Shirley Kossick
T he “Boeke Prize” is an Exclusive Books annual promotion in which six novels are selected by booksellers and then rated by critics. This year’s six are all worth reading. One, however – Bernard Schlink’s The Reader (Phoenix) – is totally out of key with the other five. Excellently translated from the German (notwithstanding the Boeke stipulation that books be “written in English”), The Reader is a searing account of a young German’s response to the Holocaust.
Born in 1944, the eponymous narrator was not directly involved in the horrors, but through an affair with an older woman he is confronted with the issues of collective guilt, responsibility and atonement. Since Schlink’s penetrating, questioning and ultimately unresolvable polemic tends to trivilaise the other nominations, it may have been best left out of consideraton.
John Irving is a well-established, often comic storyteller (remember Garp?) and A Widow for One Year (Black Swan) lives up to his reputation. It tells the story of Ruth Cole from childhood to her first real experience of love in her 40s, but, at 667 pages, it could do with some editorial pruning.
Pamela Jooste’s Dance With a Poor Man’s Daughter (Black Swan), by contrast, is a pithy account of Lily Daniels, a Cape Coloured girl growing up under apartheid. As I said in my review when this multi- prize-winning novel appeared in 1997, Dance With a Poor Man’s Daughter is highly readable, sensitive and intensely moving at times.
After last year’s masterly The Weight of Water, Anita Shreve’s –The Pilot’s Wife (Abacus) is rather disappointing. The theme of illusion and reality is intriguing as Kathryn learns more about her husband after his fatal aircrash than she ever suspected during his lifetime. The plot loses momentum before the denouement, unfortunately, and the characterisation of the passive wife/widow is unconvincing.
Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams (Picador) is a fine achievement for a first novel (his second, As It Is in Heaven, has already been published). The four letters of the title never reach their destination, but fate intervenes here and elsewhere in unexpected ways. Though I’m not an admirer of magic realism, Williams uses it discreetly to reinforce his affirmation of divine miracles and the power of love.
Good as Four Letters of Love is, White Oleander by Janet Fitch (Virago) is an even more impressive debut and wins my vote for the Boeke Prize. The first- person narrator, Astrid, has been in foster care since the age of 12 when her poet mother was imprisoned for murdering her estranged lover.
Though the two are separated, the mother-daughter theme predominates. Breaking free into discrete identities applies equally to both generations as Astrid recognises when her mother’s poetry is published (“a jailhouse Plath!”) and she is relegated to a past “that had to be burned away”.
Fitch writes beautifully and her imagery is vibrant (hatred “glittered”, voices became “serrated” with emotion, Russian cities have “turbaned towers”). An Oprah Winfrey Book Club choice catapulted White Oleander to the top of the bestseller list – not always a recommendation, but in this case Fitch deserves every accolade she has received.
The book to gain the most critics’ votes will be announced next week