When J.M. Coetzee won his second Booker Prize for Disgrace in 1999, a novel about truth and reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa, he said it was “the ultimate prize to win in the English speaking world.” He would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, but it’s a fact that the buzz around the Booker Prize is usually louder. This year there’s great interest in the subcontinent with Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka on the shortlist with his second novel. A handful of Indians, of course, have previously won including Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, Aravind Adiga; and also V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie who are usually pulled into the region’s embrace.
Allegorical satire
Like every year, the writers on the shortlist — and longlist — of Booker Prize 2022 speak their truth through fiction. NoViolet Bulawayo, whose allegorical satire on Zimbabwe, Glory, is on the shortlist, frames her tale on the lines of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. In an interview to thebookerprizes.com, she said the outline may have been from Orwell, but the need to write on the current political turmoil in her home country sent her “foraging” her childhood. She recalled her grandmother’s magical tales of enchanting animals where anything and everything was possible – “trees ran, talking animals made fires and cooked each other to escape horrible winters, lions shapeshifted by night to seduce beautiful women, rocks spoke and opened up into alternate worlds.” The stories were fictional but spoke profound truths, holding out lessons for humanity.
Bulawayo’s novel uses art as resistance to tell the truth about the situation in Zimbabwe, where there has been little change for the better even after the fall of a long-serving, authoritarian leader like Robert Mugabe. In Glory, a charismatic horse, who commanded the sun, rules and rules for decades over a society of animals, but “even the sticks and stones know there is no night ever so long that does not end with dawn”, and so it ends one day for Old Horse. The new regime ushers in a lot of hope for the animals till a cycle as old as time is repeated. Bulawayo does not want a dystopian conclusion and she leans on a “revolutionary imagination” to write her own ending.
Shehan Karunatilaka chooses to tell the story of his island home, Sri Lanka, through a war photographer, a closet gay, who forges alliances across the spectrum and ends up dead. In The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, an updated version of the pre-pandemic Chats with the Dead, the eponymous photographer is a ghost trying to reconstruct his last moments; and also live on by passing on knowledge about a hidden stash of devastating photographs of atrocities stored under a bed to the loves of his life, Jaki, and DD, the son of a minister. His debut novel, Chinaman, won a clutch of prizes, and Seven Moons with its messy afterlife which mirrors reality has got a lot of praise from critics. Maali’s pertinent remarks about the situation on the ground – “…like any reasonable person, you’d like the option of running away, especially when there is plenty to run from” – makes him a relatable character despite his flaws.
Looking inwards
Also on the shortlist is the best-selling American writer Elizabeth Strout for one of her Lucy Barton novels, Oh William! Lucy Barton is a writer – we are not told what she writes on – who lives in New York and is divorced with two girls. In Oh William!, Lucy reconnects with her first husband, William, and they examine their life and the people they grew up with, which leads to more surprising discoveries. In her quiet way, reminiscent of William Trevor, the writer Strout admires, she chips away at human experience, chronicling love and loss, and loneliness; class, gender and inequality. Lucy is never allowed to forget her impoverished background by her mother-in-law Catherine who would introduce Lucy to her friends with these words: “This is Lucy. Lucy comes from nothing.” Later, when Lucy stumbles onto Catherine’s secret and her poor origins, she is compassionate just like her creator.
If Strout looks inwards, Percival Everett takes on the issue of pervasive racism, but tells the story about lynching with black humour in The Trees. The first murder takes place in Money, Mississippi, where the police find a second dead body at the crime scene who resembles Emmett Till, a young black boy who was lynched in the town decades back. Soon, murders are reported up and down the country, and detectives seek answers from a person who has documented every lynching for years. In one chapter, when the two black detectives, Ed and Jim, stop by at a restaurant, Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit is playing (Southern trees bear a strange fruit/ Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/ Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze/ Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees). Like Bulawayo, Everett too uses art as resistance to talk about reality: “Everybody talks about genocides around the world, but when the killing is slow and spread over a hundred years, no one notices. Where there are no mass graves, no one notices. American outrage is always for show. It has a shelf life.”
Irish writer Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These tells the story of a coal and timber merchant, Bill Furlong, who finds a young unmarried mother in a coal shed of a convent mourning the loss of her baby. The backdrop is the real-life Magdalene Laundries scandal which unearthed how scores of “fallen women” in Dublin from 1922 to 1966 were enslaved by the Catholic Church and forced to do hard labour in laundries to repent for their “sins”. When a café owner tells Furlong to “watch over what you’d say about what’s there”, it reminds you of the lawyer Mitchell Garabedian’s words in Spotlight, which recounts the Boston Globe’s investigation into child abuse allegations by priests of the Catholic Church: “If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a village to abuse one.” The complicity of everyone from villagers to the state is one of the points Keegan harps on in her novel, which has already won this year’s Orwell Prize for Political Fiction.
Talking about Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker, which revolves around an unlikely friendship between a wanderer and a little boy, Joe Coppock, who then gets to see a world he never would have imagined, the Booker judges said it gives a glimpse “into the deep work of being human”. Critics have hailed it as a novel “both about quantum physics as well as ancient lore”. Treacle or medicine man wants to cure Joe’s poor eyesight but “seeing the world is not the same as seeing what the world is”. Like the writer, the wanderer is concerned about age, youth, time, history.
Back to the long list
The winner will be announced today (October 17), and it is probably also the best time to start reading the writers who made the long list this year but were dropped from the final list of six, especially Leila Mottley’s Nightcrawling, Maddie Mortimer’s Maps of our Spectacular Bodies and Audrey Magee’s The Colony for their truth-telling. Stories which travel across time and borders must always have new readers.
