couldn't be produced in merely a year and a half - the novel possesses an existential depth, and its lengthy composition period shows itself in the souls of its characters. It is also a love story, and love stories, Sammy felt, are unusual in contemporary literature. Spending a week encamped in the minds (and hearts) of these two beautiful individuals made this novel a rare and pleasurable escape, and, in his view, a worthy Booker winner.
Although some in the audience queried how realistic the novel could be, Sammy broke back immediately: as 'realistic', he challenged, as any love story. We all see ourselves as the 1 in 6 billion, and this story is as realistic as that. Sammy's defence of The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, 'this fundamentally beautiful book', was impassioned, and inspiring: one of our online audience confessed that they had already voted for this novel, but after hearing Sammy's speech, they were ready to vote for it again!
Next came Audition by Katie Kitamura, the most experimental work on this year's shortlist, introduced by Sam. Audition, Sam explained, is a novel divided into two distinct parts, which present two opposing realities. The narrator, an actress, meets a young man who claims to be her son: in Part I, he isn't; in Part II, he is. The style, Sam felt, is minimalist, and stripped of emotion: meaning emerges from what is left unsaid. The scenes shift between reality and imagination, blurring the actual world and the theatrical world, exploring how much of our identity is performance, and whether there's a real self somewhere in between the roles we play. However, as someone who is 'quite into theatre' (as he modestly put it: Sam is starring as Hamlet in this term's senior play), Sam was disappointed by the novel's lack of insight into theatre and performance at anything other than a metaphorical level.
And although Kitamura's style reminded him of Kazuo Ishiguro, unfolding in a fog of partial knowledge, Sam ultimately found the novel's narrative voice frustratingly narrow. The cold, calm of the central character is monotonous, he felt, rather than (as some reviewers have described it ) 'hypnotic'. The protagonist withholds so much that she becomes hard to connect with or even care about. Even more frustratingly, her dominant consciousness made the secondary characters become merely peripheral: the reader feels surrounded by interesting people that they never get to meet. In conclusion, Sam decided that he definitely couldn't recommend this novel: if this was judged the best novel of the year, he would feel disappointed and let down. Personally, he'd rather vote for Flashlight.
 |
| Sam, clearly very happy that he doesn't have to read Audition again |
Our final presenter was Freddie, like Tom, doing the double, having presented Yael van der Wouden's The Safekeep last year. This year's novel, David Szalay's Flesh, was, he felt, far better: a bleak book which (he confessed) made him sad, 'but' - nonetheless - 'it's good'. Flesh focusses on Istvan, whom we first meet as a confused teenager, and then follow through different stages of his life, in Hungary and London, through war and peace, from poverty to affluence and from youth to age. Unrelenting in its apathy and isolation, and underscored by violence, despair and the absurdity of living, Istvan's life is, indeed, bleak. As Freddie argued, and as Szalay's title suggests, this is a novel haunted by existence - by being - by the crudity of the body. Heavy and powerful, it will make you feel, no matter what, whether it's disgust, or anger, or sympathy.
The linguistic style of the novel, Freddie felt, is one of the most striking things about it. Composed of ruthless, stark dialogue, terse and economical, it creates and magnifies its desolate atmosphere. Istvan's own language is sparse, and his holophrase* 'ok' - a word that Freddie noted occurs 342 times in 362 pages - encapsulates his apathy and passivity, as he progresses through life, buffeted by others' desires. Responding to the audience's questions - what is Szalay saying through these silences? - Freddie felt that for Istvan, 'ok' can mean anything, but usually, it means its opposite. He uses it to cope with a reality he doesn't understand, and move along with a world that rarely gives him choices.
The novel's linguistic omissions are matched by structural omissions - it jumps over some of the most important experiences of Istvan's life (prison, the Gulf War). When he does act - pushing someone downstairs, joining the army, saving a man, punching a wall - he is driven by physical impulses that he doesn't dwell on, further expression of Szalay's belief that we are physical beings before anything else. Was this a novel that could and should win? Freddie thought it was. Technically superb, it asks important questions: he found it troubling and uncomfortable to read, but it made him reconsider what he valued in a novel.
Our six readers had delivered their critiques - all of them, Mr Mahmoud noted, entirely unassisted or enhanced in any way (take that, ChatGPT!), and of an extraordinarily high standard. Now it was time for the audience vote: which novel should win? and which novel would win? The SPS audience doesn't usually select the same book for each - but this year, amazingly, we did. We thought one book should win them both. And that book was …
.jpg)
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sonny by Kiran Desai. With a hefty vote of confidence in both categories, this was clearly the novel that our audience thought should, and would, win. Audition, presumably much to Sam's relief, scored 'nul points' all round.
So - was our confidence well-founded, or completely misplaced? After seven years of critical ineptitude, would we, like Desai's Sonia and Sonny, finally achieve our happy ending?
NO. Of course not! For a seventh year in a row, SPS readers failed to spot a winner. Accurate predictions are for other people. The novel that actually won this year was …
Flesh, by David Szalay. Are we 'ok' with this? Hmm. The judges claimed that they had read nothing quite like it, but Flesh is, arguably, quite like lots of novels. It's like The Great Gatsby (but now); The White Tiger (but here); The Line of Beauty (but straight). Nevertheless, superficial similarities don't weaken its impact, power, or stylistic brilliance. As Freddie beautifully concluded, 'Flesh is no portrait. There are no bold oils, nor rich textures. Flesh is a sharpened pencil sketch, drawn on the kerb of an equally grey pavement, blurred by the rain and tread of feet, with the occasional flash of sunlight leaving behind more total wanness.'
Huge thanks once again to all of our readers: the quality of their presentations was extraordinary, and their eloquence and insight were inspiring. Thanks also to Mrs Cummings and Mrs Wilkinson for organising the event, to Mr Mahmoud for his calm and unflappable role as chairman, to Theo for some brilliant questions, and to all of our audience, live and online, for supporting our event. If you'd like to read about our previous years of dismal predictive failure, you can find them here: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 and 2018. See you next year!
*a word encapsulating a concept or complex reality
No comments:
Post a Comment