Booker Winners 1973-1983 project: The Holiday + Heat and Dust

I have been continuing (slowly, in the background) my mission to read all the Booker prize winners from the decade of my birth. Here are two I have recently finished: one which I thought was dated but interesting, and one which I thought was pretty bad (the first one I've encountered so far in this project that I'm baffled by its Booker win!)

Reading this book in 2026, I found it dated, but also an easy and quite interesting read. I'm sure that when it won the Booker in 1975, it seemed very modern, picking apart the problematic paternalism and racism of the British in 1920s India through the eyes of a contemporary (1970s) protagonist (which it certainly does do, and quite effectively). Now, the text reads as absolutely infested with the particular kind of Orientalism that characterised 1970s attitudes to south Asian people - less obviously malignant, but still uncomfortable and damaging.

In particular, like many a British writer in the 20th century writing about India and British people's relationship to it (looking at you, Forster) the book is oddly obsessed with sex between English women and Indian men, which speaks to a kind of exoticisation that sits pretty uncomfortably in current dialogue.

The plot, a two-timelines affair, is told by an unnamed English protagonist in the present (ie 1975) who has come to India to understand and tell the story of Olivia, the first wife of her grandfather, who was a British administrator in India. Olivia, in what was a scandal at the time, left her husband to go live with a local Indian royal (the Nawab), and remained in the summer house he bought for her for the rest of her life. Unnamed Protagonist, searching for Olivia in text and place, herself becomes embroiled in sexual relationships with, first, an English hippie (a very recognisable type and one that Jhabvala skewers mercilessly) and then her Indian friend and landlord.

One device that Jhabvala uses that is an interesting inversion of the usual Orientalist trope is to represent the Indian men as more virile than the English men. Both Olivia and Unnamed Protagonist become pregnant by their Indian lovers, after not having any pregnancies with their English partners (in Olivia's case, despite serious efforts over a sustained period). Despite the book definitely leaning into the "Indian men are childish / infantile" trope in other areas (the Nawab in particular is a spoiled little baby man throughout most of the text), the book plays with the idea of sexual vitality in a way that somewhat undoes the emasculation in a social and political sense.

I enjoyed it more than I thought I was going to when I started - the premise was straightforward and the ideas were engaging, and I thought it was a bold narrative choice to present us with two pretty unlikeable female protagonists without damselling them (neither Olivia nor Unnamed Protagonist are people I warmed to, but that was actually a help rather than a hindrance to the overall cool affect of the text). I do see why it won the Booker in its time, although a book like this would never win now, and shouldn't. I think it's an interesting read on its merits, but also an interesting sociological window into 1970s Orientalism and fetishisation of Indian masculinity and Indian mysticism, and I'm pleased to have read it. 

6.5/10 for me.

This book, which shared the Booker prize with Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist in 1974, is the first actual stinker I have come across in my decade read (not bad as this is book 6 in my reading list!) I did not enjoy this book at all, I did not find it interesting and clever, and it was a frank chore to drag myself through to the end. Although I am yet to read the Gordimer, I am already betting it to be the superior book by a mile, which makes it all the more grating that it had to share the prize with this tosh.

So what is this book about?

In short (and in long): Man whose marriage has broken down goes to the seaside and thinks lengthy and dreary thoughts about the marriage and his life.

The End.

All this novel is, really, is a bunch of gloomy, self-obsessive "observations" about the sterility and despair of English middle-class life; a theme that, in cleverer hands, could be interesting, but here is really just dull and pointless. I did not give a mouse-sized shit about the protagonist or any of the side characters, and I didn't care what happened to any of them (although something, ANYTHING, actually happening would have been a refreshing change).

I read on another review of this book that Middleton wrote 44 novels ands today is close to unremembered / unread, and having slogged through this one, I get why. Chalk me up as a decided non-fan and someone who has no intention of ever reading another book by him.

2/10 for me.

Target list:

• J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)
• Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist (1974* tie)
• ✅Stanley Middleton, Holiday (1974* tie)
• ✅Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust (1975)
• David Storey, Saville (1976)
• Paul Scott, Staying On (1977)
• ✅Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea (1978)
• ✅Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore (1979)
• William Golding, Rites of Passage (1980)
• ✅Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1981)
• ✅Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark (1982)
• J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (1983)