‘The Folding Star’ by Alan Hollinghurst

Elegantly written it may be, but there is something unpleasantly unsavoury and judgemental in Alan Hollinghurst’s somewhat pompous novel of obsession and personal identity.

Redolent of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice or a gay Lolita, in moving to the historic Belgian city of Bruges to teach English conversation, the disaffected gay Edward Manners finds himself besotted with Luc, his effete young 17 year-old student. In his early 30s, Manners sees himself as something of an aesthete, obsessed with Luc as a thing of beauty rather than necessarily the boy himself. It’s a chaste obsession but with a hint of returned flirtation as an aloof Luc, initially unknowingly, is unaware of his tutor’s interest. Such emotional distance only encourages Manners, particularly as he is aware (but without details) of a sordid tale that led to the boy’s expulsion from his select school a year earlier.

But it being Hollinghurst, nothing is simple as a single narrative of obsession by an older man for a younger boy. Early in his time in the city, Manners becomes the lover of Cherif who himself becomes obsessed with the Englishman. But Manners’ passion for Luc means he cannot return the affection. With teaching insufficient to support his drinking, the tutor finds himself in an emerging (non-sexual) relationship with the father of Marcel, his second English conversation student. The curator and director of the museum dedicated to the (fictional) local symbolist artist Edgard Orst, Paul Echevin employs Manners. As the Englishman gets to know the older man, he discovers yet more tales of obsession.

It’s dense and dramatic, with arguably the most interesting part of the novel revealed when Manners is forced to return to Sussex for the funeral of ‘Dawn’, an ex-lover and schoolfriend killed in a car crash. Manners finally lets his guard down when reminiscing about his now departed schoolfriend and their exploration of sexuality together. Hollinghurst’s lyricism comes to the fore as his memories of two schoolboys are intertwined with the touching nostalgia of his father and his early death.

Hollinghurst is a sublime writer when on form. With The Folding Star, graphic sexual detail (not unusual for the novelist) as Manners enjoys encounters with locals and tourists alike in Bruges, but there’s something uncomfortable about his feelings for Luc and the readiness of others to not only understand but help.

Shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize but lost out to James Kelman and How late it was, how late…

’If I Survive You’ by Jonathan Escoffery

An exquisite, racking compulsion to survive underlies Jonathan Escoffery’s wonderful debut novel as, escaping 1970s political upheaval and violence, a Jamaican family chooses to settle in Miami.

But nothing is as easy as hoped or expected and, some 30 years later, have learned the hard way that the American Dream is not for all. Matriarch Sanya has returned to her native Kingston whilst sons Trelawny (in particular and who proves to be the main focus of If I Survive You) and Delano continue to struggle with identity and acceptance. So much so that early in the novel, following a fight with his father Topper, Trelawny, working in an assisted living residential home, is living out of his car in downtown Miami. Choices made by Topper in favour of Delano over Trelawny from childhood onwards are current throughout, leading to the younger son’s constant low esteem of himself and which contributed to the fight that now sees the two in dispute.

Full of eccentricity and heart, Escoffery’s novel is in reality a series of eight interlinked short stories – or long fractured non-linear chapters spread over time and place. From driving inland as a family to avoid the ravages of Hurricane Andrew (what proved to be the most destructive hurricane to ever hit Florida) in 1992 through to finding a way to survive the 2008 recession, this is about carving out a place – a series of odd jobs for Trelawny, a desperate Delano going to extreme measures to find the money to get his kids back following his wife’s departure, cousin Cukie discovering his father just did not want to be found.

The complexities of personal cultural identity with its perspective and acceptance is explored by Escoffery with humour, sublime storytelling and insightful evaluation of the world Trelawny and his brother survive. Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, it lost out to Paul Lynch and Prophet Song.

’Western Lane’ by Chetna Maroo

A spare, tender coming-of-age tale as eleven-year-old Gopi finds solace in the grief for the loss of her mother through the regimented squash training schedule introduced by her father.

At the local Western Lane sports centre in east London, Gopi has been playing since she was old enough to hold a racquet. Her Pakistani-born father and his brother Pavan (now living in Edinburgh) have been obsessed with the sport since they were young. Their love for the game has rubbed off onto Gopi (less so her other three sisters). Since the loss of his wife, Pa, struggling to articulate his grief and communicate with his children, has lost himself in the world of squash, constantly playing and replaying videos of 1980s Pakistani world champions Jahangir Khan and Jansher Khan. Supporting him through his grief, Gopi frequently joins him into the early hours of the morning.

Her life becomes dictated by the sport and its rhythms. Early morning practices before school and, normally, after. It’s brutal but it’s Gopi’s world. Her father is with her all the way as is Ged, the 13 year-old with his own power and talent on the court. The only cloud on the horizon is her aunt Ranjan, traditional in her approach, disapproving of the upbringing of the four sisters, childless herself and looking to informally adopt Gopi to help relieve the burden but follow in the ways of the family back in Pakistan. Edinburgh beckons Gopi but she is reluctant to leave Pa, her sisters, Ged – and the sport.

Western Lane is an evocative debut novel from Kenyan-born, UK-based Chetna Maroo. Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, it’s a quietly powerful narrative of empowerment, determination and sisterhood. It lost out to Paul Lynch and Prophet Song.

’Study For Obedience’ by Sarah Bernstein

Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, Study For Obedience from UK-based, Canadian-born author Sarah Bernstein is a meditative stream of consciousness that is unsettling and not always easy to digest.

Our unnamed narrator (in fact everything remains unnamed) drops everything to look after her elder brother whose wife has left him and taken the children with her. Home to the wealthy, entrepreneurial brother is a remote manor house in a small village in an unspecified northern country. In spite of his business success, the brother seems incapable of looking after himself – to the point the narrator in her subservience dresses him, feeds him, bathes him. And then, almost immediately after she arrives, the brother leaves on an extended business trip, leaving her alone in a place she knows no-one and does not know the customs nor the language. The brother to some extent has been accepted in the village, but the narrator’s arrival coincides with a series of local natural catastrophes. It is soon apparent she is blamed by the suspicious local, rural community.

And it is soon apparent that she (and her brother) are an obscure though reviled people who had been dogged across borders and put into pits. The author’s surname certainly positions the outsider nature of the narrative and throughout Study For Obedience, modern-day anti-semitism and stereotype is rife – none more so than the revulsion of the villagers towards her presence. Past European histories come to mind.

Meandering, occasionally darkly funny, frequently disturbing, Study For Obedience is extraordinary prose. But whether it make for ‘enjoyable’ reading ia another matter.

‘Prophet Song’ by Paul Lynch

A sense of dread continually pervades Paul Lynch’s superb, chilling Booker Prize winning Prophet Song.

Dublin today and a totalitarian dystopian Ireland unfolds following the extreme right National Alliance party seizing control of the government and leading eventually to the erosion of civil liberties and the outbreak of civil war.

With sweeping powers bestowed upon it by the new government, the Irish national police Garda Síochána judiciously arrest and detain. Central to Prophet Song, scientist Eilish Stack, a mother of four, is trying to save her family following the arrest of her husband. Organising a protest strike, Larry Stack, teacher and trade union leader, is picked up and promptly disappears without word.

It’s a visceral experience as Eilish’s world quite literally implodes around her. A comfortable suburban home life, a recent return to work following maternity leave, Eilish’s main concern other than the immediate needs of her family is the onset of dementia in her father who lives on the other side of Dublin. But all this changes with the arrest of Larry and with it the labelling of the Stack family as antisocial.

Eilish loses her job, her kids are targeted. But the Stack family is not alone – more and more families find themselves on the margins, civil rights eroded, travel around the city made more and more difficult. Neighbours living on friendly terms for years are divided: some disappear. Eilish’s Toronto-based sister, Áine, attempts desperately to convince Eilish to leave. But she refuses. She needs to be home when Larry is released. When that becomes increasingly unlikely, Eilish continues to be in denial of the gravity of the situation. And by then it is possibly too late.

Civil war breaks out: Dublin is divided by the river. Central Dublin is secured as pro-government. All services including hospitals are relocated. Security checks are introduced to enter the centre. The eldest Stack child, teenager Mark is caught between child and adulthood. Mandatory conscription by the police state at 17 sees him, on his birthday, leaving to join the rebel forces.

Like an onion, society is peeled away layer by layer. Totalitarianism evolves literally page by page in Prophet Song. Experiencing it through the day-to-day of Eilish, it becomes so extraordinarily relatable. But aspects also have recent historical reference – the military junta in Argentina in the 1970s, German and Italian Jews in pre-war 1930s, the Balkans, the Syrian civil war, Northern Ireland itself. Political or religious, the divides are there, the rifts emphasised.

Prophet Song is unquestionably devastating. But, in its deep humanity, it’s also tender, moving and thought-provoking. Paul Lynch deservedly collected the 2023 Booker Prize for a novel that remains with you long after the final page.

’This Other Eden’ by Paul Harding

Founded in 1792, a small island off the coast of Maine is home to a small number of racially integrated people founded by formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience. A little over a century later, their descendants, diminished in number, are faced with the cleansing of the island as authorities look to the welfare and education of the few children remaining.

This Other Eden is a powerful tale of prejudice and ‘other’, a small, relatively self-sufficient group which survives (just) outside the mainstream. And it is this very fact that is the cause for concern. Matthew Diamond, an idealistic missionary schoolteacher, arrives every summer, rowing across the short distance from the mainland and, within this disparate eclectic group of people, he has discovered one child fluent in Latin and another a brilliant mathematician. But both are female and black and no opportunities therefore exist in the wider community beyond the island. And the authorities with their brutal prejudices are without question in the process of clearing the island.

Teenage Ethan Honey is different. A superb artist and light-skinned boy easily able to ‘pass’, Diamond finds a way to save the boy from the fate of his family and neighbours, arranging for Ethan to stay with a former friend and artist some distance from Apple Island. Lyrical and pastoral his time may be on the land of Mr Hale, the young Irish maid soon becomes too big a distraction and its not long before both are dismissed from the property. Honey is never heard from again.

A novel inspired by the true story of the residents of Malaga Island off the coast of Maine, This Other Eden is an extraordinary story of resilience by the islanders stuck in their own struggles of survival. Apple Island is no easy place to live: the North Atlantic coastline is no walk in the park. The prophetic Zachary Hand to God Proverbs, a Civil War veteran who lives in a hollow tree carving biblical scenes, is a longtime survivor as are the nocturnal Theophilus and Candace Larks and their children, living by night, sleeping as a mass huddle in a decrepit cottage by day. Their lives may not be ‘normal’ according to social mores, but it remains ‘theirs’ and each knows nothing else. The fact what is theirs is about to be taken away from them is the fundamental injustice at the core of Paul Harding’s novel.

Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize but lost out to Prophet Song by Paul Lynch.

Booker Prize Shortlist: 2022

Opinions inevitably vary when it comes to placing preferences for one item above another (the Oscars, anyone?). Certainly no difference here as, having read all the books on the 2022 Booker Prize shortlist, the personal burning question is – did the judges make the right call?

Shortlisted books first:
Glory – NoViolet Bulowayo
The Trees – Percival Everett
Treacle Walker – Alan Garner
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida – Shehan Karunatilaka
Small Things Like These – Claire Keegan
Oh William! – Elizabeth Strout

It’s a pretty consistent list although surprised that neither Young Mungo (Douglas Stuart, winner in 2020) nor To Paradise (Hanya Yanagihara) even made the longlist – and personally would have loved to see The Colony by Audrey Magee make the shortlist.

So what of the six – and did the judges make the right call in awarding the 2022 Booker Prize to Shehan Karunatilaka and The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida?

The last book on the list I read shores up the shortlist at the bottom of the pile. The final book of a trilogy, Oh William! is by far the weakest of the three as Elizabeth Strout continues to follow the narrative life story of Lucy Barton. It’s a pity as the first two made for great reading of a woman who came from nothing and Amgash, Illinois to become a successful writer.  Instead, whilst a tale eminently readable, Oh William! is not as commanding or engrossing as its predecessors. (60%)

At 87, Alan Garner became the oldest shortlisted author in the 60 years of the Booker Prize. An author from my childhood – the fantasies of The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and The Moon of Gomrath rivalled the Narnia tales of C.S.Lewis as holiday and bedtime reading – Treacle Walker is a playful and luminous novella on the art of storytelling and a beautifully written, evocative fusion of a tale that is difficult to categorise. (62%)

Two down and four to go – and interestingly, to my mind there’s very little between them – but unlike the judges of the 2019 Booker Prize who presented a tie with Bernadine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other) and Margaret Atwood (The Testaments), a decision is to be made. So, being aware that the four are interchangeable according to the day read – fourth on the list is the eventual winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

Mordantly funny, brimming with pathos, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida looks to explore and expose the carnage of Sri Lanka’s civil wars. Described as part ghost story, part whodunnit, part political satire, it’s a crazy ride as the story looks to identify the killers of acclaimed war photographer and narrator of the book, Maali Almeida. It’s a frenetic novel that is incisive, frustrating, funny, confusing and was lauded by the judges for its ambition in scope and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques. (70%)

Calm and reflective, Claire Keegan’s novella Small Things Like These is short in word count, morally visceral in impact. It places Ireland’s inhumane Magdalene Laundries under the microscope. Ostensibly a home for ‘fallen women’, the laundries in local Catholic convents were found throughout Ireland where the young women experienced everything from deprivation to abuse and death. Short and capacious, it is a deeply affecting debut novel. (71%)

Glory is the novel I thought would pick up the prize. A coruscating African Animal Farm, a commentary on global politics, a bitter yet, at times, incredibly and bitingly funny chorus against corrupt Zimbabwean politician Robert Mugabe, Glory is NoViolet Bulawayo’s follow up to her 2013 literary debut, We Need New Names. It’s an equally deeply political and social observation of life in Zimbabwe. But, in cloaking her world and her characters in the voices of animals, Bulawayo avoids potential tome-like overt political agitprop. Instead, she can call out and emphasise the absurdities of politics, both localised and global, and how the common people are impacted in an accessible energy of a novel. (72%)

But my preference falls on new-to-me American author, Percival Everett and The Trees. Everett has written more than 20 novels and was Pulitzer Prize shortlisted in 2020. But few of his books have made it outside the States. Comic masterpiece The Trees will change all that. A dark social satire that directly addresses racism past and present in a bold and shocking way, it also mixes in old-fashioned pulp fiction film noir storylines of murder. It’s a page-turning comic horror of a novel: it also topped the best of the 2022 Booker Prize list for me. (74%).

Yet although it was not my preferred choice, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, because of that ambition in scope and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques was arguably a good call to win the Booker in 2022. My jury is out on that one.

‘Oh William!’ by Elizabeth Strout

Part three of the trilogy – assuming author Elizabeth Strout decides to end the Lucy Barton narrative at this juncture – is, like its predecessors, deceptively simple in style and prose, and continues to explore the then and now of Lucy’s life. Only the now sees Lucy, a recent widow, spending unexpectedly more time with her first husband William – and consequently the then becomes about him and them.

An eminent storyteller, Strout weaves and wafts between time frames and characters as William discovers he has a half sister only a few years older than himself. It appears that when William’s mother walked off the Maine potato farm belonging to her first husband, she left behind a baby girl. He feels he needs to know more. With time on both their hands (William’s third, and much younger, wife has just left him), Lucy agrees to accompany her former husband to the small, rural town in Maine.

And that’s about it as far as a ‘story’ is concerned. But Strout does not need a structured beginning middle and end to her storytelling. Lucy Barton may remain as the central pivot but plot lines be darned – random moments of recall, distinctive memory of place and time, conversations partially remembered, vague recognitions all form part of Lucy’s armoury of life remembered.

But sadly, Oh William! does not reach the heights of its predecessors. There’s something laconic and uncertain as the two spend time together – either in Maine or New York, alone or in the company of their two daughters. The strengths of Lucy developed over the years, someone who came from nothing as we are frequently reminded, are somehow undermined as the relationship with the William of today appears to make Lucy appear somehow gullible – not the same character who left home in rural Amgash, Illinois to take up a place of study in Chicago. Add the level of condescension – oh William! this, oh William! that – prevalent throughout and the result is a tale eminently readable but not as commanding or engrossing as the earlier parts of the trilogy.

Nominated for the 2022 Booker Prize but lost out to Shehan Karunatilaka and The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

‘The Good Doctor’ by Damon Galgut

Taut, sparingly written, The Good Doctor is a melancholic parable as a young South African doctor comes to terms with his position at the almost forgotten hospital clinic in the virtually deserted capital of what was once, during apartheid times, a Bantu homeland. Now, no-one cares about what was once a so-called nation-state. Passion (for or against such travesties of black home rule) has been replaced by indifference.

Frank Eloff is a young man escaping his failed marriage after his wife left him for his best friend. But that was many years ago with a promised promotion that never materialised. His boss, Dr Ngema, has never moved on and, in spite of her constant innovation and change mantra, little has changed with the exception of the slow denudement of the clinic itself. Few patients, few medical staff, a closed-off wing of the building, it’s all something of an irrelevance. So the arrival of recent graduate Laurence Waters, keen, enthusisatic and blind to limitations, is wholly unexpected, particularly as, in spite of the emptiness of the clinic, Dr Ngema decides he is to share rooms with Frank.

The two men are essentially different sides of the same coin. Cynical and disenchanted Frank can only watch and judge as an enthusiastic Laurence looks to take the hospital to the people – schemes involving the medics travelling into the bush to remote African villages. He’s a man on a mission, oblivious to the indifference around him – so much so he alienates himself from others, particularly Frank (but Waters being Waters, he’s even oblivious to this). A visit from African-American girlfriend, Zanele, adds to the uncertainties of the new doctor – she shares his political idealism but there’s a noticeable lack of intimacy between the two.

As Frank struggles, his old habits in the local township take on new meanings – particularly with the arrival of a regiment of men from the South African army. Incursions across the nearby border means tighter security. Frank recognises the major in charge from his days as a conscript – a brutal and sadistic Afrikaner responsible for the torture of numerous black prisoners and who is now employed by the new government. The sinister old dictator, now much diminished, who once ran the homeland also reappears having assumed to be dead. He’s to be found squatting in the old ruin of the presidential palace, tending to the gardens.

Incorporate a Cuban couple working in the hospital along with the unqualified Tehogo as a male nurse (and who is likely to be responsible for the diminishing equipment in the hospital) and Galgut offers us a snapshot of South Africa past and present – or at least a country in transition from the past into the present. Cape Town, Johannesburg are distant edifices as far as The Good Doctor is concerned – bureaucracies where decisions are made that impact the clinic without any connection to place.

The past and the future are dangerous countries; I had been living in no man’s land, between their borders, for the last seven years.

Like the wreck of the homeland capital, Galgut explores the promise of the new from the ruins of the old. But with the ghosts of the past partially incorporated into the present, with a level of apathy and indifference towards progress when family and tradition are the norm, what does it all mean? As the ex-president confides to Frank – but who will cut the grass?

The Good Doctor is a thoughtful, engaging slow burn of a novel shortlisted for 2003 Booker Prize (but lost out to DBC Pierre and Vernon God Little).

‘Small Things Like These’ by Claire Keegan

Economic in word count, morally visceral in its impact, Small Things Like These places Ireland’s inhumane Magdalene Laundries under the microscope.

It’s 1985 and Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, lives with his wife, Eileen, and their five daughters in a small, typical Irish town of shopkeepers, small businesses (including Bill’s), a cafe, a pub, a church – and a Catholic state-sanctioned Magdalene Laundry.

Ostensibly a home for ‘fallen women’, the laundries were found throughout Ireland where the young women experienced everything from deprivation to abuse and death. In making a delivery as Christmas approaches, Bill encounters one of the girls hiding in the coal hole of the convent, run by the Good Shepherd nuns as a training school there for girls, providing them with a basic education. They also ran a laundry business. The abuse of their charges is the worst kept secret in the town yet the laundry services continue to be used.

Bill’s encounter changes the course of his life and that of his family, but not before his wife warns him If you want to get on in life, there’s things you have to ignore, so you can keep on. It’s not something Bill can do.

Claire Keegan’s debut novel is far from being the first exposé of the abuses endemic within the laundries, but short and capacious, it is deeply affecting.

Shortlisted for 2022 Booker Prize, Small Things Like These lost out to The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka.