Richard Flanagan wins 2014 Man Booker Prize, I rank the Booker finalists, and the National Book Awards shortlists

Lots of literary news over the past 24 hours to cover briefly.  Yesterday afternoon, Australian writer Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for The Narrow Road to the Deep North.  It is a very good novel, one that is well-deserving of this honor, but having read 11/13 of the longlist (still have The Dog and Us to read; the latter hasn't yet been released in the US) and 6/6 of the shortlist, it wasn't my personal favorite.  This is not to say that I didn't like it quite a bit, because I did, but there were some other outstanding books on those lists that appealed to me just a tiny bit more.  So for those of you who like lists and rankings, if I had to file a preferential voting system ballot for the Booker Prize shortlist, it would have gone like this:

1.  Ali Smith, How to be Both 

2.  Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North 

3.  Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves 

4.  Neel Mukherjee, The Lives of Others

5.  Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

6.  Howard Jacobson, J 


If I were to employ star/number rating systems, the difference between the Smith and the Jacobson would be somewhere between .5 and 1, as I do consider the Jacobson to be well above the average, if not quite outstanding or excellent.  All in all, while I would have considered several other books instead of/in addition to these, this was an enjoyable shortlist (and by extension, longlist) to read.

Earlier today, the National Book Awards released their five book shortlists for Young People's Literature, Poetry, Non-Fiction, and Fiction.  I own/have reviewed some of the YPL, Poetry, and Fiction finalists and will try to review as many of these over the next month as possible.


Young People's Literature:


Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming (currently reading; excellent so far)

John Corey Whaley, Noggin

Steve Sheinkin, The Port Chicago 50

Deborah Wiles, Revolution

Eliot Schrefer, Threatened


Poetry:


Claudia Rankine, Citizen

Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night 

Fred Moten, The Feel Trio

Fanny Howe, Second Childhood

Maureen N. McClane, This Blue


Non-Fiction:


Evan Osnos, Age of Ambition:  Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

Roz Chast, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

Edward O. Wilson, The Meaning of Human Existence 

Anand Gopal, No Good Men Among the Living:  America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes

John Lahr, Tennessee Williams:  Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh


Fiction:


Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See 

Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman 

Marilynne Robinson, Lila

Phil Klay, Redeployment 

Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven

Howard Jacobson, J

Before chancing his nose outside his cottage in the morning, Kevern 'Coco' Cohen turned up the volume on the loop-television, poured tea – taking care to place the cup carelessly on the hall table – and checked twice to be certain that his utility phone was on and flashing.  A facility for making and receiving local telephone calls only – all other forms of electronic communication having been shut down after WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED, to the rapid spread of whose violence social media were thought to have contributed – the utility phone flashed a malarial yellow until someone rang, and then it glowed vermilion.  But it rarely rang.  This, too, he left on the hall table.  Then he rumpled the silk Chinese hallway runner – a precious heirloom – with his shoe. (pp. 5-6)

2010 Booker Prize winner and current finalist Howard Jacobson has been known for comic novels that explore the darker elements of English Jewish society.  In his latest novel, J (actually with two marks through the letter), however, Jacobson eschews even the trappings of comic satire for a tale that might be considered dystopic not so much for the outer trappings of a society after some social upheaval, but for how his characters are developed in relation to an event that is so profound that they refer to it as "WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED."  While the mysteries of that and why Kevern 'Coco' Cohen puts two fingers to his mouth when pronouncing certain words that begin with "J" might appeal to readers, it is Jacobson's probing of how we try to communicate through the silences that we enforce through perfunctory social niceties that make J a fascinating and sometimes disturbing read.

There are a couple of main subplots that dovetail toward the end.  Kevern's half-stifled "J" talk, which is semi-abandoned through his arc in favor of slightly more direct talk of what has actually transpired over the decades leading up to Kevern's tale,  is but one small segment of a whole spectrum of social self-silencing that has taken place in Britain after some awful events decades before.  There are no email accounts, no social media, television is strictly regulated, even the language of social discourse has been altered – there is a sense of a great, horrific story lurking behind the stony silences of the newly-altered language itself.  Kevern's own surname, Cohen, is a clue, but not necessarily the blatant one some might suspect.  Related to this is the seemingly weird behavior of a young adult orphan, Alinn, and how she sees her future and Kevern's intertwined.  This second subplot, however, is not as well-fleshed as the former, and there are places where their interactions feel forced, at least until the latter part of the novel, where more effort is made to connect the two.

I referenced dystopic fiction above not because it is an easy catch-all term for describing a near-future society that would make for an uneasy dwelling experience for contemporary readers, but because J does something interesting here:  there is not a focus so much on the material aspects of this culture, but instead on how the characters are altered by this new societal order.  Take for instance the half-stifled "j" words said, words like "jazz" or "Jesus" or "joke."  These are words that have become here "j" words, just as we have today the "N word" and the "C word" to denote words that we know what they mean but we durst not utilize them due to their offensive natures.  We speak around them, half-allude to them, knowing what we want to imply, but not daring to voice directly those darkly talismanic words lest they evoke hatred and contempt.  Therefore, it is interesting to see a similar effect caused by these "j" words through the narrative.  What does it mean to have these seemingly-disconnected words being smothered by their erstwhile speakers?

This I suspect is the main thrust of Jacobson's book.  There is indeed another "j" word, one that is never really even half-uttered, that does come to dominate the others.  It is the reason behind "WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED" and how the reader chooses to react to this ultimate "j" word might determine how she comprehends the final parts of the novel.  That "j" word, which I shall not utter here for purposes related to exploring Jacobson's themes, has led to wholesale surname changes.  It has led to a polite relabeling of urban areas, all in an effort to efface a calamity of violence that unfolded decades before.  It is a cause, if not necessarily the main one, behind the peculiar semantic shifts certain words have taken in the interim.  In not talking about it, the characters are constantly reacting to IT.  The effects this has on Kevern and Alinn's self-identities, along with certain others, is chilling not because of what is said or done, but because of what is implied and suspected.

J, however, is not a perfect novel.  There are times where the subplots bow down and threaten to collapse under the weight of its narrative pretense.  Alinn's story in particular does not feel well-developed and more could have been done to develop her conflicted relationship with Kevern.  Even the particulars behind the "j" words and the ominous "WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED" are a bit heavy-handed when more direct allusions are made to them.  This results in a conclusion that feels at times a bit forced, a bit too strident in places and yet strangely empty and devoid of impetus in others.  While this does detract from the power of the setting and its implications, on the whole J is Jacobson's darkest, most unsettling novel and perhaps his best vehicle for articulating some of his socio-cultural concerns.  It is a worthy finalist for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, but I cannot help but think if it had gone just a bit further, developed its themes of identity and societal self-silencing just a bit more, that it could have become not just a very good novel but a great one.

Ali Smith, How to be Both

Consider this moral conundrum for a moment.

George's mother says to George who's sitting in the front passenger seat.

Not says.  Said.

George's mother is dead.

What moral conundrum?  George says.

The passenger seat in the hire car is strange, being on the side of the driver's seat is on at home.  This must be a bit like driving is, except without the actual, you know, driving.

Okay.  You're an artist, her mother says.

Am I?  George says.  Since when?  And is that a moral conundrum?

Ha, ha, her mother says.  Humour me.  Imagine it.  You're an artist. (p. 3)

Of the six 2014 Man Booker Prize finalists, Ali Smith's How to be Both might be the most "artistic."  I say this with scare quotes because often there is something about art that confounds and irritates many.  Whether it is the perceived "extra effort" that is often involved in understanding an art work's (literary, visual, or performance, they are all the same here) merits or that niggling doubt that the viewer/reader just might be incapable of the requisite empathy in order to grasp just how that particular piece came into being, often such works are set aside in favor of more "tried and true," less "difficult" pieces.  No, it is not a fair assessment, but it is one that takes place more frequently than any of us are ready to admit.

Yet when one does peer closer at the piece in question and when one does encounter something that captivates them, whether it be a line shadowed just so or a le mot juste or a cadence from an actress or singer that tugs at the heart's strings, that person is then drawn into the dialogue that is symbolized by the piece or performance in front of her.  How to be Both is at its heart a dialogue that forms across the centuries between a sixteen year-old half-orphaned girl and a fifteenth century Renaissance painter, Francesco del Cossa, whose painting of Saint Vincent Ferrer haunts young George long after her fateful first visit to the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara just a few months prior to her mother's death.  It is her life, her changing views on it and on art, coupled with the "voice" of del Cossa through his paintings that George observes, that form a gripping dialogue on just what does ars gratia artis mean in this day and age.

How to be Both intertwines these two narratives, one of a modern young woman with her contemporary concerns about how to live with those of fifteenth century Italy and the struggles that del Cossa had in establishing his art, his vision, in a place where the mercenary wars were about to give way a generation later to the ruinous French invasion.  Smith does an outstanding job in establishing these two voices, as George and del Cossa's concerns are shown in vivid detail.  Smith shapes the narrative to suit this dual voice perspective:  there is a mixture of monologue, dialogue, and a bit of stream of consciousness.  In a less adroit hand, these elements easily could have collapsed under the weight of their artifice, but Smith manages to meld them together in such a fashion that each complements the other, making for a great read.

However, the intricate narrative structure is only just that, a structure around which the story and its themes are constructed.  Here too Smith does a fantastic job in establishing character and motivations.  The exploration of Art is done in a fashion that does not feel trite or treacly; after all, these two characters have suffered much for their eventual understanding of what Art entails.  Each little detail, from hawkers declaiming what they know the piece in question to be to questions of perspective, builds upon each other, creating a literary piece that is stronger than the sum of its already impressive parts.

How to be Both is the most daring of the six shortlisted titles on this year's Man Booker Prize.  Its language is captivating, its characters are powerfully dynamic despite one not being presented in a "traditional" fashion, its themes are no less ambitious than trying to discern just what "art" truly might be.  In a fairly strong field, it holds its own when it comes to being a novel that can be read and re-read multiple times for greater appreciation.  It may or may not win the award next week, but How to be Both is certainly one of my two favorites from this year's shortlist.

Brief thoughts on the 2014 Man Booker Prize shortlist

The 2014 Man Booker Prize shortlist was announced earlier today.  Out of the six finalists, I have already read five and reviewed four (with the fifth to be reviewed later this week).  Although as is usually the case with such awards, if I were choosing six favorites, not all six would have reflected the ones on this list.  However, taking into account some of the seeming guidelines of the awards (finalists tend to reflect types of books as much as quality of works) and the chosen longlist (I've currently read 10/13 from the longlist, with another awaiting on my iPad and a second in the mail; the third hasn't yet been released in the US), there were no works that I felt were strongly out of place on the award.  Perhaps I could see a case for substituting Richard Powers' Orfeo for Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North or Siri Hustvedt's The Blazing World for Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves or Paul Kingsnorth's The Wake for any of the others, but those alternates would not be necessarily better in quality but instead truly just alternate choices.  The six chosen works (or rather, the five I've read and the sixth soon-to-arrive) seem to me to be a decent selection from a uniformly good (if not terribly, inventively great) longlist of works. 

Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour 

Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North 

Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves 

Howard Jacobson, J

Neel Mukherjee, The Lives of Others

Ali Smith, How to be Both


Now if I were ranking these based on the five I've read, it'd probably go something like this:

Mukherjee
Flanagan
Fowler
Ferris
Jacobson

This, however, does not mean much, in that there is little discernible difference in prose or narrative quality to me.  There is, how, a difference in story types:  mid-20th century Bengali family/social history; a tale of war and violence (and its effects) in a WWII Japanese PoW camp in Thailand; a story that questions what makes humans and their families so special after all; a comic-serious account of religion and identity; and a tale of prejudice and identity loss.  Each of these has their appeal for certain readers and one's enjoyment of the tales will largely depend on how much the reader tends to like those story types.

As for the longlisted books that failed to make it, as I said above, the Kingsnorth, Powers, and Hustvedt would have been worthy of consideration.  Perhaps Niall Williams' History of the Rain as well.  David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks, which I finished reading Monday night and will review later this week, was just too flawed in its presentation for it to be a true contender.  Have Joseph O'Neill's The Dog to read later this week and it won't be until late October that David Nicholls' Us is released in the US, so it is impossible for me to weigh in now on their quality and if they would have been worthy alternates for the shortlist.

Hopefully in the next couple of weeks (depending on whenever the Smith arrives), I'll have all six of the finalists reviewed.  Now to await word next week on the longlisted titles (in four categories!) for the National Book Awards, which tend to suit my tastes a bit more than the Booker Prize.  I suspect I will have read/own at least some of the titles to be announced there.

Neel Mukherjee, The Lives of Others

He has begged all morning outside the landlord's house for one cup of rice.  His three children haven't eaten for five days.  Their last meal had been a handful of hay stolen from the landlord's cowshed and boiled in the cloudy yellow water from the well.  Even the well is running dry.  For the past three years they have been eating once every five or six or seven days.  The last few times he had gone to beg had yielded nothing, except abuse and forcible ejection from the grounds of the landlord's house.  In the beginning, when he had first started to beg for food, they shut and bolted all the doors and windows against him while he sat outside the house, for hours and hours, day rolling into evening into night, until they discovered his resilience and changed that tactic.  Today they had set their guards on him.  One of them had brought his stick down on Nitai's back, his shoulders, his legs, while the other one had joked, 'Where are you going to hit this dog?  He is nothing but bones, we don't even have to hit him.  Blow on him and he'll fall back.' (pp. 1-2)

Neel Mukherjee's second novel, the Booker-longlisted The Lives of Others, is not a typical family/state drama.  From its opening prologue, from whence the quote above comes, Mukherjee makes it quite clear that he is going to explore, sometimes in graphic, violent detail, the inequalities in mid-20th century Calcuttan/Kolkatan society.  It certainly is a bold choice, as the story gains much from this unflinching portrayal of the hypocrisies and sufferings of Bengalis in this region of India.

The Lives of Others (a title derived from an epigraph taken from James Salter's Light Years) opens with an explicit depiction of suffering and casual cruelty, as a starving tenant farmer, Nitai, after being denied the food necessary to keep his family alive, goes home and decapitates his wife and son, strangles his daughters, before committing suicide by drinking pesticide.  Mukhejee displays the farmer's human frailty in this last, violent act of desperation and it is that sense of gross injustice, of people starving and committing mercy murders, that carries over into the main narrative as a lingering ghost, reminding readers that behind the depictions of the various lives of the well-to-do Ghosh family there lurks a specter of famine and deprivation much worse than what these family members manage to do to one another.

However, this is not to downplay the intricate relationships that Mukherjee explores within the Ghosh family.  On the contrary, this fictitious family encapsulates well many of the divisions present in Indian (and in particular, Bengali) society in the first generation after independence.  While the character types might be of stock appearance (the self-made wealthy patriarch, the divisions among sons, the favored and ill-favored daughters, the black sheep revolutionary), he manages to enliven them with personalities that are vivid and which serve to draw the reader closer to the unfolding narrative. 

The novel's structure supports Mukherjee's exploration of societal injustices.  In addition to traditional chapters detailing the lives of the Ghosh children living in their Kolkata compound, there are short commentaries, presented in a different font, that we later learn were composed by the rebellious son, Supratik, who has renounced his social station and has become a Maoist rebel.  Mukherjee utilizes these different narrative threads to great effect, as he shows through each Ghosh son and daughter the intricate web of responsibilities and privileges, of petty power struggles and denials of affection due to differences in appearance and social grace.  These characters, including the waspish Chhaya, whose stinging spiteful remarks serve as a goad to drive others away (or toward what she desires), drive the action of The Lives of Others and make for quick page turning.

The prose for the most part is striking for its simple yet vivid quality.  Mukherjee describes his characters and scenes in such a fashion that it is easy to imagine certain sights, sounds, and smells.  There is little wasted space; the descriptions are lashed to the plot so tightly that everything seems to be subordinate to outlining just what is happening to the Ghosh family during the time of famine and social upheaval in West Bengal.  This results in a novel that manages to create a series of contrasts between characters and their social counterparts without feeling either too spartan or too lush with extraneous detail.  In addition, these clashes are set up in such a fashion that Mukherjee is able to make several pointed comments on contemporary socio-political issues (mostly through Supratik's changes in perspective during his years as a rebel) through the Ghosh family dynamics without reducing their conflicts to mere analogies for the greater conflict.

If there were a difficulty to point out, it would be a very minor one:  an Anglo-American reader might find herself needing to rely more on the helpful family chart at the beginning of the book and the glossary at the end, due to the different nature of Bengali familial relationships.  Yet this was no real hindrance to enjoying the novel, which might be one of the best Indian family/societal dramas that I've read in years.  The Lives of Others certainly is worthy of consideration for the Booker Prize and it wouldn't surprise me one bit to see it make the shortlist later this week.

Niall Williams, History of the Rain

I know what that's like too, when the last thing you feel is the pinch in your arm and this might hurt just a little and you're off into the wherever depending on the length and breadth of your imagination.  My father has a whole section of his library just for this.  Here's Thomas Traherne (1637-74), poet, mystic, entering Paradise (Book 1,569, The Faber Book of Utopias, John Carey, Faber & Faber, London):  "The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown...the dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold.  The Gates were at first the end of the world.  The green trees, when I saw them first through the gates, transported and ravished me... The men!  O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem!  Immortal Cherubims!  And the young men glittering and sparkling angels; and maids, strange and seraphic pieces of life and beauty!  Boys and girls tumbling in the street and playing were moving jewels.'

Paradise has actual gates? (pp. 31-32)

Forget Marx's observation that religion was the opiate of the masses.  For bibliophiles, the act of reading serves as a pallative, giving voice to our pains and providing, sometimes, a numbing agent for those pinpricks of the soul.  In Niall Williams' 2014 Man Booker Prize-longlisted novel, History of the Rain, he explores the ways in which literature, both composed and collected, can communicate those awful little family secrets that mere conversations fail to do.  It is an interesting approach to the staid family history genre, albeit one that depends in part upon the reader's familiarity with the books referenced.

Nineteen-year-old Ruthie Swain is an invalid, confined now to her family's County Clare home, replete with thatched roof and lack of certain modern amenities.  Desperate to understand her family's history, especially that of her late father, a poet, Ruthie turns to his vast library of books in a search to understand not just the man her father was, but just how these thousands of volumes shaped him.  As she reads and narrates her thoughts on her family and their literary influences, the diary-like tone of certain passages gives way to amusing anecdotes grounded in the literature she is perusing:

That's how I see it anyway.  That's how I see it when I ask Mam 'How did you first meet Dad?' and each time she tells me the story of Not Meeting, of Passing by, and how it seems to me God was giving them every chance not to meet, and the singular nature of their characters will mean their stories will run parallel and never do a Flannery O'Connor.  Never converge. (p. 180)

Over the course of a few hundred pages, Ruthie discusses the known facts of her parents' lives, of her father's existence as a failed poet and even worse farmer; of her mother's exasperation in dealing with him; of the impossibly high standards that her father, Virgil, holds himself to; of how her twin brother Aeney drowns and how that affected her father and his attempts to write publishable poetry.  But most importantly, there is within the family notes and the scribbled margins of her father's books a reference to a poem, "History of the Rain," that might hold clues to understanding just how Ruthie's father came to be the enigma that he was for her.

Williams rarely tells the Swain family's history in linear fashion.  Instead, he favors a more elliptical approach, in which the volumes that Ruthie mentions contains clues to not just what happened in her parents' lives and why they were reluctant to share those moments with her, but also why her father tried his level best to become a poet.  This quest to understand familial past is not original, far from it, but Williams' use of literary references to a wide range of authors spanning the globe imbues the narrative with a secondary layer that enlivens it, making it feel fresher for its more universal approach to discussing the personal.

However, there are times where the dependence upon the literary perhaps goes too deep into the well.  Ruthie's copious references to literary works at times felt a bit too much, as though she were not a fully-fleshed human but instead a literary quote generator that could spout a phrase suitable for any and all emotional moods.  However, these moments thankfully are few in number and on the whole, Williams manages to integrate well the personal family history narrative with the use of literary references as a means of exploring the human condition.  As the narrative unfolds, Ruthie arrives at the conclusion that there is a price to becoming different from others, a toll exacted for those poetic souls who seek to go so deep into this earth that they are transformed by this search for understanding.  It is perhaps a little trite, but in light of the journey that Ruthie has narrated, it is a fitting one.  History of the Rain works best if viewed as a bibliophile's relation of human thought to the real world, connecting our sorrows with those narrated by others.  It may not be a perfect novel, but it is a very human tale, one that I enjoyed reading.

Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Something was happening inside Dorrigo Evans as he watched.  Here were three hundred men watching three men destroying a man whom they knew, and yet they did nothing.  And they would continue to watch and they would continue to do nothing.  Somehow, they had assented to what was happening, they were keeping time with the drumming, and Dorrigo was first among them, the one who had arrived too late and done too little and now somehow agreed with what was happening.  He did not understand how this had come to be, only that it had.

For an instant he thought he grasped the truth of a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilisations it created, greater than any god man worshipped, for it was the only true god.  It was as if man existed only to transmit violence to ensure its domain is eternal.  For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence. (pp. 352-353 iPad iBooks e-edition)

As a young child, I was fascinated with the two World Wars.  I have two distinct memories related to this.  My father, a Vietnam War veteran, very occasionally would talk about what he experienced in that latter war, namely witnessing the torturing of a Viet Cong prisoner by Korean soldiers.  The other thing he would recollect was how a history professor of his had been in the Bataan Death March and how his harrowing stories of slave labor and brutal mistreatment by the Japanese affected him decades later.  These stories have shaped my images of warfare, especially in relation to PoWs, as being an excruciating series of terrors punctuated with witnesses (if not direct experience) of torture and depraved behavior.

In his 2014 Man Booker Prize-longlisted novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Australian writer Richard Flanagan follows the lives of a group of Australian PoWs and their Japanese captors as they are charged with building the infamous Burma Railway.  This railroad, known also as the Death Railway for the tens of thousands of forced laborers' deaths during its construction, and its construction has been described in many novels and movies, mostly famously in Pierre Boulle's The Bridge on the River Kwai.  Boulle's account of the PoWs' experiences during the building of the infamous Bridge 277, however, does not accurately describe the sufferings experienced by the PoWs.  In contrast, Flanagan's novel devotes much of its space to covering these depravities in substantial detail.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North, named after a haiku by a 17th century Japanese poet, is divided into five parts that chronicle the lives of several soldiers, most especially that of Dorrigo Evans, over the course of the twentieth century to the dawn of the twenty-first.  At first, the action is slow in developing, as the prewar lives of Evans and other PoV characters only barely hints at the transformations to occur after their capture and forced labor on the Burma Railway.  It is in the final three parts of the novel where the gradually building tension in the soldiers' lives blows up in spectacular ways.  As Evans, a medical doctor, is placed in charge of a thousand man detail, he daily has to confront the awful decisions of survival and death that he is forced to make.  He witnesses several brutal beatings, such as that quoted above, and these dehumanizing experiences change him and others around him, including some of his captors.

Flanagan asks a lot of his readers.  Not only are these sufferings outlined in sometimes graphic detail (the discovery of a man who had just died from amoebic dysentery being but one example), but just when it would seem that the Japanese and Korean soldiers had been built up to be cruel, inhuman monsters, he turns around and has several chapters in the crucial middle section told from their perspectives.  This, however, serves to create a larger dynamic here, that of how violence shapes lives.  In the final two sections, following the end of fighting, Flanagan shows these now ex-soldiers and how they struggle to adapt to their new surroundings.  The results are not always pretty, as denials and self-exculpations for what has transpired abound.  Violence continues to haunt these men, even as some struggle to justify their actions in order to prevent themselves from being condemned.

As noted above, The Narrow Road to the Deep North starts very slowly.  Although the character development established there eventually pays dividends, it was a very sluggish first couple of sections and it was not until nearly 200 pages into the novel that the story truly comes into its own.  However, the second half of the novel is so powerful in its treatment of violence and how these soldiers try to cope with what is happening to and around them that it more than makes up for the slow pace of the beginning sections.  Flanagan's prose is chilling at times, especially in his depictions of the punishments inflicted on the soldiers.  Even more than this, it is how he turns these graphic portrayals around and makes of them a commentary on the human condition that makes The Narrow Road to the Deep North a worthy nominee for the 2014 Man Booker Prize.

Karen Joy Fowler, We All Are Completely Beside Ourselves

Those weeks I spent with our grandparents in Indianapolis still serve as the most extreme demarcation in my life, my personal Rubicon.  Before, I had a sister.  After, none.

Before, the more I talked the happier our parents seemed.  After, they joined the rest of the world in asking me to be quiet.  I finally became so.  (But not for quite some time and not because I was asked.)

Before, my brother was part of the family.  After, he was just killing time until he could be shed of us.

Before, many things that happened are missing in my memory or else stripped down, condensed to their essentials like fairy tales.  Once upon a time there was a house with an apple tree in the yard and a creek and a moon-eyed cat.  After, for a period of several months, I seem to remember a lot and much of it with a suspiciously well-lit clarity.  Take any memory from my early childhood and I can tell you instantly whether it happened while we still had Fern or after she'd gone.  I can do this because I remember which me was there.  The me with Fern or the me without?  Two entirely different people. (p. 56)

What constitutes a family?  Is it a grouping of genetically-related persons who lodge together in a common dwelling?  Does the adoption of others into the home create family bonds?  If so, what happens to a family's bonds when the adopted member is removed suddenly?  These questions are just a few of the ones raised and addressed in Karen Joy Fowler's 2013 novel, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, recently selected for the 2014 Man Booker Prize longlist.

The story centers on the relationship that Rosemary Cooke, now in her early 20s in the narrative present of 1996-1997, formed in the late 1970s with Fern, who later was removed from the family in 1979 when Rosemary was five.  Theirs was an unusual relationship, one that was in equal parts grand social experiment and extended familial bonding, and for the first section of the novel, the reader only learns just a tiny bit about what made this experiment special and how their separation affected the entire Cooke family.  Fowler's story is built around a slow unraveling of the central mystery surrounding Rosemary and Fern's too-brief siblinghood and a direct discussion of that might ruin for some potential readers the magic of this tale.

We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves is largely told from Rosemary's point-of-view.  We see flashbacks to various key points in her young life, to how she struggled to conform to social expectations for kindergarteners and how her various social relationships reflected a lack in her life.  Her parents, but especially her father, are shown in a negative light, as the experiment conducted by them has had a deleterious effect on all four remaining members of the Cooke family.  But it is Rosemary's brother, Lowell, who is the most readily damaged by the sundering of the Rosemary-Fern relationship.  He turns against his parents, against his society, and becomes what might be described as an eco-terrorist, one who is on the run from the FBI during part of the 1990s narrative sections.  Fowler does an excellent job in fleshing out the other family characters with short, sharp observations that give each family member a backstory without the need for much description.

Fowler has carefully constructed the narrative, as Rosemary's reminisces combine with her current social interactions to create a contrasting before-after effect that leads to a gripping tale of loss and recovery.  Fowler subtly shows these gradual changes in Rosemary after her separation from Fern and how over the intervening 17 years she has come to terms with the changes caused by that loss.  Rosemary, like her parents and brother, is not the same as she was "before," but the "after" Rosemary, despite her closer relationship to Fern than what the rest of her family experienced, is somehow more resilient, less prone to the self-destructive behavioral changes that have afflicted the others.  These less damaging changes enable Rosemary to deal well with Fern when she re-encounters her nearly two decades later in a very different social milieu.  Their brief meeting is poignant without ever slipping into maudlin melodrama.

We Are Completely Beside Ourselves was my seventh-favorite 2013 US release and it is not surprising to see that it was nominated for the 2014 Man Booker Prize after its UK release.  It is a touching story that displays a keen level of insight into what makes us social beings.  Fowler's prose is carefully crafted to fit the characters and plot.  The characterization, as I noted above, is top-notch and the plot moves steadily, with very few hiccups, towards its emotional denouement.  It is a fitting nominee for this award, one that I would highly recommend to readers of a wide variety of literary genres.

Joshua Ferris, To Rise Again at a Decent Hour

I encouraged my patients to floss.  It was hard to do some days.  They should have flossed.  Flossing prevents periodontal disease and can extend life up to seven years.  It's also time consuming and a general pain in the ass.  That's not the dentist talking.  That's the guy who comes home, four or five drinks in him, what a great evening, ha-has all around, and, the minute he takes up the floss, says to himself, What's the point?  In the end, the heart stops, the cells die, the neurons go dark, bacteria consumes the pancreas, flies lay their eggs, beetles chew through tendons and ligaments, the skin turns to cottage cheese, the bones dissolve, and the teeth float away with the tide.  But then someone who never flossed a day in his life would come in, the picture of inconceivable self-neglect and unnecessary pain – rotted teeth, swollen gums, a live wire of infection running from enamel to nerve – and what I called hope, what I called courage, about all what I called defiance, again rose up in me, and I would go around the next day or two saying to all my patients, "You must floss, please floss, flossing makes all the difference."

A dentist is only half the doctor he claims to be.  That he's also half mortician is the secret he keeps to himself.  The ailing bits he tries to turn healthy again.  The dead bits he just tries to make presentable.  He bores a hole, clears the rot, fills the pit, and seals the hatch.  He yanks the teeth, pours the mold, fits the fakes, and paints to match.  Open cavities are the eye stones of skulls, and lone molars stand erect as tombstones. (pp. 3-4)

If you had told me before reading Joshua Ferris's Booker Prize-longlisted novel To Rise Again at a Decent Hour that a story centered around a depressed dentist whose love for Red Sox baseball was only matched by his failure to maintain any relationship would be one of the funniest novels released this year, I would have looked askance at you.  But it is true, this novel tackles some potentially drab situations (in addition to the above, add the search of an atheist for some sort of meaning) and manages to find brightness within them.  It is an impressive accomplishment.

Paul O'Rourke on the surface has an ideal life.  He is a very successful New York dentist, having a large practice located in a posh Park Avenue office complex.  However, the rest of his life is a shambles, much of it due solely to his self-destructive behavior.  His obsession over religion and meaning, trying on religious customs as though they were thrift store clothing despite his constant declarations that he is an atheist, his repetitive and borderline creepy conversations with former and current employees, his rapid cycling through of hobbies, all of these show a person on the edge of a complete and total breakdown.  Yet as he keeps circling around his core problems, reluctant to tackle what truly is the cause of his insomnia and mild depression, his observations are genuinely funny.  Yet Ferris's humor, like much great comedy, does not detract from the root pain and suffering.  Instead, Paul's humorous observations (including an insane tying in of a dental patient to Ross and Rachel from Friends) about what he experiences happening around him serves to accentuate his inner ennui, his desire to fit in and to find some meaning, any meaning in his life.

Paul's world, jumbled and rudderless as it is, is turned upside-down when it turns out that someone has created Facebook, Twitter, and a webpage using his dental practice name.  Furthermore, these pages contain religious tracts of an obscure group known as the Ulms, who claim ancestry from the few survivors of the first biblical genocide, that of the Amalekites.  As this "other Paul" makes status updates and tweets despite Paul's protests, Paul finds himself more and more drawn into what is unfolding.  People relatively close to him, from family to former lovers, find this "new" Paul fascinating in ways that the maladroit Paul just cannot be.  Paul himself begins to find, if not answers, then at least possibilities, to some of the issues, particularly faith-related ones, that have troubled him for years.

For most of the narrative, the story balances precariously between being intense and tedious.  It is a testimony to Ferris's ability to turn a phrase that moments devoted to the minutiae of matters such as the 2011 Red Sox September collapse end up being wry, attention-grabbing moments that sustain the story through a middle part that is less well-developed than the introduction and conclusion.  There is nothing actively bad about this middle section, but in Ferris's showing the reader precisely how Paul's depression and self-defeating actions have constrained his life, the narrative at times too closely resembles this repetitive downward spiral.  However, even in these less interesting moments, there are still moments of profound silliness that break up the monotony of these scenes, making them more bearable for readers.

To Rise Again at a Decent Hour succeeds primarily because Ferris's prose is outstanding.  It isn't just his clever wit and juxtaposing Paul's foibles with his monologues, but it is seen in how he mixes in controversial elements like non-faith and religious sentiment to create sparks that kindle a reader's interest rather than burning away any further desire to read.  The revelations toward the end about who is behind the "other Paul" online identity is handled well and the implications of that revelation tie in nicely with the novel's thematic explorations of non-faith and the desire to create meaning out of life.  This is not to say that the ending is predictable.  If anything, it is a conclusion that, while fitting for Paul's character and situation, does not follow standard conventions and yet, somehow, it all works.  To Rise Again at a Decent Hour is sharp, smart, and yet has a compassionate take that makes the humorous elements feel more humane and less biting than they could be, considering the serious topics that are the targets here.  It certainly is a fitting nominee for the Booker Prize and is one of the better humorous novels that I have read in years.

Richard Powers, Orfeo

The officers swung back toward the front door.  Off the dining room, a study stood open.  The room's shelves swelled with beakers, tubing, and jars with printed labels.  A half-sized refrigerator stood next to a long counter, where a compound microscope sat hooked up to a computer.  The white metal body, black eyepieces, and silver objective looked like an infant Imperial Stormtrooper.  More equipment covered a workbench on the far wall, glowing with colored LCDs.

Whoa, Officer Powell said.

My lab, Els explained.

I thought you wrote songs.

It's a hobby.  It relaxes me. 

The woman, Officer Estes, frowned.  What are all the petri dishes for? 

Peter Els wiggled his fingers.  To house bacteria.  Same as us. 

Would you mind if we...? 

Els drew back and studied his interrogator's badge.  It's getting a little late. 

The police officers traded glances.  Officer Powell opened his mouth to clarify, then stopped.

All right, Officer Estes said.  We're sorry about your dog. 

Peter Els shook his head.  That dog would sit and listen for hours.  She loved every kind of music there is.  She even sang along. (p. 7)

Richard Powers' eleventh novel, Orfeo, can be read on two levels:  a fugitive thriller and as a treatise of sorts on music and biology.  There certainly are grounds for both, as the frame story of a seventy-year-old former music teacher and amateur biologist, Peter Els, getting in trouble with the police for having what appears to be a homebrew bioterrorist kit certainly contains enough twists and turns to satisfy thriller fans.  But it is the flashback sequences, to Peter's former life and his love for music and his desire to encode music within bacterial DNA, that comprise the heart of the novel. 

Powers divides his frame and flashback stories through the use of cordoned-off epigraphs that end up comprising a related story whose impact on the main narrative is not seen until the end.  It is an effective device, as it allows for short, quick transitions without being too abrupt.  As Peter narrates his experiments with his dog Fidelio and her ability to discern tonality, the narrative tenor shifts subtly toward a slower, more rhythmic pace than the sharper, more staccato bursts of dialogue that comprise much of the frame story.  There is a discernible pattern to the prose, almost as if Powers were exploring tonality of a spoken sort within some of these passages.

There are times where the discussion of music and bacterial encoding become almost too complex, too full of jargon.  At these moments, thankfully few in number, the narrative devolves to a series of lists, barely connected to the lives enfolding around Peter's discoveries.  For the majority of the sections, however, Powers manages to achieve a layering effect by these lists of music and muses, such as this passage:

Reading wasn't possible.  All Els was good for was music.  Shelves in the front room held three dozen jewel boxes – road trip listening, left here in the vacation home alongside battered Parcheesi sets and moldy quiz books.  Ripped copies of Ella Fitzgerald's Verve Songbooks, They Might Be Giants, Sonic Youth, Nirvana and Pearl Jam, a smattering of emo, albums by Wilco, Jay-Z, the Dirt Bombs, the Strokes, and Rage Against the Machine.  There was a time when the proliferation of so many musical genres left Els cowering in a corner, holding up the Missa Solemnis as a shield.  Now he wanted alarm and angry dream, style and distraction, as much ruthless novelty as the aging youth industry could still deliver.

He found a disc by a group called Anthrax, as if some real bioterrorist had planted it there to frame him.  He looked around the cottage for something to play it on.  In the kitchen he found a nineties-style boom box.  He slipped the disc into the slot and with a single rim shot was surrounded by an air raid announcing the end of the world.  A driving motor rhythm in the drums propelled virtuosic parallel passages in the guitars and bass.  The song came on like a felon released from multiple life sentences.  The melodic machete went straight through Els's skin.  It took no imagination to see a stadium of sixty thousand people waving lighters and basking in a frenzy of shared power.  The music said you had one chance to blow through life, and the only crime was wasting it on fear. (p. 171)

Being familiar with each of the bands listed here, Powers's description of their sounds struck a chord.  There is an eloquence about his comments about Anthrax's sound that makes their music come alive for me twenty years after I stopped listening to them regularly.  There are numerous passages in Orfeo that speak to this love of music and how music is so interconnected with language and human desire.  As the story unfolds and we learn more about Peter's life, Powers manages to weave together the fugitive and flashback sequences in a complex double helix similar to the bacterial DNA he was studying.

There are, of course, other symbolic references within Orfeo, beginning with the titular reference to the mythological musician who sought to bring his bride Eurydice back from the dead.  Powers explores this in subtle ways, with an ending that is fitting without being too contrived or obvious.  Yet ultimately the plot, although for the most part executed well, matters less than how the reader comes to appreciate the musical topic.  For those who are not enamored with music or at least experience some wordless joy when listening to it, Orfeo may be a sonic wall that keeps them from understanding the novel's full import.  But for others, Powers' dexterity in mixing musical tonality with a deep, personal story leads to a deeply satisfying tale.  It may not be the easiest or most plot-centric of the Booker Prize nominees, but it certainly contains a beauty in its prose and thematic execution that make it a joy to read.

Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake

the night was clere though i slept i seen it.  though i slept i seen the calm hierde naht only the still.  when i gan down to sleep all was clere in the land and my dreams was full of stillness but my dreams did not cepe me still

when i woc in the mergen all was blaec though the night had gan and all wolde be blaec after and for all time.  a great wind had cum in the night and all was blown then and broc.  none had thought a wind lic this colde cum for all was blithe lifan as they always had and who will hiere the gleoman when the tales he tells is blaec who locs at the heofon if it brings him regn who locs in the mere when there seems no end to its deopness

none will loc but the wind will cum.  the wind cares not for the hopes of men

the times after will be for them who seen the cuman

the times after will be for the waecend (p. 9, iPad iBooks e-edition)

Paul Kingsnorth's debut novel, The Wake, perhaps has the least-traditional history of any of the 2014 Man Booker Prize-longlisted works.  Originally a crowdfunded novel, The Wake is set in the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Hastings.  This period, until recent decades, had long been dismissed as being a mostly seamless transition from English to Norman rule, from Old English to Old French being the language of court and literature.  Yet evidence, ranging from folk tales to archaeological records, has revealed that there was at least a decade's long simmering rebellion against William the Bastard/William the Conqueror's takeover.  These rebellions, many of which were based in the fens of East Anglia, inspired tales of doomed heroes like Hereward, later given the appellation of "the Wake" in the 14th century.  Certainly in the early 21st century, as we bear witnesses daily via social media and television to struggles of downtrodden peoples to retain at least a shred of dignity in the face of oppressors that seek to wipe out their very languages and cultures, there is something of an echo of these 11th century "last stands" against the rising tide of Norman occupation and dispossession of English landowners.

The Wake is a historical novel that seeks to recreate the mood and feel of these struggles following 1066.  Set mostly in the fen country where the Isle of Ely rebels fought, it is a first-person narrative presented by an ahistorical character named Buccmaster of Holland.  The setting itself has a lot of potential for social commentary about disproportionate land ownership (a regrettable legacy of the Norman Conquest) and freedom fighters, but Kingsnorth makes the bold decision to create a "shadow language," an English that is stripped of French and Latin-derived cognates and which often uses a slightly-modernized form of Old English orthography, to narrate Buccmaster's tale.  This is a tricky endeavor, as much of the narrative depends upon the reader being ready to put in the necessary syntax parsing in order to make this enterprise work.  Use too many archaisms or utilize them incorrectly and the entire affair risks collapsing under the weight of its artifice.

However, Kingsnorth adroitly uses this synthetic language to great affect.  In particular, there are instances of clever double entendres, such as the use of "waecend" in the prologue quoted above.  There is the meaning of "the awakened," but it also bears the sense of "watchful," of someone who is aware of his or her surroundings.  Buccmaster is certainly "aware" of what has transpired in England; he is caught between several social tidal waves.  He observes the "old religion," seeing the old English gods in the trees and fens of his native land.  Many of his discourses are related to this connection he perceives between nature and religion, between home and hearth.  The language he uses brings out these connections more readily than any modern idiom would.  As he and others gather in the margins to ready for a final fight against the Norman trespassers, his reflections on his passing world add a sense of gravitas to the situation.

Buccmaster is more than just a passive observer whose reminiscences about the old ways illustrate a fading society.  He is a fighter, possibly touched with madness, and it is the complexities of his character, interlaced with his tales of what the "frenc" have done and how so many are falling in their fight to preserve their lives, that make The Wake such a fascinating read.  The following passage, from near the end of the story, demonstrates well Kingsnorth's ability to imbue the coming calamity with a sense of urgency without ever abandoning the Anglo-Saxon origins of his synthetic "shadow tongue":

well there is naht else to do then but tac my sweord and use it as great weland had telt me to cwell them what has torn down all that we is in angland.  this time grimcell is not fast enough he is not locan not thincan i wolde tac him on and no other cums betweon him and welands sweord.  it gan cwic into him with a sound lic the cuttan of mete undor his sculdor and he calls out and locs at the blaed what has gan right through and cum out his baec and he wolde sae sum thing but his muth is all blud.  i locs in his eages what is not agan me now not agan me no mor and i pulls out the blaed hard and he calls then lic a cilde and falls hard on to the fyr and for a sceorte moment he writhes lic an ael on the glaif and then he mofs no mor

well then there is all callan and runnan and roaran and annis mofs lic she wolde go to him but i tacs welands great sweord what is all ofer with his blud and i sae thu (p. 383)

There is a powerful economy of description here.  Whereas a "modern" writer might try to convey this warrior having a sword run through him with a metaphor, Kingsnorth's Buccmaster recounts this with poetic redundancies.  The sword goes quick into Weland with a sound akin to the cutting of meat, yes, but it is the "not agan" and "not agan" that reinforces the deadliness of this encounter.  This is followed with "all callan and runnan and roaran," which gives the sense of a burst of immediate, helter-skelter action.  In using this, Kingsnorth hearkens back not so much to Romantic accounts of medieval battle but to descriptions older than Mallory's Le Mort d'Arthur, to a time when such repetition comprised essential parts of heroic ballads.  Kingsnorth recreates these motifs faithfully without ever making his narrative feel like a dull xerox of medieval legends.

The Wake certainly is one of the more original of the longlisted Booker Prize nominees.  Its prose is challenging, yet once the reader becomes accustomed to its quaint rhythms, it becomes a very lyrical story, one which utilizes several narrative tricks not usually explored in novel form.  Its protagonist, Buccmaster, is a surprisingly complex character, one whose thoughts and actions resonate with readers well after his final words are spoken.  The themes, especially that of resistance in the face of an inevitable defeat, are presented well and are universal enough to address issues beyond those of late 11th century English society.  Taken as a whole, The Wake is an impressive effort and certainly justifies further consideration from the Booker jury.

Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World

But I must back up and circle around.  I am writing this because I don't trust time.  I, Harriet Burden, also known as Harry to my old friends and select new friends, am sixty-two, not ancient, but well on my way to THE END, and I have too much left to do before one of my aches turns out to be a tumor or loss-of-a-name dementia or the errant truck leaps onto the sidewalk and flattens me against the wall, never to breathe again.  Life is walking tiptoe over land mines.  We never know what's coming and, if you want my opinion, we don't have a good grip on what's behind us either.  But we sure as hell can spin a story about it and break our brains trying to get it right. (pp. 19-20, iPad iBooks e-edition)

Siri Hustvedt's sixth novel, The Blazing World, is perhaps one of the cleverest fictions that I have read in some time.  It utilizes a variety of techniques, from "forged" diaries to fictionalized art exhibits to creator proxies, to create an intricate and yet powerful condemnation of certain socio-sexual biases that the presumed arbiters of elegance possess when they weigh in on the value of a particular performance or art.  This description for some might act as a warning label, yet that would deny such readers the pleasure of enjoying a well-designed mystery that engrosses a reader's attention.

The Blazing World purportedly centers itself around the posthumous diary of a woman, Harriet "Harry" Burden, who had concealed her artwork, particularly three pieces that gained her acclaim, by having three attractive male stand-ins present her work as theirs.  In the litany of diary entries (alphabeticalized journals), interview snippets, and fragments of her descriptions of these pieces, Harriet/Harry leads the readers down a long and winding road of casual sexism and institutional biases that reject the notion that great art can be produced at any age or by anyone.

However, Hustvedt plays a more subtle game than just constructing a faux history of art prejudice.  Many of the entries contain commentaries that deepen the game, such as this one from roughly halfway into the novel:

H.L. Mencken once wrote that if a critic "devotes himself to advocating the transient platitudes in a sonorous manner," he gets respect.  The contemporary platitudes are:  Dump on white males, encourage diversity, and destroy the canon; on conversely, wave the flag for the canon and old-fashioned artistic virtues.  Of course, Mencken was writing back in the day when college meant literacy.  It no longer does.  I could regale you for hours with stories of our interns, fresh from the Ivy League, who cannot distinguish between like and as, who cannot conjugate the verb to lie (as in lie down on the floor), whose diction errors give me gooseflesh, but from their semiliterate mouths come one transient "right-thinking" platitude after the other.  How I yearn for the future, when these people who cannot write a cursive hand have taken over the world. (p. 232)

This is stinging commentary, one that goes at the heart of several "culture war" arguments and blasts all sides equally with withering scorn.  In relation to discussions of art, it serves as a caustic reminder that yardsticks, no matter how well-intentioned, can limit and distort perceptions of the creative arts.  Hustvedt returns to this theme several times over the course of The Blazing World (which I should note here is a reference to a particular piece created centuries ago), each time building upon this central tenet.  This creates in turn an opportunity for readers to react against what is being argued, with any possible synthesis being part and parcel of the overall effect of the novel.

Hustvedt's prose is nearly impeccable, as her depiction of Burden in all her guises and frames of mind is so vivid that it is easy to imagine the wide spectrum of emotions that she has pored into her writings and pieces.  There is also a tangible plot that runs through these disparate sections, one that deals with Burden's battle for acceptance in a society that is loathe to acknowledge her.  Hustvedt is very careful with how this plot unfolds, as each diary entry or interview segment gradually builds up this tension between the artist and her world until it eventually explodes in a surprising fashion near the novel's end.  While there were a few occasions where perhaps more detail could have been provided at one level and less at another, on the whole, the effect of this use of layered "source material" is impressive.  The Blazing World is one of the more finely-crafted novels I've read this year; the fact that it is an engrossing read is such a bonus that it is easy to understand why it was selected for the 2014 Booker Prize longlist.  Highly recommended.