Book Reviews: Booker Prizer Longlist Books #1 and #2

I'm having a tilt at the Booker Prize longlist this year, with a goal to read all 13 novels before the shortlist announcement on 23 September. I most likely won't get there, but if you don't try...

I jumped out the gate quickly with these two, but expect things to slow down a bit now as work is pretty busy. (Listening to the second one on audiobook definitely helped, as it was my chores / exercise / driving companion!)

Here is the list. I'll highlight the ones I have read in each post as I go.

1. Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Albanian)
2. Seascraper by Benjamin Wood (British)
3. Flesh by David Szalay (Canadian)
4. Endling by Maria Reva (Ukrainian / Canadian)
5. The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (British)
6. The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits (American / British)
7. Audition by Katie Kitamura (American)
8. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Indian / British)
9. Flashlight by Susan Choi (American)
10. One Boat by Jonathan Buckley (British)
11. Universality by Natasha Brown (British)
12. The South by Tash Aw (Malaysian)
13. Love Forms by Claire Adam (Trinidadian)

The first cab off the rank for the Booker longlist for me, and I found it ... fine, even quite good, but certainly not excellent (and not, I think, a contender for the shortlist, let alone the prize, but I've been wrong before!)

The story focuses on an unnamed narrator-protagonist, who is an Albanian woman married to an American, living and working as a translator / interpreter in New York. A series of questionable choices and unsettling events unfold, danger is created, danger is ambiguously and disturbingly addressed, and the book ends in a strange and unsatisfying limbo-land, with nothing resolved and nothing gained.

I don't want to say too much more about the ins and outs of the plot, partially because the first half of the book does create a decent amount of narrative tension and to give too many more details would be to spoil the effect. I will, however, point out four things I liked and four things I didn't about this text:

Liked

- Writing is clean, spare and evocative

- The Albanian section was well executed and gave a real sense of place

- The nuanced exploration of the different ways domestic violence and abuse can manifest was chilling and effective

- The way the book plays in the space of uncertainty about the outcome for a key character (I thought this made it more scary than if definite answers were provided)

Disliked

- What I felt was a bait and switch, with the book being pitched as largely about Unnamed Protagonist's relationship with a particular interpreting client when in fact that plot was at best a C-plot and said client wasn't at all important to the overall story arc

- The bewildering and ineffective overuse of dream sequences in the final third

- The relationship between the protagonist and her husband, which gave me an enormous ick without any justifying insights or power

- The weak ending

Overall, although it's not a bad read, I do think this book could have been a lot better than it was - the concept itself was terrific but it didn't stick the landing. That said, it's a debut novel by a writer who clearly has a bucketload of talent, and I'll be interested to see how she develops in further books.

Score: 6.5-7/10
Shortlist? No

(I listened to this one on audiobook, read by the author, and I would highly recommend this option is audiobooks work for you - the voice adds considerably to the experience, and as a bonus, you get to hear the songs being actually sung rather than just reading them without a context for tune).

This book, the second on the Booker longlist for me, was almost an exact inverse of the first in one important way - whereas Misinterpretation started strong but died off in the second half, Seascraper starts slowly, actually really quite dully, but then slowly builds to a truly moving and quite brilliant ending. It probably says something about the type of reader I am that, although both books had a stronger half and a weaker half, I ended up rating this one more highly. Apparently I really need a novel to bring it home strong :-)

Stylistically, this is a very quiet, small-lives story, which reminds me quite a lot of Clare Keegan's work. Set in the 1960s, the protagonist is 20 year old Thomas Flett, who lives with his 36 year old mother in precarity near Longferry, working as a shanker (a profession I had never heard of before) as his grandfather had done before his death. Shanking is where shrimp are netted from the sands at low tide, and it is a physically demanding and not very well compensated profession, but it is what Thomas has been brought up to, despite his love and deep connection to music (which acts as a binding theme throughout the story).

I didn't love the way this book started - lots of fairly dreary description of things that smell bad and feel bad, and probably more minutiae than I needed about the shanker's daily routine - but it took a turn for the better at about the 25% mark, with the arrival of the other main character, a putative Hollywood director who is interested in using the beach as a setting for a film based on a haunting novel. Edgar, the director, hires Thomas to take him out into the sands at low tide to see the possibilities. 

Wood really comes into his power once Edgar is on the scene. The developing affinity between Thomas and Edgar, the delicately handled but growing sense of "wrongness" about Edgar's behaviour, and the absolutely mesmerising section where they go out into the foggy sands and both meet with misadventure, is what makes the book so ultimately compelling. Thomas's dream/near-death sequence which involves the vision of his dead father (who died in the war before his birth, so he never knew him) is an utter gut-punch in the best possible way. 

And through it all, the thread of music - the music Thomas likes, the music he hears in his head - sews all the themes together. The book encompasses the longing for romance, the desire to leave but not leave, the parsing out of what a life means or could mean, the sense of a working class trade that is in its final dying days, the complexities of the mother-son bond, the coming into adulthood and how that can change you, the dreadful consequences of war, and the spiky and not always obvious nature of adult male friendship.

The book ends in a place that is not triumphant or glorious, but is actively hopeful, in a quiet, grounded way. And the final thing you hear (if you listen to the audiobook, and you should!) is Wood singing the song Thomas has written - a haunting, heartfelt lament to a dying way of life. The song's name? Seascraper.

Score: 8/10
Shortlist: Maybe! Will make a stronger call after reading more titles.