Booker prize 2022: The Final Six

THE BOOKER PRIZE changes fortunes and creates celebrities. Overnight it transforms a novel into a bestseller. This year’s shortlist is noteworthy for its gender parity (three men, three women), thematic range and geographical diversity. The shortlisted authors come from five different countries—NoViolet Bulawayo (Zimbabwe), Claire Keegan (Ireland), Elizabeth Strout and Percival Everett (the US), Alan Garner (the UK) and Shehan Karunatilaka (Sri Lanka). Half of the books are inspired by true political events, such as the Sri Lankan war, the unrest in Zimbabwe during Robert Mugabe’s time, the racial murder of Emmett Till in the US and the Magdalene Laundries in Ireland. The shortlist has a few firsts to its credit; Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These at 128 pages is the shortest book to ever make it to the prize’s list. The oldest author ever to be shortlisted Alan Garner turns 88 on the day the prize will be announced (October 17).

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida | SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA | Hamish Hamilton | 400 pages | ₹ 599

Shehan Karunatilaka is the second successive author from Sri Lanka (after Anuk Arudpragasam last year) to make it to the Booker shortlist, proving that some of the finest novels from the subcontinent are emerging from the island country, and being published in India. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida was first published as Chats with the Dead in India in 2020. In the subcontinent Karuna­tilaka is well known, as his debut novel Chinaman won many an award in 2011. The Seven Moons… works on an outlandish premise, Maali Almeida, a war photographer, a gambler, a man with boyfriends and girlfriends, now dwelling in the liminal space between this life and the afterlife, must solve his own murder. He also needs to contact his loved ones so that they can locate a hidden trove of photos that will rock Sri Lanka. Almeida has no idea who killed him, and in a country where kill­ings are all too common, the list is not short. Almeida has photos of a civilian village that was allegedly forcibly combat trained by the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) and various factions cannot wait to get their hands on it.

The novel is an absurd whodunit, which succeeds at being light and dark, serious and hilarious all at the same time. Early in the novel we encounter a lexicon for Sri Lankan abbreviations that hint at what the novel might be about, the IPKF (Indian Peace Keep­ing Force) is described as “sent by our neighbours to preserve peace and are willing to burn villages and gang-rape to fulfil their mission.”

With Sri Lanka back in the news, for all of the wrong reasons, Karunatilaka’s novel, though set during the civil war of the 1990s, seems oddly resonant today.

Oh William! | ELIZABETH STROUT | Penguin | 256 pages | ₹499

Elizabeth Strout is a best-selling author, her third novel, Olive Kitteridge, won a Pulitzer Prize, sold more than one million copies, and was made into an Emmy-winning television mini-series.

The American writer’s eighth book Oh William! is a charming explora­tion of love and marriage, divorce and friendships. Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, mother of two grown-up daughters, who has recently lost her second husband to an illness. Her first husband, William, is now struggling with his third mar­riage. Told in the voice of Lucy, the novel unpacks her relationship with William who is now a friend and travel companion. Lucy and William turn to each other in times of crisis (the death or abandonment of a spouse) and discover together what worked and what shattered their relationship. Lucy had a dark childhood, of which she cannot speak, but she gives her daughters what she could never have—the comfort and confidence of being loved as a child.

It is a simple story told with immense emotional intelligence. It unpicks what it means to ‘come from nothing’ (not knowing how to behave at a swimming pool), how marriages can rot (“intimacy became a ghastly thing”), how we push away those clos­est to us (“What a really awful thing I had done… To deny my husband any chance of comforting me.”). The novel is packed with lines that have the clarity and sharpness of ice shards, reminding us that finally, “We are all mythologies, we are all mysteries.”

Treacle Walker | ALAN GARNER | Fourth Estate | 160 pages | ₹399

Alan Garner is an English writer, with numerous novels and short story col­lections to his name. He is best known for his children’s fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales. His work is rooted in his native county of Cheshire, North West England.

Treacle Walker can appear rather puzzling at first as it is a slim novel, which isn’t about anything in particular. While Garner has said that he never writes for children, he writes for no one but himself, the novel does have the staccato rhythm of a children’s book, with each chapter only a few pages long and much of the action occurring through speech. Given the Cheshire lilt of the language, it can be rather hard to follow, as one encounters numerous unfamiliar words, such as whirligig, pickthank psychopomp, nookshotten cart (to name just a few on one page!).

Treacle Walker opens with an epigraph by Carlo Rovelli, “Time is ig­norance”. And this novel is an explora­tion of time, through the eyes of a child named Joe who wears a patch on one eye. Joe reads comics. Joe waits for the train to pass below his house. One day Joe meets a wandering vendor Treacle Walker who offers him a cup and a stone in exchange for a pair of old pyjamas and the shoulder of a lamb. Joe then meets a man in a bog, Thin Armen, who tells him that Joe has a gift of being able to see the eternal in the present.

By fusing myth and phys­ics, time now and future time, Garner delivers a snug little metaphysical novel, where a young boy wants nothing else but to “hear no more the beat of Time, to have no morrow and no yesterday. To be free of years.”

Small Things Like These | CLAIRE KEEGAN | Faber & Faber | 128 pages | ₹399

Claire Keegan is an acclaimed short story writer who lives in rural Ireland. Small Things Like These is a political novel that wears its cause lightly. While the dedication and the note on the text make clear the book is about the Magdalene Laundries of Ireland, they are never expressly named in the novel itself. These were institu­tions usually run by the church, from the 18th to the late 20th centuries, allegedly for unwed mothers, or other ‘fallen’ women. In truth they were slave camps, where women were confined indefinitely and made to wash and launder and clean, which led to the death of thousands of women and infants.

In Small Things Like These, we learn about the horrors of these institutions through Bill Furlong, the child of an unwed mother, who is now a coal and timber merchant. It is 1985 and young people are emigrating from the small Irish town to New York, Boston and London. With Christmas around the corner, Furlong is busier than ever, de­livering coal through snow and sleet. The “times were raw,” but Furlong is all the more determined to “keep his head down and stay on the right side of people” in order to provide for his wife and daughters.

But his wish to keep his head down is sorely tested when he has to make a coal delivery to a convent, which he knows runs a training school for girls, providing them with basic education, and a laundry business, which had the reputations of pro­ducing the cleanest whites. On his visit he sees something that makes him realise the complicity of his vil­lage. He asks himself and leaves us with the simple question; “Was there any point in being alive without helping one another?”

Given its slimness and the punch it packs, Small Things Like These does read like a short story. And as any writer would attest, a short story is perhaps the hardest of all forms to master. Keegan aces it.

The Trees | PERCIVAL EVERETT | Influx Press | 334 pages | ₹1,018

Percival Everett is an American writer who has more than 30 titles to his name, including novels, short story and poetry collections. He is also a professor of English at the University of Southern California.

The Trees is the most macabre but also the most memorable novel on the shortlist. Its benign name hides its sinister power. Strange murders are oc­curring in Money, Mississippi, a “crazily battered and likely dead Black man is running on the loose, killing White boys with shady histories.” Mutilated white bodies are being found in pools of blood with severed testicles. The cut testicles are found in the hand of a second dead body—that reappears at different crimes scenes—that of a Black man who resembles Emmett Till, a Black boy lynched in the same town 65 years ago.

The investigating officers in The Trees find that the dead white males have more in common than expected. As the body count rises, they seek answers from an elderly Black woman who has a record of every lynching that has occurred in the country catalogued in her house.

The novel tells of racism and lynching in the most deadpan of tones. There is blood and gore. But there are also laugh-out-loud moments. As the book hurtles towards an even bloodier finale, the tone gets more political with mentions of a president who has an impeachment motion against him and whose concern for his hair is greater than his worry for the country.

By taking the premise to the ex­treme, Everett delivers a sledgehammer of a novel, which reads like a Spike Lee movie waiting to be made. Emmett Till was a 14-year-old African American boy who was abducted, tortured, and lynched in Mississippi in 1955. His ‘crime’? A white woman accused him of offending her. The brutality of his murder and the fact that his killers were acquitted proved to be a pivotal moment in the American civil rights move­ment. As Everett writes of Till in The Trees, “The image of the boy in his open casket awakened the nation to the horror of lynching. At least the White nation. The horror that was lynching was called life by Black America.”

Glory | NOVIOLET BULAWAYO | Chatto & Windus | 416 pages | ₹999

NoViolet Bulawayo is the first Black African woman to appear on the Booker shortlist twice, her debut novel We Need New Names was shortlisted for the 2013 prize.

Glory is rightly hailed as a Zimba­bwean Animal Farm, as it is set in the animal kingdom of Jidada. Old Horse and his wife, a donkey named Marvel­lous are being pushed out of power. Hope seems afloat with the arrival of the new horse in power Tuvius Delight Shasha (who is Old Horse’s Brutus). But even with new horse nothing much changes, as Destiny, the goat, witnesses all things— corruption and injustice— remain unchanged.

The novel echoes the rise and fall of the Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe.

Like any good novel, Glory might tell of a particular time and place, but its posterity is assured by how familiar it seems. Bulawayo writes of the many ministers in Old Horse’s cabinet, and one cannot but help chuckle at the mention of the Minister of Revolu­tion, the Minister of Corruption, the Minister of Order, the Minister of Things, the Minster of Nothing, the Minister of Propaganda, the Minister of Homophobic Affairs, the Minister of Disinformation and the Minister of Looting. Readers will be able to identify these same in their own country. By us­ing fable and satire, Bulawayo reminds readers, “Once the governed lose their fear, then it’s absolutely game over for the regime.”

About The Author

Nandini Nair

•