The longlist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize was announced Wednesday at midday London time. It’s a 13-book list with some interesting omissions, and possibly (although this is arguable) some emerging themes of interest to the judges.
In year two of the revised eligibility criteria, the “US creep” is becoming more apparent – there are 5 books by USians on this time, although one of the authors counted as USians originates elsewhere (Laila Lalami was born in Morocco) and one, Hanya Yanagihara, is of Hawaiian ancestry. Unlike last year’s golden 13, though, the list demonstrates a reasonable diversity in the non-US English-speaking world, with three British authors, an Irish author, and one apiece from New Zealand, India, Ireland, Jamaica and Nigeria.
As has become customary for the Booker, there is a sturdy showing by debutantes, with US writer Bill Clegg, Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma and New Zealander Anna Smaill all making an appearance with their first books. Debuts almost never win – the only two exceptions to date being Keri Hulme, with The Bone People in 1985 and Arundhati Roy, with The God of Small Things in 1997 – but it is still a mightily useful thing for a first-time author to be listed. No doubt the increased visibility a Booker berth will give these three books will help them, and hopefully their authors in future endeavours.
This year’s list is also a lot more gender balanced than last year’s 10/3 weighting in favour of male-authored books; it’s got 7 books by women and 6 by men, which, in a 13-book list, is about as close to even as it could reasonably get. As always, the real interest will come in seeing how these odds shorten at shortlist stage.
The list is as follows:
Bill Clegg (US) – Did You Ever Have a Family (Jonathan Cape)
Anne Enright (Ireland) – The Green Road (Jonathan Cape)
Marlon James (Jamaica) – A Brief History of Seven Killings (Oneworld Publications)
Laila Lalami (US) – The Moor’s Account (Periscope, Garnet Publishing)
Tom McCarthy (UK) – Satin Island (Jonathan Cape)
Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria) – The Fishermen (ONE, Pushkin Press)
Andrew O’Hagan (UK) – The Illuminations (Faber & Faber)
Marilynne Robinson (US) – Lila (Virago)
Anuradha Roy (India) – Sleeping on Jupiter (MacLehose Press, Quercus)
Sunjeev Sahota (UK) – The Year of the Runaways (Picador)
Anna Smaill (New Zealand) – The Chimes (Sceptre)
Anne Tyler (US) – A Spool of Blue Thread (Chatto & Windus)
Hanya Yanagihara (US) – A Little Life (Picador)
Probably the first thing to note about this list is the omissions, glaring or otherwise depending on who you ask. Notable absentees are the popular choice, Kate Atkinson, for A God in Ruins, her companion novel to Life After Life – itself widely regarded as an unfair omission from the 2013 longlist. (As I explained last week, I think the exclusion of A God in Ruins was the right choice, but I am a minority view on that point). Where, it is asked, is Kazuo Ishiguro with his new book, The Buried Giant? Where is Hilary Mantel, two-times past Booker winner, for The Mirror and the Light, the hotly anticipated series finale in her Cromwell cycle? Where is Harper Lee with possibly the most talked-about of all possible contenders, Go Set a Watchman?
These are only four of the couple of dozen books that had short odds just days ago of grabbing a slot on the Booker list, while at least half of the actual list’s titles haven’t appeared anywhere in the book world’s prediction machine. While this is not exactly unusual – the longlist always throws some curveballs, in both the inclusion and exclusion directions – it is probably the least predicted list in recent years. Does that suggest freshness, boldness and originality, or a skewed perspective? Hard to tell, without a thorough read of the list itself.
Thematically, it’s a mixed bag, although there are a few linking ideas winding through some of the titles. Family appears as the central leitmotif in (funnily enough) Clegg’s Did You Ever Have a Family, Tyler’s truly beautiful A Spool of Blue Thread, Enright’s The Green Road, and Robinson’s final book in her Gilead cycle, Lila; it’s also a key theme in O’Hagan’s The Illuminations and Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways.
It’s always intriguing to see what different novelists do with this most fundamental of human themes, and it’s an area that has been markedly under-represented in past Booker longlists. Perhaps this signals an interest in smaller, more intimate truth-telling from this year’s judges, eschewing the traditional focus on Meaning of Life As Expressed Through War, Usually, Or Other Heroic Manly Events. If so, it’s a welcome directional change.
Aside from the family focus, there’s an interesting, and quite unusual, tolerance for the weird and off-kilter in this list too, with one true genre novel (a dystopia – debut writer Smaill’s The Chimes), McCarthy’s intriguing Satin Island, and James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, which fictionalises the attempted murder of Bob Marley in 1976.
Otherwise, there are two books about childhood trauma, and the harm it inflicts into adulthood – Roy’s novel focuses on a woman revisiting an ashram in which she was abused as a child, while Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which sounds really depressing, apparently looks at four friends in New York whose lives are scarred and broken by the pains of their childhood. (The publicity blurb describes it as “a depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance”, which sounds like a barrel of laughs).
The list is rounded off with Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account, the only historical book on this year’s plate, which is a fictionalised account of a Moroccan slave, one of four survivors of the failed sixteenth-century attempt to colonise Spanish Florida; and Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen, which, on description, sounds like it combines elements of African myth-telling with a family conflict plotline. (There’s family cropping up as a key theme, again!)
Overall, this is a more diverse and interesting list than the safe ground of 2014’s longlist. Although the US creep is definitely a factor, none of the USians appear tokenist in the way that a couple certainly did in 2014, and the more obvious pitfalls have been successfully skirted. There might be an argument that a couple of berths were booked on the basis of past glories and reader affection for great novelists approaching the end of their careers (Tyler and Robinson would fit this bill, for instance), but the books themselves sound like a strong, lively collection. It’s quite probable that there are two or three weaker ones on there, which will become apparent as the list is read, dissected and discussed ad infinitum over the coming 6 weeks before the shortlist announcement on 15 September. On balance, though, it’s a good longlist for a prize that isn’t always noted for them.