Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, in a year full of family sagas, is surely the standout volume, but the panel may just opt for Sarah Bernstein’s ‘spectrally vague brainteaser’
Yes, it’s that time again: next Sunday the winner of this year’s Booker prize will be announced. Everyone has their favourites and it’s easy to carp about novels the judges missed, but the truth is we don’t know which ones they consider – the list of 150-odd titles is never made public and probably any number of subterranean factors determines its makeup; a few years ago I heard of at least one big-name British author, an obvious contender, who refused to be considered. And awards – now brands in themselves – seek to establish their own identities: was Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead crossed off the list after winning the Pulitzer and Women’s prizes for fiction?
One of the judges, Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, recently said he isn’t comfortable with historical fiction, which perhaps had something to do with the absence from the longlist of two of the year’s most feted novels, Zadie Smith’s The Fraud and Tom Crewe’s The New Life. True, one historical novel has made the shortlist: This Other Eden (Hutchinson Heinemann), by Pulitzer-winning US author Paul Harding – but that’s no surprise: the chair of judges, Esi Edugyan, says how good she thinks it is on the cover of the book itself, published last February.
Drawing on the true story of the forced eviction of a mixed-race island community in New England before the first world war, it may have Edugyan’s vote but I think it’s a novel that’s hard to love. We follow various descendants of a freed slave as a well-meaning missionary, privately racist, attempts to spare one of them – a gifted young painter who happens to pass as white – by having him moved to a friend’s estate on shore.
At the core of what ensues is his doomed romance with his landlord’s Irish maid. But Harding relies on laboriously laid slabs of narration to generate dramatic irony as we see events from different points of view – the painter’s, the maid’s, then his family’s, confronted with her pregnancy as she visits the island in search of the painter’s past.
In his previous novel, Enon, Harding found a measure of comedy even in the plight of a father mourning the death of his teenage daughter in a road accident. Nothing to laugh about in This Other Eden, a mark of Harding’s sense of responsibility to his painful material. For sure, he wrings pathos from the injustice and horror from the climactic violence but the novel never justifies its own interest in the spectacle.
