US Edition Imagine for a moment that this week Martin Amis and Ian McEwan had been selected for the Man Booker longlist. Their agents and supporters would have been elated. A good case could have been made for the inclusion of McEwan’s Solar, one of his best and certainly funniest books, though not one that has endeared him to the literary establishment. It’s harder to argue for Amis’s The Pregnant Widow, a novel in which the writer’s characteristic linguistic explosions are undermined by structural flaws.
But had their names been on the longlist, commentators would doubtless be fretting about why we hadn’t moved on and are still dependent for our literary celebrities on grey-haired men who came to prominence in the late Seventies.
The judges, led by Andrew Motion, seem to have anticipated this cavilling by stating that they have made their selection on each novel’s “intrinsic quality, without reference to the past work of their authors”. Surely this is the right way to go. This is a longlist that disgraces no one.
Peter Carey, who has won the Booker twice and is the bookies’ favourite, and Howard Jacobson, who has twice been shortlisted, are the token old guys on a list that celebrates the vibrancy of fiction today, and includes plenty of writers who are pushing the boundaries of what the novel can be.
It is a robust rebuke to the American critic Lee Siegel, who argued recently that the novel is dead – “a museum-piece genre” – and that non-fiction is now more relevant and engaging. This is a crass argument, and hardly a new one, that is enlightening only in so far as it recognises the strength of many non-fiction writers such as Dave Eggers or, over here, William Fiennes. But if it fails to take account of the best American novelists – what about Jonathan Franzen or Michael Chabon or Lorrie Moore? – it is equally redundant for the British (and, for the purposes of Booker, the Commonwealth) ones.
This year’s longlist can be charged with neither Siegel’s complaint that fiction is cripplingly self-conscious nor that it is too theoretical, as these books can be characterised, above all, by the pleasure they take in storytelling.
There are some novels that will provoke, for sure. The judges have gone, perhaps bravely, for Tom McCarthy (interviewed here on page 25), a British author who has had a cult following since his debut, Remainder, and is finding mainstream success with his third novel, C, about language and technology. They have also picked David Mitchell, whose five novels are unashamedly experimental, pushing the limits of what genre fiction can be. But neither of these novels is short on narrative drive.
This is true of the rest of the list, too. Room, by the Irish-Canadian novelist Emma Donoghue (reviewed on page 25), is an oddly powerful account of the tender relationship between a mother and son, imprisoned for years in the house of their abductor. The Slap by the Australian Christos Tsiolkas, already a book-club favourite, examines the fallout of a domestic event – a child is smacked by a parent, crucially not his own – at a barbecue. There is humour in Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question (reviewed here on page 24), and in Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies, about an Irish boarding school. And there is history aplenty, from Helen Dunmore’s The Betrayal (Fifties’ Leningrad) to Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (Jamaica, the end of slavery) and Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America (about Alexis de Tocqueville).
Nobody who has been to one of this country’s numerous book festivals – whether at Hay in May, or Dartington earlier this month – could possibly be persuaded that the novel is dead. And if Siegel’s profound gloom about the state of fiction might hold a little in the US, where the greats are dying off and the new generation, as put forward by The New Yorker in its 20 novelists under-40 list, has yet to prove itself, this week’s Booker longlist stands counter to that claim over here. Martin Amis might have failed to establish himself as the English Saul Bellow, but there are plenty of exciting younger writers ready to fill his shoes.
*The winner of the Booker prize will be announced on October 12