A Literary Life

The longlist for the 2013 Man Booker Prize seems a diverse one.   There are works that range from 100 pages to 1,000.   They are a set of works that cross continents and set in different historical periods, from the dark ages to present day.   They are works that deal with the Iraq conflict, the fallout from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the enclosure of British land, a pioneering flight and the effects of the 2008 economic crash on two very different countries. Yet despite such differences, there are common links between some of the works.   Two novels deal with the economic crash (The Spinning Heart, Five Star Billionaire).   Two novels mention Virginia Woolf (Unexploded, in which Woolf appears).   A number of the novels deal with foreigners adrift in the United States (We Need New Names, The Lowland, TransAtlantic).   There are novels that deal with motherhood (The Testament of Mary and The Lowland) and novels that deal with children...

Eleanor Catton came to prominence with her 2007 debut, The Rehearsal, which won international acclaim, and was awarded The Betty Trask Award, and a long-listing for the Orange Prize in 2010.   There was, then, high expectation for her second novel.   Before it had even been published in the UK, that second novel, The Luminaries, had been long-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2013.   Coming in at over 800 pages, The Luminaries is a complex, multi-layered novel that owes a debt to both Dickens and Wilkie Collins, but yet feels fresh, thrilling and very modern despite its 1860s setting. Opening in January 1866, Walter Moody has just disembarked off Godspeed, a barque that has bought him to Hokitika on the west coast of New Zealand where a gold rush is forcing towns to spring out of the barren landscape.   He checks into the Crown Hotel where, unbeknown to him, 12 men have gathered.   As Moody is quietly interrogated, he reveals to men that he can be t...

At over 1,000 pages, The Kills is by far the longest novel on the 2013 Man Booker Prize longlist.   It is by novelist, Richard House, and comes trumpeted as a multimedia experience, for House is also a filmmaker and there are short films that add to The Kills experience when viewed online or embedded in the digital edition. The Kills is actually four novellas grouped together (the spine of the hardback states that these are Books 1 – 4, novellas individually titled Sutler, The Massive, The Kill and The Hit, and all were, it seems, published individually as ebooks before being grouped together for physical publication.)   Then there are those online films – the book provides the URLs and tells you when they should be watched.   If you buy the book on your iPad you can watch the films at the right spots.   These films are extras, things that enhance what you know already, or offer a side story connected to the main plot, and though they are not necessary t...

Colm Tóibín is no stranger to the Man Booker prize.   He has been shortlisted in 1999 and 2004, and longlisted in 2009.   His work is often cited for its originality, beauty and power.   Of all the novels longlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize, Tóibín’s is the shortest, coming in at just 104 pages in hardback. The Testament of Mary tells the story of Jesus Christ from his mother’s point of view.   Her first person narration brings us close to many of the gospel tales, but from a perspective never accorded them before.   To present stories that are so familiar to anybody raised in a Christian country, whose iconography is ubiquitous, must present challenges to any writer: to make those moments seem fresh and startling again is the mark of a master.   For in The Testament of Mary, Tóibín manages to breathe new life into the gospel stories, and to bring to life for the reader a woman whom we all think we know, but never truly have. My initial ...

Jim Crace published his first book in 1986, and since then has released a number of highly regarded novels, including 1997’s Quarantine (shortlisted for the Man Booker in that year), and 1999’s Being Dead.   He might have other great novels besides these two, but I hold my hand up and admit these are the only two I’d previously read.   I thought both were fantastic, which makes me wonder now why I’ve not tracked down his other novels.   There has been some reluctance in me, I think, the feeling that maybe those other novels of his maybe won’t be as good as Quarantine or Being Dead.   When Crace announced his retirement from fiction I felt it as a sad thing, that we were losing someone with an original and startling voice.   Then his possibly final novel, Harvest, was longlisted for the Booker, and I returned to the sometimes strange world of Jim Crace’s fiction. As summer comes to a close, and Walter Thirsk begins to prepare for winter.   He li...