Here’s an admission: this year’s Man Booker longlist caught me napping. At the time of its publication I had not read even one of the longlisted titles. In self-defence, I was out of the country on sabbatical and had three of them in my luggage (by Elizabeth Strout, AL Kennedy and Deborah Levy, since you ask). But I can honestly say this has never happened before.
Second-guessing prize long- and shortlists is a mug’s game which literary journalists are compelled to play every year, but this year the odds seemed to be stacked even higher against us. Even the oracular Justine Jordan name-checked only six of the 13 in her column rounding up likely contenders. She has now sagely gone off on her own sabbatical, so is unavailable for shortlist prediction duty, though her tips look pretty robust.
She smartly backed Ian McGuire’s “gloriously nasty whaling yarn” North Water as a hot outsider. She was also enthusiastic about Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk, “an uncomfortable mining of myth, motherhood and female self-definition”, declared AL Kennedy’s Serious Sweet her best book in years; and was keen on David Szalay’s All That Man Is , which she described as “an impressive investigation of masculinity and – with excellent timing – Europe”.
Assuming that my reading is not seriously out of step with everyone else’s, is it just coincidence that led to my resounding zero? I think not. For one thing, I’ve been been reading a lot of fiction in translation this year, because I think that’s where a lot of the new energy lies.
Though I understand the argument for the ineligibility of translated books (how much is the work of the writer, how much of the translator?), the fact that the Booker is now open to Americans but not to the literatures of Europe, Latin America and much of Asia seems increasingly skewing. Han Kang’s Human Acts about a blot on the historical conscience of Korea surely belongs alongside Madeleine Thien’s chronicle of 20th century Chinese history, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, though one was written in English and the other in Korean. (The main Booker’s loss is the International prize’s gain, but it consigned Han’s superb novel, The Vegetarian, to an ‘international’ silo).
But this list also seems to will a change in generation and genre: the “zipalong” imperative defined by 2011 judge Chris Mullin is in evidence in the inclusion of two thrillers (one, The Many, a gothic miniature, at 172 pages). The Many is also one of four first novels. Though this is fewer than the 11 debuts that appeared on this year’s Baileys longlist, it’s still part of a fashion for prioritising novelty that rarely stands up in all its choices.
Before I’m dismissed as a crabby oldtimer, having now had time to study the contenders, I think this is a decent list. So I’m going to stick my neck on the block yet again and nominate the following for Tuesday’s shortlist: Hot Milk; Serious Sweet; The Sellout; My Name is Lucy Barton; The North Water; Do Not Say We Have Nothing.
Now over to you. I’ll send a selection of my favourite translated novels to anyone who gets all six right.
The longlist in full
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
The Schooldays of Jesus by JM Coetzee
Serious Sweet by AL Kennedy
Hot Milk by Deborah Levy
His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet
North Water by Ian McGuire
Hystopia by David Means
The Many by Wyl Menmuir
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh
Work Like Any Other by Virginia Reeves
My Name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout
All That Man Is by David Szalay
Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien
