Shirley Kossick
The shortlist for this year’s Boeke Prize – the annual Exclusive Books marketing
device – has something for everyone, from the lightweight to the very serious and from serial murder to genocide. A mixed bag indeed, which makes it all the more difficult to choose a winner since the six novels are so different in style, subgenre, content and, presumably, target audience.
Bearing the Boeke criteria in mind (”unputdownable, compulsively, page- turningly readable and accessible quality work”), I think one can start by eliminating Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding (Picador). It is accessible alright, but also quite putdownable. This year in the life of a thirtysomething spinster trying to juggle the various elements of her life while desperately seeking a male, is both amusing in parts and has a ring of truthfulness about it. Yet, despite its protracted presence in the bestseller lists, the novel becomes tedious and repetitive, especially in its daily report of Bridget’s weight and alcohol, cigarette and calorie intake.
Strangely enough, the other five novels on the shortlist are all debut works, though one would never guess it from the skill and assurance of the writers. Kathy Reichs’s Dj Dead (Arrow), for example, certainly rivals Patricia Cornwell both in clever plotting and thorough knowledge of forensic medicine. Reichs is herself a forensic anthropologist who imbues her heroine, Dr Temperance Brennan, with her own expertise and insider’s knowledge of exhumations, autopsies and criminal laboratories.
The result is an extremely grisly tale of a serial killer, definitely not for the faint-hearted. Convincingly written and fast-paced as Dj Dead is, it deserves to be judged against other police and investigative thrillers, rather than alongside books with which it has so little in common.
The exotic background and insight into an enclosed, partly secret world has made Arthur Golden’s fictional Memoirs of a Geisha (Vintage)into another bestseller. The narrative opens in 1929 when an impoverished fisherman, watching his wife die without any of the comforts she needs, sells his two young daughters to a wealthy businessman. He, in turn, apprentices the prettier one, later renamed Sayuri, to an okiya or geisha house.
The humiliation of the initial examination she is subjected to and the shock of her removal from her simple home leave Sayuri confused but still innocent. Understanding develops as she is initiated into the geisha milieu, its hierarchies and rivalries, its elaborate costumes and intricate ceremonies.
Golden writes well and sustains a sense of reality through the central device of an extended interview with Sayuri. But there is a less palatable aspect to the book in its relish for sexual detail, especially the sale of virginity, or mizuage, which makes for uncomfortable reading.
The announcement of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (Flamingo)as the winner of the 1997 Booker Prize took many critics by surprise. A debut novel by a totally unknown young Indian writer, the book received enormous publicity before it was called in by the Booker judges.
Critics, however, were divided in their reviews, many condemning Roy’s often flowery language and overblown imagery (Carmen Callil even went as far as to call the book execrable). This did nothing to dampen popular demand, which has kept it in the bestseller lists for months.
A rites-of-passage tale set in the Indian province of Kerala, The God of Small Things is the story of a family in crisis. The plot has all the ingredients for thrilling action – child abuse, drunkenness, incest, murder and illicit sex – set against a background of religious intolerance, Marxist marches and the inequities of the caste system. There is enough meat here for several banquets, which may be part of the reason why The God of Small Things often seems turgid and its time shifts confusing.
Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (Scepptre) won the United States’s National Book Award. It is set in 19th-century America, near the end of the Civil War, and focuses on the painful journey of Inman, a wounded man, from the battlefields across the devastated South. What keeps him going is the constant thought of Ada and the love he feels for her.
Alternating with chapters on Inman’s odyssey are scenes of Ada’s struggle to wring a livelihood from the land. Though the hardships she and other civilians experience are less overtly dramatic than the horrors of actual combat, Frazier vividly describes their suffering. Worst of all is the scorched-earth policy which a passing refugee calls ”a fresh idea on warfare. Make the women and children atone for the deaths of soldiers.”
This is a really magnificent book filled with pain and repulsion at the brutality of war. In this, Frazier manages to rival that most enduring of Civil War novels, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane. But Cold Mountain is also a romance, and alongside the pity and the terror runs a fine lyrical vein and a beautifully expressed appreciation of natural beauty.
If there were just these five books on the Boeke shortlist I’d feel no hesitation in naming Cold Mountain for the ”prize”. But the sixth and last book, Fugitive Pieces (Bloomsbury), is so extraordinarily powerful and so profoundly moving that my vote for top place goes to author Anne Michaels.
Winner of the controversial Orange Prize in 1997, Fugitive Pieces is also about the effects of war. Michaels tells the agonising story of Jakob Beer who, as a young child in Poland, was hidden from the Nazis by a geologist, Athos Roussos. He carries the frail and traumatised Jakob inside his overcoat and takes him to his home on the Greek Island of Zakynthos.
As the only member of his family to survive, Jakob suffers a terrible sense of guilt and is obsessed with the fate of his parents and his beloved sister Bella. Through the tender love Athos gives him, Jakob makes considerable progress towards a normal life and eventually becomes a poet. The wounds to his soul inflicted by war and persecution never totally heal, however.
In tandem to Jakob’s story is that of Ben, who has also been indelibly damaged by war. Though he did not directly experience Nazi atrocities, as the son of two concentration-camp survivors he is deeply affected. Neither of his parents can talk about the horrors they have endured, which sets up a barrier of silence around Ben.
The lives of Jakob and Ben interrelate through the younger man’s passion for poetry which draws Jakob to him as mentor. Michaels is herself an award-winning poet and her deft use of evocative and precise language is clearly evident in this debut novel. Readable, accessible and, to my mind, unputdownable, Fugitive Pieces is one of the great novels of the decade and fully deserves all the plaudits we can heap upon it.