The booksellers select six novels that have done well and ask critics to choose the best. This year’s six are each excellent in its own way.
The prophets of doom who predicted that John le Carré’s writing career would end with the Cold War have once more been proved wrong with the publication of The Constant Gardener (Coronet). This gripping story is set partly in a vividly described Kenya and takes its impetus from a murder. Simple solutions give way to a more complex intrigue redolent of the fiction of Graham Greene, demonstrating that double-dealing and evasion are not the sole terrain of the spy thriller.
Also breaking away to some extent from the rather limited, not to say cosy, ambit of her earlier books is Joanne Harris in Five Quarters of the Orange (Black Swan). Though again set in a small French village, this book has World War II as a backdrop and the dramatic effect on the villagers of the occupation. The launch of a successful crêperie and mouth-watering descriptions of delicious edibles link this book to Harris’s earlier work. The events have a terrible and tragic dimension but in Harris’s undemanding account they tend to be trivialised.
Two other women have also been selected, making the distribution between the sexes an even three and three. The first is Margaret Atwood with The Blind Assassin (Flamingo) which won the 2000 Booker Prize. Though undoubtedly a fine work, I doubt whether this is Atwood’s best novel, a distinction that possibly belongs to Alias Grace.
Amy Tan’s novel, The Bonesetter’s Daughter (Flamingo), is more straightforward and achieves a fresh approach to her favoured themes of memory, conflicting cultures and mother-daughter dynamics.
Another expatriate Chinese writer featuring on this year’s Boeke list is Dai Sijie, whose debut novel, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (Vintage), is powerful, at times funny and often moving. It is set in the time of the Cultural Revolution and tells the story of two young men, the sons of doctors, who are sent into the country for “re-education”.
Last, but to my mind, the most accomplished novel of the six, is Ian McEwan’s Atonement (Vintage), which was shortlisted for last year’s Booker Prize. It says a lot for the book that, though it lost the judges’ accolade, it won the BBC poll for the “People’s Booker”.
The protagonist, Briony, is 13 when the action opens; she loves inventing stories and is searching for the means and depth to give her characters reality. Unfortunately, when she is confronted by a real-life emotional situation her immaturity leads her into misreading the signs. The confusion that results as Briony mingles fact and fiction has catastrophic and long-reaching consequences for which her subsequent life is spent trying to atone — hence the novel’s title.
It is the imaginative reach of the writing and its commentary on the nature of fiction that makes Atonement, for me, the uncontestable winner in this group.
The Booker Prize shortlist, announced last week, comprises Life of Pi by Yann Martel, a fantastic novel about a boy adrift with several wild animals; Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry, a portrait of contemporary Bombay; Unless by Carol Shields, about interpersonal bonds; The Story of Lucy Gault by William Trevor, a haunting story of love and loss; Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, set in the dark underworld of Victorian London; Dirt Music by Tim Winton, set in an Australian fishing village.