No image strikes greater fear into me than the yearly publicity shot of the Booker longlist. Thirteen books standing upright and huddled together, some fat, some thin, gazing into my soul like I’m witness to a criminal line-up. There’s the don, Hilary Mantel, an obvious inclusion but surely her win would be the most boring possible conclusion. Anne Tyler, war-beaten like a trireme, appears on a purely honourary basis, the concept of literary awards surely an insult to her living legend status. Colum McCann, as always, is just happy to be there.
It is impossible, too, to ignore the sheer amount of unfamiliar names on this year’s longlist. Eight of the thirteen novels are debuts, which makes the list only more daunting as we feel we’re fending for ourselves in uncharted seas. Therefore I offer myself as a sort of literary Jane McDonald. This small selection is truly a credit to the diversity of this year’s longlist, taking us from Glasgow in the 1980s to Ethiopia in the 1940s, from late-00s Kilburn to present-day Pune in India. This diversity, however, also extends to their success.
Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain brings us to 1980s Glasgow and contains all the joie de vivre that you'd expect from a novel set in 1980s Glasgow. The novel is quite Dickensian in its set-up: it is the story of a young boy who faces constant, extreme adversity in the hands of a cast of larger-than-life characters who often tread the fine line between the comic and tragic.
There’s Shug Bain, the philandering stepfather who drives a taxi and abandons his family, causing them to move to the bleak mining town of Pithead. There’s Agnes Bain, the loving matriarch who sinks deeper and deeper into alcoholism, her life and dreams collapsing around her.
And of course there’s young Shuggie, a boy who is denied anything resembling a childhood, forced to grow up before he can discover who he is.
While I would describe the novel overall as good, the relentless misery of Shuggie Bain often ends up reading like soapy melodrama. This is likely the result of Stuart’s bricks-and-mortar approach to prose writing which, despite his self-conscious attempts to inject humour to detract from his weaknesses, really lets the book down and absolutely inhibits Shuggie Bain from being a great novel. Instead, it is Stuart’s load-bearing knack for characterisation and dialogue that keeps you going through this hefty, bleak book.
Maaza Mengiste's The Shadow King is a work that fails to live up to its fascinating premise. It is set against the backdrop of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War of the mid-1930s, when Benito Mussolini went up against Emperor Haile Selassie with the aim of making Ethiopia, like its neighbour Eritrea, an Italian colony. As the war broke out, Selassie famously fled to exile in England, not returning to his country for five years, until the East African Campaign saw the Allied forces free Ethiopia of Italian rule in 1941.
Mengiste’s novel focuses on Hirut, a young woman who becomes employed as a maid to Kidane, an officer within Haile Selassie’s close circle. As the Italian forces begin their invasion and Selassie flees, Hirut assembles a Cumann na mBan-style battalion of women who fight alongside Kidane and his men against the Italians.
The potential of this novel is astronomical but, sadly, The Shadow King is rarely enticing and I was often just left plainly bored. My feelings are in no way helped by the novel’s several interlude chapters, which follow Haile Selassie himself as he prepares for and executes his exile. These interludes are excellent fragments of storytelling that the rest of the novel could learn something from, but they merely exist as oases in a desert of boredom.
Pairing all of this with Mengiste’s singular approach to prose (she has a weakness for colons and will often use several per sentence as if they were commas), urges me to feel nothing but disappointment in regards to The Shadow King.
If the Booker were solely judged on opening lines, Avni Doshi's Burnt Sugar would be the clear winner with the glorious "I would be lying if I said my mother's misery has never given me pleasure". As Tara succumbs to dementia, it causes her daughter Antara to assume the role of carer, an ironic title, because Antara has rarely cared for her mother. Doshi explores the fractured history of Tara and Antara's relationship in a vinegary story that bolsters no winners.
The most fascinating aspect of the novel is Tara’s wild past. Leaving her husband after the birth of Antara, she joins an ashram and becomes the lover of a guru. In the ashram, the young Antara is forced to find a mother figure in the eccentric Kali Mata, an American who made her way to India and became the guru’s consort. Eventually Tara sends Antara off to a bleak convent school.
It isn’t difficult to understand why there is now friction between Antara and her mother, but what makes the novel stand out is the total unreliability of Antara’s perspective. As it progresses, and in a very Moshfeghean move, we begin to question Antara’s role as narrator and the veracity of her claims.
Burnt Sugar is a captivating work. While I feel it may not be overall strong enough to make the shortlist (it has serious pacing issues and can sometimes be confusing in its sporadic timeline), it is undoubtably one of the Booker’s more interesting offerings this year.
By far the best novel of my brief overview is Gabriel Krauze's Who They Was. A bloody and brutal book, it is an excellent work of autofiction in which Krauze fictionalises the true events of his younger years as a violent delinquent in London. Krauze writes entirely in Multicultural London English (a random line reads like: We go out onto the balcony to bun the zoot I billed and Gotti says the way you was just on it the second I said come we eat that brer, that's how I know you're on this ting Snoopz). There are shades of Welsh's Trainspotting and Burgess' A Clockwork Orange in this valiant prose style.
The novel sees Gabriel, known back then as Snoopz, as he tries to balance his criminal life, a world of iced-out Daytonas and Seikos, of Prada and Fendi and Gucci, with his life as a student, studying for an English degree at Queen Mary. It feels like a well-worn dichotomy, the young gang member who also happens to be a brilliant student with a passion for words, but since this is autofiction, who can judge? This is Krauze’s real life.
And honestly, what a life. The fact that Krauze has managed to construct a poetic and cohesive narrative entirely out of hyperspecific slang and lingo proves his standing as a fiercely talented writer. Who They Was is a brutal whirlwind of a novel that, in many ways, acts as an atonement for the violence of Krauze’s youth. This is a truly unmissable debut.
The shortlist for the Booker Prize will be announced on Tuesday, September 15th.
The 2020 longlist is:
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (Oneworld Publications)
This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Faber & Faber)
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)
Who They Was by Gabriel Krauze (4th Estate, HarperCollins)
The Mirror & The Light by Hilary Mantel (4th Estate, HarperCollins)
Apeirogon by Colum McCann (Bloomsbury Publishing)
The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste (Canongate Books)
Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (Bloomsbury Circus, Bloomsbury Publishing)
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Picador, Pan Macmillan)
Real Life by Brandon Taylor (Originals, Daunt Books Publishing)
Redhead by The Side of The Road by Anne Tyler (Chatto & Windus, Vintage)
Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward (Corsair, Little, Brown)
How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang (Virago, Little, Brown)
