I generally avoid books that have won or been shortlisted for major literary prizes, and also other books by these authors. Major prize-winners are often contentious. One Booker Prize judge walked out after his colleagues picked a novel he described as ‘utter crap’. Another was deemed ‘an affront to literature’ by a director of a major bookselling chain. They do, however, occasionally surface as choices by members of my book club.
Some years ago, one of our group with intellectual leanings chose Autumn, by Ali Smith. She is a distinguished academic, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded the CBE. Her books have won or been shortlisted for numerous awards, including the Booker and Costa prizes.
I think Autumn is about a young woman’s relationship with her German neighbour. Her potty mother disapproves both because he is a foreigner and she suspects he is gay. But if anyone who has read the book thinks differently, I would love to hear. The novel is not a book, it is a number of disjointed chapters bound into one volume. Rarely does one follow on from another and there is no indication of where you are, which could be the present, going back in time or looking towards the future. The style is weird, in particular, Ali’s repeated use of a single phrase, which she then repeats, with variations, for at least one and often two pages. Autumn was shortlisted for the 2016 Costa…… Fortunately, the meeting to discuss this book was cancelled, avoiding any potential embarrassment when the rest of us would have panned it.
Ian McEwan’s Saturday was another book club number. A prolific and distinguished author, Ian has written novels, short stories, children’s books, scripts and screenplays. A fellow of four societies and a CBE, he has been nominated six times for the Booker Prize and won it for Amsterdam.
Saturday chronicles a day in the life of top London neurosurgeon Henry Perowne. It is 2003, and the Iraq war looms. It begins as Henry awakes and begins to think about his barrister wife Rosalind and his two children. Theo is an up-and-coming blues guitarist, Daisy an aspiring novelist living in Paris. Daisy is due home that day for a family party. Rosalind has an emergency at the newspaper where she works and departs early. Henry gets up, has a chat over coffee with Theo, agrees to attend his rehearsal later, then leaves to fetch his car and begin his schedule. En route to a squash game with his registrar, he is involved in a minor collision with another car and meets Baxter, whose aggressive behaviour he recognises as symptomatic of the fatal Huntington’s Chorea. After squash, he goes shopping, visits his elderly mother and finally beats the traffic to attend the rehearsal.
The backstory I found both very odd and incongruous, because there are regular accounts of neurosurgical procedures in minute and excruciating detail. Ian shadowed an eminent surgeon for two years, sitting in operating theatres and taking notes. Why, oh why?
Come the evening, the party is in full swing chez Perowne, when Baxter and his thugs break in to rob the family. Baxter forces Daisy to do a striptease to try and extract the location of the safe, which does not exist. In the ensuing fight, Baxter fractures his skull and Henry operates to save him. This would not be allowed ethically and especially after Henry’s rather liquid evening.
Ian’s style is good and very readable, but the whole novel does not hang together and the ending looks rushed and ill thought out. It was critically and commercially successful, and won The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, but there were some mixed reviews that described it as superficial and lacking in depth.
In a similar vein, how do some books ever get published? One such is Vernon God Little, described by its proposer as a Marmite book. Set in the US mid-West, it revolves around a miscarriage of justice to a teenage boy. By the end of the first page, I felt nauseated. Crude and cruel descriptions of people with problems like obesity or a limp. Graphic and coarse comments about the minutiae of bodily and sexual functions. Could the author have crammed any more four-letter words into one page? I managed 35 pages before I gave up. My crit deemed it ‘an unending foul-mouthed stream’ and ‘possibly the worst book I have ever read’. Much to the chagrin of its supporter, we all shot it down in flames.
So who is right? Am I stuffy, middle-of-the-road and unappreciative of some fine literature, or is it that the literary cognoscenti just write on a different plane and win plaudits because they are judged by other literary savants?
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Good question, Nigel. To which I have no answer. Lit is always a matter of taste, and so it can be hard to arbitrate it. I’m also in a book club and often wind up reading books I’d never otherwise have even heard of. That is mostly a blessing. Occasionally, I just opt out of a particular book if I couldn’t get past the first 30 pages.